So let me go over the timeline with you.
- Peter kirby exited the mining scam "Cointerra" before joining Factom. Paul Snow wasn't terribly active in the movement prior, but claimed to be Bitcoin wealthy on camera once or twice.
Peter left Cointerra in Feb of 2014, Peter joined us in September of 2014 roughly 7 months later, and Cointerra goes bust in January of 2015 four months after that.
Cointerra sold mining hardware. They didn't do any cloud mining at all, as claim here.
Cointerra's ASIC chip worked very well (according to people I have talked to) but their board could not handle the power. They also had problems meeting their production dates. Unfortunate for anyone pre-purchasing hardware (PLEASE, nobody do that!), but no evidence of intent to scam. And Cointerra folds 11 months after Peter left them.
I bought my first Bitcoins in 2011 on a whim, and was not too active until mid 2013. I ran the weekly Bitcoin meetups here in Austin starting somewhere around June of 2013. I organized the Mini Bitcoin Conference Series in Austin in the fall of 2013, and the Texas Bitcoin Conference in March of 2014. Maybe that isn't "terribly active" in the movement, but so what?
- Factom asked everyone in the community to be their "advisors" prior to crowdfunding to gain the trust of the community (I said no)
We published our whitepaper, the consensus algorithm, and asked for input from the community at large. From that input, we refined a number of aspects of our design and implementation. We set up the token sale based on delivered milestones. Like many projects, those milestones were harder to reach than hoped, but at this point we have delivered the protocol (milestone 1) and have access to only 1/3 of the funds from the token sale. The second milestone (the consensus algorithm) will release another 1/3. And the elections of the distributed servers will release the final 1/3. These constraints and the third party verifications of our milestones were put in place on advise provided by these advisors.
So in some sense you are correct. We did recruit advisors to gain trust. But what that means in our case is that we actively solicited their advice and their views to shape an approach that would justify and earn that trust.
- Factom claims that they would have protected against the Sony hack (In multiple languages)
Factom provides a mechanism to distribute authorization (the role of a System of Record). Additionally, access can be made to not only require proper credentials, but also to include the age of said credentials (as Factom provides a time stamping service). Distributed authority, audit trails, and timestamping could greatly limit what a hacker can gain from compromising a network or database.
- The claim at the NABC was that "The Gutenberg press was being stored in Factom". Of course factom only stores hashes. I pushed - and they corrected the record
Actually we claimed we were storing hashes plus some meta information (titles, authors, etc.). This was misquoted (sometimes even by our own people) as storing books on Factom. I do not recall you being at all instrumental in correcting the record, as I was deeply involved in Factom, and corrected this assertion every time I encountered it.
- Jimmy Song personally wrote a scathing article on factom on liberty.me. It was removed because of an individual who was clearly involved in the Factom project emailed Jimmy Song's employer and made a veiled threat as to the repercussions of their employees writing critical articles of the project. When confronted about this - Paul Snow did not make any attempt to re-post the content (which imo - was his chance to make the situation 'right' in light of a company that, you know, is supposed to be dedicated to fighting censorship). This article has since (somehow/finally) been reposted.. The series is pretty fucking good.
Obviously I was willing to engage Jimmy and his observations, and I continue to be available to discuss concerns about our project. I do not know the details about why these posts were removed, but I am very glad they are live again.
I don't know what you mean when you say I was confronted about this. Nor do I understand what you would expect me to do, even if I was "confronted." Keep in mind, I stand by my responses to Jimmy, and I believe Factom was harmed by taking down those responses.
But there was little I could do to correct this. I do not have the right to post the content of someone else, and I have no authority or sway with either Jimmy's employer nor with Liberty.me. I have known Jimmy personally from the meetups I ran in 2013, but I don't know him well enough to post his work without a request from him or at least permission.
Largely motivated by this event, I have made it very clear to our organization that we encourage ALL discussion of our project, negative or positive, and that nobody in our organization will ever in the future seek to suppress discussion about Factom.
And to my knowledge, this incident has not been repeated, and in fact I have posted numerous times your own discussions with me from skype. Discussions with detractors is particularly valuable both for me to understand how to make a better tech, and to correct misconceptions about our tech. Cheerleaders are nearly useless in this regard.
Thus I agree with you that the series Jimmy wrote is very good, especially since I think I did a pretty good job of addressing Jimmy's concerns.
- Factom lies about a relationship with DBS ... powering dishwashers? (Because IoT is the buzzword du jour that will sell tokens)
There have been a few missteps in the press, and we established processes to prevent goofs like the DBS statement in the future. As far as IoT is concerned, the discussion was about how to create networks of trusted devices, and we talked about how Factom can help with that (the dishwashers article). Not sure I'd lump in our discussion of Factom and IoT (which made no claims of active projects) with the DBS quote. After all, IBM and others make a lot of hay over IoT, and little if any of that is out in the market yet.
- The Texas bitcoin conference was an extensive pitch for Factom (Why is a pre-funded company advertising, unless the fundraise is 'the product') and .. Hope Gold Coin (a scam that @junseth managed to crash before it got off the ground, thankfully)
I don't know what "pre-funded" means, given we did have funds we had raised. Companies often (if not usually) go through multiple funding rounds. The Hope Gold Coin effort was tied to groups that have done fundraising concerts for decades. That relationship fell apart after the conference, and as you say the coin didn't get off the ground.
- Factom promises to great fanfare the securing of a land title deal with hondurus
Now we have some likely intentional misrepresentation. This article came out on May 15 (and was supposed to go out later than that). This came AFTER the token sale (April 2nd - May 15), not before as you imply here. The project is still under negotiation, and it is not dead. But government projects often involve negotiations that drag out for months and even years.
- Fundraise happens - and Factom raises far short of the 10 million USD they were planning
We never stated any goal for the token sale. The token sale was less than expected, but it has been enough to support the project along with more traditional investment.
And as already pointed out, brighton36 is blatantly misrepresenting the order of events here to build an impression that isn't true. We did not use the Honduras story (May 15) to try and bump up the token sales that ended on May 15. At all.
- @junseth confronts factom about the Hondurus deal. Guess what? Never happened. Paul refuses to correct the record, and this fact only goes to light when the chat is published. (Oh btw - also on page 44 of that link is the likely admission that Adam Wagner was paid to astroturf pro-factom articles)
And another couple of misrepresentations. I encourage everyone to read the discussion we had (where I have never refused to "correct the record"), as well as reading Jimmy's articles and my responses, and various conversations on Reddit. Even if we were perfect (and we are not), some people would not care for our company nor our technology. Not the same thing as asserting we are a scam or worthless to anyone.
What I refused to do was say that a negotiation (that is still in progress) is over. It might fall through, true enough. But the process is still dragging on as I write this.
- Factom's response to the Hondurus deal? A rogue reporter for Reuters. So we contact the reporter (Gertrude Chavez) - her response? She spent hours at night with Peter to get the copy perfect. The reporter is outraged that Factom is reporting otherwise and that the entire story was verified by Peter Kirby.
So we have a bit of a "she said, he said" situation here. We did not get the copy ahead of publishing, and it was released prior to the date we had expected. Some of the wording (going on about how poor and corrupt Honduras is) was not helpful or useful from our perspective.
- Due to disappointing results Factom launches a second fundraise on bnktothefuture.com
So due to the need to raise funds to continue the project, we did additional fund raising. Not terribly shocking.
- Somehow, around this point Abhi Dobhal's company "Epigraph" becomes the actual consulting company that Factom takes credit for being. (and for telling its fundraisers, it will be)
Actually, that would be May 17, 2015. http://cointelegraph.com/news/114280/honduran-govt-to-build-land-registry-initiative-on-bitcoin-blockchain For the record that was from the beginning as far as Factom's announcements on the project are concerned.
This is another either lie or misrepresentation intended to imply something ... I have no idea what. Maybe just terribly sloppy research.
- Due to disappointing results from the first and second fundraise, Factom secures yet another round of funding. In this round - they tell potential investors that they've already sold $1.2 million in software licenses prior. Guess where those licenses came from? Factoid Bagholders and second-round investors that thought they were holding some form of shares and/or tokens. the crowdfunders are the product of Factom.
Again, a bit insulting to any company that goes through different rounds of funding. And inaccurate, since we are still finalizing our seed round (which includes the Banktothefuture campaign)
As far as characterizing the factoids as licences to the protocol, this is exactly what they are. The only use for a factoid is to be converted into Entry Credits that allow one to access the protocol. Entry Credits are not transferable, so users of Factom (the protocol) do not need wallets, and do not need a crypto currency.
We had very clear language around the token sale, and never represented Factoids as shares. Heck, the whole architecture of Factom is designed to negate the use of the token as some kind of share.
The Factoids (our token) are tradable, allowing an entity to secure and maintain an inventory to sell Entry Credits to users. Factoids will eventually pay the servers to run the protocol once the protocol is fully functional. Until the protocol is fully functional, the only source of Factoids are those awarded to early contributors and those that bought the tokens.
- Peter continually has problems explaining how the software works. So do a lot of people.
Not true, and pretty much an intentional lie. Peter has done a great job representing Factom in meetings and events around the world. A couple or so months ago you began promoting a slice out of an interview. And all you had was a person who fumbled a question for a moment. God help me if someone could play back my answer to every question I've ever been asked. I'd even guess everyone has fumbled a question at some point.
- Because the business model makes no sense. You can store a notarization in the bitcoin blockchain for pennies. Want to store more? Store a merkleroot every ten minutes for 3 cents. Can't be trusted for even ten minutes to tell the truth? I call bullshit on that market. If that market exists - it's already being serviced by someone at a centralized institution that has no counterparty risk.
This is of course the topic that would be very fun to go over in detail. Factom provides an entry for about 0.1 cents. Which for those of us that understand math, is way less than pennies. And while anyone can store Merkle roots, this doesn't create a chain of entries over time, the way Factom does.
And if you think centralized solutions do not carry counterparty risk, you don't understand the term "counterparty risk". That term refers to the risk to each party of a contract that the other (the "counterparty") will not live up to its contractual obligations. If you use a centralized solution to record your history, you almost always enter a contract. And you then have the risk that they will not record your history, or perhaps not validate your history. And that institution will carry the risk that you may use their service for activities that may make them liable (by reputation if not by law). Or a payment you made might be reversed. Or you might sue them for damages due to an outage of their services.
We call these risks "Counterparty Risks". Two parties, and a contract.
The use of Factom doesn't require a contract, so there is by definition no counterparty risk. The protocol embeds anti-censorship features to ensure that your applications remain supported, and is provable against the Bitcoin blockchain over time. Using Factom you do risk the protocol might die, but that isn't by definition a counterparty risk. And should you choose to run a "Factom" service yourself (it is open source) then you could continue to use Factom anyway.
- David Johnson is perpetually pitching scams to the community. I'm waiting for the hammer to drop on this guy. There's a good story here, and I can only guess what it is. I'm hoping a decent reporter digs into this case.
David has been working full time on Factom for over a year. In this space, he worked on Mastercoin which became Omni, and which was forked to become Counterparty. He provided funding and promotion for Maidsafe and Storj. He has also promoted Ethereum, Tether (running on Omni I believe), and maybe some other projects.
Nothing he has worked on was a scam. I of course view scams as business ventures constructed to defraud investors or customers. You seem operate under some other definition for scam. David isn't a developer, and I am not quite sure how honest it is to judge someone for working for projects that might not be as successful as one might like.
- This is a company who's selling truth tokens, and has a pattern of lying and censoring. This is a scam, and will end badly. I'm sure there's a whole boatload of scandals ahead (something tells me their truthbutt chain will be far more centralized and problematic than they're letting on)
A conclusion I don't think is justified by your rant here (it isn't the "timeline" you claim). We have never called our token a "truth token", though I can see the appeal for the term.
At this point I think the reader can conclude you would LIKE for factom to have a scandal, but all you really have is a few mistakes in the press (heck, not too many more than I found in your own timeline here!) and some complaints about the need for a company to do fundraising. Notably missing in your rant is all the work we have done, documentation delivered, code released. You don't even credit us for being willing to answer your questions.
As you say, you refused to be one of our advisors. Is that really something to brag about?
It's kind of a great scam. People want to do the right thing - and beat censorship. Plus, they want to make money doing it. Factom sold the community "truth token scamcoins" when Bitcoin has had this ability to do so just fine for years
Bitcoin cannot scale the way Factom can. Factom puts about 12 Megabytes into Bitcoin every year. That would be the case even if Factom was processing over 100 entries per second (something I believe the architecture can handle as is. Modifications should vastly increase capacity without any more load on Bitcoin). That could secure as much as 50 terabytes of data per year with the Bitcoin blockchain. This isn't something Bitcoin can handle, but the approach that Factom is using can. And even if Factom housed 50 terabytes of entries, applications would only need the chains they care about. They wouldn't need 50 terabytes of data to validate their histories.
As I said before, no project is the cat's meow to everyone. But I do believe Factom solves real problems, and will be a significant factor in ensuring the success of the Bitcoin Protocol.
Factom is a "scam" that employs somewhere around 15 people, and a few part time people. We develop open source directly in Github. So far, anyone can see what we are doing:
250 commits to our document project,
~370 commits in factomd (towards milestone 2),
1,435 commits to FactomCode (most of the existing protocol),
530 commits to the wallet API,
maybe 300 commits to BTCD (altered to use their wire protocol),
124 commits to the wallet GUI,
72 commits to a testing repo,
244 commits to the Factoid code,
199 to the CLI,
115 to the Go API for factom,
And much, much more. After all, not all of our work and effort is documented in Github.
You can go to Github and validate: https://github.com/FactomProject
We have done all of this and more on a shoestring. One consistant theme above is about how little money we raised. This is a very active project and we are working hard to not just deliver a protocol, but to document it and respond in real time to the community about what we are doing, how we are doing it, and why we are doing it the way we are.
I hope this helps.
