I'm gonna quote this here just in case. Fairly solid points and lots of upvotes on HT.
dman99
Just a reminder: Always be cautious when investing, Hashcoin included
I just want to put out a reminder to remind everyone to be cautious when making large investments. This forum has an incredibly strong bias towards the success of Hashcoin with the majority of people talking as if it's a sure thing. You should approach this investment as you do any other.
Hashtalk is filled with praise for Hashcoin so far. So instead of simply restating these, I'm going to go over my main concerns with this whole concept.
Overly non-technical 'whitepaper'
Having a lot of experience in academia and a technical profession, I've ready many whitepapers. The Hashcoin "whitepaper" comes off as much more as a piece of marketing material than anything else. The paper is filled with ambiguous language, completely lacking any diagrams, and has nothing in the way of actual useful code samples. In my opinion, I had trouble finding the whitepaper as anything more than marketing fluff.
Compare the Hashcoin whitepaper to the Bitcoin whitepaper (
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf). It's kind of like night and day, isn't it?
Lofty ideas with no details
Many of the concepts presented in the paper don't appear to be well thought out. Reading this, I get the feeling that I was reading the transcript of a conversation between a few dudes laying around on beanbag chairs, smoking a joint, and talking about their ideas for the "ultimate cryptocurrency".
This is said to be the result of months of work of many developers. This may be true, but then why does the paper feel like something which was thrown together in the past week? Would you be comfortable standing in front of a group of professors with these ideas and defending them as if you were defending your doctoral dissertation? Would you feel confident emailing this whitepaper to Gavin Andresen or Gregory Maxwell?
Lack of discussion outside this forum
Why is there no discussion of Hashcoin outside of this forum? The hashcoin subreddit (
www.reddit.com/r/hashcoin) has one post. The GAWminers subreddit (
www.reddit.com/r/gawminers) barely mentions Hashcoin. There is nearly no discussion on bitcointalk, even in the Altcoin subforum (the forum where every stupid coin ever invented at least has a thread or two). Either Hashcoin isn't even being taken seriously enough to be noticed or we're just really ahead of the game.
Lack of professionalism
I am a single person, and I find GAWminers to be incredibly lacking in terms of professionalism. There are grammatical errors in the whitepaper, the culmination of man-months of hard work of the team. @GAW_CEO seems to love using the wrong 'its' and using 'then' instead of 'than'. So far, his advertisement strategy has been to make ambiguous tweets and ask others to spread the word. Perhaps this will change this week with the upcoming 'media tour'.
These small details make me question the legitimacy of of all his claims. I am a single person and I find this very concerning. Suppose if I were the CFO of a billion dollar corporation. Small mistakes like this would prevent me from even letting you finish pitch. In comparison, @jmordica seems to portray a much more professional image and is I would want to see if I were in an executive position.
PREMINE
The ultimate death sentence in any cryptocurrency is a premine. Hashcoin is being pre-mined. You may hear people twisting words claiming this isn't true, but it has to be. For x number of coins to be available on day 1, those coins have to have been created. How could those coins be created if no blocks had been mined yet? Unless I can load up my mining rig and mine your coin on day 1, it has been premined. No way around it.
Centralization
The more I read the whitepaper, the more it screamed of centralization. The initial distribution of coins is being done by GAW. Mining is going to be centralized around Prime Controllers and Orion Controllers. GAW will be in charge of the grand majority of the physical miners, so the physical mining is centralized as well. Sure, you may have the option to use your own hardware to mine, but good luck competing against GAW's datacenters. Would you like it if ghash.io suddenly had over 51% of the bitcoin mining network? Do you think GAW is going to have over 51% of the Hashcoin mining network?
Others' concerns
Thanks to /u/keirashark for these:
Right now, HashCoin doesn't exist, it's only a whitepaper. There is no client, no wallet, no addresses, no coins, no blockchain.
Hashpoints are essentially coupons that GAW "promises" can be redeemed for Hashcoins later. They currently have no cash or bitcoin value except a "stated" $0.01 value, but only when buying HashCoins in the future.
Right now, these Hashlet miners, if set to mine Bitcoin, take 80-100% in fees per 1Mh per day. There is an obvious encouragement to mine Hashpoints. The other Hashlets (solos) pay out essentially nothing. (Often 1 satoshi per 1Mh/day.)
There is a "fund" that apparently will buy back coins if they begin to drop below the $20 per coin level. (Personally this makes no sense to me at all.)
tl;dr
Do you due-diligence. Don't trust the words or opinions of others. One of the most remarkable things about the world of cryptocurrency is how complete trustless everything is. The only trust you must have is in the publicly available source code and the underlying cryptography. Use this mentality when thinking about Hashcoin: read the primary source material yourself and formulate your own opinions. Others' opinions can be valuable to use as more material when making your opinion, but should not be the basis of your opinion.
With all of this said, I am invested in this ecosystem so I'd love to see Hashcoin succeed. I just think people here need to be more critical and analytical instead of just agreeing with the very-biased masses here on Hashtalk.
