At first, we thought Pomegranate was cool for winning the commemorative coin, but following Pomegranate's meteroic growth, @dutch and I noticed various peculiarities.
A lot of us wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt, especially since each individual point this article made could have plausible explanations, but altogether, they don't add up.
The best recourse would be to be open and transparent about how Pomegranate works. I think we'll all rest easy if we can trust Charity Engine and Pomegranate.
- What is an example of an ad that leads to a Charity Engine 7.0.80 download? Despite a 99% acquisition through ads, we're having trouble finding any.
- Charity Engine 7.0.80 was reportedly released on 24 June 2014 with no updates since. Why did it take so long to announce an upcoming update just today?
- And why hasn't there been an update the last 3½ years since the severe vulnerability CVE-2013-2298, which affects Charity Engine 7.0.80?
- Another independent investigation found that Charity Engine is bundled with other programs and may be installed without the users noticing. Can you walk us through the installation flow of a Charity Engine software bundle?
- Why is it called Pomegranate?
- Why did you just rename the second Pomegranate pool from "pomegranate2" to "PSVR-1075"? This name change reduces transparency and suggests that you may be trying to hide the second pool.
- We expect to see a lot of active users if there are over 460,000 hosts in 2016, but the Charity Engine forum is almost dead. Where is the community talking about Charity Engine?
- Why aren't people talking about Charity Engine? There is hardly a peep about Charity Engine on social media.
- When users like myself or this guy try to do work for Charity Engine 7.0.76 (the public version), we get what appears to be a dummy task taking up "0.0001 CPU" and using very little CPU. Why can't we voluntarily contribute to Charity Engine through the client?
- If your users are knowingly running Charity Engine, why did Pomegranate participate in yoyo@home, a project that requires strong authenticators? This is bad security practice at best and unaware users at worst.
- PrimeGrid (address S6RimEgrEar84vQpsmVAVFbGkxfJ4i2sec) provided funds to get Pomegranate started. What is PrimeGrid's role in Pomegranate?
- PrimeGrid consequently was the project with the least return from Pomegranate despite providing the initial wallet funds. This suggests that PrimeGrid was not incentivizing Pomegranate to crunch for them. Why is Pomegranate not contributing compute power to PrimeGrid?
- Can you provide your earnings reports and charity donations so that we can verify your 33-33-33 income distribution claim?
If and only if we resolve these questions and confirm that your user base is legitimate, we'll go out of our way to exonerate Charity Engine.
And also, what was the deal with exclusively obsolete hardware as VGTU hosts?
Edit: And out of interest: Why no Primegrid?