What happened?
This morning (CST), one of our members changed the password of the Bitcointalk account. A few hours after that, we got a message from Iconic Expert threatening to fork Libertycoin and start a new thread because we had changed the password. Obviously, that sounded nuts. After that, he joined the IRC channel where I (Templar77) already had been for a few hours. He said he was trying to work for Libertycoin but I was always in his way. I asked him what was the problem, but he never answered that. I even told him that I still wanted to collaborate with him, but he said he was done with Libertycoin and he left.
After that, the price plumbed to from 12k satoshi to 5k satoshi.
How Iconic Expert got involved in Libertycoin
We gave him access to the Bitcointalk account almost a week ago. His task was to ‘promote’ Libertycoin. When we received him we were not well informed of what he had done in the Blackcoin community.
All the week when he was involved our thread was flooded with attacks against him. In the beginning, we didn’t give much importance to those posts for we thought it was coming from trolls, but days passed and the attacks against him never stopped, so we decided to investigate more about him.
Iconic Expert
Christopher Bouzy, aka Iconic Expert, received Blackcoin donations to ‘make’ an event in Wall Street, but then he cancelled it and never gave back the money to the people. Basically, he said he was leaving Blackcoin and launching his own coin, but never returned the money.
We have confirmed so far that he uses other ‘proxy’ accounts, like Barabbas, to post in Bitcointalk and Twitter.
The price fall
So what has changed in Libertycoin? Nothing, Libertycoin is the same coin that was yesterday, and the day before, so there is really no reason for a reduction in the price. Libertycoin is now stronger because we got rid of a known scammer.
We obviously do not have all the answers for what caused the price fall, but we can say it is very likely that Iconic Expert dumping all his coins and all the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) he caused with his ‘proxy’ accounts.
Iconic Expert bough in probably around 1,000 – 2,000 satoshi so he probably had a big amount of coins.
Anonymity
Libertycoin Anonymity Development (past)
As you might now, we offered a bounty of 7 BTC and 30,000 XLB to implement any kind of anonymity in the Libertycoin protocol. Almost a week ago, Tranzium and others started developing it. A standalone version was set up here:
http://cosmiclottery.com/libertycoin/Around two days ago, we received an email from the team working on that implementation saying they could not finish the work because they were struggling to implement it into the wallet/daemon, so we keep waiting for them and finish it while finding someone else to do the job.
Libertycoin Anonymity Development (today)
Today Polzki contacted us with a possible solution. He says he knows the CEO of a programming company in China, so they can help us develop a new and innovative anonymity function for the Libertycoin protocol.
The website of the company:
http://www.synv.com/At 1:50 pm (China) he will be talking to the CEO of the company.
The CEO is his friend so he might make us a huge discount for it, but we will also support him with the bounty we raised if it is needed.
The development team
From now, loljosh, Polzki and I (Templar77) will have predominant roll in the development of this coin.
I personally don’t have anything to hide; I say this because Iconic Expert things he can attack me publishing my personal information.
My personal Information is easily acquired because I as I mentioned I have nothing to hide. My name is Carlos from Mexico and I am a Economics and Political Science student but I am also a self-taught person in programming. It’s just information that you can easily google.
Proof-of-ownership
I own 312,000 Libertycoins which I bought with my own money in various moments, some of them even when XLB was trading at 600 satoshi. I have moved 300,000 coins to the address below:
LZ2suWZw4RoCVT4amdUJRzu4pLawnfQEjR
I show you that so you know how much I believe in this coin. I’m not planning to ‘dump’ any time soon. I’ll keep the coins in that address, and I don’t plan to move them for I’m a terrible trader.
Scam accusations
In recent days, a thread was made saying Libertycoin is a scam coin, but that, of couse, lacks of any logic or fundament.
-Libertycoin was pre-announced almost two days it was launched, so it was not ‘ninja-launched’.
-Libertycoin didn’t have a single premined block.
-Libertycoin was mined for four days.
-The network reached almost 80 Gh/s which means thousands of miners when mining.
I own a miner with 200 Kh/s so if I own Libertycoin is because I bought them. I have the right to buy any coin I want and make use of it in any way. I this case I invested in Libertycoin because I believe in it as a long term investment. I have provided you my address, so you can ‘monitor’ it if you like.
The future
As I mentioned above I believe in Libertycoin as a long term investment, for that reason I have the following projects planned.
Liberty Labs
In a couple of days, I will be registering my startup that will be dedicated to create and offer services for Libertycoin and Bitcoin, especially in Latin America.
Liberator operation
I am planning to set up ATMs in Mexico City using the machines from
http://projectskyhook.com . This ATMs will work both for Bitcoin and Libertycoin. This ‘operation’ should bring a lot of attention from the media for these will first ATMs in Mexico City, and Libertycoin will be one of the few altcoins that have this kind of infrastructure.
In the future, I could ‘deploy’ more ATMs in other countries such as Panama and Argentina.
Exchange
The other thing I’ve been working for months, is to create a Bitcoin/FIAT exchange for Mexico. I have got all the legal stuff done but the ‘platform’ is still under developments and should be launching in less than 3 months. I’m planning to add Libertycoin to this project as well.
My vision of cryptocurrency and Libertycoin
Many people may have problems with my ideology/vision of cryptocurrencies. I describe myself as a Libertarian and maybe a crypto anarchist. I believe in total decentralization, so I usually struggle with the concept of ‘dev tem’ taking care of absolutely everything in a coin.
I hate when people blame the ‘dev team’ for a given price in the market. It’s not the job of a dev to care about the price. If the price falls is not our fault or our job to make it rise. That’s just pump and dump coins behavior. I cannot type sudo apt-get price $1 and make the price rise. It’s a free market. If you want a coin’s price to rise you have to work for it and not just depend on the ‘dev team’.
Many people struggle with idea too:
I do not thing that what people call ‘innovation’ is needed for a coin to succeed. It only needs hard work, a good name, time and a good community.
Litecoin is the proof of that. It is just a copy of Tenebrix and Fairbrix with no innovations at all and yet it stands as the second biggest cryptocurrency.
We can say the same for Dogecoin, Zetacoin, Feathercoin, and many others.
Even Blackcoin is just a copy of Novacoin with just simple tweaks. It provides no innovation at all.
Darkcoin is another good example, it was not the first anonymous coin and they don’t even delivered what they promised: a decentralized anon feature. It’s totally centralized.
In my opinion, name is king. With a name like ‘Libertycoin’ we should be able to have more success than coins like Darkcoin. ‘Real life’ businesses will never say “Darkcoin acceted here’. They will rather prefer more friendly names.
We will implement anonymity because the community asked for it, but I don’t believe it’s primordial for Libertycoin to succed.
Templar77