GAW / Josh Garza discussion Paycoin XPY xpy.io ION ionomy. ALWAYS MAKE MONEY :)

[anderl]

I can't believe Josh has the balls to say banks control b your funds and your access to then but GAW doesn't. Yet as a former customer I've had my funds frozen more times at zencloud in 1 month than I've had in 7 years using PayPal.

[anderl]

So as someone "invested" in mining at GAW (and other places) and also a fairly hardcore skeptic on this new coin, I have to say this thread has devolved into absurdity.  I come here looking for solid, reasonable risks (quantifiable) with regards to Pay Coin.  Lord knows I don't get to see much of that at Hash Talk.  So with a few good comments on the technical limitations of the coin, and the vast abyss of the unknowns of the coin, we're surrounded with personal attacks on GAW and Josh, and a significant amount of untrue statements.

Is the Cantor guy the father in law of Garza?  I've seen it posted here no less than 3 times.
The Garza vs youtube vid posted?  Not OUR Josh Garza?

These things absolutely destroy the credibility of the detractors of GAW.  Even those that have legitimate  issues with the company.  If this is a moderated thread, I ask the moderator to start removing the proven wrong accusations to allow a real picture for those looking.  Otherwise what's the point?  A circle jerk hatred thread to GAW?  That serves no one.  

I have a serious problem with ALL so called crypto news outlets.  The CCN articles are shit from start to finish.  They are glorified press releases with a question at the beginning.  That said, the coinfire article also was far too anonymous.  LEO, if you stand behind your research, which may or may not have been performed by you, then you should post your full name and stand behind the article.  The fact that you named a Walmart source (Tara) was great, but you should have done for all of the contacts you spoke with and you should have put your name out there.

Anything less, and I hold CCN (and the like) to the same standard, is a fucking blog.  Blogs are not news, they are, at best, an opinion piece.  The fact that the coinfire article had its origins from Reddit (oddly enough one redditor, weeks before this article was posted, also said one retailer threatened legal action regarding GAW's claims) doesn't lend credibility to the article.  Did LEO just contact the redditor in question and ask details?  Is that part of their "team", or did LEO contact these people directly?

Yup so I guess the WSJ blog post is an option piece and be treated with the same disdain then.

[suchmoon]

I can't believe Josh has the balls to say banks control b your funds and your access to then but GAW doesn't. Yet as a former customer I've had my funds frozen more times at zencloud in 1 month than I've had in 7 years using PayPal.

Yeah, he's had that part backwards on multiple occasions. He also called PayPal out like that via one of his tweets. With GAW/Zen you're completely at their mercy because your coins/hashpoints only exist in their database with its questionable reliability and security. With a bank you at least have a legal framework, insurance, and a fairly functional consumer protection agency (at least in the the US) backing your deposit.

[crashoveride54902]

I can't believe Josh has the balls to say banks control b your funds and your access to then but GAW doesn't. Yet as a former customer I've had my funds frozen more times at zencloud in 1 month than I've had in 7 years using PayPal.

shhhh!!! people can't be reading that...that'll crash the whole system!!

[jimmothy]

So as someone "invested" in mining at GAW (and other places) and also a fairly hardcore skeptic on this new coin, I have to say this thread has devolved into absurdity.  I come here looking for solid, reasonable risks (quantifiable) with regards to Pay Coin.  Lord knows I don't get to see much of that at Hash Talk.  So with a few good comments on the technical limitations of the coin, and the vast abyss of the unknowns of the coin, we're surrounded with personal attacks on GAW and Josh, and a significant amount of untrue statements.

Is the Cantor guy the father in law of Garza?  I've seen it posted here no less than 3 times.
The Garza vs youtube vid posted?  Not OUR Josh Garza?

These things absolutely destroy the credibility of the detractors of GAW.  Even those that have legitimate  issues with the company.  If this is a moderated thread, I ask the moderator to start removing the proven wrong accusations to allow a real picture for those looking.  Otherwise what's the point?  A circle jerk hatred thread to GAW?  That serves no one.  

I have a serious problem with ALL so called crypto news outlets.  The CCN articles are shit from start to finish.  They are glorified press releases with a question at the beginning.  That said, the coinfire article also was far too anonymous.  LEO, if you stand behind your research, which may or may not have been performed by you, then you should post your full name and stand behind the article.  The fact that you named a Walmart source (Tara) was great, but you should have done for all of the contacts you spoke with and you should have put your name out there.

Anything less, and I hold CCN (and the like) to the same standard, is a fucking blog.  Blogs are not news, they are, at best, an opinion piece.  The fact that the coinfire article had its origins from Reddit (oddly enough one redditor, weeks before this article was posted, also said one retailer threatened legal action regarding GAW's claims) doesn't lend credibility to the article.  Did LEO just contact the redditor in question and ask details?  Is that part of their "team", or did LEO contact these people directly?

I agree, the unconstructive hate is detrimental to this thread.

Minor correction: The "one redditor" was actually coinfire.
Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2l7myv/can_we_talk_about_gaw/

[suchmoon]

So as someone "invested" in mining at GAW (and other places) and also a fairly hardcore skeptic on this new coin, I have to say this thread has devolved into absurdity.  I come here looking for solid, reasonable risks (quantifiable) with regards to Pay Coin.  Lord knows I don't get to see much of that at Hash Talk.  So with a few good comments on the technical limitations of the coin, and the vast abyss of the unknowns of the coin, we're surrounded with personal attacks on GAW and Josh, and a significant amount of untrue statements.

Is the Cantor guy the father in law of Garza?  I've seen it posted here no less than 3 times.
The Garza vs youtube vid posted?  Not OUR Josh Garza?

These things absolutely destroy the credibility of the detractors of GAW.  Even those that have legitimate  issues with the company.  If this is a moderated thread, I ask the moderator to start removing the proven wrong accusations to allow a real picture for those looking.  Otherwise what's the point?  A circle jerk hatred thread to GAW?  That serves no one.  

I have a serious problem with ALL so called crypto news outlets.  The CCN articles are shit from start to finish.  They are glorified press releases with a question at the beginning.  That said, the coinfire article also was far too anonymous.  LEO, if you stand behind your research, which may or may not have been performed by you, then you should post your full name and stand behind the article.  The fact that you named a Walmart source (Tara) was great, but you should have done for all of the contacts you spoke with and you should have put your name out there.

Anything less, and I hold CCN (and the like) to the same standard, is a fucking blog.  Blogs are not news, they are, at best, an opinion piece.  The fact that the coinfire article had its origins from Reddit (oddly enough one redditor, weeks before this article was posted, also said one retailer threatened legal action regarding GAW's claims) doesn't lend credibility to the article.  Did LEO just contact the redditor in question and ask details?  Is that part of their "team", or did LEO contact these people directly?

This thread its not self-moderated and it shouldn't be. We don't need another HT. There is no reason to trust one person to be a judge of whats right or wrong. Any smart reader/poster - which no doubt includes yourself - can decide on their own which facts and opinions are worth their attention. You don't have to trust anyone in this thread, just stick to verifiable facts and you'll still get a reasonably good picture of what's going on.

If someone posts that X is a father-in-law to Y and there is no verifiable source or it's irrelevant to the discussion - move on. If someone only yells profanities and doesn't contribute anything substantial - put them on the ignore list. At least you have that option here. It would be great if everyone just played nice and we all did a group hug on every page, but this is interwebs 2014 edition, it doesn't work like that.

[numanoid]

Yup so I guess the WSJ blog post is an option piece and be treated with the same disdain then.

Had this been from WSJ proper, I'd disagree. Given it was "blogs.WSJ.com" means it IS, absolutely, a blog.  I'm not happy with the "media blitz"  I've seen so far.  We've had the same press release on 10+ sites, and now this blog, which had a lot of incorrect/confusing information in it, and not a real, hard news story on it.

Now, saying that, we have to understand that this is still a crypto story.  What was the last BTC article featured in WSJ?  I don't doubt there is one, but I don't expect much coming from it.

[numanoid]

I agree, the unconstructive hate is detrimental to this thread.

Minor correction: The "one redditor" was actually coinfire.
Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2l7myv/can_we_talk_about_gaw/

Thank you for the correction.  I didn't follow the initial reddit post.  I'm glad it was "original research" rather than what I assumed.

[NeonTranceBadger]

I can't believe Josh has the balls to say banks control b your funds and your access to then but GAW doesn't. Yet as a former customer I've had my funds frozen more times at zencloud in 1 month than I've had in 7 years using PayPal.

Yeah, he's had that part backwards on multiple occasions. He also called PayPal out like that via one of his tweets. With GAW/Zen you're completely at their mercy because your coins/hashpoints only exist in their database with its questionable reliability and security. With a bank you at least have a legal framework, insurance, and a fairly functional consumer protection agency (at least in the the US) backing your deposit.

You bring up a very good point that hasn't been brought up that I've seen.  What would happen if their servers are hacked and peoples balances are stolen and converted into BTC or FIAT before GAW can track it.  There is no kind of insurance for this like the FDIC, so they would be losing their PayCoin and no way to get it back.  

[AtomicFrost]

This Paybase announcement is interesting.

Seems like quite the ambitious project, and they're entering into the minefield of FINCEN regulations. I wonder what method they'll use to verify the identity of their clients?

I hope they're prepared for that.

[Sundark]

I guess if they are not prepared they should not announce that. The fact they did makes me think that they know what they are doing.

[suchmoon]

I can't believe Josh has the balls to say banks control b your funds and your access to then but GAW doesn't. Yet as a former customer I've had my funds frozen more times at zencloud in 1 month than I've had in 7 years using PayPal.

Yeah, he's had that part backwards on multiple occasions. He also called PayPal out like that via one of his tweets. With GAW/Zen you're completely at their mercy because your coins/hashpoints only exist in their database with its questionable reliability and security. With a bank you at least have a legal framework, insurance, and a fairly functional consumer protection agency (at least in the the US) backing your deposit.

You bring up a very good point that hasn't been brought up that I've seen.  What would happen if their servers are hacked and peoples balances are stolen and converted into BTC or FIAT before GAW can track it.  There is no kind of insurance for this like the FDIC, so they would be losing their PayCoin and no way to get it back.  

Hopefully they employ proper cold wallets and can cover the risk of losing the contents of the hot wallet, probably a tiny percentage of the total funds. But as we could see in the 25 MH/s hashlet debacle there are other risk factors. Hashlets themselves are a huge risk because someone can sell them and withdraw funds immediately without touching the cold wallet. Recent 2FA requirement for all withdrawals helps with that, but the hypothetical hack could bypass that too if it's done at a low enough level (i.e. not just a UI exploit).

Today's announcement mentions some kind of insurance. Maybe that is what we are talking about here, but it doesn't say if it's just for PayBase, or for Hashbase/Zencloud/Hashlets etc. The other problem is that if it's provided by GAW itself (and not by a third party like FDIC) it still depends on GAW having their data right, which in these past few months was a struggle for them.

[numanoid]

When the coin opens to the public on Jan. 2 with what Mr. Garza says will be an anticipated market capitalization of $250 million, the company will partly back that with a store of fiat currency worth around $100 million.

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/11/25/bitbeat-gaw-miners-to-launch-bitcoin-challenger-paycoin/

It took bitcoin 4 1/2 years to achieve a market cap of $250 million and GAW expects their coin to achieve that in 3 months (whitepaper to market)?

This makes 0 sense.

You cannot just create $250 million out of thin air.  Markets just don't work like that.

Hey Chris.  I enjoyed your posts on HT in the short time you were there.  I agreed with your challenging posts.  In this case though, I disagree.  I think with the proper investment capital you absolutely CAN start with a market cap with that number.  Unknown startups do that everyday with unknown IPOs.  $250 million is chump change in the VC world.

Now keep in mind that this will be the market cap at launch.  5 minutes after launch and we'll see what the actual market cap is.  The fiat backing is probably the biggest plus of this coin.  BTC has nothing like it and you can see what happens with its price.  With close to 100 million USD as a glorified buy wall to keep the price up, it's not hard to understand how this number is reached.

Now, if you remember the INITIAL white paper, they said 96 million coins at launch.  At $20 per coin, that put the market cap at over 2 billion USD.  I, and others on HT, were up in arms on the math.  Josh's responses were absolute BS and made me seriously consider dumping everything I had at GAW since the math did not add up.

With the NEW whitepaper and a mere 5ish million coins for the ICO (and a total coin amount down to 12 million from 1.2 BILLION) made the numbers add up a bit.

Regardless of all that shit I just wrote (heh) the bottom line is you can't compare the early days of BTC to paycoin.  A closer comparison would be to SYScoin, which supposedly had a few hundred BTC to keep the price up.  Anyone who followed SYS knows they had a horrible launch and were in league with a verified scammer.

I'll let the more witty posters here comment on the above with regards to GAW.  

That said, I don't believe for a second that Josh is out to scam us.  I do believe that he may be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over his head in launching a new coin.  As someone who has been "mining" this coin for weeks now I hope for the best but am prepared for the worst.

[suchmoon]

This Paybase announcement is interesting.

Seems like quite the ambitious project, and they're entering into the minefield of FINCEN regulations. I wonder what method they'll use to verify the identity of their clients?

I hope they're prepared for that.

In the US there are services that do this kind of thing, so it would be just a matter of hooking into some kind of API. I don't know about the rest of the world. I have a feeling PayBase will be US-only at least initially.

[Searing]

I would believe in this hashcoin if it ran as a regular pool regular home miners with equipment could mine

as it is i'm fence sitting (see tagline) on how this works out on if my ethics or I mean the tagline below goes bye bye (sigh goodbye 0.10 btc a month)

but without anyone being able to at least MINE his coin using other then virtual mining.....can't see how it is not questionable

to say the least..

[Jacques de Molay]

The way I see it, his bank rant was what we probably all feel at one stage, meaning those that get paid your wages directly into a bank and then you get access to your money.  So I am not talking about cash in hand stuff.  A lot of places will not pay you cash in hand anymore.  So I get that, however with the Hashoins/paycoins we have been mining are still virtually worthless until at the very latest end of march (if you check his time line)  

Out with one and stuck inside another system.  With his newly acquired 5 petahash, gee I wonder who is going to be able to control most of his block chain.

[maildir]

Nightmare waiting to happen -- every single movement tracked by them, data mining, re-selling of your information's, movements, purchases etc. etc. Everything they are proposing already exists as has been pointed out here before; specifically Coinkite which is a debit card

https://coinkite.com/faq/terminal

The browser plugin also exists today

https://www.snapcard.io/

Nothing new or innovative here other than taking all the separate components and unifying them under their own coin issuance. As some mentioned a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Worse is the issue of privacy -- the big picture of all of this is a throwback to '90's with AOL and their GUI for noobs. Everything you touch will be recorded and logged by GAW and for what exactly? To make it appear as though you are purchasing goods with this crypto currency which no doubt will include a hefty fee.

[numanoid]

Paybase looks interesting.  I've been drinking since 4 CST so I may have glossed over some items, but the bill pay is outstanding and the "tipping" feature, if implemented correctly for major social media sites could be a game changer.  Doge got me into cryptos and I always said that if Doge could get mainstream usage on Facebook, it would be a force to be reckoned with.

How the hell is this browser plugin going to work?  If I have $20k in my paycoin wallet (which I should if it launches at $20 per coin) can I go on a shopping spree on Amazon and checkout with Paycoin?  Will magic occur where it converts my USD purchase to PAY and deduct from my wallet?  I gotta say, if this is the case, it's pretty awesome.  Yeah, it may not subscribe to some of the BTC philosophies, but IN MY OPINION, that is secondary.  I know many will disagree.

Now for some criticism.  One of my biggest concerns on this whole thing, and GAW in general, is that Josh is making this up as he goes.  We now have yet another data point to suggest this.  The platform was supposed to be HASHbase and the coin was supposed to be HASHcoin.  Josh trademarked Hashcoin and worked with the creator of the initial hashcoin.  Only a day after Hascoin was announced, and the HT community hated it and suggested new names, did Hashcoin become a "code name".

Then came PAY coin, and now PAY base.

There is no fucking doubt in my mind that these names were a departure from the initial planned name and lends credence to the fact that Josh is making a lot of this up as he goes along.  The overall coin numbers being cut by a factor of 100 plays into this as well.

Regardless, I like what I see so far.  I gotta run to HT for a bit to see what is being discussed there.

[jimmothy]

Out with one and stuck inside another system.  With his newly acquired 5 petahash, gee I wonder who is going to be able to control most of his block chain.

The service, which offered guarantees to overcome some of the customer relations problems of the delay- and lawsuit-prone bitcoin mining industry, now accounts for a whopping 50% of all new mining capacity coming online, he said.  After starting operations in the summer, GAW is on track to finish the year with $120 million in sales, he said.

With $120 million they can even centralize the entire bitcoin network!

That's amazing for a company that doesn't even manufacture hardware.

[numanoid]

I would believe in this hashcoin if it ran as a regular pool regular home miners with equipment could mine

as it is i'm fence sitting (see tagline) on how this works out on if my ethics or I mean the tagline below goes bye bye (sigh goodbye 0.10 btc a month)

but without anyone being able to at least MINE his coin using other then virtual mining.....can't see how it is not questionable

to say the least..

I have no idea HOW at this point, but the coin is supposed to be available for mining from NON-GAW miners.  It's SHA-256 algo.

That said, GAW owners with Primes may have a significant advantage to outside miners.  5 to 1 upside was mentioned, whatever that means.

Also, the Prime and Orion controllers, which will earn you coins if you host them, are available outside of GAW as well.