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melvster
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April 08, 2015, 10:37:21 AM |
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Hope this project gets on track again. I'd like to share what I know.
I've known coinsolidation, real name Nathan Rixham, for about 5 years, he's a scottish freelance developer, known as webr3 (which means web revision 3.0). We are both members of the semantic web community.
As most people here can tell, hes a smart and capable coder and communicator.
Before he was involved in the semantic web community, he was a member of the PHP community, famously with mark karpeles, who I think found out about bitcoin through nathan!
Over the course of knowing him, we became friends. Unfortunately Nathan periodically reported financial difficulties, and as a friend I always wanted to do my best to help. This probably happened a dozen times. Sometimes it was just some money to tide him over. But mostly it was short term loans. For example his paypal account would be locked for 1-2 days and he'd need enough to get him through for 1-2 days. Or sometimes a loan to get him to the weekend. Sometimes he'd be stranded without petrol and no money to drive home. Every time I would try and help him if i could, even sometimes asking my friends to, when I didnt have the money.
Each of these loans was 1-2 days to be made right at the weekend. Never once was any of the money repaid. But I try not to judge people, he was a friend and I just wanted what was best for him. My thought was that he would get himself back on his feet, make a decent living and then we'd all square up in the future. I didnt treat any of these failed promises to repay as theft, I wasnt rich, but just wanted to help as a friend. All this changed about 2 years ago.
I was in the middle of something and Nathan said he needed some XRP to complete a trade and would return them immediately. He was a bigtime XRP trader and knew all the insiders. I said no, because I wanted to keep my XRP. He said it was a risk free thing, so I made it 100% clear that this was no 'loan' like all the other times, I wanted it back and didnt have time to chase it. The chasing time with nathan is as expensive as the actual loan, much more sometimes. And I was so busy I just did it. At that point he disappeared and I spent days trying to contact him to find out what happened. His response was, 'A direct debit came into my bank account and the money was gone'. Essentially a polite way of saying he spent or stole the money.
I was unhappy with this. I told him to pay me back so that I would not have to worry about it. Even if it was just a few $ a week, I wanted a feeling id be made whole and above all not having to chase He agreed. At this point he disappeared on me for about 6 months. What he told me later was he was burnt out and just went round taking pictures in scotland. It later emerged that during this time he was actually insanitycoin from wolf. Something he initially denied but then admitted when it became obvious.
After several months, I contacted Nathan to say I was going to retract a positive review of him on the forums due the the XRP, because I want to be honest with the community. He immediately surfaced again, and said he'd pay back in installments. So I held off. Then he showed me bitmark, and the work he'd done on the coin. Looking at the 70 milestones completed in the first 2 months, I was impressed. And thought finally he's doing something positive with his life, making what could be a great project, which could make a great difference. I told him not to worry about the XRP and to continue coding, and that I would help as much as I could.
I donated to the project, I ran servers. I spent 2 months solid making a basic proof of concept for marking and BTM. I helped people where I could. I sent infomation about the project to many people, p2p foundation, w3c payments, crowdbucks and lots of others. However, in september the good pace of work that had started tailed off, and the marking API was the focus. In October we were told it was complete and ready to be checked in. In November we were told that the markign was done and that markthis was the focus, and well into it. In December we were told there was a large body of code in private repos which was a mistake and would be checked in, but it wasnt. In January we were told that it would be a fresh start. In Feburary ... etc. etc.
Finally we learnt that Nathan had been involved in multiple coins without them knowing much about each other WOLF, BTM, GMC. There is now a suspicion he's also involved with other coins, artos, federacoin, metalcoin, and many more, and has been doing this over and over. I'm not the only person where he's taken money, there' sa large number of people, none of them knowing about each other, but the money taken is the smaller part of it. This project has gone from a 30 million dollar market cap, with potential to be much bigger to almost nothing now. So many stake holders have lost out.
The good news is that Nathan knows this was wrong, is prepared to face the consequences and most importantly wants to put things right. I really hope that can happen, and is not just another 'ill do it at the weekend'. I hope it's taken seriously this time, and I think everyone wants to believe.
That's about all I know, and I have no problem at all sharing it. We done know everything yet but I'd encourage stake holder to share.
I still would like to see this project reach its full potential starting with marking code being a reality and checked in as it goes along. This still could be a great project, but the heavy slide it's in needs to stop and be reversed. The project needs to get back to honest coding checked in as it goes along, like the vast majority of open source projects. I really hope this can be turned around and made into a success, because the web needs a good reputation system.
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