I guess that’s a valid response?

If you’re here from part one, you’ll be delighted to know that Aphelion responded with pure professionalism that you’d expect from a group trying to collect around 30 million dollars.

To start, I’d like to make this very, very clear.

I HOPE I’M WRONG.

I can’t make that clear enough. I hope Aphelion is real, they achieve their goals, and the pre-sale investors get to ram my house with a space yacht. In the end, I’m just some guy with a computer. If you decide that I’m an idiot and/or wrong, I wholeheartedly support your choice to invest in Aphelion.

Without further delay, I give you their response:

This is an official Aphelion response to a recent categorically false post claiming that we are a scam. We typically don’t comment on fake news especially claims this absurd, but at the request of our supporters we have decided to make an exception just this once to set the record straight.

Sounds good to me so far!

Note: The following questions and answers are the only proposed basis for the scam claim and lack any critical thinking or facts. Please allow us to comment once again and put this to rest once and for all so we can get back to building the technology the true foundation of what any judgement should rest.

Yeowch! Here’s where you lose me. If it lacked any critical thinking or facts, I wouldn’t have gotten any upvotes and members of the Neo community would have told me to fuck right off.

Below is their response to my questions. Above the question is a short summary of my initial question, their response, and my last response in the following format:

(Question summary)

Aphelion’s answer

My response

___________________________________________________________________

Let’s begin:

( Regarding the timing of the ICO being a day before the planned 2X fork)

Question #1 — Completely irrelevant as the fork is cancelled, but even had our ICO start shared a date with the fork that is ZERO evidence of a scam or dump. Silly comparison.

Fair enough. I’ll give them that. This ISN’T evidence of a scam. However, to make my concerns clear: After the bitcoin Cash fork, Neo jumped almost 700% in two weeks. Considering that Aphelion ICO will have a day one 50% bonus makes me wary of this specific timing. Aphelion could have moved it two weeks in either direction and this wouldn’t have been a concern.

(Regarding a 13 person team with 11 of them being listed as ‘advisors’)

Question #2 — We’ve structured our organization the way we see fit at this time and will adjust as needed to meet the needs of the project. Again, this fails to provide any evidence to the claims. Irrelevant.

Asking about the organizational structure when your founders and only two official team members appear to have zero history of working with blockchains or even a interest in the field up until now isn’t irrelevant.

(Regarding 30 million dollar ICO funding goal)

Question #3 — Our target raise is what we determined would put us in the best position to meet our goals for our revolutionary project. Again, fails to provide any evidence of scam. Irrelevant.

This answer is what pushed me over the edge to making this post and publishing it on medium. Let me get this 100% straight: You sat down and determined an overall budget that requires you to have between Two million dollars and Thirty million dollars?

Is your accountant deranged? Do you have an accountant? Do you realize how insanely shady that sounds? If I came at type of organization that required a budget process and told them my budget requires between two million and thirty million dollars, I’d be laughed out of the building. What is wrong with you?

(When asking who on their team had blockchain experience.)

Question #4 Regarding who on our team has blockchain experience, we have several very promising blockchain developers working under one of those listed. And yet again this provides zero facts or evidence to support a scam claim. Irrelevant.

Cool. Who? I’m not asking for their life history here, but the one person who you offered up as having ‘extensive experience’ appears to have none. Not his personal Facebook page,his company page (allcode), or his linkedin give any sort of indication that he knows anything about this technology prior to a couple months ago.

(When asked about their plans on how they’ll liquidate the Neo earned from the ICO.)

Question #5 — Irrelevant

You’re asking for about 1.2 million Neo. Easily more than enough to manipulate the market or simply crash it by dumping it. This isn’t irrelevant.

They then say this:

You’ll notice there is a growing theme of irrelevance here and a total lack of ANY evidence of the claim. Mostly is an opinion piece that lacks any critical thinking at this point. Let’s continue…

I do notice a growing theme here: You saying “IRRELEVANT” to my questions doesn’t make it true. It just means you want them to be irrelevant. That’s not how this works.

(Regarding a question about them being based in St. Kitts and Nevis, a tropical island country in the Bahamas.)

Question #6 — This claim, like the others, has a total lack of fact checking. We’ve NEVER claimed to be incorporated in Barcelona. Our founder, Ian Holtz happens to live in Barcelona but Aphelion has always been incorporated in Nevis for reasons outlined in our FAQs. Once again totally irrelevant to the scam claim.

Again, I have to grant them this one: I didn’t archive the aphelion site when it said Catalonia, so I’m forced to allow the claim to stand. That still doesn’t answer the basic question of Why would you list yourself as being incorporated in a tiny island with a population of less than 50,000, shitty internet connections, and has a huge problem with overseas money laundering? Because it’s “Light on regulations” is a terrible way to convince the internet to give you money.

( They claim to have researched the concept and acquired legal council in the first quarter of 2017. I asked for evidence of this via private email if they were willing.)

Question #7 Totally bizarre request here and again completely irrelevant. A timestamp of the concept or a contract with legal is again ZERO evidence supporting the claims and we won’t participate.

I’ll make it clear: I’m offering 75 neo to your ICO now if you’re willing to show this via private email. The fact of the matter is that the crypto market cap has jumped from around 30 billion dollars to over 200 billion dollars between March 31st and now. Something that grows that fast will gain attention of a lot of people, both good and bad. If you’re able to produce proof that you were interested in the field prior to this insane amount of growth, that would go a long way in laying any concerns to rest that you’re not swinging in for the quick cash.

(I asked essentially why it took so long for them to contact CoZ, the volunteer organization for Neo. It took a while for them to start asking basic questions in Slack about how to run an ICO on Neo.)

Question #8 — We still don’t understand this question. We can confirm that our devs have been very active on Slack with CoZ (its how we built the ICO code) and Aphelion has had dialogue with NEO council but we aren’t using those as marketing tools. We are an independent project.

Fair enough. I won’t argue this then.

(About if they don’t reach at least 28 million dollars if they would be refunding the Neo to their investors.)

Question #9 — We’ve already answered this but yet again totally baseless for a scam claim. Edit: Minimum funding goal has been reached.

At no point could I find any sort of communication that said what your minimum funding was. If it was in the Aphelion whitepaper or on the website, I wouldn’t have asked. It’s very fortunate and not at all fishy that that you managed to reach your minimum funding goals right after I asked this question though.

As you can see, there is zero substance, evidence or facts supporting the scam claim.

Clearly.

Here is the bottom line (and our final response to such outlandish garbage): We respect that people are entitled to their opinions, after all, ICOs are voluntary and we recommend anybody participating to complete their own due diligence before contributing to any project, but when we are blatantly attacked and called a scam with absolutely ZERO evidence to support that claim is when a line has been crossed.

I’ll let this stand on it’s own. If you’ve read this far, you’ll understand my concerns.

These baseless claims are part of a bigger problem facing the internet today and we encourage not only those following Aphelion but everyone for that matter to take a stand and put some critical thinking behind any claims. The world will become a better place.

Nice Oscar acceptance speech. You know what else is a big problem facing the internet? Scams, thieves, and people who don’t know what they’re doing making outlandish claims that they simply don’t have the ability or experience to achieve.

We encourage the community to join us on Telegram, read our whitepaper (look at the algorithm code there — a small piece to the puzzle behind the scenes) before believing fake news. We promise to stay true to our mission and vision and provide as much transparency as possible to our ground-breaking project. The exciting part is that the movement is growing and the supporters vastly out way the critics and that confirms we are on the right path. In closing, we hope the community will continue to judge the project Aphelion on its technology and not baseless, fact less critics.

To be fair: They DID add some pseudo code to their website. It doesn’t mean anything, but it does look fancy.

If you’re still reading, I’ll be real here: I’m just some faceless person behind the computer. I consider myself to be below average intelligence and my past trades would reflect that. I’ve been wrong a lot of times before, and I sincerely hope this is one of them. That’s why I’m putting my money where my mouth is. I will personally put 75 Neo into their ICO on the last day of their crowd fund (so no bonus for me) if they are willing to forward me any sort of email from them that gives the impression they were interested in building Aphelion before March 31st 2017, before the crypto market blew up.

Additionally, I’ve done the following: As listed on this reddit post here, if Aphelion has build a working decentralized exchange as set out in their whitepaper one year from that post, I’ll liquidate 25 Neo regardless of the price and donate it to Child’s Play charity. Additionally, I’ll be giving 1 Neo to whomever posted a !Remind me first on that thread to keep me honest.

Something to keep in mind: Aphelion has failed nearly every test guideline set out by CoZ

Lastly, to lay it all out, investing in Aphelion requires you to believe 100% of the following, or it’s money in the toilet.

It’s not a scam

They won’t crash the market by dumping their Neo

They won’t screw up the voting system as lined out in the Neo whitepaper by having over 1% of the entire voting system to themselves.

They have competent team members

That they can achieve the goals that their whitepaper is laying out

The Aph token will actually be useful in their network

No one else will do it better or faster

And people will actually want to use this exchange.

Caveat emptor