you are obsessed with drk. glad i am not an xmr investor
![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
Oh my, Block-o-Feta, you said the "i" word! Here's a hint: there are no XMR "investors". Monero is a medium of exchange and a store of value. If individuals purchase units of Monero they do not directly enrich me or the rest of the core team. We can argue that there is indirect enrichment, because every Monero contributor undoubtedly holds a small stash of Monero, but it is far from...say...5% of the total emission that was instamined in a day. Investors do not pay our salaries.
On the other hand, we are also acutely aware that we are in a position of stewardship by virtue of the community. After all, when thankful_for_today chose to ignore what the community wanted it was us who took stewardship away from him, so the same could happen to us. The fact that we are still around a year later means that
the community thinks we're doing ok. In other words, our position of stewardship is only by virtue of the community at large, and our "authority" is relative. We are not beholden to "investors", we are beholden to the community at large regardless of how much Monero they own (and sometimes don't own).
Which is why I find terms like "investor", or anything describing our role as if we were upper management, quite laughable. We are unpaid volunteers, placed in relative authority, pushing a profoundly technologically interesting project forward...because sometimes the pursuit of mathematics or science or medicine or art or music is more important than making money.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Just to be honest here, I don't believe 1 word of this, because anyone can read your history and see the kind of other projects you were involved in, for example:
Last May you didn't seem to care about anonymity but you were trying to raise $200,000 from Vertcoin investors to fund a private centralized payment system that you called Vertpay which looks very similar to what Moolah tried to do with Moopay / DOGE etc (a scam I did a
lot of research on after getting burned myself). Your investment offering was that the Vertcoin investors would get 20% of Vertpay for that investment:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=595754.0 /
When
interviewed about it you said:
"I think that with this, you know, any IPO, any investment in a company is a risk. We're not pretending that
this is some sort of riskless investment. But I think the VERTCOIN community as a whole are generally not
stupid people, they're pretty astute, they not involved with a coin based on a meme or anything like that."When asked about how you would make money from Vertpay:
"So Peter and I put in a fair whack of seed funding initially to get this off the ground, to get the right people
to get the software developed and architected to the point where it is. We looked at various options of VC
funding or putting more funding in ourselves...We don't want to do this on a small scale, we want to do this
on a reasonably sized scale, get it into the market....see what we can build on top of that, once there is cash flowing in"Interviewer suggests if you are trying to drive success from the Vertcoin community you said:
"...Absolutely because then everyone has a vested interest in it's success...we look at the Bitcoin security space...most are
prone to scams so you end up having to fight a whole bunch of negativity from the very beginning, which isn't great."You gave up on that pretty quick after realizing you weren't going to get 200k investment from Vertcoin investors in the following (very Alex Green / Ryan Kennedy style comment)
"...there's been a systemic attack of VertPay by smearing me and alluding that VertPay is a scam-by-association. While this is blatantly untrue, it would appear that the Vertcoin community as a whole either do not want this IPO to continue or are unsure and swing this way and that. Thus we have decided to shutter the IPO and switch VertPay back to the original focus on launching with several currencies."Here is Vertpay now:
https://vertpay.com/And here is Vertcoin now, 11 months on:
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2F2ycAAnp.png&t=665&c=Y3dDep27elYGhA)
Your next project was Monero, and with your new Monero hat on your latest approach is:
"...Which is why I find terms like "investor", or anything describing our role as if we were upper management, quite laughable. We are unpaid volunteers, placed in relative authority, pushing a profoundly technologically interesting project forward"
So I don't buy that someone like you who has a history of running businesses (e.g. OpenRigs), VCs, raising IPOs, exchange trading...is now an 'unpaid volunteer, placed in relative authority' especially as your last $ making attempt you realized it was too hard I think because in your own words
'most are prone to scams so you end up having to fight a whole bunch of negativity from the very beginning'. No one is accusing you of a scam in Monero (but 100s of people did with OpenRigs non-deliveries / VertPay IPO) because you are positioning yourself as an "unpaid volunteer with profoundly interesting tech" which the typical Monero investor laps up, so perfect opportunity for someone like you to position yourself to be right in the center of the $. Anyone interested can listen to DOGE create Ben Doernberg highlight how this type of strategy worked for Moolah by gaining the trust of a whole community and gaining the position to be able to exploit the situation:
https://soundcloud.com/mindtomatter/ltb-e156-the-moolah-storyAnd the main red flag is when you say 'We can argue that there is indirect enrichment, because every Monero contributor undoubtedly holds a small stash of Monero'.
The idea that someone with the balls to try to raise 200k from the Vertcoin investors in an apparent mirror of Moolah's play on DOGE and put in a 'fair whack of seed funding', then becomes the main voice of Monero, who then says the only $ you are making
'is indirect enrichment, because every Monero contributor undoubtedly holds a small stash of Monero' I think is laughable. Especially when you have experience with
exchange trading and there are obviously some extremely large whales playing with the Monero price on Poloniex and with 100's of thousands of $ in
investment capital flowing through the Monero exchange market every day - I do not believe one word. Especially when we look at how much effort you put into trying to attack other coins you see as a threat instead of working on your 'profoundly technologically interesting project' and actually accusing other devs of having large stashes of their own coin.
If this isn't true, what is your main investment right now if not Monero, or did you miraculously decide you didn't want to make serious $ when you saw how profound Monero's tech was, after you ditched VertPay? You did OpenRigs before you tried to taise 200k from Vertcion investors, and you have dozens of people on BCT claiming they never received their products and that that was a scam too. So what is your latest money making idea right now if not Monero or are you just working for free now?
My prediction is with you running the show (yes you are lol) this is going the way of Vertcoin pretty soon, so all you people spending $ on Monero and believing the BS about this being some volunteer organization,
you are investors, don't believe something just because someone tells you that it's true, and my advice: CAVEAT EMPTOR.
Walks like a duck...Talks like a duck...Yes folks, it's a duck.
cheers