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?
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.
"...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.
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.
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.
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