The Substratum community has been on a tear lately, encouraging others to spread malicious inconsequential “truths” about the P-Rep team I am apart of. Let’s take some time to look at the facts and reality they ignore daily with their own project.
“Unsubstantiated Claims”
Now, the first topic we will break down is that of some of the writings on this blog, as being “unsubstantiated claims”. Let’s take a look at some recent statements from Substratum’s former Tech Lead, Dan Weibe.
Dan Weibe:
“There was never any revenue in the business model, so of course the money had to run out sooner or later. I guess it chose a point somewhat between sooner and later, and ran out after almost two years. That’s not bad; we got a good start on the project, and it’s in a perfectly reasonable place for the community to take over, I think”.
“Dan and Jason are gone. BJ is gone too, but he was usually too busy with other things to pair on code. I’m in the office now, and I see Steve, Jon, and Matt, and they tell me Kevin will be coming back from lunch. So…two pairs on the payroll, at least one solo not on the payroll”.
To all the Substratum supporters who will argue and say there are still “private funds”, I encourage you to tend to the cultivation of your mind and retract inflammatory statements towards those who only tried to warn you… months ago.
This is straight from the Tech Lead, a primary source. There is no argument you can make that will ascertain a legitimate “excuse” that the community is so accustomed to forming. They have no more funds, period. Any argument against this is just pervasive and unintelligent.
Dan Weibe:
“Substratum Host? Just a little thinking. No formal planning, certainly no coding. The biggest problem there that I see is the private-key problem, which I have detailed elsewhere. It’s a real showstopper; until somebody smarter than I have been so far figures out a way around it, there’s really no use spending more effort on Host. Without a solution to that problem, it can’t possibly work”.
“CryptoPay? We wrote some code for this, mostly preliminary versions of back-end microservices in Scala using Lagom and Cassandra. There wasn’t enough to show anybody anything, really, and I don’t think we own (“we”–listen to me! Substratum owns) that codebase anymore. I’m not sure what’s happened there since we pivoted back toward Node, but I wouldn’t be astonished to learn that nothing further has been done”.
So much lying that went on behind the scenes…
A Den of Ineptitude and Censorship
Before you decide to call RHIZOME a P-Rep team that is a “bad actor“, I incline you to look upon the motives of those spreading fabrications about us in a granular and objective light. For, not only have we been involved within the ICON community since the beginning, we have published progress reports, remained active on all social channels, and are welcome to discuss topics of relevance to the community.
Unlike Substratum, we don’t censor our social channels (unless someone is clearly out of line) and we have nothing to hide. Which, if we look through Substratum’s reddit history, there is a massive influx of posts deleted and a clear Zero-Tolerance policy on critical questions.
Dan Weibe:
“No, it wasn’t a couple of days. It was months, and eventually it was all of us. It was never just me. Anyway, as I said, I heard talk about Substratum being reimbursed for that by Amplify months and months ago–last year sometime, I think. I don’t know whether it happened or not, but I heard folks talking about it”.
This comment from Substratum’s (former) tech lead was in lieu of reimbursement from work done for Amplify which included months of hard work with ultimately no reimbursement. Conversely, this means during this time development of all 3 “core products” – NODE, HOST, and CryptoPay were paused in the process. Which, everyone thought was being worked on in the first place.
Substratum’s New “Transition”
As we have been accustomed to, all is indeed still well within Substratum and anyone arguing otherwise is “fudding”. Let’s look at a statement from Justin Tabb’s post in his recent post about Substratum’s “transition”.
Justin Tabb:
“As with all businesses if the time from initial funding to post-revenue is too long things get challenging. Two years after our ICO the company has exhausted, through employment and operational expense, the initial ICO fund but is continuing on with additional private funding. Due to the nature of private funding we have been advised to consolidate expenses until we are post-revenue by migrating the Ohio location to Tennessee where we have additional space. All members of the Ohio location have been offered the opportunity to transition to Tennessee and some are going through the exploration process of that with the Tennessee team”.
Now to any intelligent observer we can make a few key observations here.
- Where/What is this “private funding”?
- Why has the team been downsized to less than 7 people when there used to be 28?
- Lastly, why the lies?
Dan Weibe, the Tech Lead of Substratum (formerly) was offered extra funding to stay longer at Substratum, but he respectfully declined. Therefore, that “extra funding” was likely coming out of Justin Tabb’s pocket as we, the outsiders, have no definitive proof of the existence of this “extra funding”. Because… it’s non-existent.
Conclusion
Before listening/spreading inflammatory accusations about others, I encourage the Substratum community to tend to the cultivation of their mind and for others to take statements from a proven malicious group of supporters as grains of salt.