Comment by oskarpearson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oskarpearson | Hacker News Reader

In the spirit of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof", has anyone verified this?

Problems:

1) No mention on the Royal Mint website that I can see. News releases seem to normally be on http://www.mint.ca/store/mint/about-the-mint/news-releases-7...

2) Whois should probably point to Royal Mint, not this person's house, and not to a hotmail address.

Administrative Contact: Zaykova, Vessela vessyz@hotmail.com

Address: 131 Camelia Ave, Ottawa, Ontario, K1K 2X5 This is a suburb. Streetview: http://bit.ly/HMFiMB

3) Domain is registered through GoDaddy, which IMHO is a bad sign... like having a hotmail address ;)

4) Site T&C say the site is operated by ChallengePost.

ChallengePost has been listed on techcrunch: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/challengepost

ChallengePost.com has their domain registered through GoDaddy though, so perhaps I'm wrong about that signal :)

5) No mention on the ChallengePost blog at http://blog.challengepost.com/

6) Vessela Zaykova does apparently work for the Royal mint though, according to http://ca.linkedin.com/in/vessela

So - very interesting news, an inadvertent early leak, or very elaborate hoax?

Oskar

I am CEO of ChallengePost and this challenge is real: http://mintchipchallenge.com http://challengepost.com/discover

Note how excited we are that the winners receive gold bars. -Brandon

Why is there no public announcement of this? Why does the actual Canadian Mint website have no links or mentions of this project? Why are there goats and wheat on your webpage? What is this for, some digitally enabled 19th century version of Canada? What kind of goofy hoax is this?

Back in the day, people used goats for currency. Then it became wheat, then coins, then... you get the picture.

The Mint will be issuing a press release momentarily.

The ancient Irish used slave girls

http://books.google.com/books?id=GYhajCQU8XIC&lpg=PT345&...

Why is there no public announcement of this? Why does the actual Canadian Mint website have no links or mentions of this project?

Government bodies move slow as all hell. Even when a specific department of the Mint authorises something, it'll have to pass through about six other departments before a blog post is signed off.

(the goats thing is a timeline of currency, seems relatively self-explanatory to me)

I am just as skeptical as you and am waiting for an official press release. This was posted on the 15th of March and claims there will be an official announcement on the 17th of April.

http://www.techvibes.com/blog/royal-canadian-mint-developing...

FWIW, we emailed an @mint.ca address asking if it is legitimate, and they confirmed.

Late April Fools' joke? Government projects never finish on time.

http://www.techvibes.com/blog/royal-canadian-mint-developing...

"...will be formally unveiled on April 17 by Chief Financial Officer Marc Brulé in a keynote at The Canadian Institute's Forum on Canadian Payment Innovations.

The digital payments space has been booming recently. Canadian-born companies like PayFirma and NetSecure are already active in the mobile payments industry, not to mention American counterparts such as Square, as well as some failed ideas such as the Bitcoin."

Doesn't necessarily mean it is real but it does seem to be.

Failed ideas?

I guess 1 BTC to ~$4.5 CAD [1] is considered a failure to some. Based on the average volume of 10K BTC a week, that's $45,000 CAD exchanging hands a week. Not mind blowing, but certainly not a failure, I would say.

[1] Average price from https://www.cavirtex.com/home

10K a week? Not by a long shot. Check out http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60zm1g10zm2g25zxz... - Average looks more like 50K/day, and that's just one exchange (the biggest one). If you look at the chart over the longer term, you can see the volumes steadily rising.

I did the same, prior to reading the comments. These struck me as odd as well. I've submitted a request for information on mint.ca

Any chance this was done by some "intrapreneurs" from the Mint going outside the normal channels to test the waters?

It could also be a ploy by Square or Payfirma for recruiting employees among the contest applicants.

mintchip.ca is registered by the Royal Canadian Mint Corp.

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