A (not so) Brief Laugh at the Waltonchain “Whitepaper 2.0”.
Waltonchain has never failed to deliver us the laughs and memes we crave after we lost interest in laughing at EOS, Bitconnect and Verge. Just recently, they released their “whitepaper 2.0”. Apparently their first whitepaper wasn’t good enough (well, if you look back and read it, you’ll see it actually wasn’t good at all).
If you want the full whitepaper to read for yourself, click below. It’s worth it, trust me. I almost thought it was a joke pulled by 4chan’ers at first, but the days went on and no one from WTC removed it, so clearly this joke was published on purpose.
https://waltonchain.org/templets/default/doc/Waltonchain-whitepaper_EN_20180525.pdf
Let’s dive in then…
Okay, first off, lazy formatting is not a major issue, but it would have taken like two seconds to fit the table of contents on one page. Again, no biggie, not like anyone would ever print this into a book. Now to the real “content”.
Introduction full of fluff… that’s actually normal for 99% of whitepapers out there so you can’t say it’s just WaltonChain doing it at least.
The following pages pretty much detail the current issues that the Internet of Things faces… and then just moves on without detailing, in any way whatsoever, how they intend to solve this issues, other than “we’ll throw blockchain at it”. Given this is still the beginning I will give them the benefit of the doubt that the later pages have more content.
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This goes on for a bit but I can sum up the next few pages for you: Blockchain is beneficial to the IoT. No shit, WaltonChain team… we knew that already.
Moving on…
This next page is titled “The Vision of Waltonchain”… but again, it’s just another few pages on “Why blockchain is good”, and nothing about their own project.
You just have to love their choice in visual representation too. Fig. 1.4 is fucking 10/10. Almost as top-notch as Fig. 1.5: “Vision of Waltonchain” (about as vague as this entire whitepaper so far).
They finally start talking about their own upcoming blockchain, but only about the cross-chain ecosystem… but there’s no details or math to explain how they work. That’s okay though, I guess they save the math for later? (Narrator: “But they didn’t.”)
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On to 2: Technological Superiority (lol)
Hold up, did they just lie in their whitepaper?
THEY DID! How did they expect that to go unnoticed? They don’t have their own mainnet. They failed to launch one back in October of 2017, then again in January 2018, then again in May, and now they’re just going to pretend their testnet is the mainnet? They tried this exact tactic in May after their third missed mainnet deadline and it blew up royally in their faces… why try again? Do they really think their “investors” are that stupid? They are for the most part, but still. I really don’t know how Waltonchain plans to come back from this, you can’t lie in your whitepaper. No one is going to trust you, and in this team’s specific case, no one trusts them already. Not even their community, as seen by going into any of their social hubs (constantly there are people complaining or asking questions and getting banned).
Not 100% sure that you can redefine something that was never defined in the first place.
I love this figure. “The Three Core Technology Advantages of Waltonchain… are also things that are inherent to pretty much any other blockchain these days, but just forget about that and buy our shitcoin.”
News flash Waltonchain: The two leaders in DLT+IoT, IOTA and VeChain, are already designing and producing hardware to use with their software (IOTA however is Ternary, but still). If the top two are producing hardware, how can you say “the existing applications lack hardware support”?. At this time, it’s YOU that lacks hardware support… and software support for that matter (yeah, I was there to witness each and every delayed mainnet launch).
Well, I would have expected more on their coveted RFID chips they hype to the end of the world and back… than just one page consisting of very little detail. Could it be that these chips they’ve never shown or proved in any way… don’t exist?
“We use Proof of Work, and Proof of Stake. Both at once. Totally resistant to 51% attacks for sure. What, Math to back our claims up? No, don’t worry about that.”
Seriously go read any other whitepaper, and go look at their consensus protocol. Notice all the math that explains how the fuck it works. Then notice the complete lack of math IN THIS ENTIRE WHITEPAPER… This is cryptography, Waltonchain. If there’s no Math, there’s no anything.
Some asked them about the complete lack of detail/math/explanations. Waltonchain responded (Not some fake account, @Waltonchain_EN is the official english WTC twitter, even says so in their subreddit sidebar, which links to said Twitter account).
So there you have it, folks. Waltonchain thinks it’s community is brain-dead. I don’t know if Waltonchain’s twttter guys are just morons or what, but this is just one of countless PR-related mishaps for these clowns. Imagine if Satoshi just left out all those “illogical equations and algo”… there wouldn’t ever have been Bitcoin in the first place then… Or Vitalik & Co. with Ethereum. Again. Cryptography. No math = NOTHING BUT TALK.
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More “we will do this, that, and this other thing as well” without ANY explanation, other than “refer to this figure” [queue tiny bullshit figure you need to zoom heavily in to, that doesn’t really give any more insight than the vague buzzwords prior to it].
We designed and built a number of smart contract libraries where smart contracts can be quickly queried, invoked, inherited and reused via the event function index.
Cool… are there plans to make that source code public any time soon or…? The IoT doesn’t need a centralized testnet with no public code…
Hold up, is that another lie?
Yep. Centralized testnet does not equal a public chain. That’s 2 lies now?
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Okay, get ready for this next part. Are you ready to see a super-detailed diagram of beloved, long-praised Waltonchain RFID chips? Here you go!:
I’m not even joking that’s the figure they went with.
This, to me, was by far the funniest part of the whitepaper.
On to their Food and Garment traceability details!
Well… “details”.
I like how their whitepaper contains even less info about these projects than their Medium posts did… everyone was saying “whitepaper will reveal it all” back then… lol
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This is a list of projects that Waltonchain is “consulting”.
However, it appears they just snuck these names in the whitepaper without revealing them beforehand. Even worse, the companies are either Waltonchain’s own projects, companies that don’t exist, or companies that have no ties to Waltonchain (you can contact them for yourself).
Their community appears to be questioning this already:
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“Waltonchain built, deployed and launched it’s parent chain and WTC client applications in 2018.”
Hah… 3 more months and this will technically be lie #3 in this whitepaper. Still just a testnet.
I’m confused, 2018 is almost over, and you still don’t have the blockchain you actually need to do what you say you’re trying to do…
Just like you were “about to release” it this exact time last year? Don’t you need token swap first for these chains to be stable? And since that’s not until 2019 at the least… you’re not “about” to do anything.
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Hey, there’s another lie. Sure, it’s a “non-profit” organization on paper… but who do you think is mining all those testnet coins?
No fucking wonder WTC is doing a token swap where they honour the mined testnet coins as IOU’s for ERC20 WTC… They’re mining well over 2/3rds of them… They say that large blue wedge is “many small miners”. Anyone with a brain knows it’s much more profitable to mine ETH/XMR, so they don’t have that many miners.
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That’s it. The whitepaper’s over. All that’s left is their photoshopped team members and some references (that don’t actually reference anything specific).
Actually… wait…
Old Whitepaper photo — 2017
New Whitepaper photo — 2018
They couldn’t even be bothered to take new photos a year later? That is just bad photoshop. Here’s another pair:
Also, the references in this whitepaper are the EXACT same from the old one… yet there is a vast amount of different content…
Hopefully you got a nice chuckle (or many) out of that whitepaper. As someone who loved the Bitconnect memes, and spent some free time trolling Verge holders during their 15 minutes of “fame”, I find Waltonchain very funny, especially during these sideways times in the market.
Edit: So I just noticed the date on the whitepaper.
They released it in September. This PoS took a third of the year to make.
