I sent an email to one of the creators of Quark Coin got a reply

Bill Still Report #132, Kolin Evans was interviewed. He is a Sydneysider and one of the developers of Quark Coin:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qXhqSy0nbg[/youtube]




I wrote an email to him:

Please Explain how QRK is not a Pre-mine Pump & Dump Scam

Hello Mr. Evans,

With the recent Bill Still and (soon to be) Max Keiser exposure for QRK, it could be that the price will be higher before Christmas.

I saw in your Skype interview with Bill Still that one of the things the development team felt BTC had done wrong was making a system where big miners would eventually take over as the mining difficulty ramped up. So QRK is coming into this from the other end, having premined MILLIONS of these coins. So, what many crypto-traders like myself want to know, I'm sure is:

1) If there are about 247 million of these coins already premined, who has them? The developers? A group of say, 30 people (including yourself) are holding onto millions of coins? How many people are holding onto these millions and millions of coins?

2) Can you explain how the "fauceting" system works. Is this how the current QRK holders intend to disseminate the money to the public?

3) Finally, how is this not a pump and dump scam? If there are 247 million coins waiting to be circulated, what is to stop the price getting to, say, 0.001 BTC and then having that smashed down by massive sell orders, like Warragamba Dam had just busted open?

I'll post your answers up on the cypto-forum that I post on and let the posters there evaluate the answers.

Thanks for your time,
EJ

 

This was the reply:


Hi mate ive addressed this but look out for a video , im on a mobile device at present , so I cant link the graphs basically as soon as grass roots investors started buying , on one exchange alone over 120 million quark were traded .

Then that exchange stopped functionality due to the massive volume and many rushed the second .

Also a "pre_ mine " is when one person mines the blockchain then releases the currency , just not the reality in quark case and no serious crypto advocate suggests it .

Im a veteran of the forums the only time this was tried to be brought up is because quark has gone viral .

So i have a message to the people on the crypto forum you post on , quark has gone viral , the how to buy has hit close to 20 thousand hits , we have no fiat exchange and are not on a chinese excahnge .

Slander wil not work the cat is out of the bag , millions were brought and sold and we are at 13c , very attractive to our grassroots investors .

Cheers mate

Kol .

 

Recently opened an account with cryptsy. What's the general thoughts from this sub forum on quark. Does it have Potential, is anyone invested in quark?
There's a lot of hype. Good and bad

 

Seems quite scammy to me although I admit I tried to buy some. May still do, but only to try and squeeze out a profit, unlike the quark early adopters who do this strictly for the love.

^So scammy. 98% mined before anyone heard about it is a pre-mine, the end. Quark is a pre-mine just like Ripple and many others. It's actually quite obvious, and Kolin has a lot of incentive to lie about it. Yeah, no serious crypto advocate is going to dump a pump'n'dump coin at a ridiculous profit....riiight.

 

^ I did not understand this part.
Is he saying the people holding the pre-mined coins are releasing them into the market or is he saying that they are holding onto them?

 

Earthjade, here is my take on it: He's saying that even though only a few early adopters hold essentially all the coins, they would not sell them because it would collapse the price and probably destroy the idea of quarkcoins, and the early adopters wouldn't make any money. He seems to be avoiding the obvious step where the early adopters cash out, leaving the new adopters to deal with the mess and take the fall, and the early adopters (him) ride off into the sunset to make the next alt. It's not like this is his life work or something. He's not married to quark. He did a find&replace and changed Bitcoin to Quark. He tweaked a few numbers. No different to any altcoin. I'm guessing Kolin is the same guy that advertised to make you your own alt-coin on gumtree a few months back.

He's also saying that lots of quark were sold by the early adopters to new adopters, so hmmm, yes, what is he saying exactly?

To be honest, he seems very vague about it (probably for good reason) so I've read between the lines a little. I generally don't get involved in alt-coins so maybe I missed something.

 

I would like to know how many QRKs are currently in circulation and by circulation, I mean being traded on exchanges and in the hands of the non pre-mined people.

 

I saw this:

Quarkcoin - A 'Scamcoin...' With a Future?

Capitalization: $~40 Million
Price: $0.16
Number of Coins: 245M (as of 12/4/13)

You may not be surprised to learn that when I started writing this, I was ready to stuff Quark down at the bottom with the evil, brand heist that is a Megacoin. Quark has a horrible reputation, associated with pump and dumps, premining, and there really does seem to be too many of them at 245 million. Still, the more I research, the more I became relatively bullish on Quark, at least short term.

Pros
Unique 6-way hashing method has led at least one to conclude that Quark could be a third pillar in a BTC/LTC/Quark paradigm, such that Quark is a necessary third power due to the instability in a bipolar economy.
Low price and a high number of Quarkcoins means it could encourage speculative purchasing.
Huge number of Quarkcoins has a psychological advantage over relative scarce BTC and LTC.
Not really a great metric, but buzz is clearly building as Quarks are selling for nearly 50 cents on Ebay; this is a good indicator for speculative buying.
Cool branding, logo, and website.
Merchant support is mobilizing albeit at an insane price, 20% mark-up. However, you can buy anything on Amazon, according to QuarkSpend.com. Still, since Quark's popularity is relatively young, this does indicate higher longevity.

Cons
Claims to be more secure than Bitcoin, but in reality, a 51% attack is very much a possibility.
Perceived as a "pre-mined scamcoin," but this may also be an indicator that it is undervalued.

Verdict: Quarkcoin is a hard call. As a short term investment, it could work out favorably, but it's hard to gauge how the coin will fare longer term. Beyond the massive quantity available and the unique hashing, Quark doesn't offer anything other coins don't, but it has materialized massive momentum very quickly, though this could be due to hype-man Max Keiser more than anything. I'd say it's low risk short-term, medium-risk medium term, but in terms of say, a year out, it's hard to see how or why Quark would stick around.

Read more at: http://www.heavy.com/tech/2013/12/qkc-vs-mec-wdc-ftc-pts/

 

I have another con

I tryed so send a few quarks from one wallet to another wallet using Quarkcoin version v0.8.3.6-g09e437b-beta to check how fast it works.

both wallats on two different notebooks.

On each Notebook i did send different amounts of coins to the same adress. Some transfered well - some not.

They are still on the transferlist and marked as unconfirmed and disapeared in the balance. Seems the amount of coins stuck in the transferlist is lost in space.

As long as it does not work correctly i will not try to get some more of this coins.

After changing some BTC to QRKC at crypsy i received them well in my wallet. But now i not sure anything is ok and i am not wiling
send a bigger amount of coins either to annother wallet than to a exchange. Coins could be lost in nowhere.

Anybody makes same experiance ???

 

So the early adopters, and holders of the majority of the coins, love the quark and wouldn't dump them on the open market because they all trust one another to not take the profits and run...Okay!

 

I absolutely hate it when people who are meant to be trying to give you confidence in their abilities can't spell or come across as a total jock (and I don't mean Scottish)

The PR side of QRK is $hit, sorry ;(

 

I see over on the QRK forums there is a thread about trying to remove Kolin as the "face" of Quark.
In all honesty, he didn't answer my questions satisfactorily. There is nothing he said that helps to convince me that the holders of the pre-mined QRK are not just going to all jump ship to BTC and leave the latecomers holding onto their privates. I wanted to know how the "fauceting" of QRK works and he ignored that completely.
Working in a job where I have to deal with clients, it's pretty obvious Mr. Evans has had no occupational experience of that sort. Just an observation of fact.

 

They make 245 million of it.

Prolly you're better off collecting USD.

 

Hi guys,

EntropyExtropy from the Quark forums here. You're right, Kolin isn't the best 'face' of Quark. He's done a lot of work to 'get the word out', but perhaps he isn't the best at instilling confidence in people who have questions. I'll be checking back here to answer your questions, or you can email me/tweet me and I'm more than happy to continue the conversation.

First on the technical side of things for Ninteno: were you previously running a version of the quark client? With the release of 8.3.6, there's a database incompatibility with previous versions, and, in some cases, transactions won't post to the blockchain. I will also say that we're currently having trouble with our big mining pool because of the strain it's under from the community; that's being fixed ASAP. My suggestion would be to backup your wallet.dat file (just copy it to another directory) and delete everything in your %APPDATA%/quarkcoin folder (/home/$USER/.quarkcoin for Linux). Restart the quarkcoin-qt client and let it redownload the blockchain and the new peer list, then exit, copy back your wallet.dat file and reopen the computer. That should fix the problem.

There are many things about Quark that put people off initially. I would preface this with saying that, even for Max, the initial developer, Quark's popularity is completely unexpected. In the intervening months between July and mid-November, Quark fell off the radar. I think this is one of the reasons that people lob the 'pre-mining' accusation at Quark. The fact of the matter is that Quark was never designed with its current popularity in mind; it was initially an experiment in the advantages of different hasing algorithms and block times. Quark was never pre-mined, meaning that blocks were mined or insta-mined prior to release, but instead mining has been continuing, more or less, throughout Quarks obscurity. When I joined the quark project in the middle of November, all but one of the mining pools had shut down. It's only with this recent surge of popularity that people think of 'pre-mining', because nobody really cared about Quark otherwise.

I think the point that Kolin is trying to make is that Quark's relative valuelessness for most of its operational life means that miners have sold or traded huge sums quark in order to recoup costs, and Quark has been freely given away in the past in the same way that Infinitecoin and others are today.

That being said, the community has taken up a public auditing of the blockchain to see exactly how centralized distribution is. From what we have found so far, it looks as if around 30 wallets hold 33% of the monetary supply. This is actually comparative to other prominant coins; Peercoin and Feathercoin are even more highly centralized and only 47 people hold 35% of the Bitcoin supply. Is this a problem? Yes, many of us think it is. So we're trying to figure out ways to redistribute Quark in a fairer way, including large-holders dedicating Quark to faucets and bounties for future development.

One thing I will say is that, even if some large holders were to dump (which, at this point, is a possibility that threatens every coin), the momentum behind Quark has solidified its development future. Max has opened development to the community and many, many people have stepped in to fill the vacant rolls, from client and web development to PR and branding. It's been inspiring to see the community rally in the last two weeks; that's how I initially got involved.

I'll be lurking in order to answer whatever questions you guys have.

 

Sorry if I went a little overboard, Entropy. I did some more reading and saw that people have been mining them for some time as you politely mentioned. The fact that 98% are out there was the crux of my point, I guess. Still an issue for me personally.

I assume that increased transaction fees will supply the bulk of miner's income? What happens if quark is not all that popular then? Miners would get reduced incomes if people weren't actually using quark much. With other coins they can be assured of getting 'x' coins per block plus a little more.

So if I'm correct in my assumption, quark doesn't seem to be an anti-fragile formula. A drop in usage will cause further drops in usage, until it death-spirals to having no users using it, because there are no incentives. That's how I'm seeing it right now anyway.

Kolin is fine, just too vague, and to be honest he reminded me of Jesse from Breaking Bad.

 

I can see the resemblance, although in Kolin's case there's much less cursing.

This is something we're investigating. Max and the rest of the development team have been weighing the benefits of increasing the yearly inflation to 2-3m, which might not seem like a lot at the current valuation, but if price-discovery predications, as we push for merchant adoption, pan out the way some analysts predict and we see dollar parity, then we believe it would be enough to sustain a distributed enough mining community to both secure the network and maintain speedy transactions. Inflation is the wrong term, of course; for many, that's the reason they're getting into gold/silver/digital equivalents in the first place: to escape from rampant inflation in fiat. But a yearly distribution of coin is necessary, as you've said, for mining and to make up for orphaned coins and lost wallets.

I agree that the fact that most of the circulation is already out there is troublesome. I had difficulty with it at first, as well; in fact, I was outspoken for doing a reverse-split on the blockchain it fix and to restart mining in a more 'traditional' way. It was pointed out to me, however, that a lot of people have already put their money into Quark. The volumes traded on Cryptsy, for instance, indicate that Bill Still's campaign has had a serious effect. Would it be any 'fairer' to reduce the circulation, 10:1? On the other hand, if we continue to mine, say, doubling the circulation, then the 'trust' aspect of the coin is lost; who's to say, after you've changed the initial minting details of a coin, that you wouldn't change it again in the future?

So now we come to a crossroads where no path seems to satisfy everyone. It seems that Quark will be the first 'fully-mined' crypto and will, in that vein, be an experimental case that other cryptos can learn from. I would also consider the issue of mining vs. buying in for other cryptos; look at Bitcoin and the oligarchical structure of its mining cartels, you learn that mining for bitcoin is very expensive. The vast majority of people are currently buying in to the bitcoin ecosystem; in that vein, bitcoin is effectively fully-mined at any one instant because the average consumer doesn't have the capability of getting in on the action.

Not that this is a justification of the circulation issues, but one other way to look at it.I50L5mqW