Hey there - I'm currently the lead of the dev team for ChanCoin - the much-maligned and often-doxxed Gossamer Socks. Since the project began in August, I've spent most of my time primarily as a community manager and project coordinator - although I'd initially hoped to fill the role of platform API developer and infrastructure engineer.
I wanted to take the time to make a post to outline 1) the project's current status, 2) The actual history of the coin, in broad strokes 3) my current priorities and those for the immediate future. Not in that order, necessarily.
A Brief History of ChanCoin and the ForkageddonChanCoin was started by a pseudonymous channer from Australia who went by the name CHANCOIN. He posted an ANN thread and a thread on 4chan's /biz/ which garnered some hype - quickly the discord linked to from the post was full of users, people were downloading the wallet and CPU mining. It took some time before it was determined that the coin had a 30% pre-mine - 9 million out of a total 30 million coins. The founder claimed this would go towards development, and did indeed hand out coins liberally to the first few people to 'join the dev team'. The details of this period will be covered more deeply in a post-mortem on the Forkageddon which will be written as times allows and will include (hopefully) forensic analysis of the old and new blockchains. I should also mention that at this time, the founder 'accidentally' sent 500,000 coins to a random person. This person became known as 'the stranger' over time.
Several qualified developers joined the team - most were given some number of coins after joining. Airdrops occurred daily in the discord and a functional userscript allowed users to tip one another for posts on 4chan. The founder worked quickly to get us onto multiple exchanges, however he was generally unavailable to discuss anything with the development team.
Fast forward about a month. Due to community feedback, 1/3 of the pre-mine (3 million coins) have been verifiably burned. The dev team and community agree that an additional 3 million should be burned and that the remaining coins be kept in a multi-sig and used for community projects and developer remuneration. At this point, devs became suspicious, as the founder (who by now was going by the name 'Andy') claimed to have only 1.2 million coins. The devs knew this to be untrue based on the number of pre-mine coins which had been distributed to them.
At about the same time, prominent community members began to notice unusual activity on the blockchain - someone was moving large amounts of coins from wallet to wallet, seemingly in an attempt to manually tumble them. When Andy was asked about this by one community member, he said he was 'testing' wallet upgrades. But who tests wallet upgrades by sending 1.2 million coins
on the main net from one wallet to three others in chuns of 400k each?
The developers met with the aforementioned community members and decided unanimously to fork the coin, freezing Andy's funds so that he could not dump them, wiping out the value of countless people's portfolios.
We worked for several days to update the wallet, adding in a list of unspent transaction outputs which we knew to be Andy's. We modified the wallet so that these coins were 'frozen' and would not be valid for use in transactions. We then emailed the exchanges with background on the situation, asking them to immediately halt trading and to update their wallets.
It took exchanges time on the order of weeks to cease trading. During this time, Andy was able to apply massive hashing power to the old chain to catch up to the new chain and surpass it - and since the exchanges were still running the old wallet, he could then dump as many funds as he liked into exchange wallets, where there was nothing anyone could do to prevent him from dumping them. And dump them he did.
Subsequent to this he did reach out and give us control over a few accounts holding a little more than 1.2 million coins. Thanks to this, we have been able to remunerate the losses suffered by his double-spending of coins. Cryptopia's remuneration is complete, and we are currently working with Nova Exchange to ensure that all user coins are accounted for.
Current StatusAs I mentioned, we are still working with nova to resume trading and remunerate them for coins lost. Beyond this, a couple of
my next priorities for this project include:
- Adding a dedicated testnet to the chancoin.org domain and (later on) providing a Docker container which can be used to develop against the testnet
- Adding sections to our website for community procedures and standards, as well as a section for contributors on getting started
- The aforementioned post-mortem
Recently we've had some really cool projects come to light - a dubs bot for threads on 4chan's /biz/ board, a tipping bot for use in our discord and a packaged chrome extension which allows users to tip using CHAN on 4chan. This extension is compatible with 4ChanX. I'll let the creators of those projects describe them more fully here and in other relevant documentation.
Please let us know if there are questions - a lot of insane nonsensical FUD has been spread about this project, and I myself have been harassed in meatspace a great deal. I will close with a message to the troglodytes who've been maligning me of late, courtesy of good old Rudyard Kipling...
If you can keep your head when all about you;
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too.
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
...
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Translation for the haters - Bite me
Thanks,
Gossamer Socks
