I was there in the Discord channel from very early on, so I want to explain the story from MY perspective.
I am not saying everything was bad from the start, and I also do not want to blame him for every single thing. At the beginning, the project actually looked pretty good to me.
I found the GitHub repository while I was looking for new coins where I could contribute very early and maybe get a leading position. Yes, that is selfish, but let’s be honest, everyone would love to be at the beginning of Bitcoin in 2009. That was exactly the kind of feeling BlockZero was promising.
There was a testnet, it worked, the mainnet launched at the promised time, and I was prepared. I had tested mining on testnet, I caught the mainnet start, and technically the repo and landing page were public. So at least from that side, it was not completely hidden. People had a chance to find it if they were looking.
My early involvementIn the beginning, everything was friendly.
I joined the Discord, talked a bit, contributed some ideas and started working on a pool. There was no public pool at that time. He told me he was working on his own pool too, which is totally fine.
I rented a VPS, hosted a public node and later bought the .cc domain. The creator had the .org domain.
I also asked him about the landing page and if I could host it. His answer was basically that it is open-source and everybody can do whatever he wants with it.
There were also discussions about a Bitcointalk announcement because that would bring more people in. He allowed me to do it. I prepared things, proposed independent nodes, DNS seeders, multiple contributors, more transparency and more decentralization away from one person.
I also proposed creating a Telegram community. He allowed that too, but luckily I never had the time to actually do it.
The poolYes, I promoted my pool a bit. I am not going to pretend I did not.
Was it selfish? Sure, in some way. I wanted the pool to grow, and I wanted to be early. But again, that was the whole point of the coin. It was marketed with this “be early like Bitcoin 2009” feeling.
At that time there was no other pool. I answered people’s questions in Discord, helped with mining issues and fixed bugs on the pool.
There was one case where a miner did not receive around 18 BLOZ because of a pool bug. I sent him 25 BLOZ as compensation and as a sorry, then fixed the bug quickly. So I was not there to scam people or steal from miners.
The first real red flag, SegWit and bech32The first direct contact with the dev happened because of the SegWit problem.
We were all using bech32 addresses because that was what the guides recommended. But nobody had really tested normal transactions before, only mining.
When I wanted to send the missing coins to the miner, I noticed that it did not work. The Bitcoin fork still had the original Bitcoin SegWit activation height in the code, around block 481824. So in practice, the coins on bech32 addresses were not normally spendable with SegWit rules until that height.
This was a huge issue.
I contacted him and explained the problem. The chain was still very young, somewhere around block 400, so I wanted to solve it before the network got bigger.
At first I tried setting SegWitHeight to 0 because I thought that would be the cleanest solution. But that was wrong, because it invalidated the existing chain. The existing blocks were mined without the required SegWit data, so making SegWit active from block 0 made those old blocks invalid.
I noticed that quickly and then proposed a future activation instead. My suggestion was block 500.
That would have kept the existing chain valid and still given everyone a short window to update before SegWit became active. It was not some magic no-risk solution, because consensus changes always need coordination, but it would have been much cleaner than activating it retroactively or almost immediately.
When I started testing, he told me very clearly not to do anything myself because my pool had a lot of hashpower and I could fork the coin. That was fair in principle, and exactly why I contacted him instead of just pushing my own fix. But the tone was already a bit panic and angry.
Still, I stopped and let him work on it.
Then I saw commits. First it looked like he set activation to 0, which would have broken the whole existing chain. Then he changed it again, I believe to around block 413. He mined the activating block himself, but there was no proper announcement to everyone.
No clear “guys, there is a critical consensus issue, please update before block X”.
No proper coordination.
No public explanation of what happened and why everyone had to update.
He just later asked if everyone was on the latest rc9 version or something like that.
That is not how you handle a consensus-related issue, especially if you want people to trust the chain.
The bridge and wrapped coinAfter that, the bridge and wrapped coin topic came up.
This was also not transparent enough in my opinion. We discussed whether it should be added to the Bitcointalk ANN, but I decided not to include it yet because I wanted him to work it out properly first.
At that point I was still trying to help. I wanted to mirror things, keep the project alive and make sure it does not depend only on one person.
Kind of funny, because later it became exactly that problem.
Where things started to changeSome time before the escalation, he publicly wrote in Discord something like:
“Be aware of risk of other websites, they have no affiliation with bloz.org, they can contain malware etc.”I was basically the only one with such websites at that time.
I had talked with him, contributed, hosted a node, worked on a pool, discussed the ANN and asked for permission before doing things. And suddenly there was a public warning that made me look like some scammer.
Then he wrote me privately, in summary:
“I am worried about confusion with the landing page, so I will take the website away from open-source, please change your design.”Okay, fine. I did not like it, but I could understand the concern about confusion.
Around that time I had also posted some updates about the pool. Bug fixes, improvements, payout fixes and stuff like that. I posted some of it in the mining thread and also some things in general.
So yes, I did mention the pool before. I am not going to pretend I never did. But it was not like I was spamming the Discord all day.
The important part is the timeline and the context.
There were pool-related posts in different threads before he ever warned me. One of them was in general, one was in the mining thread. Those were before the warning.
After that, he messaged me because of a pool post in general and told me to stop promoting my pool.
I said okay, no problem, I will not do it anymore.
After that warning, someone asked in the mining thread about the patched xmrig and solo mining. I answered that for solo mining you do not need xmrig, because there is a command through the full node. I told him he can look it up on GitHub and on the landing, and that the links are already in Discord.
There was no pool link in that answer.
I did not tell him to use my pool.
I did not even mention my pool in that reply.
It was just a normal answer to a mining question.
Then he sent me another screenshot from the mining thread and treated it like a last warning.
That is the part I could not understand.
Yes, there was an older pool-related message visible above in that screenshot. But that message was from before his warning.
My actual message after the warning was only about solo mining and full-node mining. No pool promotion, no pool link, nothing like that.
So either he meant my latest answer, which was clearly not pool promotion, or he meant the older pool message visible above, which makes no sense because it was before he warned me.
That is why the “multiple advertisement warnings” thing felt dishonest to me.
Warn me once, fine. Tell me you do not want pool promotion anymore, fine. I can accept that.
But do not warn me, I say okay, then answer a normal mining question without even mentioning my pool, and still treat it like a “last warning”.
The disclaimers got worseAfter that I saw more disclaimers about other domains and no affiliation with the BLOZ team or project.
In one message he did not even write it generally, he specifically mentioned the .cc TLD. That was obviously my domain.
As far as I checked, there were no other similar landing pages except mine. And mine existed because I had asked him before and he had given consent while the landing was still open-source.
The disclaimers were also not neutral. They talked about malware, unfair pool payouts and similar things.
That is not just “be careful, check what you use”.
That makes someone look like a scammer.
And at that point it felt very clear to me that I was no longer seen as a contributor, but as competition.
The banSo I wrote him and asked what his problem is. I asked if he wants to do everything alone, why he is making these accusations and why he is acting like this.
Then he banned me from the Discord.
Just like that.
After that he sent me a message that looked very ChatGPT generated. It was something like “I assume you are out of the project, but this is not about control, this is about transparency, no source code...” and so on.
Some of his points are not completely wrong. For example, yes, I could have open-sourced more parts faster. Fair enough.
But he could have just said that normally.
Also, he talks about pool transparency, but I do not see his pool being open-source either.
He also used the advertisement thing again, but again, he warned me one time and then retroactively used older messages from before the warning as “multiple warnings”.
That is just not honest.
He said I could join again if I want to, but honestly, after getting banned and then receiving some generated corporate-style message instead of a real answer, no thanks.
What happened afterAnd then things got even worse.
The bridge fee was raised to 3.9 percent.
The landing page was removed from the public repos after it was previously open-source and after I was told everybody could do whatever they want with it.
Then he implemented a dev fund of 20 percent, with a minimum of 10 percent of every block from block 1500.
For me, that is too much. Way too much.
You cannot sell a project with this early Bitcoin 2009 feeling, no premine, community, fair start, decentralization, and then suddenly add 10 to 20 percent of every block to a dev fund.
I am not giving away 10 to 20 percent of each block to one dev like that. For me this is where it crosses the line.
Why I am outSo this is why I am out.
I do not know how the fork will go. I do not know if anyone will stay with this version, if it has a future, or if the community even wants to continue this work.
I personally like the coin idea. I like RandomX. I saw potential in it.
But not with this kind of control, not with this communication, and not with this dev fund.
I learned a lot while working on this project. I hope I explained the story as clearly and honestly as I can. Maybe the order of a few small things is not perfect because a lot happened in Discord and I no longer have access to the channel, but the important part is accurate from my perspective.
I am frustrated because I really wanted this to become something good.
But I do not want to waste time on a pump and dump or just another shitcoin fork. If I continue with something, I want it to solve real problems, have some technical innovation, be transparent and actually be useful.
I will watch the project for a few more days and then decide if it makes sense to continue this work in some form, or if it is better to focus on building a proper coin from scratch.
Everyone can choose his side. I will not continue commenting on every action from the original dev.
Thanks folks.
P.S. Yes, I also used ChatGPT for formatting help, however I asked to keep the style and fix gramatics.
P.S.S. Actually I was writing this to answer to this message, as it was the trigger for this:
Def DEV is shady AF, i saw how he was promoting the other guys pool on the discord then he says he doest not know him, then why post his pool on the ann in the launch.
The no premine was bs, he was mining since the day one than annouce it days later... so no premine right?
I am not sure what exactly is meaned by the pool in the ann in the launch, as I didn't catch the moment, as far I know there was not a single link of mine in the announcements, not as mirror, not as something else or additional resources.
I was promoting in some way my pool, yeah, providing updates with the fixed bugs and improvements, answering questions how to mine etc.
If you mean that by promoting, then it was probably just me. If something else, then sorry, had not enough context to answer.
I just wanted to state, yeah, the DEV is shady, but not because of the premine thing. I mean you couldn't do really much wrong at the beginning. I mean yeah, you could test if the transactions even work, but this is nothing that should be critized. We were enough people there and nobody checked that properly, not even in testnet.
Let's not blame everything just for the reason of it.
There are things to critize, but focus on the real ones.
