BTCD is no more

[jl777]

There is a lot of misunderstanding about basically everything, from the finances to the tech. Please read the following links to get up to speed:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1605144.msg16149001#msg16149001

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1605144.msg16171231#msg16171231

For some reason the BTCD community feels entitled to 100% of all the results from all the work I have done and what SuperNET has paid for. How much has BTCD community actually donated to me or SuperNET for iguana?

Answer: 0

I know people have put money into the BTCD, I have too, but that doesnt pay for the expenses. I am working without getting paid, but it turns out that few others are willing to do that and servers they always cost money.

There is actually the ability for me to stop volunteering my time for BTCD and just say goodbye, and use the GPL codebase in any other project. Now that would be a betrayal, even if I refunded all the BTCD funds I received for all the development work: 0

So maybe the price will go up after the iguana release, or maybe the 'buy the rumor sell the news' crowd will sell and the price goes down. The market is unpredictable so it is hard to base future expenses based on potential market prices. Plus to take advantage of any price increase, BTCD would need to be sold and after that, then what?

The reality is that if I came begging for 500 BTC to fund expenses, it would have brought in how much? With effort we probably could have raised 10,000 BTCD or so. However, that means I need to stop coding and become a fund raiser? And how long does the 10,000 BTCD last, especially if it has to be sold to pay for expenses?

Also, the full solution with BTC fees and notary nodes would have ongoing costs and I would need 10 years worth to make sure it is funded for long enough to get self-sustaining revenues from transaction fees. With 500 BTC as the max possible that could be raised and likely much less, this means BTCD could not afford dPoW.

However dPoW is needed for the full SuperNET solution of interoperating chains loosely coupled via atomic swaps. The reason is weak chains are too insecure for storing large amounts of funds, so it is not a viable long term solution.

SuperNET investors have put in thousands of BTC worth of crypto and if you read the link above, you will see that it hasnt been exactly the carefree path of infinite money. To have to pay for operating expenses from portfolio gains is ok in a bull market, but what happens when this bull market gets tired?

If there are no more trading gains, then even the SuperNET workforce becomes reduced back to just me.

Contrary to the FUD there has NOT been dozens of ICOs for all the assets. Most of them were dividended out for free to establish a trading market, no funds were raised from any ICO type of sales for anything other than SuperNET which operates as a hybrid fund. I have paid more for pangea assets than I have received from selling it. So without this fantasy ICO funds from all the assets, many of which are projects from other devs, where does the money come from?

I could have come here and asked for thousands of BTC, but instead I designed the komodo ICO to allow a decent conversion into the ICO. A smaller piece of a larger pie.

yet, the feeling is that there is some giant betrayal that there is a fixed price conversion into komodo. In order to offer a conversion right, there has to be some sort of fixed price. In order to get a market based price uncontaminated by the ICO knowledge, we used a 50% bonus from trailing month. Not perfect, but better than any alternatives that exist.

That was my assessment. However maybe I was wrong and the community prefers to not have a conversion right for the ICO? That seemed like nonsense, so I didnt even bother investigating such things.

Maybe one way to look at it is that instead of having to come up with new funding to pay for expenses, the contribution from BTCD is to convert into the komodo?

Is that really too much to ask for?

I have asked for some solution to the "unfairness" to long term holders and finally there was a post with a possible solution:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1605144.msg16170817#msg16170817

people have expected me to do everything as evidenced by the lack of active contributions. how many of you have installed iguana? tested it? helped in any active way?

That is fine, I dont complain. I do what I have to do, but it does take longer if I am the only one doing things. (I do get help from the SuperNET project, which is paying for servers, testers, config managment and GUI devs). But that means I am forced to make executive decisions and in this case knowledge of the future would have contaminated the result. I decide that is not the right way.

Some have said it is in BTCD holder's interest to have the komodo ICO raise as little as possible. If you understand tech, then you will realize that is not the case at all, as without enough funding, BTCD might end up with 80%+ of komodo, but there wont be enough funds to properly do dPoW and pay for continued development.

It is a fine balance, if the terms are too preferential to BTCD holders, then it is against ICO investors. As a large BTCD holder, I had to err on the side of being conservative to avoid conflict of interest and maybe I went a bit too far, though using what is near the 1 year all time high price and 50% premium doesnt seem such a big sacrifice.

That being said, I am open to a bonus payment to long time BTCD holders based on a community agreed formula and data as per the third link above. If the community cannot agree on how to allocate any bonus, then I certainly dont feel that I can just decide it after the reaction to my recent decision.

Now the bonus would be earned only at the higher end of the ICO result as clearly if no funds come in and BTCD already ends up with all of komodo it makes no sense to bonus out more. However, until I get an idea of whether the community can even agree to any bonus plan, I really cant make any decisions. The bonus amount would come out of the 10% reserved for ICO expenses.

Remember there is also the revshare asset snapshot, so it is not like I have neglected the BTCD, I had to make a determination of a fair exchange rate to be able to offer an exchange. If the requirement to have an exchange to komodo is removed, then this problem goes away. I have been and continue to work on my single project, which is to create the tech that allows crypto to go mainstream. I have done my best to enable BTCD -> komodo to be a key part of this solution at a decent conversion price. It seems many do not like this at all and so I am open to alternate proposals.

If the BTCD community does not want this future path, then we need to figure out an alternate plan. I can help bring a new dev team up to speed to take over the BTCD 1.0 development without dPoW and LP nodes, but of course the community would need to find/fund such a dev team.

What is needed is a solution and not just a general complaint of unfairness.

Let me know what you decide, I will honor the community decision. And if there is any alternate solution that solves the issues presented, of course I am open to that.

James

[l8orre]

James- the solution you have come up with is considerate and fair.

They say money brings out the worst in people- and we see that proven plenty in crypto, where it is exacerbated by anonymity.

These arrogant parasite whiners and complainers are not worth and not intelligent enough to let them spoil such a venture as this.

They think they own you, and that is a resentful notion.

Community? Which community?  Some deranged basement dwelling neckbeards that screech the loudest and most incoherent? Certainly not.

None of these critters will be able to make a proposal worth considering.

Please go through with it as outlined, and don't heed these two or three toxic distractors.

[jl777]

James- the solution you have come up with is considerate and fair.

They say money brings out the worst in people- and we see that proven plenty in crypto, where it is exacerbated by anonymity.

These arrogant parasite whiners and complainers are not worth and not intelligent enough to let them spoil such a venture as this.

They think they own you, and that is a resentful notion.

Community? Which community?  Some deranged basement dwelling neckbeards that screech the loudest and most incoherent? Certainly not.

None of these critters will be able to make a proposal worth considering.

Please go through with it as outlined, and don't heed these two or three toxic distractors.

I wouldnt paint everyone with the same brush used to paint icebreaker. I dont see him volunteering to be the new lead dev.

Still I have heard enough complaints that I decided to formally address them. I have been doing my best with limited resources and I feel the results achieved with iguana are quite significant, but that is just the start of things. The problem of course is that as things go from being in the pure development stage that pays no dev costs, to rolling out products to the public, it will necessarily incur ongoing costs. If not money, then time.

I do see people helping out with support questions, but even for something like that, often I need to be the one that posts the answers. So what happens when we release a product? Am I to end up doing all the customer support for all the end users? What happens to the development schedule then?

I hope the people who initially came to the conclusion about how unfair the komodo conversion is, will after considering the constraints will understand that it is not unreasonable. In any case, it was the best I could do and it does provide a path toward completion of my vision, which has evolved and improved over time. Now I can describe in detail the entire structure, however if I do, then trolls will come out and say I am working on too many projects!

I cannot help that I am used to managing a dozen+ top caliber devs and so I am used to thinking in terms that a team like that can create. Without the dev team, I have to code it myself, but I can still get it done, it just takes a bit longer.

Took me 9 months to write iguana, the first multicoin parallel syncing bitcoin protocol daemon, including RPC, that compiles to 2MB. Is that slow? Not sure, but I know if I tried to find someone to do that, they would ask to fund a full dev team for at least that long. People dont realize the scale and difficulty of creating working backward compatible improvements to the state of art.

[damon0]

Thank you James - this type of communication is genuine..  Reaching out to the communities (BTCD and SuperNET) too ask for help to a solution, is great news.

I don't think very many people were aware that SuperNET has been paying for everything and BTCD has been getting a free ride.  This equated to those in the KNOW valuing BTCD little and those NOT in the KNOW valuing BTCD equivalent to SuperNET.  This is reflected in the Marketcaps almost being equal, and therefore contributes to the pain of BTCD investors.  When someone wants to buy into Iguana, do they buy SuperNET or BTCD?  They seemed almost equivalent to many, and therefore a shock to value BTCD so low.  Maybe BTCD should have been $1 and SuperNET $5, but very few knew that the devs valued BTCD so little.  Again, this is clearly reflected in the Marketcap..  How do we protect the investors of both BTCD and SuperNET?  My opinion is that it's not done by taking in 3000 BTC before the Market has had a chance to correct..

There are a couple minor corrections I would like to point out.  There was a peak of .004 btc on August 13th, and with the 25% bonus for BTC on the first week this actually equates to almost NO preference for BTCD based on Aug peak (except the 5/5/5)..

Most of us know you have been working yourself to death with very little help and this is reflected both in the time and the mareketcap..  But, don't forget that is the nature of investing.  People don't invest in Nike and then go volunteer at Nike headquarters testing shoes.  Past decisions are generally seen with more clarity later on.  Obviously, within the SuperNET ANN and the BTCD takeover there should have been a method to fund continual development, but apparently there wasn't.  Hence, we are all down, development team and investors..

The BTCD and SuperNET communities need to step up to provide the resources needed to complete the projects.  That being said, it will be much easier to get resolve if James and team can wait until the Iguana release and allow the crypto world to drool over the Swiss Army knife of Blockchain wallets..  If the whales are correct and BTCD or SuperNET shoot up 7X, it's hard to believe that the community wouldn't back a viable solution..  No one wants the price crash back down after a 7X or 50X pump..

Basically, I would like to see this drama as a product of mis-communication and frustration.  Both are normal growing pains for a thriving community..  Instead of seeing this as something negative, look at it as the community coming together..

There is ALWAYS a solution that will keep SuperNET/BTCD investors thriving and Developers with enough resources to advance the tech..  We just need to find a good balance.  I would like to suggest that the Komodo team do their best take ideas from the community and factor in some details like allowing the Freemarket to correct after the Iguana release.  If the market corrects like Steem or Monero, then everything changes and it will be quite easy to fund future development..

[barbierir]

I understand some people are upset, the news was quite shocking for me too. But please try looking rationally at the whole picture, if new funds are necessary is there any other way? Or how many C coders are available in the Btcd community to work for free?

Also people that don't follow the development on Slack may have a less than clear understanding of how advanced Supernet is and how much work James puts into it every day. I invested heavily in this project and my worst worry is the fact that he is working at it alone, if new funds allow to pay more C devs, the notary nodes and other stuff then it is a good bargain. A small sacrifice now for larger and more secure gains in the future.

I think that James solutions to Bitcoin/Crypto problems make sense and are very important. I believe Supernet/Komodo will become the hub of the whole crypto ecosystem.

Moreover James has demonstrated many times to be one of the most reliable, bright, visionary, skilled and hard-working dev in the crypto community. If he choose this way you can bet he didn't take the decision lightly.

[flyer88]

I understand some people are upset, the news was quite shocking for me too. But please try looking rationally at the whole picture, if new funds are necessary is there any other way? Or how many C coders are available in the Btcd community to work for free?

I dont think the problem is, that the project needs new funds. The problem is the amount and the time.

Projects like nxt/ardor dont need any IPO to further develop new tech. They thought out the possibility to participate for the old community and new investors and it works! Everyone is happy, why isnt that possible here?

James you start to dilute the value of BTCD holders in such an enormous way months before the hot Phase of supernet development starts, which would have an Impact on BTCD Price for sure, and now you are surprised about the reaction? Really? I think youre smarter than that.


You Need Money for development? No Problem. BTCD-Holders 50% of the New coins, ICO-Investors 50% of the new coins.

Why the hell do you need 30Mio$ for development? Man thats still a coin isnt it? Sometimes it feels that crypto-world is like European Football Business. Totally out of control and no more feeling for reality.

[jl777]

I understand some people are upset, the news was quite shocking for me too. But please try looking rationally at the whole picture, if new funds are necessary is there any other way? Or how many C coders are available in the Btcd community to work for free?

I dont think the problem is, that the project needs new funds. The problem is the amount and the time.

Projects like nxt/ardor dont need any IPO to further develop new tech. They thought out the possibility to participate for the old community and new investors and it works! Everyone is happy, why isnt that possible here?

James you start to dilute the value of BTCD holders in such an enormous way months before the hot Phase of supernet development starts, which would have an Impact on BTCD Price for sure, and now you are surprised about the reaction? Really? I think youre smarter than that.


You Need Money for development? No Problem. BTCD-Holders 50% of the New coins, ICO-Investors 50% of the new coins.

Why the hell do you need 30Mio$ for development? Man thats still a coin isnt it? Sometimes it feels that crypto-world is like European Football Business. Totally out of control and no more feeling for reality.

There is absolutely no guarantee that full 30K BTC is raised, and even that would be $18 mil not $30 mil.

If 6000 BTC is raised, certainly possible, then indeed it will be split evenly between BTCD holders and ICO investors.

relevant post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1605144.msg16173131#msg16173131

[iCEBREAKER]

I don't think jl777's habit of starting projects faster than he finishes old ones is good for SuperNet or its constituent coins.

For God's sake man, stop adding (and by adding I mean "announcing an intention to someday add") new coins/projects/products until at least the majority of previous commitments have substantial progress.

EG:  BBR was supposed to be a "core" coin, but have we seen a single line of code to that end?

EG2:  Pangea Poker was supposed to be out in "early April" but that date slipped without even an explanation.

This cancerous feature bloat isn't being rewarded by the market, and resembles GAW/PayCoin's 'start new scams faster than they can be exposed' strategy.

Let's try doing one thing and doing it better than anyone else, instead of chasing overambitious pipe dreams of being all things to all people for all purposes.

James quietly is building a purely fictional spaceship, but Just the believers know when this spaceship will launch into the sky, then what will happen.

If hard to understand for you until now, certainly you will see in future there is just one James in crypto world! just one James!

You were right!

BTCD the purely fictional spaceship will never launch.

Now the True Believers are praying for some new fictional spaceship called Komodo.

[bitkokos2]

Now another part. The "owner" of BTCD as far as I know (I might be mistaken) is/was Azeh. Which as far as I can see is not active in here and instead of that he is active in another coin. He didn't send weekly dividents for 3 months.

When are we getting the dividends that are owed for the past 3 months, according to the above?

When Sasha has time to do it.

I will speak to Azeh and see if he has the calculations of how much he can dividend out then i will front him the BTCD to get everyone paid first.

Any news?

[PondSea]

Now another part. The "owner" of BTCD as far as I know (I might be mistaken) is/was Azeh. Which as far as I can see is not active in here and instead of that he is active in another coin. He didn't send weekly dividents for 3 months.

When are we getting the dividends that are owed for the past 3 months, according to the above?

When Sasha has time to do it.

I will speak to Azeh and see if he has the calculations of how much he can dividend out then i will front him the BTCD to get everyone paid first.

Any news?

I sent a message to Azeh about it. I will reach out to him again.

[KomodoPlatform]

The technlogy SuperNET is developing is not fictional, it is not an empty promise.

It is here! Verify the progress yourself!

github.com/jl777/SuperNET
docs.supernet.org (a list of iguana API)
SuperNET Slack channel #Iguana

 - Iguana is functioning at the command line level
 - There is a team developing HTML/JS GUI (they post updates to #Iguana channel)
 - Both the iguana core and GUI are open source
 - Soon there will be installers, and a first release

Komodo ICO will bring more funds that are necessary to remove all the obstacles there are before we can get a mainstream adoption. But that is a long term plan.

With the short term, there are at least:
1) Iguana release
2) anonymous transactions
3) dPoW

We are working really hard to have the first Iguana release before the ICO starts. During ICO there will be a working dPoW in testnet. Finally, very soon after the ICO ends, we will get anonymous transactions.

What James has done during the past has not been a simple task. He has solved extremely hard problems. Here is what he just said about Iguana:

Took me 9 months to write iguana, the first multicoin parallel syncing bitcoin protocol daemon, including RPC, that compiles to 2MB. Is that slow? Not sure, but I know if I tried to find someone to do that, they would ask to fund a full dev team for at least that long. People dont realize the scale and difficulty of creating working backward compatible improvements to the state of art.

[bitkokos2]

What I propose (and I might be wrong) which I don't mind swapping BTCD to KMD.
There are 20 million BTCD and 200 million KMD.
The swap shouldn't be BTCD to BTC and then BTC to KMD.
It should be an equal percentage based on total BTCD and KMD
Those who have 100BTCD will get ten times that in KMD. 1000KMD

I fully understand that funds are needed. ICO is not an option. From what I have seen so far, ICO coins tend to go down in value during the first days as developers who have plenty, dump them and investors are left there and interest goes down.
We/you need to find a way to draw attention and make investors join and invest just by buying and not by ICO, so there you go with the funding part.
With this way we will all benefit. Developers, old and new investors.

Other options might also be available AND might be better that what I proposed above and I think that was a matter which should have been discussed by the whole community prior to the "surprise" we received a week ago.

So, to make it clear what I do not like most from that change is the ICO part which will mostly help devs and not others and that's not going to be fair.

My option if things stay as they are, is to sell all of my BTCD, wait a bit where the KMD price will definitely be a fraction of 0.0042 BTC and buy later. As BTCD will be left without dev this will make price go down too and I might buy some too.

[flyer88]

Youre absolutely right. I dont think that anything will change here. The decisions were made before the announcement and there is no will to adjust that.

[jl777]

What I propose (and I might be wrong) which I don't mind swapping BTCD to KMD.
There are 20 million BTCD and 200 million KMD.
The swap shouldn't be BTCD to BTC and then BTC to KMD.
It should be an equal percentage based on total BTCD and KMD
Those who have 100BTCD will get ten times that in KMD. 1000KMD

I fully understand that funds are needed. ICO is not an option. From what I have seen so far, ICO coins tend to go down in value during the first days as developers who have plenty, dump them and investors are left there and interest goes down.
We/you need to find a way to draw attention and make investors join and invest just by buying and not by ICO, so there you go with the funding part.
With this way we will all benefit. Developers, old and new investors.

Other options might also be available AND might be better that what I proposed above and I think that was a matter which should have been discussed by the whole community prior to the "surprise" we received a week ago.

So, to make it clear what I do not like most from that change is the ICO part which will mostly help devs and not others and that's not going to be fair.

My option if things stay as they are, is to sell all of my BTCD, wait a bit where the KMD price will definitely be a fraction of 0.0042 BTC and buy later. As BTCD will be left without dev this will make price go down too and I might buy some too.

I think you misunderstood it to be 1 KMD for 1 BTCD, that is not possible under any scenario. Even in the max raised case, it would be more than 10 KMD per BTCD

What is being kept 1:1 is the value of BTCD against the value of KMD.
conversion price is approx 188 BTCD per BTC, so for 188 BTCD you get 1 BTC worth of KMD.

In the event the max 30,000 BTC are raised that is 3000 KMD per BTC, so my rough calculations are 3000/188 = ~16 KMD per BTCD, in the so called max dilution scenario. And that is for the unlikely maximum raised scenario, if less is raised the ratio goes higher. My calculations are probably off by a bit as things need to be offset for BTCD allocation, but hopefully you get the idea.

I hope this clears things up as I too would be upset if we were talking about 1 KMD for 1 BTCD!

[bitkokos2]

I am not sure why investors will be waiting for ICO to buy at 0.0042 - 0.0053 where they can buy BTCD now for 0.0035 and exchange that for KMD later.
Also, besides that ANN thread of KMD which is mostly read by BTCD community and trolls what else have you done or willing to do to draw attention and expect 30000 BTC ?
I don't even expect 1000 BTC as there are only BTCD hodlers who will just do a swap.

[WorldCoiner]

James, I must say you are doing a very good job here in communicating. You are always staying friendly and calm
The only thing was, that the timing went a little bad when you announced the fix price of BTCD/BTC for Komodo. I expected a little better rate for BTCD.
The ICO terms in general are fine and you should go on. If you give BTCD a little extra of +5%-10% would be fine, but if not I can life with this.
I expect from Komodo the same positive effect for the project, as Lisk has done for Crypti.
For me the situation is somehow similar.
So go one and use the good ICO conditions to get a proper founding – despite some ugly comments here.

[jl777]

I am not sure why investors will be waiting for ICO to buy at 0.0042 - 0.0053 where they can buy BTCD now for 0.0035 and exchange that for KMD later.
Also, besides that ANN thread of KMD which is mostly read by BTCD community and trolls what else have you done or willing to do to draw attention and expect 30000 BTC ?
I don't even expect 1000 BTC as there are only BTCD hodlers who will just do a swap.

If only 1000 BTC comes in then there is no issue at all for BTCD hodlers, so if that is the expectation, then why all the fuss.

The early birds get a better price in exchange for more risk. The more time passes, the less the risk, so the higher the price. Even the last day ICO investors are taking more risk than first day exchange buyers.

There are people arbitraging below the ICO prices, though you will note the volumes are not very big, even compared to your 1000 BTC estimate. Though people who are convinced to invest will get the best price possible via BTCD below the arbitrage price.

I am not doing the marketing of the ICO, I am taking time out from coding to answer questions. That being said, I am fairly well known across all of crypto, from NXT to bitshares to bitcoin. I have volunteered my time to the zcash project and also the btcforks project and many others if they are asking me a question.

Also, please why do I have to keep repeating that 30K is a maximum, there is no expectation to raise the maximum. If there was it would be called the expected amount and the maximum would be higher. We are expecting 10,000+, but of course you could be right and it is 1,000. There is only one way to find out

[jl777]

James, I must say you are doing a very good job here in communicating. You are always staying friendly and calm
The only thing was, that the timing went a little bad when you announced the fix price of BTCD/BTC for Komodo. I expected a little better rate for BTCD.
The ICO terms in general are fine and you should go on. If you give BTCD a little extra of +5%-10% would be fine, but if not I can life with this.
I expect from Komodo the same positive effect for the project, as Lisk has done for Crypti.
For me the situation is somehow similar.
So go one and use the good ICO conditions to get a proper founding – despite some ugly comments here.

I would say that Lisk was used as a validation of the swap method.

I did propose a way for BTCD long time holders to get a bonus, which could be in the 300 BTC range. That is actually within your 5% to 10%, but actually would be a lot more for the long time holders.

The requirements to get this bonus are that the BTCD community come to a consensus on how to calculate the bonus. For obvious reasons, I will not be involved in that process.

And komodo needs to raise the higher end of the goal. This amount would come from the 10% allocation for ICO costs so it doesnt affect the ICO structure.

[syberwolfen]

I must say, I was very surprise, and upset when the change was announce.

This was due to my past experience in crypto (crave, librex, dao,....) and number of other bad choice
BTCD was one of my first investment and I believed in it...
The more I read the more I think james doing the proper thing

let go and blast the crypto to where it is suppose to be the number one device in world 

[Azeh]

New Poll Concerning the future direction of BTCD. Please Vote.

Also, please no not ask me my personal opinion about the matter.  This vote is for the community to decide.

Lastly, concerning BTCD Staker Divs, please relax, they will be paid out when I receive them from Sasha.  Staker Divs are a gift from MMBTCD, and were intended as a token of good faith to those securing the BitcoinDark blockchain and they will be paid out.  Sasha and i have both been extremely busy lately, but it will happen