Argakiig has his own coin, Sonic. He was on the XST dev team but decided to make his own coin. He was never on the Arcoin team, just a temporary hired hand to make a block explorer. To my knowledge he does not communicate with the Arcoin developer any more. Like me, he works on his coin without any external compensation, so when a job comes around he takes it so he can eat, feed his family, and buy things he needs.

Argakiig and I collaborate all the time. We develop code together and we have ideas together. Each coin is a test bed for different technologies that will go into the other at some point. This is typically how altcoins progress anyway, except in our case it's not an adversarial relationship. For example, the StealthCoin team developed anonymous SMS transactions, and Sonic extended this idea to steganographic transactions.

For each coin, major technological innovations will not overlap until long after the markets have absorbed the impact of these innovations. But on minor points there will be overlap. Collaboration, rather than conflict, is the future direction of crypto-currencies. Given the history of conflict within these markets, it may be hard to accept a new paradigm of collaboration, but it's happening.

-- Hondo