Realize that in this project the #1 guy was caught making numerous sock puppet accounts. His answer to that was to say he threw away the passwords to them. It is called "Faith of Burn".
Then #2 guy took care of stakes. Somehow he managed to give out 5-6 stakes for people who created accounts that had a slight misspelling. (Same security problem with our account names) He never caught this until a third party who had had their stake given away bought it to attention. Huh? Sketchy to say the least.
Everyone involved in the project has a BTT account from around the same time.
To this date they have never published a whitepaper about their consensus algorithm or what is better about it. I am not sure the developers are known. They have had plenty of time to do this. 1 shortish whitepaper isn't that difficult.
They played the game really well, but I can't see this coin going anywhere.
you are correct about utopian and socks. however you have it sort of wrong. he was only caught with one account and admitted that he had others. it isnt very likely he would have been able to redeem them either as the second round of sock removals involved logging IP address and browser finger prints which he could not have known about as he was removed from all private boards/chats and was long gone by the time the second sock removal was implemented.
as for patmast3r, the #2 guy as you say, i know that you would have to take my word for it but that was a genuine mistake. if you think about it, if he really wanted to scam he could have just dumped the 100's of nemstakes he was in control of onto the market and run away with a hell of a lot more than 6 stakes worth. so it doesnt make much sense that he would scam 6 stakes when he could have stole a hell of a lot more.
The white paper has been put off because development of the software is far more important. in all honesty would it be better to launch with a whitepaper and shaky software or to put of the whitepaper and focus on launching with a heavily tested and optimised platform with some very powerful features like remote harvesting and the first ever blockchain based multisig implementation aswell as a new anti-spam feature which is working spectacularly as of now.
the anti-spam feature works like this:
It basicly works like this:
1) The cache is limited to 1000 transactions (slots).
2) If there are less than 120 transactions waiting in the cache any new transaction is accepted.
3) Otherwise it is calculated how many slots the originator of the transaction is allowed to occupy in the transaction cache.
If he has already reached his maximum, then the transaction is rejected.
This maximum is dependent in the fill level of the cache, the importance of the account and the transaction fee.
screen shots of the new multisig implementation can be seen here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=942352.0remote harvesting is a remarkable feature:
first you need to understand there are two parts to the nem software. NIS(nem infrastructure software) and NCC(Nem Community Client). NCC connects to NIS and one or the other can be run remotely and connected to from another location. IE. NIS running on a server can be connected to by multiple instances of NCC.
The state of the art harvesting(forging) technology allows (multiple) users to connect to a (single) remote instance of the software and harvest using a cold storage account with out ever sending a private key or any sensitive data over the network, even the operator of the instance (of NIS) could be a known thief and the account you harvest on it with can not be compromised. combine this with multisig and you can lock down your coins in a cold storage multisig account and use that account to harvest on a thiefs NIS and your coins will be safe all while using them to harvest. and in the same way you can harvest safely on a thief's nis, you can also do transactions safely.
these features all out on beta currently and working perfectly and the network has held up to enormous pressure. recently we had a blockchain restart but the one that was just stopped had over 2.2 million transactions in the space of a few months and for around 2 days every block was over loaded ie. more than the max transactions per block were done causing a huge backlog of transactions. the network handled this easily. also, even though there were 2.2m transactions, (far more than have been done in NXT in over a year), NIS still downloads/scans the bocks much faster than nxt(i would compare to bitshares but i havnt used it). getting to this stage is with out a doubt more important than a white paper and i think most would agree.
in regards to your comment about what makes POI better, you are also right that few details have been released about it. But imo what is better about it is that instead of participants in the network being rewarded based on "how much" (how much mining power they have, how much money they have in the system) participants are rewarded based on "how well" they participate in the network. much like a web of trust, your "weight" is judged by how much you transact and with who. The essence of POS is not completely removed however. if no one in the network was to transact, it would act exactly the same as POS. your importance is weighted relative to other accounts too. ie. if no one else transacts except for 5 people in the network. those 5 people would essential absorb importance from those who do not transact. at least this is my understanding of it so there very well might be some errors in my understanding due to there being a lack of technical information released for PoI.
i cannot say that you are wrong in you last statement as that is your opinion and i wont argue with that. However, if we fail to "go anywhere" it will most certainly not be from a lack of technological advancement or a lack of interest from the community.
hope you dont mind me stopping in to fill in some details.
if any parties are interested you can test the beta here:
https://forum.nemcoin.com/beta-launch-discussion/nem-beta-0-5-4/