January 31, 2018
We have some explaining to do.
On January 29th, two core Hush devs had a personal conflict that resulted in Hush's servers being taken offline. This action impacted the web wallet, our main explorer, and all of the BTCH code and research. It also created a huge level of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt within the Hush community. We'd like to lay out our plans as to how Hush will be moving forward to try and alleviate some of that unease.
As you might expect from this kind of event, the Hush Core Team has been shaken up. While we are not fond of "airing dirty laundry" so to speak (nor do we believe personal drama is interesting enough to discuss, usually) we do hold Radical Transparency as a Hush value. Therefore we wish to let the community know that the core Hush Team is now Duke Leto (Back End Dev), and Tamsin Thorn (Technical Writer). We would like to specify that no one was asked to leave the project. All team members who have decided to move on to other projects have done so on their own accord. The remaining Hush team would also like to move forward with restructuring and rebuilding. We are seeking new core members to round out our skill sets and create redundancy within the team.
We believe that the silver lining in this upheaval is the immediate and strong response by the community itself to step up. Almost immediately, a new
Discord server was launched and community members started volunteering skills, donations, time, damage control, and infrastructure resources. Most excitedly, we now have a dedicated marketing team and will be focusing efforts on listing HUSH and BTCH on exchanges in upcoming days.
As far as projects go, we are concentrating on migration and recovering from recent events. HushNG is nearly complete, but launch will be delayed until the core team has enough bandwidth to finish it. Know that it is a priority for the team.
Let's talk about the BTCH merged airdrop.
The good news is that no changes will be made to the snapshot date. It remains on 1 Feb, noon UTC. We still get a
lot of questions about how to receive the airdrop. We ask that you direct these questions to our #support channel in Discord so that community members can assist. The core team will be very hard pressed to answer Support questions for a while (although we are in the process of hiring a dedicated Support person.) Duke, in particular is primarily offline working on the BTCH code with jl777. Remember that this kind of merged airdrop has NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE and the devs need to concentrate. Additionally, the server that carries BTCH data and code now needs to be recreated by hand. This is an involved process, as you can imagine.
Claiming your airdrop is also unchanged. As outlined on btchush.org, you should be able to claim your BTCH sometime in Feb. We are working hard to make sure that doesn't get pushed back too far. Having to recreate the server has thrown a wrench in that timeline. But rest assured, it will still happen. For now, Hold your HUSH until the snapshot and you'll be able to claim BTCH in the future.
From
btchush.org:
Will everything be done and launch at the above time?
No, the full network is expected to launch some time in February, since there needs to be time to decide on a final value for each taddr, and then make many many transactions on the BTCH chain to fill the appropriate taddrs with value on the BTCH chain.
What can you do to help?
We can always use more people in Discord fielding Support questions. If you are interested in getting involved with interactions with exchanges and pools let us know. And if you are a developer we definitely want to hear from you. Send us your resume and/or github info. Lastly, this incident has outlined a specific need to crowd-source new explorers. There should be multiple explorers, not just one. And those should be controlled by independent entities, not just the creators of Hush. It is in the everyone's interest to be able to independently verify transactions. If you create an explorer, please do let us know.
The party responsible for bringing down the servers did reinstate them temporarily to assist with transition. They have given us until tomorrow to migrate. All of our focus will be on this task today since this impacts the web wallet and the explorer. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Edit: TheTrunk is no longer with the team.
