Topic: Glassbox spreading FUD about NXT and JL777 assets (Read 15199 times)

GlassBox · « **Reply #60 on:** January 04, 2015, 02:54:43 am »

James, thanks for contributing to this thread. Since you're here, and your assets were a primary focus of this particular report, this would be a great time to ask:

- What are your reasons for remaining anonymous?

- Would you ever consider making your identity known?

- What are your thoughts on implementing some of the additional transparency recomendations we outlined in the conclusion of our report?

capodieci · « **Reply #61 on:** January 04, 2015, 03:28:41 am »

Quote from: GlassBox on January 04, 2015, 02:50:46 am

We didn't find anything specifically in the bitbucket account that isn't open-source. However, we wanted to provide crystal-clear clarity on this point

This is why you published insinuations?

R

GlassBox · « **Reply #62 on:** January 04, 2015, 03:39:39 am »

Not insinuating anything...however, a common miconception in crypto (perpetuated by Jeff's Garzick's statement's on the topic) is that NXT isn't 100% open-sourced. Some comments in this thread suggested that the dev code, at least, isn't completely open. (An interesting point, although it's not mission critical like the live source code is). Thus we wanted to be super-clear on the open-source issue - even to the point of belaboring the point. Thanks for providing more clarity on this.

_mr_e · « **Reply #63 on:** January 04, 2015, 03:54:30 am »

Quote from: GlassBox on January 04, 2015, 03:39:39 am

Not insinuating anything...however, a common miconception in crypto (perpetuated by Jeff's Garzick's statement's on the topic) is that NXT isn't 100% open-sourced. Some comments in this thread suggested that the dev code, at least, isn't completely open. (An interesting point, although it's not mission critical like the live source code is). Thus we wanted to be super-clear on the open-source issue - even to the point of belaboring the point. Thanks for providing more clarity on this.

The in progress code is in a private repo yes. When the code is ready for release and packaged into an official release, the code is made public. I believe this was because too many other projects were stealing the innovative code and implementing hap hazard into other projects, making it look bad and taking away from the hard work of our devs.

As for James' anonymity, I think you need to take a deeper look at what it is he is really doing. His reasons for remaining anonymous should become very obvious. What he is managing to pull off would simply not be possible otherwise and his anonymity is one of the strengths of many of his concepts and projects. Anonymous trust is his greatest asset, one he has worked very hard to cultivate.

capodieci · « **Reply #64 on:** January 04, 2015, 03:56:24 am »

Quote from: GlassBox on January 04, 2015, 03:39:39 am

Not insinuating anything...however, [...] Thanks for providing more clarity on this.

Well, I apologize for being somehow a little aggressive.

I wonder what past trauma this is brought back lol

R

capodieci · « **Reply #65 on:** January 04, 2015, 04:10:53 am »

Quote from: _mr_e on January 04, 2015, 03:54:30 am

[...]
As for James' anonymity, I think you need to take a deeper look at what it is he is really doing. His reasons for remaining anonymous should become very obvious. What he is managing to pull off would simply not be possible otherwise and his anonymity is clearly the greatest strength of many of his concepts and projects. Anonymous trust is his greatest asset, one he has worked very hard to cultivate.

Well, in my opinion there is an identity on what "James" aka "JL777" does, and that is in fact "James" aka "JL777". The reputation is attached to that identity. If he or she is an old lady in Alaska or a young kid in Denmark what is the difference?

Doing thing anonymously, to me, is doing them without attaching an identity to it.

LEAs can anyways, if really needed, track someone if in their jurisdiction.

Protecting the persona (rather than the identity) from the general public is a necessary move many public people do.

My 0.05 NXT

R.

jl777 · « **Reply #66 on:** January 04, 2015, 04:16:25 am »

Quote from: GlassBox on January 04, 2015, 02:54:43 am

James, thanks for contributing to this thread. Since you're here, and your assets were a primary focus of this particular report, this would be a great time to ask:

- What are your reasons for remaining anonymous?

- Would you ever consider making your identity known?

- What are your thoughts on implementing some of the additional transparency recomendations we outlined in the conclusion of our report?

I am not sure how much more transparent I can be. All the accounts are on the blockchain and I have posted which accounts are for which assets, etc. Everybody can see all the transactions for all the public accounts and even my personal one. I have a minority interest in pretty much all the assets, so they are more community owned than "jl777" assets.

For SuperNET: https://nxtforum.org/index.php?topic=5407.0 has details on all the expenditures. Is that not transparent enough?

http://104.236.15.119:8086/logs/channels has slack logs of all the activity. https://github.com/jl777/libjl777 is my development repo with thousands of commits and over 40,000 lines of code I have written. Since my work product is published as I develop it and all the finances are transparent and the community activity is logged, what benefit is there to expose my identity? Does it really matter what my blood type is?

Specific threats have been made against me, so I do not feel it wise to disclose my identity. There is a chance that if my identity was known that something bad would happen to me. Is that something worth risking? At the very least it would take up a lot of time dealing with people hassling me, so the downside of disclosing my identity seems to be quite a bit larger than any benefits.

If people feel that they need to know my identity before they invest, then they should buy paycoin or many other projects which have fully identified people. In any case, I dont expect to be doing much fund raising in the future as SuperNET has enough funds and once we release revenue generating products, people can continue to not buy SuperNET because I am anonymous, that is their choice.

All expenditures are approved by committee and as soon as NXT has the Phasing implemented, we will be putting the SuperNET NXT into a Phased account so I wont have sole access to it. As it is, we felt that the least risk way to safekeep the NXT was for me to retain it.

James

if you PM me your email, I can send you a slack invite and you can follow all the activity there

LooTz · « **Reply #67 on:** January 04, 2015, 04:54:52 am »

Quote from: GlassBox on January 04, 2015, 03:39:39 am

Not insinuating anything...however, a common miconception in crypto (perpetuated by Jeff's Garzick's statement's on the topic) is that NXT isn't 100% open-sourced. Some comments in this thread suggested that the dev code, at least, isn't completely open. (An interesting point, although it's not mission critical like the live source code is). Thus we wanted to be super-clear on the open-source issue - even to the point of belaboring the point. Thanks for providing more clarity on this.

Hey look we are both newbie's here maybe we can grow into this together

ChuckOne · « **Reply #68 on:** January 04, 2015, 10:46:23 am »

Quote from: GlassBox on January 04, 2015, 03:39:39 am

Not insinuating anything...however, a common miconception in crypto (perpetuated by Jeff's Garzick's statement's on the topic) is that NXT isn't 100% open-sourced. Some comments in this thread suggested that the dev code, at least, isn't completely open. (An interesting point, although it's not mission critical like the live source code is). Thus we wanted to be super-clear on the open-source issue - even to the point of belaboring the point. Thanks for providing more clarity on this.

The source code is open source since 0.4.7 and that was a long time ago.

Jeff made some statements too quickly and without proper research done. This topic is extremely complicated and relies on many philosophical and information-theoretical assumptions (regarding software in general and crypto in particular) that I will not bring up here again because different people different assumptions to be true. Sorry for being too abstract on this but we finally settled this by the following:

NRS development currently does not follow 100% standard open-source software development and especially building, packaging and distribution. But the current approach works and I am confident that time will shape that process to be better and better over time as we grow naturally. If in the end of this natural shaping process stands the usual standard procedure, the better. A confirmation for the standard procedure and confidence we did it right.

Another issue that comes up regularly is that people say "Why not making development public as well?" That as well is an extremely sensitive issue and also based on several assumptions and lack of knowledge how things work. We currently do not consider making the development public for three reasons:

1) Simply not necessary because it is done when it is done anyway and only the fully implemented code is relevant as only that works; half-backed code does not work and is therefore not relevant.

2) Simply not possible because developers develop on their own machine. We cannot make that changes public as developers machine are private property. What happens once in a while is that developers push changes to another place (could be a USB stick, could be a remote repository, could be our private repository). The possibilities with git are endless. We will not surveil our developers (not as long as I am in charge). They are free to do what they think is best to do their work. And if it means they only push finished features after 2 months from their private machine which means the same as not making development public in the first place.

3) hinder adoption by clones

4) changing just because of the sake of changing does only draw development resources away of which we have little to waste

I hope that sufficiently covers all cases of "Nxt is not open source."

salsacz · « **Reply #69 on:** January 04, 2015, 10:54:08 am »

actually we just celebrated one year of open source Nxt - 0.4.7 was released year and a day ago

Come-from-Beyond · « **Reply #70 on:** January 04, 2015, 11:06:54 am »

Quote from: salsacz on January 04, 2015, 10:54:08 am

actually we just celebrated one year of open source Nxt - 0.4.7 was released year and a day ago

Actually Nxt was open source from day 0. Non-programmers just don't understand that non-obfuscated Java binary is equal to its source code. The trick used to detect trolls is still working...

Edit: Yes, I hint that anyone saying that Nxt is not open-source is trolling. I could claim that Bitcoin is not open-source because Gavin doesn't commit intermediate code and code review is organized in such the manner that makes is prohibitely impossible to contribute to Bitcoin development.

smartwart · « **Reply #71 on:** January 04, 2015, 12:50:48 pm »

Quote with comments:

Quote from: GlassBox on January 04, 2015, 01:24:18 am

Thanks to everyone who provided a warm welcome. It's much appreciated.

Before addressing some of the individual questions and issues posed here, we want to clarify a few crucial points:

- We didn't set out to do a piece on the James assets. But upon digging into the ecosystem, we saw that this comprises a large amount of both the discussion here at NXT, and the money moving into assets. Put another way, there is a lot of money changing hands in this sub-set of NXT assets. So it seemed like a natural choice to start with a focus on jl777.
+ the natural choice would be to start with Nxt as it self.
As you did, non insiders easily could think Nxt == JL777...

- We're aware that there's a vast ecosystem of innovation and development happening outside the James realm. If we gave the impression that we were conflating NXT with James - our bad. We intend on providing additional NXT converage in the future that touches on other aspects of the platform.
+ Serious medias normally deploy an "against presentation" if they provided biased information or based on wrong assumptions.

- We're intent on providing fact-based analysis. NXT is a complex beast - as are all crypto platforms. While we do our best to confirm facts (and cite those facts wherever possible), we may make mistakes. In the event we got a fact wrong, please let us know - along with providing evidence supporting this proposed correction.
+ Everyone is doing mistakes.
But if you feel the complexity is >> as your understanding, why do you feel it was a "fact based analysis"?

- In terms of being skeptical, well - that's our job! Investors should always be skeptical. However, we will always strive to be fair and accurate. While you may disagree with our interpreation of facts, those facts are a binary thing - and with sufficient research can usually be determined.
+ please stay skeptical and critical, but there is a difference between "assumptions" and "facts"...

Just some comments about it.
Changing the content of an article would be the worst case.
Serious authors don't change their released articles -> they clarify all the things in a new additional article.

durerus · « **Reply #72 on:** January 04, 2015, 01:10:24 pm »

Quote from: smartwart on January 04, 2015, 12:50:48 pm

clarify all the things in a new additional article.

+1 That would be even better for GlassBox to gain trust!

@GlassBox: The optimum would have been if - as part of your research - you had posted your criticism for discussion here in the forums before publishing the article. Anyhow, the article is out now. And you can still make the best out of this situation

Jack Needles · « **Reply #73 on:** January 04, 2015, 02:52:47 pm »

GlassBox · « **Reply #74 on:** January 04, 2015, 07:40:18 pm »

<<Well, I apologize for being somehow a little aggressive.

I wonder what past trauma this is brought back lol >>

No worries!

<< I am not sure how much more transparent I can be. All the accounts are on the blockchain and I have posted which accounts are for which assets, etc. Everybody can see all the transactions for all the public accounts and even my personal one. I have a minority interest in pretty much all the assets, so they are more community owned than "jl777" assets.

/libjl777 is my development repo with thousands of commits and over 40,000 lines of code I have written. Since my work product is published as I develop it and all the finances are transparent and the community activity is logged, what benefit is there to expose my identity? Does it really matter what my blood type is?

Specific threats have been made against me, so I do not feel it wise to disclose my identity. There is a chance that if my identity was known that something bad would happen to me. Is that something worth risking? At the very least it would take up a lot of time dealing with people hassling me, so the downside of disclosing my identity seems to be quite a bit larger than any benefits.

If people feel that they need to know my identity before they invest, then they should buy paycoin or many other projects which have fully identified people. In any case, I dont expect to be doing much fund raising in the future as SuperNET has enough funds and once we release revenue generating products, people can continue to not buy SuperNET because I am anonymous, that is their choice.

All expenditures are approved by committee and as soon as NXT has the Phasing implemented, we will be putting the SuperNET NXT into a Phased account so I wont have sole access to it. As it is, we felt that the least risk way to safekeep the NXT was for me to retain it.

James

if you PM me your email, I can send you a slack invite and you can follow all the activity there >>

Thanks for the links, and for clarifying your reasons for being anonymous. We'll take a look.

To clarify, what exactly do we have access to once we recieve the slack invite?

GlassBox · « **Reply #75 on:** January 04, 2015, 07:42:51 pm »

Quote from: ChuckOne on January 04, 2015, 10:46:23 am

Quote from: GlassBox on January 04, 2015, 03:39:39 am
Not insinuating anything...however, a common miconception in crypto (perpetuated by Jeff's Garzick's statement's on the topic) is that NXT isn't 100% open-sourced. Some comments in this thread suggested that the dev code, at least, isn't completely open. (An interesting point, although it's not mission critical like the live source code is). Thus we wanted to be super-clear on the open-source issue - even to the point of belaboring the point. Thanks for providing more clarity on this.

The source code is open source since 0.4.7 and that was a long time ago.

Jeff made some statements too quickly and without proper research done. This topic is extremely complicated and relies on many philosophical and information-theoretical assumptions (regarding software in general and crypto in particular) that I will not bring up here again because different people different assumptions to be true. Sorry for being too abstract on this but we finally settled this by the following:

NRS development currently does not follow 100% standard open-source software development and especially building, packaging and distribution. But the current approach works and I am confident that time will shape that process to be better and better over time as we grow naturally. If in the end of this natural shaping process stands the usual standard procedure, the better. A confirmation for the standard procedure and confidence we did it right.

Another issue that comes up regularly is that people say "Why not making development public as well?" That as well is an extremely sensitive issue and also based on several assumptions and lack of knowledge how things work. We currently do not consider making the development public for three reasons:

1) Simply not necessary because it is done when it is done anyway and only the fully implemented code is relevant as only that works; half-backed code does not work and is therefore not relevant.

2) Simply not possible because developers develop on their own machine. We cannot make that changes public as developers machine are private property. What happens once in a while is that developers push changes to another place (could be a USB stick, could be a remote repository, could be our private repository). The possibilities with git are endless. We will not surveil our developers (not as long as I am in charge). They are free to do what they think is best to do their work. And if it means they only push finished features after 2 months from their private machine which means the same as not making development public in the first place.

3) hinder adoption by clones

4) changing just because of the sake of changing does only draw development resources away of which we have little to waste

I hope that sufficiently covers all cases of "Nxt is not open source."

That's a very helpful explanation. Mind if we quote you in a follow-up article?

GlassBox · « **Reply #76 on:** January 04, 2015, 07:48:54 pm »

Quote from: durerus on January 04, 2015, 01:10:24 pm

Quote from: smartwart on January 04, 2015, 12:50:48 pm

clarify all the things in a new additional article.

+1 That would be even better for GlassBox to gain trust!

@GlassBox: The optimum would have been if - as part of your research - you had posted your criticism for discussion here in the forums before publishing the article. Anyhow, the article is out now. And you can still make the best out of this situation

We agree that a follow-up article is a good idea. We're going to take into account some of the findings from the dialogue we're having right now - and in fact, will probably create a separate thread just to get gain additional clarity on these issues. We'll also use that opportunity to further clarify the open-source issue.

Honestly there is so much source material on nxtforum that we didn't have much trouble finding information for our report. But like you mention, approaching the community before the report's release is another option. We'll keep that in mind. This was our first report, and very much a learn-as-we-go endeavor.

GlassBox · « **Reply #77 on:** January 04, 2015, 07:53:10 pm »

Quote from: smartwart on January 04, 2015, 12:50:48 pm

Quote with comments:
Quote from: GlassBox on January 04, 2015, 01:24:18 am
Thanks to everyone who provided a warm welcome. It's much appreciated.

Before addressing some of the individual questions and issues posed here, we want to clarify a few crucial points:

- We didn't set out to do a piece on the James assets. But upon digging into the ecosystem, we saw that this comprises a large amount of both the discussion here at NXT, and the money moving into assets. Put another way, there is a lot of money changing hands in this sub-set of NXT assets. So it seemed like a natural choice to start with a focus on jl777.
+ the natural choice would be to start with Nxt as it self.
As you did, non insiders easily could think Nxt == JL777...

- We're aware that there's a vast ecosystem of innovation and development happening outside the James realm. If we gave the impression that we were conflating NXT with James - our bad. We intend on providing additional NXT converage in the future that touches on other aspects of the platform.
+ Serious medias normally deploy an "against presentation" if they provided biased information or based on wrong assumptions.

- We're intent on providing fact-based analysis. NXT is a complex beast - as are all crypto platforms. While we do our best to confirm facts (and cite those facts wherever possible), we may make mistakes. In the event we got a fact wrong, please let us know - along with providing evidence supporting this proposed correction.
+ Everyone is doing mistakes.
But if you feel the complexity is >> as your understanding, why do you feel it was a "fact based analysis"?

- In terms of being skeptical, well - that's our job! Investors should always be skeptical. However, we will always strive to be fair and accurate. While you may disagree with our interpreation of facts, those facts are a binary thing - and with sufficient research can usually be determined.
+ please stay skeptical and critical, but there is a difference between "assumptions" and "facts"...

Just some comments about it.
Changing the content of an article would be the worst case.
Serious authors don't change their released articles -> they clarify all the things in a new additional article.

We believe it's perfectly fine to issue a correction within an article; journalists do it all the time. But in this case, we agree that a follow-up piece is not a bad idea. We're already planning our next platform to cover, but have time to issue a follow-up within the next two weeks.

Thanks again, everyone for the comments, suggestions, thoughts, and feedback. We appreciate it.

jl777 · « **Reply #78 on:** January 04, 2015, 07:59:35 pm »

Quote from: GlassBox on January 04, 2015, 07:40:18 pm

Thanks for the links, and for clarifying your reasons for being anonymous. We'll take a look.

To clarify, what exactly do we have access to once we recieve the slack invite?

you will be able to interactively chat with the dozens of channels at: http://104.236.15.119:8086/logs/channels

Damelon · « **Reply #79 on:** January 04, 2015, 08:04:13 pm »

Quote from: GlassBox on January 04, 2015, 07:53:10 pm

We believe it's perfectly fine to issue a correction within an article; journalists do it all the time. But in this case, we agree that a follow-up piece is not a bad idea. We're already planning our next platform to cover, but have time to issue a follow-up within the next two weeks.

Thanks again, everyone for the comments, suggestions, thoughts, and feedback. We appreciate it.

I, for one, would like to express my admiration for going to make a follow up article.
To many times we've seen (I am talking crypto in general) articles that contained bad facts, not because of malignancy, but lack of research.
These stay out there and continue to harm. It's the 'net after all.

I am looking forward to what you will post. I don't even care if I'll like it, as long as it reflects reality

News:

Author Topic: Glassbox spreading FUD about NXT and JL777 assets (Read 15199 times)