For anyone still wondering about Dan's ability to code, I have had a private discussion with Xander Shepard recently. He does the Linux builds for XC and is listed on the XC team roster on the official website.
He has seen the private github repository and has verified with me that Dan makes very regular commits and that he is indeed a skilled coder with the experience he says he has.
I just wanted to help clarify this matter.
My view of the situation so far is this:
Dan is probably more of a networks guy than an A level crypto developer. Evidence seems to suggest he's paid tens of thousands of dollars for outsourcing. The break down of this exactly we're never going to know. I'd guess a lot of that money has been paid to Christan Howe and that he's done the vast majority of development for XC. With Dan possibly coming up with the ideas about the mixer and such. I'd bet that Dan is in fact very technical and does have a lot of specific domain knowledge in his professional field, but that he's not necessarily the lead developer type. None of this in itself is inherently bad.
We do know that he paid loljosh to create XC. He's never publicly admitted it, but we can see in that screenshot that we have the additional evidence for that now as well.
The problem as I see it is that his image has been cultivated to be some sort of crypto coding god. "One of crypto's best" as everyone likes to throw around. And XC has built a kind of cult of personality around him. This ways parlayed in to his "freelance" work with Prometheus, including the code reviews.
I will say this though: if XC ever actually goes open source, and their mixer does actually turn out to be as good as it's been sold to XC holders as, and Dan was the designer(but not the coder of it) then that would be a positive mark for him. If it's tested by third parties and the code is reviewed by experts, and it does what it says on the tin, then that would be a good thing. Until then though we have no idea, and I don't know why it hasn't been open sourced yet. Because a true decentralised trustless mixer would probably shut a lot of people up and provide some evidence that at least someone was able to design some legit tech.
Read the pastebin of the conversation between the SDC devs and the XC team:
https://gist.github.com/atcsecure/cf6a478ef3169cefdc6dYou'll see that Dan is way more than a "networks guy."
He's an "infrastructure developer", who "started back in the 80's[, and] outside of XC most of [his] work is mesh networking/development for IP over RF." He's a "full systems guy, the whole 9, linux through security and windows (ug)" and has done numerous secure systems for government and corporations.
He did not "pay loljosh to create XC". Neither is it true that he's "never publicly admitted it." He has.
He paid loljosh for a standard PoS clone, which Dan then turned into the unique thing that XC is. Loljosh does not have the skills to create anything like XC.
One thing everyone should realise is that two conflicting claims were presented in the smear campaign:
- Dan can't code
- Dan is a master coder and that's why Prometheus valued him so highly, and used him to create so many coins.
So let's just get this nonsense out of the way forever. Dan is a master coder. He's a uniquely skilled and highly experienced systems architect.
Importantly, being a systems architect means you don't have to work on all the low level stuff. You get other devs to create various bits and pieces for you. How else do you think XC has achieved such a ridiculous rate of development? Look at the
timeline: it would take more than the 1000+ hours Dan has sunk into XC for one person to create all that.
Ahem... the Rev 1 mixer tech was
open sourced. Go and look at it yourself.
