It lately became a hobby of mine to respond to FUD and yuluxugi32132 already knows that most of his points are bs because I explained to him in the Nimiq thread, so let's continue here for everyone else.
1. Nimiq was not registered as a legal entity during the entire period of the Initial Token Offer (ITO). So, Nimiq Team was NOT registered during the fundraising with the Initial Coin Offering (although they were selling tokens).
Incorrect. According to
https://nimiq.com/terms/ the token sale was performed by Nimiq Network Ltd, a BVI company.
Moreover, during the entire ICO period, they didn't have any KYC. Only after the ICO ended, they created a foundation and hired a company to be in charge with the process of KYC to convert the NET (Nimiq Exchange Token) to NIM the coin.
Correct. According to
https://nimiq.com/terms/ they were allowed to take such action.
They have registered the foundation in a special place in Switzerland to allow them to move the funds without publishing any information about the foundation and in which ways they were incorporated. By this time, nobody except them doesn't know the board of the Nimiq Foundation. Information like who is in the foundation, who administrates the foundation, how many people are in the foundation, who is in charge, how much funds did they declare, who is paying who. Is the Costa Rican villa administrated by the Swiss Nimiq Foundation? All these questions were never answered by them. Everything is total shady about their foundation being registered in Switzerland. I repeat again that the foundation was created a half a year after the ICO was ended and the 12.8 million dollars were collected
Incorrect. The Nimiq Foundation (Stiftung) is registered in Zug, also known as Crypto Valley, under CHE-164.077.595. It is the same city where Ethereum Foundation and many other Crypto projects reside. You can check details on their board member at the Swiss company register:
https://zg.chregister.ch/cr-portal/auszug/auszug.xhtml?uid=CHE-164.077.595&amt=ZGYou are correct that the Foundation was only founded after the token sale, which is probably because it takes some time to set up such foundations...
Because the Foundation was registered after many months of the ICO period, and the KYC was started in January 2018, an ICO refunding can be done on Nimiq and SEC can commit Class actions against them individually.
Incorrect, as stated, the token sale was run by a company, Nimiq Network Ltd. Additionally SEC ruling on the token sale is hard or impossible, as US citizens were excluded from the token sale both using the terms and technical measures.
As Richy stated on Telegram: It was bought by one of the team members (along with other domains) long time ago because he thought it was a 'cool name'. When the project started, founders liked that name the best and used the domain.
2. Beside the ICO, they even pre-mined about 7.5% of the entire network vesting it into 3 addresses.
A) Foundation
B) ImpactX Charity
C) Early contributors.
Correct. This is also represented in the token sale terms
https://nimiq.com/terms/.
3. The biggest issue I see in the project is that they declare that 2.5% of the funds were premined and they go to ImpactX Charity Foundation. Nobody and they never published what is ImpatX Charity Foundation. We don't know if the ImpactX charity exists, who decided that the funds should go to ImpactX and not to OUR KIDS FOUNDATION. Is ImpactX Charity Foundation registered? Who administrated it ? I believe the 2.5% charity foundation was just another "nice" lie to hide the fact they will keep another 2.5% of the funds to themselves that this "ImpactX Foundation" doesn't exist and it will never exist. Moreover, they never explained who the Foundation, ImpactX and Early contributors own the vesting about? Is it a single owner or is it a multi-signature wallet? Is the private key owned by whom? Robin, Richy, Elion or by who?
I agree that there is few information on internals of the ImpactX foundation, but in their favor I would argue that: a) for their last transparency report on company internals and financials (mid 2018), ImpactX did not own any funds (due to vesting). b) At this point ImpactX Foundation owns 15k USD worth of NIM. It's probably not fully operational yet.
4. Another scam point is that they declared in their transparency report that they invested 1.1 million dollars into "real estate". They never explained this. It looks like the Foundation paid 1.1 million dollars from the ICO directly to Elion Chin (who owned the Costa Rican villa and also had a Real Estate company called nimiq and the domain nimiq.com was owned by him). So, probably they paid Elion Chin over a million dollar for a 2 store mansion in Costa Rica. This is definitely not a wise direction, but they never explained what the 1.1 million dollar investment from the ICO money means.
Partially correct. While they did not give too much details on the real estate deal, it was mentioned that the funds were not used to buy a villa. This implies they also didn't pay money for the personal home of one of the founders (why should they?) Their investment into real estate was before mid 2018, so they made good deal as it's probably worth way more in BTC today than back then.
5. Another major lie was back in Jully when people started to question that Robin has left the project. After some time, Richy started to create a lie that Robin was "starting to work on research about scalability". Absolutely no news and no information was given by Robin for over 6 months. Robin Linus's last medium post and last video appearance are in May 2018. For over 7 months, they continued to lie and Robin was never seen in the project. A lot of concerns started to appear last week when people decided to question Richy lie that Robin Linus was indeed working in the project. They started to say that Robin was not the founder of the project and that his involvement was not that much as Nimiq was a team project. By using this message, their community admins and Richy was trying to remove Robin from the project forever.
Robins last public statements on his research were in Sep 2018. No team member ever claimed that he is no longer a member of the team or the founder of the project. In fact there were some rumors that he might have left or exit-scamed but Richy strongly opposed this rumors. What Richy indeed said, is that Robin never was the CEO of the project, which you can confirm on the team page (even in older versions through archive).
Last night Robin decided to write a message on telegram regarding his involvement in the project. It definitely shows that Nimiq has a internal "fight" over the leadership of the project and probably who is in charge of the project ICO money. Moreover, they also knew and acknowledged that the ICO investors lost more than 95% of the money. It looks that Robin decided after 7 months to whistleblow that the project is a total failure and they need to tell the truth to the ICO investors about their huge failure.
Happy New Year everyone!
First of all: we want to be more responsible in 2019.
So let’s face the truth: There have been lots of rumors around Nimiq and we understand the dissatisfaction. Since the ICO our investors have lost almost all their money. Even in comparison to BTC we are down 95%. According to the ranking on coinmarketcap we fell from ~250th to ~600th place in one year. Long story short: we failed to fulfill our potential.
Now the best way forward is to be honest with ourselves and in particular with you.
We are working hard on resolving internal disputes regarding necessary changes and our way forward. It has been quite a grind so far because lots of different opinions and emotions are involved. Now to terminate our process we commit to make an official statement by Sunday night.
Let’s work together to unfold Nimiq’s full potential and let’s make 2019 the year of Nimiq!
It looks like a forward looking announcement to me, not like he is about to whistleblow that Nimiq is a scam. He is merely stating the fact that Nimiq did not perform to well with regard to price over the last year.
6. Another major problem of the team is that according to their team reports' without taking in consideration their 1.1 million dollar mansion in Costa Rica in July'18 they had about 10 million dollars. Their burning rate was only $250,000 per month in July'17. Probably the burning rate at the moment is higher than $350,000 and they would have only 5 million USD. It means the project would have funds to survive just for another 12 months. When the project will become broke most (if not all) of the leave the project and probably the entire network will shut down and be closed. They argue it is a decentralized project. This is not true. If it would be a decentralized network it means they would not require to have a full time network guy to watch the network and maintain it. When the seed nodes were offline the nimiq.com network was also down for many hours. Transactions couldn't be processed and synchronization couldn't be done. If they run out of money, the NIM will be worthless of value 0 and the website nimiq.com will get closed. It will be closed exactly like the previous Real Estate website nimiq.com
The burning rate report of 250k was from July 2018, which is only a few months back. Your claim is that since then they lost a huge amount of money and increased their burning rate without any substantial reasoning.
It's typical for young networks to have hickups when nodes are offline as there are only very few nodes. In the mean time, there are more and more nodes and the network would survive even without connectivity through the seed nodes provided by the company.
6. Nimiq raised over 12 million dollars during the ICO period in the summer back then. During the ICO they were presenting Nimiq as a "ready to go" blockchain, but in fact, everything presented in their demo during the ICO period was totally broken. Their demo was not even a blockchain in the real sense and this is the reason why it took them another year to create a completely new blockchain from scratch. After the demo, initially, they were trying to clone cryptonite blockchain with Mini Blockchain, but after some time they discovered another paper called Non-Interactive Proofs of Proofs of work and they decided to stick with a complete model that was not developed or built by them.
This is complete non-sense.
Their token sale demo actually was a full block chain. You can go back in time using their git repository. Back then, their network had no support for light clients, only full nodes running in the browser. To have short loading times they had to do snapshots.
It is true that they originally envisioned implementing the Mini-Blockchain scheme (even though that doesn't imply they fully clone cryptonite). But NiPoPoW is actually an evolution of Mini-Blockchain, using very similar approaches.
7. Nimiq never published any official white paper. Their only "white paper" is a medium article that described "how cool would be a Browser based blockchain", but intentionally forgetting about describing any kind of technology advantages or breakthrough. As explained in 2. they solutions of cloning the code of cryptonite was later discovered and then switched to NIPOPOW, although the entire team didn't have any kind of clue about the direction of the project or its technology. There is fundamentally no innovation into this project. Nim is just some good story marketing convinced a bunch of people to believe it is a ground-breaking technology while simply it is isn't.
The technology focus and main feature of Nimiq is it's network layer and the ability to run normal network nodes in a browser. This is a pretty unique feature in the industry. The underlying consensus and blockchain technology is not it's most relevant part and can be improved and revised without changing any of the major properties of Nimiq.
8. At the moment over 70% of the mining is centralized in a Chinese Mining Pool named SkyPool. The vulnerability of 50%+1 is real from the day of launch. Since day 1 of the Nimiq Blockchain SkyPool anytime can attack the network with 50%+1 attacks.
That's true. Although Nimiq developed a pool mining protocol that allows for decentralized mining (which would make pools unable to perform a 50%+1 attack), Skypool is using (at least to some degree) a different protocol and might be able to perform a 50%+1 attack.
9. ICO Investors lost over 95% of the investment. This lose is not to fiat, but even to Bitcoin parity. Interesting is that the entire Blockchain market is worth ~2 million dollars, while the project still has 8 million dollars from the ICO funds. Why are they not interested in their ecosystem while they have 4 times more money than their entire project and community.
The "even to Bitcoin parity" is stupid in this context, given that current Bitcoin price is twice the price during token sale. And I can only stress that Nimiq Team seams to be still interested in their ecosystem, providing constant update to all of their tools and developer support on social media. The fact that they are not buying their own coin to artificially increase price is more a strength to me - they don't want fake numbers.
10. Pool miners closed their pools. Multiple pools including porkachu, Philpool, Beepool and other pools were closed due to unprofitability of this coin.
Beeppool closed for personal reasons (as he announced in his Discord), Philpool seems to have been unprofitable, but he was also a very small pool with less than 1% of the global hashrate. Porkachu is a member of the community, not the name of a pool
11. Most of the community is gone and they never look back. There are just barely 50 people involved in their project channel groups namely Telegram and Discord. Most of these are miners who are interesting to make some activity in their channels in order to dump the NIM coin on the market.
The number 50 is definitely too low from what I have seen. But maybe they all have about 3 accounts (like you seem to do here on BitcoinTalk)
12. Censorship is at its high. You get an instant ban if you post a simple question about their foundation structure or about their funding. Immediately, like in seconds an "admin" on their telegram or discord will gonna ban you and remove all your messages. They call this a fight against FUD. They accuse users to be others and ban innocent people
Questions are not banned, if they are not in caps and extremely suggestive (spreading FUD). Most normal questions are answered properly in my experience, if you just ask friendly. There was a person on Discord scaming with OTC trades that was banned using multiple identities as he popped up again and again, but this stopped happening after major exchanges started listing NIM.
Also it seem the Telegram bot is overblocking new users that post links a bit, but with all those pump group advertisements on Telegram, you need to do some automated blocking. This blocking only applies to posts, the user will not be banned because of that.
I guess that's it. Also check your definition of SCAM. The most important part of a SCAM is not providing what was promised. Nimiq Team already overshot what they promised in the token sale terms, check
https://nimiq.com/terms/
