Sorry I've been away for so long.
When you're given a lot of empty hype and bullshit, and nobody can answer questions logically, you know something is very wrong.
I've spent 3 days trying to find out what has really been going on with this takeover.
I'd like to thank the real talkcoin developer “Talkcoin” for helping me piece things together, and also a person in the takeover team who wishes to remain anonymous.
Part 1“This is hardly a takover.... we just all agreed to replace one team member who happened to be the core dev who created the project.” It seems we've all been royally duped.
What we've been presented is this:The dev team behind talkcoin have replaced the original developer because of some kind of financial impropriety/dishonesty against the coin, and are continuing development of the coin for the community's sake.
The real story is this:There is only 1 coin developer who's been building talkcoin, who founded the coin has written all the features by himself. He is the real dev and is called "Talkcoin" (as opposed to TalkTeam).
TalkTeam is someone he paid to help out with non-technical tasks such as running the forum.
Recently, a group of miners led by TalkTeam – who were in a trusted position supposedly helping the talkcoin dev, made a hostile takeover move against both the dev and the community. They tried to force-implement their own agenda and, by the looks of the code, apparently steal coins. And they used a provably false claim of financial dishonesty of the dev as an excuse. They didn't say anything at all to the dev, they simply went behind his back and paid an outsider (Bushstar) to change the talkcoin code. And then they stuck 2 fingers up to the community as we all know. The code changes were:
1) Re-routed all the destroyed Talkcoins, which were originally being sent to the genesis block for destruction, into their own wallet (!!!)
2) Re-routed the dev fund wallet to their own wallet, so they now take all the dev funds for themselves even though they're not developers and haven't done any development work.
3) Removed dev fund voting so they always get 3% of the block reward instead of what the community decides
4) Removed the block reward voting system to force use of the block reward they wanted to get as miners –
22% of the current market cap
per month!
By them mining their own enforced 2 million new coins every month, they would soon own a huge chunk of talkcoin for very cheap. The price of coins would be so low that there wouldn't be large mining competition for them. The value would effectively be slowly leeched from the current holders of the coin to themselves.
Is it just coincidence that they got so heavy about dictating the block reward to force the 2 million new coins? You decide. Even if we were to assume their aim wasn't to leech talkcoin's value from investors, they still knew that's what would happen when they set that block reward and mined these coins.
Investors buy coins on the exchange, then the miners end up owning that value after the investors' coins are diluted to nearly nothing. And they kept saying it was in our best interests!
They've tried to justify it by saying they need to follow the original bitcoin financial model (as opposed to any normal altcoin model) but as I detailed in my last post, bitcoin did not use this model of investor leeching and it's extremely abnormal for crypto.
They constantly spam out posts to have us believe that they have some understanding of economics that nobody else understands, seemingly that basic supply and demand laws aren't real and flooding the market with coins won't lower the price (!)
Please see my last post to view their level of understanding of economics.
Back to the story - they approached the mining pools and exchanges with the new code and said there had been a “takeover”, but without mentioning that they were making a
hostile takeover
attempt against both the coin developer and the community. They couldn't say that because of course the pools and exchanges wouldn't have accepted it.
At the same time they had the PR machine in motion, building up for weeks that something incredibly great was happening to the coin. They used their position as official helpers of the real dev to make everything look official and above board.
They then falsely accused the real developer of financial impropriety in order to destroy his reputation and cut him out.
In the original talkcoin OP, the one operated by the real dev “Talkcoin”, he (Talkcoin) explains that there is a user-votable dev fund to fund coin development:
“Users can vote the amount of coins to be given to developers in each block that they found... If you want to give 1%, 2% or 3% you choose! The default value is 1%. Note: you also can reduce donation to zero!”
The dev was sharing the coins from this fund out and “TalkTeam” and his group were all being paid from it. The dev says TalkTeam personally received more than 100k coins of it.
Yet last week when TalkTeam announced he was taking over he suddenly claimed:
“For the record, we the team did not know about the dev fund.”
“We are against the secrecy in how this was hidden and operated secretly without telling the rest of the team and the community.”
“We started crisis meetings on IRC recently and audited the core code”
Ignition75, part of the takeover group, said:
“The lead dev has been dishonest”
“Soon we will be free of the dishonest code.”
Ignition75 was asked by someone to explain what the dishonest code was but he wouldn't give a reply.
So the dev fund was detailed in the OP and the team had been getting paid from it for 3 months, yet they suddenly claimed it was a big secret that the dev had kept to himself and made it out to be an emergency situation which required taking over the coin.
But strangely at another point Talkteam admits he actually DID know about it:
“Although the fund is mentioned on the old thread we didn't see that it was implemented”
And their solution to this emergency? Take over the coin, funnel the dev fund money into their own wallets instead, and take out the community vote so they get 3% of the block reward automatically, forever. Take all the coins heading for destruction in the genesis block for themselves. (Hard to believe! But its in the code). Then force 2 million new coins to be created every month for them to mine, against everyone's wishes.
After all the accusations and the takeover post, the real developer was outnumbered and intimidated and he almost felt himself that he must have done something wrong. And so he has kept away from the talkcoin forum. Which was unfortunate for us because we didn't find out what was going on.
As we all know, everyone in the community has been up in arms and the price collapsed, but the team have made it clear in their pretend-polite way the coin is now theirs and they're running a dictatorship.
Their enforced coin spam creation of 22% per month has made all investors' coins worth very little, doomed the coin's future, and crashed the market on bittrex. Since their announcement, the price on bittrex has fallen from 1450 sats to 450 sats, with only 0.1 btc volume – meaning we've already hit the delisting threshold.
The community made it very clear what they thought and the forum filled up with demands for a vote about block reward and complaints such as:
"How can you get away with taking over and doing what you want against everyones wishes? Go and f**k yourselves."One of their tricks is to use their numbers (there are 8 people listed as in their group - though not all are part of the takeover) as a way to volume-post to dilute the complaints against them. If someone complains, they will send a few posts out trying to put a peaceful face on everything to make sure things don't get out of control, and to try to hide the complaints from any mining pools or exchanges who might be checking out the thread. Sometimes they even just post to agree with each other! If you take out their propaganda posts from the thread,
virtually every post is a complaint against what they are doing, except for posts from 1 guy who coincidentally is also a miner.
Who are these people?
Talkcoin was started by the developer “Talkcoin” (as opposed to “TalkTeam” the takeover leader). He came up with the concept and did all of the development of the coin.
According to Talkcoin:
Talkcoin paid TalkTeam to help out, he helped out with non-technical things such as the forum.
He also paid djm34 to do some basic cosmetic changes on the wallet – “new fonts, new color, new icons etc”. Interesting that he's now listed as their "lead developer"!
TalkTeam then invited his friends into the team without any authority to do so, a group of miners: “Other people in the team have been invited by TalkTeam without my agreement, I don't really know what they do and I don't think they are useful.”
Very little noticable has happened on the coin other than the development which Talkcoin did, so what these people have done is unknown other than awarding themselves posh titles like “business developer” and collecting the cash from the dev fund. According to Talkcoin, “these titles are just bullshit but it's better for marketing”
This group have now backstabbed and lost the only talkcoin developer in order to take control, the only person who understood the code or had the vision. They now have between them a bunch of posh titles, but nobody who knows about coin development, other than maybe the outsider they're paying to do the takeover code. So now they have a problem. They're happily mining away but they have no idea how to maintain the talkcoin code, much less build new features on it. And Talkcoin says he didn't comment any of his code so it would be difficult for other people to change it. The new wallet release they made to make their takeover attempt seems like it has already stopped working correctly, and people are having to manually edit their config files to get it running.
So all that stuff about future roadmap. Well it doesn't look like there is any future roadmap except to Brokeville. They've given some vague words holding a general promise of their development plan happening within 3-5 years(!?), focused around communications.
So there we have it, talkcoin hostile takeover exposed!
Part 2But talkcoin is
our money, and the people who own the coin are the ones who have the say. These people actually have no right to just take it over and do whatever they like.
So here is the good news!
They may have made it seem to everyone like they're now in control and we have no choice but to accept the takeover. But what they don't want us to know is, that's actually not the situation at all. And their hardfork hasn't even happened yet.
It's actually really simple: we stick to using the official wallet and we tell the mining pools and exchanges what's been going on. They will not then switch to their hardfork and we can go back to normal.
Once we stop this hardfork (community agreeing of course!), the dev has agreed to continue development as usual. (this is “Talkcoin” rather than “TalkTeam”)
The block reward voting system wasn't very popular, so the dev agrees that the voting system should be removed and the block reward should be fixed at around 5 TAC (if the community agrees), to get the price back on track.
I will stick around to help make sure everything goes smoothly and help find new team members, ones who can do actual work.
I would also like to help out in the future of talkcoin with some development and the occasional PR. Who am I and why do I think I can help? I have 20 years experience of software development and running a software business. I ran the MtGox protest in Japan earlier this year (along with my co-protester). I'm regularly at bitcoin events, I'm often on the news talking about bitcoin, have contacts throughout the industry, and have many of the key industry players and TV/press following me on social media.
If you guys agree with not letting these guys take our coin, I would like you to say so. We will then contact the exchanges and pools to make sure they're using the official code and this crap should all be over.
Please only use the official wallets.
These are on
http://talkcoin.org which is still run by the real dev.
Kolin
