Before I say anything, I want to make a few things clear about my intentions of writing these series. Do I intend to hurt the holders of smartcash? God forbid. On the contrary, my intention is to protect the holders and perhaps use my last small influence per se, in order to bring some attention to certain things that can be fatal to the future of SmartCash if not addressed soon enough. What about the TipBots? Do I intend to steal the funds stored on tipbots I manage? Not at all. TipBot users will soon be able to access their funds as I'll be working towards migrating the backend to new servers, so please accept my sincere apologies for this in the meantime. I plan to write more which is why I decided to call this episode 1.
Oh God help me. Where do I begin? I know and admit that we all have our own biases but I'll do my best to be as unbiased as possible in this post. I myself am a holder of this coin and am still holding and not planning to sell and would like to see its problems solved before it's too late. After almost 12 months of working for the founders, I've had enough and have finally resigned. SmartCash began as the website says: "a community governance, cooperation and growth-focused blockchain based currency and a decentralized economy". But is that really the case? In the beginning I believed it, as did many others and still do. But when time goes on you begin to open your eyes and spot the foul story behind it all.
One example of flaws I'd like to address (which is common in other cryptos but more so in the case of SmartCash) is that in the early days of SmartCash the blockrewards were a lot bigger than they are today - almost 5x more compared to now within only 14 months while bitcoin block rewards for example remained the same for 4 years - and so the amount of smartcash addresses eligible for smartrewards (cold staking) were also much lower. As a result, first month of cold staking for instance gave earnings of appx. 405% per address balance and the only people with big balances at the time were the founders themselves and a few others involved since with smartcash only 5% of the block rewards goes to miners. This is while still as of today 70% of the block rewards go directly to a few addresses that are controlled by the founders.
In the beginning, the founders paid themselves handsomely for the initial work and got even better rewarded from cold staking which still as of today keeps snowballing by draining the allocated rewards pool. This amongst other things created a power vaccum that led to the situation we're in now. Almost all decisions have been and are made by 3 founders who control more than 65% of the ciculating supply and probably own more than 10% of the circulating supply. This is only a glimpse into the extremely unfair distribution of block rewards designed by the founders to maintain control of the blockchain not only through centralized voting system which I will get into later, but also both the circulating supply and the community treasuries.
The point of the currency was to let the community vote on 3rd party proposals and use the funds from the treasury. This doesn't happen any longer since it barely matters if a proposal passes or not. The founders a.k.a JuicyG/Solarminer/Alexander have the final say about even letting a proposal go to voting, as well as having the power to steer the vote any direction they want, no matter how much the community votes. They got an overpriced proposal with a youtuber through by themselves and paid him insane money in SmartCash pegged to $ for ridiculously little exposure and ignored the community's input on the matter.
Past couple of weeks I've opened my eyes and understood how much they have used me and others to build an empire for themselves, along with just how far the project has gone off track and how centralized it has become. They have been censoring any criticism and pretending like everything is fine for quite some time now that it makes one think whether the whole system was just a ponzi scheme and the founders are slowly exiting.
As a developer, I mostly worked on tipbots and the rpc explorer which didn't have address indexing when I first forked it from github but I ended up adding address indexing to it plus a richlist which the founders asked me to remove. On Friday I decided to quit my job and took my codes with me, so I took down the tipbots and rpc explorer and left the team. I have no intention to keep the funds in the tipbots as they belong to the community members. And as I explained above, I will soon run them on my own server so community members can withdraw their funds.
I did make some demands in exchange of the source codes from the founders for the damage to my reputation that they have caused (getting people that had faith in me to buy a lot of coins well above 30 cents, which are now way down well over 90%) along with community members. As I explained to the founders as well, I did not need this for myself but for those I personally know who have been bleeding due to their bad decisions. I then thought to myself that this is still a selfish demand because there are many others who have been and are still bleeding and there are things in smartcash that if not fixed can turn smartcash into the next bitconnect. So, I decided to demand other things that would benefit the whole community and strengthen the blockchain. But the founders were not interested at all in meeting any of these demands. They instead started to slander my character by calling me a thief and reporting my Twitter account as being stolen. So I have decided to make the issue public in the hope that it may result in public pressure from the community on the founders to fix these problems before smartcash turns into the next bitconnect.
My demands were as the following:
To approve a proposal to stop Ben Swann and let the community vote for it. As you can see below, one of the communiity members has already submitted a proposal to stop Ben since his proposal is one of the main reasons price has tanked so much. Ben received about 60K USD from the community funds on the 1st of September and he dumped it all on the market causing the market to crash another 30% from an already 90+% crash. More and more people in the community stood up to object to this proposal again but they were either banned on discord or kicked and censored. These community members started to blame everything on the "devs" and when I shared my opinion as one of the devs, that happens to agree with them, I also ended up receiving a red flag from the founders that I need to shut up. It almost makes you think the founders are in collusion with Ben? Or maybe they don't mind the price tanking further so they can pay themselves more since their paycheks are also pegged to USD? Not to mention the founders already pay themselves ridiculous amounts of salaries. For example, address
SYwJCcKcEAcW47SSFkL1sYb3zXmdpexR1falone has received a paycheck of appx. 7M coins on the 5th of November when price was about 5 cents. Since this is paid from development hive, it must therefore be for Jeremey Maus, the coordinator of the development hive who goes by the nickname, solarminer.
Fix the voting system. Put it on steemit or somewhere uncensorable and make it transparent. This way everyone can submit proposals and no one can censor them. This doesn't require much development since a platform like steemit already exists and voting can easily be done in the comments section where community members can leave their addresses with signatures. If this is not the best way to go about, suggest something else that is decentralized and uncensorable unlike the current voting system.
To fix the price tank and the bleeding of those whose portfolios are over 90% down, and also fix the problems and concerns of many about the 920+ million coins locked in one address and controlled by the founders, spend more than 90% of the community funds and do an airdrop on all addresses perhaps based on the number of the days they have been holding. Blacklist the addresses that obviously belong to whales such as the one above who have paid themselves unfairly without any voting or community consensus. Or perhaps blacklist all addresses before the big pump which led to the massive dump and left many bleeeding beyond recovery. This would not only decentralize the circulating supply but also help erase the major concerns that holds most investors back from buying smartcash. Please notice that within the past 14+ months, only 27 million coins from the community treasury has been spent and more than 920 million coins are still there sitting in one address which keeps getting almost 50% of the block rewards. So obviously, these coins will never get spent on community proposals and are only increasing the concerns of holders and buyers. Spending more than 90% of these funds will still leave enough coins for community proposals which will continue to increase by receiving almost 50% of the block rewards. And if this amount stacks up again and is not spent, repeat the airdrop a few months after.
Issue transparent reports about the spendings from hive addresses which have been and are still getting more than 20% of the block rewards. Put the reports for vote so the community can have a say in how much the hives spend, pay themselves, or others. This would put a stop to the continuation of unfair distribution of the block rewards and would help stablize the price and erase another major concern that holds buyers back. Perhaps thinking about changing the peg to USD in both proposals and hive spendings might also be a good idea to consider as we have all seen the devestating effects of the recent Ben Swann's dump early this month.
I would like to encourage every holder who agrees with me even partially to get involved and put pressure on the founders and the hive teams. Public pressure is our last hope for smartcash in the meantime. I predict that if these problems are not solved soon enough, smartcash might become the next bitconnect. Could I be wrong in my prediction? Absolutely. But so can everyone else. So what do we do? Do we continue to pretend these problems are not real and ignore them? Or do we take a step to solve them and reduce the risks that can be fatal to the future of the blockchain? I let you be the judges...
Upon my departure I've been both threatened and ridiculed, but I'm determined to clear my conscience and reputation. I believe this is the right way to do it. I'm neither a thief nor a thug, so the community members affected by tipbots going down have nothing to fear. Users will soon be able to access their funds and withdraw as I will be working towards setting up the tipbots on my own servers next. And saying not fixing these issues can lead smartcash to become the next bitconnect is not an exaggeration. I do not think so. I think it's a fact based on my own research. Any project that is not sufficiently decentralized according to the SEC, is a security. Although a bit complicated, the case for smartcash can be easily be made and this is a serious danger that needs to be dealt with before it's too late. Let me know what you think below and if you want to support this post, make sure you don't forget to upvote and resteem. PEACE!
P.S. As I finished this post, I found out that the hive has cracked and emptied the wallets(and it is no surprise since I was not the only one who had access to these servers and/or wallets) so I can no longer be held fully responsible for any lost funds; not to mention that all the tipbots had a simple term that no one can be held responsible for any lost funds to discourage users from holding their funds in a risky and centralized environment and I did experience a number of attacks during my responsibility but that's beyond the point here. I would have taken the bots back live by today on my own server had they not emptied the wallets. Having said that, as I explained above, it was not my intention to hurt the community in anyway, and I am willing to personally do anything for the community members to make this up.
EDIT: Thanks to donations from myself and @decentralizd, tipbots will be back live in the next 24 hours. First tipbot to go live at the time of this edit is the discordbot. However, keep in mind that the founders have apparently removed the tipbot from their server so you need to join this server: https://discord.gg/crPxZ47
I will happily fund half if not all of the tipbot funds for users if they don't let you give the users the funds and try to frame you as the bad guy.. just let me know man sorry they are so damn stubborn and can't see reason.
That's so generous of you bro. I was thinking of funding the bots myself tbh to show my good faith towards the community but now that you wanna chip in, I'm happy to go half half! I'll get you on discord now and we can start by kicking off the discord bot first :] Cheers! :D
I am stilling holding this coin since Oct. last year. WTF is going here? My concern is about the community funds. Who controls the funds for distribution to the projects that get approved? I sure hope they have a great multi-sig wallet. Do the funds get automatically get paid out via the blockchain. This is my greatest fear is someone running off with the millions of Smart in the COmmunity fund reserve.
Yeah unfortunately the worst scenario is the case for now but don't worry we're gonna push the founders to change things. That's what these series will be about :]
Little known fact, I was the one helping Cryptodate to create the monthly reports when it got stopped suddenly. Wonder whatever happened to him. :(
My designs in the initial stages of SmartCash were welcomed by everyone except for JuicyG. I remembered a remark by him saying that one of my design was a “poor” cut and paste effort. It was a laughable comment to someone who has been a designer who has worked with vectors for 17 years. I felt somewhat insulted but laughed it off as I was just a “community” member.
My works are still being used by Criptosurfer though. Sad to say I’m not actively designing for SmartCash anymore but I’m still proud of being part of the early stages of its history. Do hope it well that’s why I’m still refraining from selling it off.
Hi msg768, thank you for this insight into the SmartCash structures. It was certainly interesting and shows some serious concerns.
I would like to start with why you took the bots? Weren't you paid to create them for SmartCash? Why do you think you own them?
The fact that the founders rewarded themselves handsomely is pretty common in the cryptoworld. We see skewed distributions all over the place, for example Steem or even worse EOS and yet have grand hopes into the possibilities for these coins. I don't like it but that doesn't mean I think these coins are doomed. Quite the contrary. I feel very similar about SmartCash. Also, what you describe is a typical problem that all decentralized coins face: The first few years are still very much centralized and must gradually try to decentralize more.
However, SmartCash is currently suffering from an aggressive voting strategy from the whales. We didn't need your post to see this. For the past two months or so we see millions of votes smashing down the vast majority of proposals while before that we rarely saw more than 3 million total votes. The biggest problem with that is basically that it appears as if proposals are being decided by a few whales alone.
This is a big problem for growing decentralization of votes. Steemit inc. for example is never using their upvote power and only intervene by supporting dApps with delegated Steem Power. Making proposals censorship resistant and limit the massive influence of the founders in favor of more decentralization is something to strive for in the future. As it is in the best interest of the SMART blockchain I am sure we will find ways to make that happen together with the whales.
Also, I think that the Ben Swann proposal was indeed overvalued in terms of reach. But I also think that it was a prestige thing to support someone from the alternative media and freedom community. SmartCash has a lot of the Anarchapulco vibe and should in fact sponsor a few more people with maybe slightly smaller payments to create SmartCash sponsored content. I can totally understand why the whales threw their votes at him. It would have been nice to see Ben hold the coins instead of dumping them. Maybe this could be a part of a future proposal.
To repeatedly compare SmartCash with BitConnect is a pretty low attack, though and the only reason why I didn't upvote this otherwise interesting post. BitConnect was an obvious pyramid scheme that was doomed from the beginning. SmartCash on the other hand is a feature rich crypto with tons of cool open source development and a great vision. Managing the community treasury and voting process in a more decentralized way is achievable and I don't see the founders blocking that as they want to see SmartCash thrive more than anybody else.
And finally, dropping chunks of the treasury as airdrops on the holders and exclude the whales would surely redistribute wealth and voting power on SmartCash. My initial thought was that it would be a bad socialist move. But that would not take away anything from the whales, just make the community more powerful and lower the way to blown-up treasury, which will continue to grow afterwards anyway. On the other hand it would most certainly create a huge selling pressure on the price as many would just want to cash out the extra money to survive the bear market. So I don't know about that one.
All-in-all I think your post will hopefully by heard by the whales so that we can all come together and solve the decentralization problem for proposals and treasury instead of fighting and creating FUD for SmartCash. The price will probably drop much further together with the entire market. I hope I can use my chance to get a bigger stake then because I believe in the future of SmartCash. It is just so much more fun to hold and use compared to most other coins that I cannot help myself but to be optimistic.
You may need to define "SmartCash" and keep in mind that smartcash.cc or the so-called official hives are not a company or corporation. I did not get paid by any company or corporation to work for them. They sometimes make it sound like that's the case but if that's the case, I'd like to know what their license number is? The heart of the issue as I explained above is centralization of power vs. decentralization of power. The founders started with an extremely centralized system but promised to decentralize things eventually. That unfortunately hasn't happened yet. They want to control everything for the sake of influence and that's why they are mad at me for not letting them control the tipbots and their social media accounts.
Markus Ghambari being paid by a collective community group, and then absconding with that work product, do you really think that there is not a legal issue there especially in Australia and NSW state laws, which apply to you? Maybe your own guilt caused you to act badly and now you have doubled down on it, but continuing to besmirch the SmartCash name which includes the community and team, as they are inseparable. will not end well for either you or smartcash, it would be a net negative. in relation to decentralization, not sure if you were paying attention, but the hives went from 3 hives to 6 hives this year furthering the decentralisation, each of these also have there own social media etc, as you were not part of these hives activities you wouldnt even know what is going on in those hive chats etc
Jarrod Hockley-Franks, I didn't hear a license number or an ABN. But in the case of your statement, I would like to see smartcash.cc regulated if you like regulations so much. I do not have and have never had any contract with anyone from smartcash.cc so technically I have been working for myself. I'd like to see the contract I have signed if I'm wrong. Having said that, I'm committed to the community and I'm working on bringing the bots back live with my own funds on my own server since the founders have emptied the wallets. BigD is chipping in as well in this cause to help me show my good faith towards the community even though technically speaking I cannot be held responsible for anything whatsoever. Because the tipbots had a very simple term that no one can be held responsible for any lost funds in order to discourage people from holding their funds in a risky and centralized system. And if anyone has stolen here, it's those who have emptied the wallets without my permission and have now banned the discordbot on their server and are even reporting the new discord server I have made in order to allow users withdraw their funds. As with the 3 new hives, I'll get into that in the next episodes. I'm sure being one of the new hive coordinators you're well aware of the fact that not only the budgets of the 3 new hives are much less than the first 3, meaning the total balances, but also the founders can use sporks - soft fork - to disable them anytime which means these hives are not really independent. Not to mention even if they were, it would still not solve the issues of the fact that they're not operating based on any community consensus or voting but are rather forced upon the community. But yet again even when we get to consensus and voting, we still have an issue with at least initial unfair distribution of the block rewards. We either get real with these serious issues and seek to resolve them or we sit back and pretend it's all okay and ban, censor or fire anyone who raises them.
The community pays you?
Well we would REALLY like to discuss your wage and terms.
Sincerely ~Everyone you tax with inflation and no transparency~
Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of radical authoritarian ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy, which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe.
Focus here since you are so dense: forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt since you likely got used to the beaches of hawaii during the bull run and are worried about next season. Get your morale standards up please.
If they are operating as a business without a license they are already breaking the law... if they payout "dividends" they are already breaking the law... Eventually the law and the police will catch up, in the mean time, learn who it is legal to pay, or be paid by according to local law...
P.S.:most financial crimes involving deception don't have statutes of limitations.
SmartCash posted that you demanded a ransom payment of 5,000,000 SMART. Is that true? And if yes, why did you do that?
Please read my comment HERE.
@flauwy and well articulated and balance response.
Thanks for the update and great work for the tipbot as well, didn't know you were the dev behind of it.
Posted using Partiko Android
Thank you @cloudspyder. Me, as well as a others too, I believe, wondered from the outside what the heck was going on with smartcash. I wondered to no end why it was sinking with out respite, now I know.
Thanks again for all you did to salvage the situation. I really do wish these scammy founders can be arrested because, as I see it, they are into another project already and want to sink this
incorrect assumptions, the team is fully focused on the development of smartcash, services. as evidenced by the roadmap and how much of it that has been delivered. in relation to price movements, the community as in free market has more to do with price movement then any other modifier of price. if you sell your smart for a lower price you contribute to a lower value.
The team also promised decentralization, this is a lie as of right now and they are doubling down on centralizing EVERYTHING, and banning those calling bullshit. Reminds me of something...
Fascism = forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy
Your idea on the voting system in a real decentralized way is good, unfortunately big whales are controlling every proposal and deciding on behalf of the majority, so it would be better to have "one user = one vote" system. That is a real Decentralize way.
I wanted to get a smart node but that chart is fugly. A smartnode went from being worth $16,000 in January to a little over $200 right now. That is like a 99% loss.
This is part of the problem in crypto. People going against their better judgement and holding. Better to be down 50% than 99%.
Tell me about it mate....
I think you made the right choice by leaving. They are holding most of the voting power which doesn't make it decentralized. It's the POS equivalent of a 51% attack.
https://steemit.com/smartcash/@blockchainlib/important-security-update-for-the-smartcash-tipbots
What happened to smartcash community then?
Hey mate. Not sure what you mean?
Estamos aqui se esforcando cada vez mais para que esse tipo de post não contamine a comunidade.
Thanks for posting. I know more and more truth will come out. May all the shunned come out and tell your stories. We believed in an idea that is not being followed. We deserve what we were promised. We put our trust in SMART. Hope this can get turned around before we bleed to death.
Thanks for reading!
Thank you for shining a light on this. SC is my second biggest investment and biggest disappointment so far. I had just started investing heavily in SC when was hit with the zerocoin exploit. Apparently, the fix for this vulnerability had existed for months but SC failed to apply the patch in a timely manner. I believe this also cause the ugly breakup between SC and Cryptopia. My coins were stuck there for weeks. I was also mining SC and wondered why it was always so slow compared to other similar coins. It's like there was some kind of excessively high difficulty artificially put in place. I switched away from mining SC a long time ago. I also wanted to do proposals but after watching for a while it seemed, best I can describe it, - contrived. After reading your write-up I am starting to understand why I had that unsettled feeling. I still have high hopes for SC and want it to be a huge success. I will support you in your efforts for more transparency, fairness and the true community involvement needed for SC to get out of the bog that it's in.
Yeah there is more to the price being down which I will get into in the next episodes.
Oh my
This is interesting and I think this will be a problem in the future if it doesn't get fix quick. Thanks for bringing this to light. I hope the coin can proceed in a more descentralized fashion. The problem with POS is exactly this centralization that occurs thought the massive amounts of holding
No worries. Thanks for reading.
had no idea this was going on so thank you very much for the information. I started one smart node a few months ago and just watched the price tank was curious what was up but was hard to find information.
Sh.t... very old post that I did not follow.
EDIT: Need to read more.
Bro, based on your proposals it seems that YOU want to CENTRALIZED SmartCash who is slowly becoming decentralized.
For the sound of it, you wanted to make SmartCash to be based on your own idea.
We all appreciate what you did but it Seems to me that even tho you are a very smart person, you were never able to see the big picture.
IT IS INSULTING TO ME AND THE SMARTCASH COMMUNITY for you to even compare this great project to the disgusting BITCONNECT, however, I wish you luck on your new endeavor and I would ask you to please stop bugging our community with your centralized ideas.
Thank you! 😊
Not sure if you read the post thouroughly or just talking out of your ass?
He wants to truly decentralize the voting process and reduce the power-vaccum that was created after founders paying themselves insane amounts of the currency compared to the circulating supply since the start (and snowball that with cold staking) aswell as receive transparency about how much they are paying themselves.
That seems hell of a lot more decentralized than having total control over which proposals are shown up for voting aswell as having the power to steer any proposal their way since the smartcash in their control is more than the community would manage to get together to vote with (Unless you expect every single holder to vote).
You obviously dont know how the proposal system works, all proposals that follow the guidelines are approved for voting. then the community holders that want to vote, vote. if a proposal is not able to evidence there costing such that it clears due diligence checks and has a clear way of benifiting smartcash. then it would not be approved.
Hey there. I don’t think you read it if that’s all you got out of it lol..
No point of trying argue with stupid, but I'll try.
"Based on your proposals you want to centralize* smartcash".
Do you even know the meaning of decentralization?
I see his suggestions the right opposite of centralizing. If you think the dividing power, decentralizing the proposal and voting system is something cetralized then I don't know what to say.
A = Centralized B = Decentralized
The issue you fail to see, is your understanding of Centralised vs Decentralised, requires understanding of the things you are classifying into those terms. the meaning of the words is not the issue, its your lack of knowledge of the actual processes and services, you are trying to classify.
If you think centrally decided concepts from a closed chat room of small teams each run by a collective 3 individuals and the rest are literally illegal employees with 0 paperwork is decentralization, you need to start over in your crypto education.
decentralization comes in all levels of the chain, from the way its managed, distributed, maintained and so on. Please stop peddling nonsense and go back to your overpaid job where noone hears from you for 6 months until your paycheck is being harmed. You are welcome for the job btw.
Ok kiddo, have it your way 😘
I’ll be “waiting” for Episode 2 😆😆😆
Just so you know kiddo.
Thanks for your input. Can you please explain which one of my suggestions above are based on centralization of power rather than decentralization?
You know, I few weeks ago I saw someone posting a proposal for the proposals to stop to what someone from the SmartCash team (might’ve been you), respondes that that was against the SmartCash algorithm itself.
There has to be a time and place for things to evolve in the SmartCash ecosystem; the founders have to be there until the project goes 100% Decentralized. It happened to Litecoin, it’s happening to Ethereum, to BitcoinCash, etc.
Smar people like you has very well based ideas in how to speed up this process which is very understandable, but this will create a project based on your own idea. That’s what I mean by a centralized project to your own idea.
Smartcash is going to places because of the Faith that the community placed on it, and won’t stop just because our ideas didn’t get implemented.
You didn't answer my question. And you seem to have problems with both reading and writing in English. I feel like I'm speaking to a bot when I read your comments.
You are right about me having problems speaking, reading, and writing English, but I don’t have problems reading people.
“Pride is the first step toward destruction. Proud thoughts will lead you to defeat.”
It seems that you want to do the right thing brother, but your intentions against SmartCash and its community are pure evil. Don’t let it win.
Allemeister was the one trying to raise a non rule complaint proposal to undo another proposal.
Since when did the community approve these rules that were arbitrarily added post launch with no input from the community? Please show me a link from before I got you hired in the first place since you know so much, i'll wait.
Since when is it against the rules to propose a past proposal be defunded for logical reasons btw? Is Benn all of the sudden some protected give member like you overlords?
^^^ He's got a point.
I just saw this tweet lol.
I had the feeling...
What are you talking about?! Did you read the post or are just here to relay the message from your selfish paymasters?
have you even looked at the hive team page, to know who is a Hive Team member because lasted i looked @melip isnt a payed team member, instead a valued community member that focus's on positive, instead of tearing down, or slinging FUD.
Since when do you decide whos a community member or not?
I will always side with the SmartCash project. Small minded people will never get my attention, you’re lucky I’m replying to your comment 😊
What verbiage made you think he was wanting SC to be centralized? The way I read his write-up, SC control and power is already centralized since only a certain select few own most of the coins and he was not in favor of that.
Is not his verbiage, but his attitude.
People that had been following SC for a while, understand the still centralization of the project; it has to be this way, it has to follow a plan, a road map until is not any more.
The whole idea of his proposal asking to change the route of the project to his own idea means centralization to me, he is basically asking the community to change the already set map for what he considers “fair”.
Personally, I didn’t put my money into the project because I considered it fair, but because they are doing things with it, including paying themselves, what’s wrong with that if they are showing results in the progress of the project.
I’m sorry for this may sound arrogant.
“I dislike people that after they leave a job or get fired, they immediately start trashing their previous employer and find “courage” to say the everything that’s “wrong” in their previous job to “save” their former coworkers”, I considered pure BS and this is why:
Judge for yourself.
Thank you.
As of approximately 4:00PM Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on Friday, September 7th the SmartCash tipbots, telegram bridge bot, and original RPC explorer became inaccessible.
The former SmartCash developer managing those services, Markus (msg768), deactivated the servers and demanded a ransom payment of 5,000,000 SMART ($128,505 USD equivalent) in order to return these services to an operational state and hand over the code and password to the wallet, which was not paid.
The SmartCash team is committed to returning full access to tipbots and associated balances as soon as possible. At this time we recommend you do not send any further SMART to your former tipbot addresses or use the SmartCash TipBot on Twitter and all other SmartCash tipbots until further notice.
The password to the tipbot wallet was left in the server logs allowing the community balances to be secured, however Markus had corrupted the filesystems to attempt to keep SmartCash from restoring data. An initial analysis shows that approximately 70,000 ($1,800 USD equivalent ) of the total 100,000 SMART tipbot balance has already been stolen by Markus, corresponding to a number of tips that were sent on Twitter but were left unclaimed. The remaining 30,000 SMART ($771 USD equivalent) have been moved to new addresses to prevent Markus from stealing the remaining amounts. The tipbot code has been forked on GitHub and tipbots will be online again once a full security audit has been completed.
Markus’ decision to steal community funds and demand a ransom payment was unethical, unprofessional, and deceptive. It is standard practice in the SmartCash Development Hive to share private code repositories with at least two other team members. When Markus had been asked to do this over the last several weeks he had become increasingly evasive, making excuses why he could not do so. At this time, all SmartCash Developers have confirmed to be following the code sharing and shared access requirements that were set to ensure decentralization.
SmartCash will provide updates when the updated tipbot services are online again. We are committed to improving them with better stability, enhanced security, and new integrations and features. Thank you for your patience and understanding while we work to restore services.
https://smartcash.cc/important-security-update-for-the-smartcash-tipbots/