In a statement released to CCN.com and a few other outlets this morning, which is available in full below, Litecoin Association Director Andrew Vegetabile urges the Paycoin community to “put their foot down” in regards to the actions of Homero Josh Garza, the owner of GAW miners. Garza is the CEO of the widely-defamed “Geniuses at Work” corporation whose antics have earned him and his company a less than favorable reputation in the cryptocurrency world.
You may remember that Vegetabile has previously demanded that Litecoin be delisted from the exchange Garza purchased, Coin-Swap, and taken Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong to task for writing off altcoins. The following statement was released independently of the Litecoin Association, without their endorsement.
Also read: Josh Garza Releases A Hit List of Media Outlets
As the one who has started the initial public statement months ago on the initial potential issues with GAW and Paycoin, I felt it was necessary to be the one who can attempt to close this chapter in crypto eco-system. For those unaware, GAW bought an exchange and I felt it was irresponsible to have an exchange along with a crypto coin because it presented an ethical boundary that should not have been crossed where one could have the potential of owning a coin and having the means to dump it.
Within the last few months since my statement, I have learned many things about GAW. Investigations by the SEC (substantiated) along with potential investigations by FinCen, the IRS, the DHS, and others. I want to reiterate one of my statements made months ago, which stated that I foresaw something like this akin to leading up to a massive failure beyond cryptos, which now bleed into standard news sites and once again giving cryptos a black eye. The level of at the best mismanagement and at its worse potential scamming and illegal activities has reached beyond which I can once again sit back and stay idle.
The amount of promises have been daunting at best. A $20 pay floor (at the time of this writing is a magnitude less at ~$.20), the always profitable miners, acceptance with major retailers such as Walmart and Target, Paybase, and a slew of other items. Development beyond initial release was practically nonexistent for the core wallet, forcing customers to utilize online means to store coins which were susceptible to hacks and withdraw freezes.
What GAW and Josh Garza have done above amounts to potential mismanagement. But this is not the end of transgressions. For anyone following the Bitcointalk thread which is over 1600 pages now, within the last few days more details of potentially illegal actions have been exposed. These include securities fraud, money laundering, extortion, grand theft, insider trading, retaliation against whistleblowers, wire fraud, charity fraud, and I’m sure there is more I missed. This is not trolling or FUD at all, and I caution anyone calling this as such. These are serious illegal activities and should not be taken lightly.
I know that writing this exposes me to trolls from both sides of the isle, but at this point this is well beyond me. The fallout from all of this will be damaging to the entire crypto eco system and set back efforts from thousands of collective volunteers across all the communities that work tirelessly to promote cryptos in order to gain mass adoption. What Mr Garza has done was give a metaphorical middle finger to everyone in cryptos and has earned him a place alongside Mark Karpeles and Ryan Kennedy in my eyes.
What can be done to put an end to all of this? The answer is that the Paycoin community needs to put their foot down and take their coin back. I understand that the Paycoin foundation has been attempting to bring more transparency to their actions and I applaud them for their recent efforts. On the other hand at this point in time I am unaware of who had knowledge of what was going on at what point in time, so I am respectfully careful with them. Regardless, there has to be a developer within the Paycoin community that is able to make the necessary changes required in order to move past this soiled event in our history. If this is the Paycoin foundation to do this, and they do it correctly, so be it.
In order for the communities to heal from this entire debacle, the code must be forked. In my personal opinion, all prime controllers need to be removed and the coins contained within them need to be sent to a burning address. In addition, any serious bug fixes must be resolved in order for community members who own Paycoin can have a reliable offline means of storage instead of relying on an exchange to store coins (at the time of this writing I believe a wallet update was done, but I am unsure if the major bugs were fixed). Also, the community could be more involved in the direction of the coin. Demand 100% transparency from the leaders in your community, and ensure that they have substance to back up the claims they make, regardless of the leader who may be providing information.
There are more suggestions to be added here, but these items are the major one that needs to be resolved (and the most difficult). In order for the community to continue being a Paycoin community, they need to remove GAW from the picture.
I also wanted to add in my intentions here. What people fail to understand is that while the circumstances under which Paycoin was created along with GAW are trash, the community isn’t. They are already a part of the crypto eco-system whether people like it or not. In order for all of us who really wish to see cryptos grow, we should be helping those in these types of situations. That is my intentions behind this.
Lastly, I would like to end with this, a personal message to Josh Garza. On my short time here on earth I have met many people with sociopathic traits, and you fit the bill. I really have nothing else to say beyond this, and the way you have used people like toilet paper is deplorable. And just as a FYI I’m still up for the live debate you decided to run away from.
The above statement references perhaps the longest cryptocurrency investigation ever conducted, conducted by a group of people now apparently dedicated to exposing truth about Josh Garza. Here is a link to it. Within it the reader may find hundreds of pages of documentation confirming the claims made above.