Wall of text
- Alexander
I won't counter your points as it's getting tiring. I pointed out some concerns in my original post, you wrote a quite eloquent reply addressing everything BUT the main concern. That concern was the matter of recourse, accountability and security for the community in general. Please don't insult me by implying that I am trying to get cheap aircoins by spreading misinformation. As anyone can read in my posts I am not posting false facts or accusations but concerns and my experiences in general. Yes you appear to know your stuff and for all purposes it looks like you will act as you intend to. I mentioned, twice I believe, that I don't think you are malicious in intent (at least not now). I believe you have every intention of going forward with the plan. If I made it seem like a personal attack on you then I apologize. It is only because I feel so strongly about the crypto community that I want it to succeed.
What I think you are failing to realize, which I do find ironic (given your enlightened nature when it comes to the cryptocurrency world) is why I brought up my concerns and continued to do so even after your response. Things were "all fine for awhile" as you put it because I put the matter down hoping that you or your team would step up and volunteer a solution. You did not and continued on like nothing was or is wrong with this whole picture. Hence my continued posting. I spread my time very thinly over the forums so if you don't see me posting here every day it is not because "everything is fine". Saying "if you don't like it you can go somewhere else" is a cop out and you know it.
You have failed to see that you are providing the cryptocurrency community a disservice.
In fact you are a negative influence on the community in general.Even if you are not malicious, which again I don't believe you are,
you are teaching people that it is ok to trust anonymous people with large sums of money on their word, with no recourse should things go wrong.A lot of the people blindly supporting this project are new to the community or don't know any better. You are teaching them that a centralized manipulative authority is ok. You are also teaching them that it is also ok this authority is run by anonymous people with no oversight or legal framework.
Lets say you are true to your word,
indefinitely. What about the next project that comes along, using your model? What if they say "it worked for aircoin so it will work for us as well!", people mine and invest in it. Then what if the developers of
that coin turn out to be malicious and dump the coin, killing it and ruining everyones investment of time and money. There would then be some ownness on you, for helping to legitimize a a system where these actions can flourish with no recourse.
This is not why we created cryptocurrencies. Believe it or not, they werent just created for everyone to "get rich quick". They were created to solve real-world problems with the financial system and trust-based systems in general. Cryptocurrencies were created as a trustless means of commerce.
These are problems that you are not alleviating but exacerbating.
For someone who wrote a whole paper on the problems with the cryptocurrency community in general I would think that this concern would and should be shared by you. But I guess when you stand to make a lot of money from it, those concerns are not convenient are they? It is also not convenient for anyone else to have those concerns.
Lastly you haven't even told people how much you are going to pay yourself out of this "investment fund". So you will just decide that yourself at a later date I guess?
If the fund is worth 10 million then why not pay yourself 200k a year, hell, lets just make it 300k to be fair
What happens if the people don't like how much you decide to pay yourself?
Fun fact: because you can pay yourself out of the undefined profits listed on a third party exchange (that no one but yourself will have access to) we won't even know how much you end up paying yourself! We will have to take your word.Progress!Your problem is with our opinions and how they conflict with your opinions, not our coin and its mechanism of action. But, this is a good post, and worth a real response. But this response, because it is opinion and not about the mechanism of the coin,
is mine alone and not reflected by the business of AIRcoin. Such things, as stated before, are marked with "-Alexander" at the end of the post.
5 years.
The bitcoin community has had 5 years to legitimize itself, a lifetime in the world of software (even operating systems don't last that long!). The end result is an unstable, bubbling community that, in 3 months, is
very likely to be shut down entirely (we know it's going to end in 3-4 months, with certainty, unless something changes), and will be ended by a giant, aging architecture that existed decades before Bitcoin was even thought of. Is it successful in being a "trustless" means of commerce? No. Definitely not. You demonstrate in your post the importance of trust when it comes to supporting such an idea. But worse, we fear that it hasn't become a true "means of commerce" either.
If the community wants to survive, there needs to be recourse, and you are completely right about that. And right now, development teams, none of them, have true accountability. Bitcoin, Litecoin, and most if not all Altcoins have the same anonymity and lack of accountability that you see in AIRcoin. They are allowed to pump and unashamedly dump, and that includes the massive amounts of Bitcoin being held by only a few individuals. They are allowed to run exchanges with gaping security holes, and they are able to steal hundreds of BTC from online wallets. What is the greater evil? Giving competent teams a chance to prove their legitimacy, or being "secure in knowing that your investment is,
clearly, part of a scam like Pandacoin was? Is it better to have honor among thieves, or distrust among friends?
"Centralized manipulation" is management. Not all management is manipulation. Anyone who believes that centralized manipulation is, at its core, wrong, would have to be an absolute anarchist, and no forms of government exist without manipulation (The government has to be able to "manipulate", or it has no power at all), that's the reality of it. We know that in order to get the most effect out of nearly any endeavor, it requires leadership. Decision. Action. This puts power in someone else's hands, and that sovereignty has been the topic of debate for years, from Martin Luther to the Magna Carta to Leviathan to Jesus Christ, the same question "Why should anyone have power if they
could abuse it?" has remained. The difference between the word "management" and "manipulation" comes down to intent. A company frauds their customers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and its "manipulation". A company cannot pay back debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars and ends up bankrupt, and its "mis-management". The point we're trying to make is that management or leadership is not inherently wrong.
While the following paragraph is an idea under wraps, I think it's appropriate now to explain it. I, Alexander, have been drafting a series of documents with the teams behind other coins to form an agreement among the best cryptocoin developers of the formation of a
transparent alliance among developers who will pool resources in order to reform the community in a way that
will not be seen as an enemy of powers far larger than this community. A code of conduct that gives clear instructions that allow the users of a coin to effectively strengthen or destroy coins that violate the best interests of the community. In other words, we are trying to provide incentive for development teams that stick to their word, equal or greater to the incentive to dump. Those developers then can share knowledge, contacts, support, advice, and most importantly,
conduct in hopes of legitimizing the technology. We have 3 months to either legitimize ourselves, or face the death of this market. That's it. That's the game. No one on my team is willing to risk that, we're too heavily involved in this coin, and we are trying to move as fast as possible toward it.
But in one respect, you are right, other users may accept our word on faith and not without understanding the system. And that (I can completely agree with you and stand with you arm-in-arm against) is bad. That's why I'm still posting here, why we answer questions and encourage them, and why we recommend to those who simply cannot trust our coin to avoid it. It's not an easy position to be in, and when your posts are relatively on-point (such as this one) I hope that it strengthens our position. We can't be completely transparent, because we have to protect ourselves too. It doesn't help that our pools claims to have suffered DDOS attacks, or that we have only limited control over what people can do with our code. Transparency is a balance between protecting our identities and business, and providing good knowledge. If we were any other altcoin, we could have easily gotten away with absolutely no transparency, but that's not the way we want to do things.
Since you're still supporting our coin with an interest to buy (and possibly mining as well) I can assume you want it to succeed. In that case, you can see the most benefit by not attacking us, but giving honest answers to improvement. If you are worried about how it would appear on the thread, simply email me. You're still a user of the coin, and only when a user no longer acts professionally (even if he professionally disagrees) do they become a problem. If you think we need to change the way we present ourselves, or if you think that we are damaging the community, ask us questions and make
real suggestions for improvement rather than condemning us, because the world you are suggesting, the world without AIRcoin, is certainly no better, and possibly significantly worse.
Let's not be enemies, we will take your concerns extremely seriously, if you will offer better solutions than pure condemnation.
- Alexander
