Below NectarCoin addresses the latest rounds of comments, criticisms, other feedback and suggestions. Please keep them coming.
We aim to address every batch of posts in a single response posted by the end of each weekday.
All our previous posts: Link
As requested, here am sent my manelecrypto herself ... One of our favorite twitter cryptocelebs/commentators is @manelecrypto, who often posts some of the funniest, frequent, timely, on-target crypto commentary on the web - it's quite witty. We address some recent comments directed to us:
In the days to come, we plan to publicise Nectar wherever crypto is widely followed, including CoinBlab (I think we've already started posting our profile there). But we have our small suspicions that Coinblab is run by whale-manipulators/pump-and-dump groups. And we really want to keep Nectar as clean as possible - one of our biggest selling points is that we're new to the system (Mr Smith Goes to Washington) and are not tangled up in all that baggage. We do plan to post more on Coinblab, but we'd like to know more about who's behind it and what their intentions are.
As for the FUD, we consider it the "cost of doing business." Any time you do business, especially if you're successful, you have to put up with some noise/criticism. As an IT services group (in the "real world"), we have to put up with our fair share of difficult clients. Our perspective is that, as long as there's mutual respect, clients who entrust us their hard-earned money, have every right to have their concerns expressed and addressed. We don't always have all the answers - all the right answers. Constructive criticism and input makes us question our wrong assumptions and do a better job of serving our clients going forward.
As long as that criticism is constructive and not vulgar, we welcome it. If it's vulgar and clearly motivated by no other intention but to undermine the coin and hurt the community around it, we'll respond swiftly and vigorously. You can see our FUD policy in the [ANN] #1 post.
We're reluctant to censor - one option we've considered is opening two threads, one moderated and one unmoderated, so that if FUD becomes a problem (doesnt seem to be so far), people will be free to pick whether they want to read the clean, filtered thread to get to informative content/updates faster and more easily or go through the unfiltered messy message thread.
As always, we're open to suggestions that address the tradeoff between freedom and order and, more specifically, what we can do to ensure valid criticism gets through and deliberate attempts to hurt the coin/community do not.
If you stick with Bitcointalk, your coin will die. I'm a paid FUDer and make nice money; I've killed coins. There are about 20 ways I could kill your coin with one or two posts. If I bring in some sock puppets or some friends game over. Once a believable rumor is planted it doesn't go away. Other people pass it along, it grows and becomes the "truth". Bitcointalk is completely corrupt and follows the interests of Bitcoin itself, big coiners and whoever has paid off the mods. I KNOW this. Coinblab is controlled by manipulators but on there you control the information flow and manage the message. IconicExpert's latest coin is a total bug fuck but still alive because he stays off bitcointalk completelty and sticks to Twitter and Coinblab. The trolls don't have a way in ... We hear you - it is ugly out there, and we're well aware of alternatives to BCT. We are planning on a broader marketing campaign and that includes posting on Coinblab and other emerging forums, as well as creating a forum on our own website. It would be very interesting for us to know what special anti-FUD/spam tools/ressurces Coinblab has that bitcointalk currently doesn't.
But BCT appears to remain the leader for now. According to the view ticker up top, this message thread has been read more than 16000 times. By our count, there are at least 2000 users (many of them unregistered guests) online at any given time:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=who. Even if we account for repeat views and even if we account for some simultaneous log-ins of puppet accounts, that's a lot of eyeballs and probably far exceeds the best alternatives out there. NEOS, which had been hot up to that point, abandoned BCT and its price went into a coma soon after (at least, it looks comatose). IE decided to focus only on Coinblab and raised less than 6% of his ICO target. And his absence (at least the absence of a recognisable username) hasn't kept people from panning his coin's launch on multiple threads here.
That doesn't mean BCT is the end-all, be-all of forums now and always (and that there weren't other factors behind the examples mentioned above including general altcoin market weakness), only that we don't think it's wise to ignore it. We feel the best approach is to broadcast widely and to invoke anti-FUD moderation only very selectively but very thoroughly if it gets out of hand.
We are well aware that several coins - notably NXT and Ethereum - that have had great success hosting their own forums and going off to other places such as Reddit (I think Ethereum devs hardly comment on BCT). We are also preparing for that contigency and will be setting up a forum on our own website. A big selling point for a forum outside bitcointalk beyond the FUD is that their forum tech is archaic. Even under the best conditions without any FUD, it's too time consuming to drill down and find the updates and other information you're looking for here. Forum tech has evolved a lot from what's currently being used here, and we think Shadowcash's forum is a great example of that - things like seeing posts being posted in real time.
Our general opinion on FUD - we're aware of the campaigns (paid and otherwise from people propping up other coins in what many perceive as a shrinking pie), but we also think FUD can be a symptom of fundamental weaknesses in the coin (either in the coin itself, the way the devs treat the community, the quality of their work, etc). FUD is everywhere, but it tends to be more limited and have much less weight when it comes to coins that are clearly legitimate enterprises, have integrity, a solid track record of dynamic innovation and delivering on promises - arguably coins like Ethereum, Counterparty, etc.
Maybe we're romantics/naive - and we stand ready to adapt to ANY clearly deliberate campaigns to undermine confidence in the coin and hurt those who choose to join us - but we tend to believe that the cream rises to the top and that criticism makes you more humble and better. Call us optimistic, but we think even some FUDers are starting to realise how badly they've hurt the golden goose and that we all need more big success stories in this ecosystem (like DRK's massive success earlier this year) to bring greater positive attention and more money into this ecosystem for everyone. We see things turning around.
We don't want this thread to become an echo chamber. We don't want to just talk to people who agree with us. A forum is supposed to be a place for give-and-take/back-and-forth discussion. Better judgement, greater wisdom and better decisions can emerge from that.
We plan to be very responsive to community input about all aspects (including marketing and wallet/messenger design and functionality) and will consider lowering the coin price (since several people have commented on this) as well as the number of coins, but keep in mind that we've priced the coin to be able to provide a budget that covers a full-time commitment over an 18-month+ period from a professional staff of serious designers, programmers and marketers. The kind of quality dev team and the kind of 24/7 commitment that people clearly want. We have to make sure the budget supports that.
Regarding the quantity of coins (putting aside the price), we thought it might actually be too low. Our goal is to make Nectar widely used, especially across college campuses, media institutions and other groups who value secure chat communications. We want a widely circulated coin to be widely available without a lot of people having to make multi-decimal .000000x calculations or conversions to Nectar-satoshi ("nectarines"/"natoshis"?) in their heads. We think this is one thing Dogecoin got right and one of the reasons it's been effective as a tipping/social coin. Again, we want everything about Nectar to be user friendly.
One possibility we're considering is to increase the coin supply and proportionately reduce the price per coin to keep everything even.
True -- Doge coin reduces all those decimal places, but all those digits shifted before the decimal make for ridiculously large numbers that represent only a few bucks in a way that makes them feel as worthless as Zimbabwe dollars, so we take your point on that. We also think that going in the opposite direction and making the coin too rare goes to more ridiculousness in the other direction. We dont want people having to transact in quadrillionths of a coin. At this point, we think we've struck the right balance or are somewhat close, but it's hard to tell for sure without knowing what the future holds.
td;lr: Looks like we'll stay put.
We are very keen on p2p chat anon but are ambivalent about the state of currenct anon-transactions tech. We think there are a lot of big technical questions and challenges that haven't been fully solved (though Shadowcoin and the Cryptonote coins seem promising and seem to be making progress). We dont want to give false promises. What we've promised so far is only what we're certain we can deliver. That said, we are building Nectar to be a very flexible, modular system (including a plugin platform) that will be future-proofed for upgrades.
We just think there are more immediate issues about usability and adoption that really need to be addressed fast, first, and we want to focus on those - things we're sure we can deliver - before we address bigger, more exotic things.
If Cryptonote, Shadowcoin and Darkcoin fail to achieve solid, verified anon-transaction tech and we decide to make a big push on this front, we likely wont say anything about it or announce anything until we achieve it 100% in a way that is 100% verified by well-respected third party experts (on the level of Andreas Antonopoulos). In other words, we'd Ninja announce it. We will not run the risk of dragging people through weeks and months of anticipation and anxiety for nothing, as so many "anon" coins have.
ANON is bullshit, it doesn't work but the geek market likes it and wants it. Believe me, there's nothing an altcoin can do that the NSA can't see through like glass. You can cut/paste the anon code from lots of coins. Put in, update the ANN and your value will double.Yes, the ANON craze has seen a lot of empty promises, delusions and wasted time and BTC. We're not going to involve ourselves in any of that. We will consider your idea, perhaps via the plugin platform that we'll have more to say about in the future.
We love nature pics too! Bees are adorable... from a distance.
The bees are good, the birds are good. Get rid of the damned infographics. When people see an ICO with infographics they think scam because infographics usually mean scam. Also put all of your features in big bold letters at the top of your ANN.We take your point and mandele's on features up top and will be revising our [ANN] very soon in that regard.
We'll use any excuse we can to inject great nature photography into anything, but there was a specific branding message we wanted to convey with it. Too often crypto is geek/tech-focused. We want to break the mainstream-adoption barrier the way Apple/Windows did for PCs and Apple/Android/Samsung have for mobile phones. We want crypto to be less stale and more rich and bold in color and vision.
Regarding the infographics, our understanding is that infographics are images of roadmaps and such. Are you referring to the user interface images - we feel those are critical. We want to immediately convey that a huge part of what we want to do with this project is develop a fresh, new, intuitive, user-friendly interface that looks and performs nothing like the typical Qt wallet. We feel it's one of our biggest selling points.
As far as infographics, like the kind of roadmap graphics developed by Shadowcoin and Checkcoin, we tend to like them a lot and feel they're really well done. They convey professionalism, class and seriousness. Some of the most obvious coin scams we've seen immediately came across to us as potential scams because of their amateurish graphics. One guy (and you know who you are) clearly copy-pasted random imagery and pawned it off as a "roadmap" using Windows Paint. It was an insult and screamed obvious scam - it happened to be yet another "anon" coin that has thankfully faded from the scene.
Do these things and we'll back you with good posts, good Twitter and other good stuff. You guys have a winner if you fix some things. More later.
There's a lot of good food for thought here that we will continue to discuss and digest internally. We really appreciated the time you took to check us out and make the comments and take all constructive criticism very seriously.
Wow, we thought we might be a bit picture-heavy. Glad you appreciate nature photography like we do. Regarding roadmap ETAs, please see our previous comments. We will be providing a roadmap and %-completed updates on a regular basis, but we want to avoid overpromising and underdelivering, so we will avoid giving hard dates. The nature of programming is that you can always run up against unanticipated unknowns that have to be worked through and worked around on unpredictable schedules. But where we're more certain, we'll give more guidance. And again, we'll always be provided "% complete" updates.
Direct 2-way/fiat conversion - we completely agree. And will have more to say on this. The user-friendliness of the system will rely heavily on making use of crypto as easy and the tech as "invisible" to mainstream users as possible. Everything that supports that we can enable we will enable.
You need to enable this now, ASAP. Only way to real world use.You are
absolutely right about that. Absolutely right. It's even more important for us than other coins because a huge part of what we want to do is make the crypto coin tech less techy, less conspicous to users in the same way that one of the best things about Macs and Windows GUI was getting rid of the DOS command line. The key to getting more adoption is making the crypto coins more usable. They key to making them more usable is not having to jump through hoops to get and spend your coins. We're going to have a graphic that illustrates more of our perspective on this soon.
This, btw, is also part of the reason for the CFC size - we need the coin's markets to have deep liquidity for the coin to be more easily bought and sold by a growing user base without rocking the price massively. We want this to be treated and usable as a serious, liquid currency within a very short time frame.
Coin looks great as does wallet but you cant go charging 8000 - 30,000 on buy first get in cheaper basis. nobodys gonna wanna pay double or more than the first price.
We do not want this coin exposed to post-CFC dumps and we'd consider narrowing the gap between the early-bird and last-chance price (among other things we're already planning to do to reduce if not eliminate the risk of a post-CFC dump), but we think there's a lot of merit to awarding those who take the greatest risk and buy in first. It also offers a strong incentive to get people to buy into the crowdfund.
Ethereum, SYS (putting aside its current problems) and others had great success with their crowdfunding using a staggered, multi-price release.
If you look at the Ethereum btc wallet chart here around the summer period of the crowdsale
https://blockchain.info/charts/balance?address=36PrZ1KHYMpqSyAQXSG8VwbUiq2EogxLo2you'll notice that the speed of fundraising tended to accelerate any time the CFC price was about to increase.
And even 8000 sats is pretty damn expensive. Youd be better off having 1 price, much fairer and youd prob raise more in the end. Good luck raising 2200 BTCs in todays scene with those prices!!??
We really appreciate the compliments and your interest and we're taking all input very seriously. We don't have the all the answers and there are often tradeoffs and uncertainty about what the best course is.
That being said, here's our perspective on the CFC pricing, along the lines of what we've said in our FAQ and elsewhere:
* the CFC price is a max target, not a minimum
* This is not priced like the usual altcoin CFC because we do not want to build "yet another altcoin". We want to build a top coin. We feel that a number of the current top coins are vulnerable and that even bitcoin is vulnerable to being displaced as the top dog, judging from its market action over the past few weeks. Basically, we're requesting 2200BTC because we want to build a high-quality, 2200BTC coin that's worth at least that much.
* We think one of the reasons so many altcoins have failed is because devs do not have the resources to deliver and do everything they've promised and that the community and markets demand of them. They just don't have the budgets required. So either they're scammers who deliberately low-balled and never intended to deliver on grandiose promises -- devs who only ask for as much BTC as they intend to steal rather than what they need to build. Or they're well intentioned devs who didn't plan well for what they were getting into (development-wise, community management-wise, etc) and bit off more than they could chew, so they cut corners, get overwhelmed and eventually bail, getting back to spending their time on something where the reward comes closer to covering the labor. Crypto enthusiasts want a high-quality product from a high-quality team that is responsive and delivers high-quality service. Programming talent and quality customer service is like anything else -- generally, you get what you pay for.
* As mentioned in the [ANN] and as confirmed by Cryptoasian, we're a IT service provider that works on multiple projects for multiple clients at any given time. As part of planning ahead for a long-term commitment to this project, we'll need to divert manpower from other projects and commit schedules for months in advance. BTC has behaved like "just another pump-and-dump altcoin" over the past year. As a logistical necessity, we have to hedge at least somewhat for whatever might happen to bitcoin's price over the next few months to reduce the risk our budget will implode after we've already committed the manpower. BTC isn't what it used to be. 2200BTC isn't what it used to be and we're not 100% certain what its purchasing power might be over the coming year.
* what we've disclosed in the [ANN] is only the start of what we have planned as far as features/functionality and marketing/adoption.
* We don't receive a dime until we deliver on each component
In short, to anyone who thinks that our CFC target is too high, we'd humbly suggest that you think a little bigger and apply a different measuring stick to what we aim to achieve. This wont be shibecoin.
We again welcome all suggestions and comments and appreciate your time and interest.
lol at the attempt to get you to move to Coinblab , dont fall for it!!
Yes, we have our suspicions about Coinblab - we found the way it was being promoted by several twitter celebs in sync with one another a few weeks ago to be highly suspicious. Does anyone know who's actually behind it? We'll still post there and anywhere there might be decent exposure to altcoin enthusiasts, but we're not under any illusions about what might be going on there.
Here you go, they're beginning to creep around. This one is a Syscoin bag holder. If your coin manages to grow Syscoin is more in the dirt. They need Bitcointalk to spread FUD. Coinblab is one choice. There are others. Bitcointalk is a cesspool that will suck you in.
Syscoin's launch could've been better, but we support what they say they're trying to do in the direction of blockchain 2.0 tech and wish them the best.
We are very open to recommendations on other forums that are good to invest time on. We cant post on them all ourselves, so if anyone has any kind of ranking of the ones with the best traffic, please let us know.
I don't trust IPO or ICO of any kind,for most of them are scams.
Sadly, many are. But please do not lump us with the rest. There are those of us who believe there's much more to be gained from doing a good job than scamming people.
We do not understand the short-sighted mentality of scammers - it's obvious to us that there is so much more to be gained by developing a great lifelong reputation in blockchain tech, which we consider the boom market of the future. We want to build an excellent lifelong brand reputation in this space. A lifelong positive reputation in blockchain tech will be worth a lot more over years/decades than a one-time allotment of 2200BTC.
After what's happened in altcoin markets over the past few months, people have very good reason to be cynical and skeptical, but please at least consider the possibility that we might be different from the usual and that many of the things we propose (especially our commitment to PODs, our proposal of a results-based/milestone-based escrow where payment is not released until we deliver and a proposed budget that would cover months of serious commitment by a professional team) are not the kinds of things a scammer would propose.
One of the reasons we're doing this is because we're just as appalled by much of what's happened here and want to demonstrate that there's a much better way of doing things that benefits everyone.
We are happy to address any specific concerns you might have.
If we missed anything in any of our responses above, please let us know. And thank you again for your time and interest. Please keep these helpful comments and suggestions coming.
