1) Dan drained the XC premine when there was a promise of transparency.
We've been frank and apologetic about this. We dropped the ball and did not report expenditures as they happened. Again, we apologise.
This does not constitute anything resembling a "scam." It's an oversight. And the premine was
not dumped. Dan did
not treat it as his private stash of wealth. It was used, as promised, for development.
This is testament to our ethical intentions. It does the exact opposite of you assert.
2) Dan has been consistently deceptive. If you honestly think that he doesn't frequently bend the truth and dodge legit questions then you're being willfully ignorant.
No he has not. It is incredibly easy to make this claim about
anyone because English is not a formal language and there is always space to interpret statements in multiple ways. Therefore it is
always possible to mount a claim about someone being "deceptive". But there are insufficient grounds to assert this claim unless you've also eliminated all the ways in which the statement can interpreted as being truthful.
Thus only way to attain a realistically grounded interpretation of anything is to read charitably and critically. Uncharitable reading latches onto any possible way to interpret a statement as untruthful, and from that point onwards is blinkered toward alternative readings.
Oh, and "dodging" questions has to do with denying either
- the legitimacy of demands that personal information be disclosed, or with
- refraining from addressing the same repudiated questions repeatedly.
You have insufficient grounds to attribute a refusal to answer a question to him being deceptive, because the above reasons cannot be ruled out.
3) Dan deceived at best and lied at worst when directly asked if he had involvement in HAL by claiming he had no role in the development despite Promethus saying that Dan helped develop their anon. Even if Dan didn't physically write any code, he was involved in the development. It was confirmed by Prometheus that he was involved with more than just a code review.
More uncharitable reading there? As above, in order to attain a reliably realistic interpretation of a post, one must interpret both critically and charitably.
Why? Because there's no case to be made from the mere possibility that a statement
could be dishonest. A legitimate case for someone's dishonesty does the opposite: it undermines all reasons why the statement could be interpreted as honest. This is foundation-level epistemology.
Any allegation that does not achieve this is either unfounded FUD or a smear campaign.
His wording has consistently been deceptive. It is unethical period. Please explain how that is not unethical.
As above, the perception of him being deceptive has everything to do with your uncharitable and insufficiently critical reading of him.
Dan doing a code review under the pretense of being an unbiased third party to lure unsuspecting investors in to a Prometheus pump and dump is the epitome of unethical behavior. How is could it not be?
Pretense of being an unbiased third party? Why pretense? What grounds for this claim?
Pump and dump? Again, what grounds? Prometheus is frank about calling himself a “pumper” but is vocal that this does not make him a “dumper,” as his statement details.
Neither does being a “pumper” make him a scammer. He does not abandon coins after a pump, as is the case with KeyCoin, a coin formerly pumped by him which has just completed KeyTrader with his funding, long after the pump.
Furthermore it is clear from the screenshots that he actively recruits talented developers to create real technology.
So it appears that Prometheus aims, primarily, to profit from his coins, but creates projects with real innovation that outlast a pump and are funded to continue onwards and retain a fair market value. Ultimately Prometheus appears to be an investor who supplies the necessary capital for a coin to gain recognition and the momentum to stand a chance at long-term success.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=829576.msg9422694#msg9422694"Excuse"? "Caught"?
You don't get "caught" by a fact that is already known on both sides.
What you do get is frustrated beyond the ability to continue conversation with an individual as intolerably belligerent as Longandshort. And then you just get out, in desperation.
Dan's statement affirms that he was unable emotionally to deal with the persistence and brutality of the onslaught against him and simply shut it down.
After shutting it down, he then issued his statement to reconfirm the truth.
Call it "lying"? That's like an attacker calling his victim's cries of anguish "cowardly." Brute.
5) He was confirmed to have loljosh launch the clone coin by both n00bnoxious and Synechist in my deleted post from the blocknet thread. Him saying he "assisted with some QT work" is a lie. Launching the chain is much more than "assisted with some QT work".
A "lie"? Be careful not to overextend your claims beyond the grounds they're based on. We don't know if Loljosh launched the chain, and neither does it matter to anything.
Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Loljosh launched the chain. Or maybe Loljosh showed Dan how to launch it. Or maybe Loljosh just delivered the QT code and Dan asked someone else how to launch it. Is this a problem? No. It does not impinge on Dan's ability as a developer or diminish his reputation. Dan's track record, pace of development, and reliability/professionalism is beyond doubt, based on XC alone, never mind his contracts outside of crypto.
It pretty much makes no difference what Loljosh did or didn't do. XC is real, and its privacy tech is
so far ahead of anything else out there that it's completely irrelevant whether, when, or how he learnt about launching a chain.
I'd seriously love to hear a defense of these actions.
I'd seriously love to hear a defense for continuing with this smear campaign. It's been soundly repudiated.
1) Dan drained the XC premine when there was a promise of transparency.
We've been frank and apologetic about this. We dropped the ball and did not report expenditures as they happened. Again, we apologise.
This does not constitute anything resembling a "scam." It's an oversight. And the premine was
not dumped. Dan did
not treat it as his private stash of wealth. It was used, as promised, for development.
This is testament to our ethical intentions. It does the exact opposite of you assert.
2) Dan has been consistently deceptive. If you honestly think that he doesn't frequently bend the truth and dodge legit questions then you're being willfully ignorant.
No he has not. It is incredibly easy to make this claim about
anyone because English is not a formal language and there is always space to interpret statements in multiple ways. Therefore it is
always possible to mount a claim about someone being "deceptive". But there are insufficient grounds to assert this claim unless you've also eliminated all the ways in which the statement can interpreted as being truthful.
Thus only way to attain a realistically grounded interpretation of anything is to read charitably and critically. Uncharitable reading latches onto any possible way to interpret a statement as untruthful, and from that point onwards is blinkered toward alternative readings.
Oh, and "dodging" questions has to do with denying either
- the legitimacy of demands that personal information be disclosed, or with
- refraining from addressing the same repudiated questions repeatedly.
You have insufficient grounds to attribute a refusal to answer a question to him being deceptive, because the above reasons cannot be ruled out.
3) Dan deceived at best and lied at worst when directly asked if he had involvement in HAL by claiming he had no role in the development despite Promethus saying that Dan helped develop their anon. Even if Dan didn't physically write any code, he was involved in the development. It was confirmed by Prometheus that he was involved with more than just a code review.
More uncharitable reading there? As above, in order to attain a reliably realistic interpretation of a post, one must interpret both critically and charitably.
Why? Because there's no case to be made from the mere possibility that a statement
could be dishonest. A legitimate case for someone's dishonesty does the opposite: it undermines all reasons why the statement could be interpreted as honest. This is foundation-level epistemology.
Any allegation that does not achieve this is either unfounded FUD or a smear campaign.
His wording has consistently been deceptive. It is unethical period. Please explain how that is not unethical.
As above, the perception of him being deceptive has everything to do with your uncharitable and insufficiently critical reading of him.
Dan doing a code review under the pretense of being an unbiased third party to lure unsuspecting investors in to a Prometheus pump and dump is the epitome of unethical behavior. How is could it not be?
Pretense of being an unbiased third party? Why pretense? What grounds for this claim?
Pump and dump? Again, what grounds? Prometheus is frank about calling himself a “pumper” but is vocal that this does not make him a “dumper,” as his statement details.
Neither does being a “pumper” make him a scammer. He does not abandon coins after a pump, as is the case with KeyCoin, a coin formerly pumped by him which has just completed KeyTrader with his funding, long after the pump.
Furthermore it is clear from the screenshots that he actively recruits talented developers to create real technology.
So it appears that Prometheus aims, primarily, to profit from his coins, but creates projects with real innovation that outlast a pump and are funded to continue onwards and retain a fair market value. Ultimately Prometheus appears to be an investor who supplies the necessary capital for a coin to gain recognition and the momentum to stand a chance at long-term success.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=829576.msg9422694#msg9422694"Excuse"? "Caught"?
You don't get "caught" by a fact that is already known on both sides.
What you do get is frustrated beyond the ability to continue conversation with an individual as intolerably belligerent as Longandshort. And then you just get out, in desperation.
Dan's statement affirms that he was unable emotionally to deal with the persistence and brutality of the onslaught against him and simply shut it down.
After shutting it down, he then issued his statement to reconfirm the truth.
Call it "lying"? That's like an attacker calling his victim's cries of anguish "cowardly." Brute.
5) He was confirmed to have loljosh launch the clone coin by both n00bnoxious and Synechist in my deleted post from the blocknet thread. Him saying he "assisted with some QT work" is a lie. Launching the chain is much more than "assisted with some QT work".
A "lie"? Be careful not to overextend your claims beyond the grounds they're based on. We don't know if Loljosh launched the chain, and neither does it matter to anything.
Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Loljosh launched the chain. Or maybe Loljosh showed Dan how to launch it. Or maybe Loljosh just delivered the QT code and Dan asked someone else how to launch it. Is this a problem? No. It does not impinge on Dan's ability as a developer or diminish his reputation. Dan's track record, pace of development, and reliability/professionalism is beyond doubt, based on XC alone, never mind his contracts outside of crypto.
It pretty much makes no difference what Loljosh did or didn't do. XC is real, and its privacy tech is
so far ahead of anything else out there that it's completely irrelevant whether, when, or how he learnt about launching a chain.
I'd seriously love to hear a defense of these actions.
I'd seriously love to hear a defense for continuing with this smear campaign. It's been soundly repudiated.
My main contention is that there has been unethical behavior. I'm not trying to argue the semantics of the word scam. I'm not interested in a smear campaign, I'd be happy with the full truth.
There's been a consistent lack of clarity and honesty from my observations over the months. It's your job to cover it up and dress it in the best possible manner.
I mainly want to make sure we're at the point where everyone involved has the ability to make an informed choice based on all the available information.
If someone has a full understanding of everything that's gone on and perceives these actions as ethical, then I'm not going to try convince them otherwise. The XC community's classification of every criticism or anything that could potentially be perceived as negative as "FUD" creates an echo chamber effect where there's lots of people who I feel really don't understand the full story.
I'm going to cut and paste another reply here on a similar issue. But the tl;dr summary of it is that is all possible scenarios related to Dan and the HAL code review, him doing the review while involved with Promethus should be considered unethical. And the code reviews alone were already widely considered unethical even before the Prometheus reveal among the community.
There are many possible scenarios indicated by the language that Dan has used to describe his relationship with HAL. I personally think he has at least some coding ability, and potentially lots, but we do know that he outsources a large amount of his coding. Dan repeatedly made statements like "I didn't code for HAL", which may very well be true statements. There exsits many possibilities in between where he could have still developed for HAL, but outsourced the actual coding. Prometheus mentioned that Dan 'took the HAL anon to another level', he may have designed it and had Christian Howe code it. He may have not done that, and simply worked with Promethus on a strictly theoretical level, outlining the tech while Prometheus paid his own man to code it(although the 'Dan's coin' talk from both Prom and Coinada makes this seem less likely). So while there are many different scenarios that might have taken place - and we're obviously not going to be getting the full truth anytime soon - either Prom and Coinada are lying about Dan's involvement in HAL, or Dan had some level of involvement in it.
If Prom and Coinada are not lying, then was it unethical for Dan to do a code review for HAL?
If Prom and Coinada are lying, and Dan had actually had zero involvement with HAL specifically before the code review ,would it be ethical for him to review HAL's code considering by this time he was already involved with Prometheus?
If this seemingly unlikely course of events look place, it still reflects very poorly on Dan. All of those code reviews he did. Even when we as a community naively assumed that he was in fact an unbiased third party. The community at large certainly did not know about his connection with Prometheus. If you think that would have been ignored after reading the XC thread where multiple members put forth the belief that XC was somehow different and not associated with the shady underground of altcoins, then you weren't paying attention. The XC echo chamber shielded many of those community members from the true opinions of people, but I can guarantee you that you could mention XC on any trollbox or non XC thread and hear some real opinions about XC and Dan Metcalf. If you think I'm lying, I'd advise you to try it sometime posing as someone making a legit inquiry about XC and watch the reactions you get.
We could get deeper in to why I and others considered Dan's implicit approval of those coins that he reviewed was unethical, but I don't feel the need. A lot of the issue stemmed from the way they were presented, and press releases calling them "the defacto standard of legitimacy". This was of course before the public had any idea of the Dan and Prometheus connection. But that's not really necessary at this point. Really the only thing left to do is for someone to make a full timeline of events with all of the comments that were made and make it available and let people make their own judgement. That's unlikely to happen though unless someone really wants to take the time to put something like that together. A journalist might.
One can look at Prometheus' twitter history and collocate his promotions with the charts of the coins that he was behind the funding of. If this doesn't paint the picture of one of crypto's most notorious pump and dumpers, I don't know what will. Of course, no one can prove that he ever sold a single coin in his life. Short of getting his account history from the exchanges. So yes, there's always going to be some reasonable doubt you can point to. In Dan's defense, he could have been naive, and not understood what Prometheus' history is with altcoins. But he didn't, and he went as far to say he considers Prometheus 'an ethical promoter'. People who are okay with this(and I'm sure there are many) are welcome to spend their money as they wish. I worry about people who aren't as familiar with the history of alts who might not know what kind of people they're associating with though.
