Bitcoin Private: Explanations & Solidarity, a message from the core developers
Originally published by Michael Otis, a core Bitcoin Private developer, representing the Bitcoin Private development team.
Sometimes half-truths can be more deceptive than outright lies. The team believes that proverb would hold true of some of the recent accusations being made against us and specifically a couple of our team members, Jake and Giuseppe. This statement is our attempt to set the record straight in a more direct fashion.
So what is true? Our team has made financial mistakes along the way; we sent a payment for 5.5 BTC to one of our developers instead of .55 BTC as was intended. The developer would not return the overpayment, but instead agreed to consider it a prepayment for future work. To his credit, the developer has continued his work. Make no mistake — we were extremely disappointed with this individual’s position, but accepted this concession as the best way to recoup the value of the sent BTC for the project’s sake.
The second mistake is an exchange-related one, so we will refrain from naming the particular exchange as we are still in conversations with them about getting listed and it would still be in the best interest of the project to get listed with them. In short, the mistake involved a hacked email (with forged email headers) from this exchange confirming a listing of ZCL and BTCP plus fork support for 17 BTC. After a few back and forth messages, we made the payment. And we were scammed. We haven’t divulged the details because the conversation with this exchange is not yet over. They’ve even expressed remorse over what happened and we are still in active, constructive conversations with them, and any attempt to disclose the identity of this exchange would ultimately serve the interests other than those of the BTCP community.
Surrounding these two mistakes are baseless accusations made by people who are attempting to use them to lend credibility to untruths; people who if denied power and control of this project would simply want to watch the world burn. No, there was no set promise to give away figures of unclaimed BTCP to individuals in secret — in fact, there is no set plan yet to do anything with the unclaimed BTCP, period. When the time comes to address the unmoved coins, any proposed plan for what to do with the unmoved BTCP would require a hard fork — and therefore have to meet the approval of the mining community and the community at large. But that time is not now, and is simply serving as a red herring for the agenda of others.
To be clear — the team is extremely remorseful for these mistakes. The individuals directly involved in those mistakes are sorry for them and have expressed a willingness to accept responsibility for them. And every day, we debate on how much to share, knowing that too little information doesn’t hold true to our commitment as a transparent project and too much information can create distracting drama when placed in the hands of those who would rather see us fail. If we have fallen short of your expectations in handling that delicate balance at times, we apologize for it- and will strive to do it better. But we also want to make clear that none of the core developers are interested in throwing Jake and Giuseppe under the proverbial bus, as we view the team’s mistakes as simply that — mistakes, and we are all growing and learning how to do things better. Jake and Giuseppe in particular have proven their commitment to this project, and the dev team’s desire is that this team continue working together- in a consensus fashion with Jake and Giuseppe as just two of many voices- to make this project the long-term success we envisioned from the start — for the sake of the project and the community.
We’ve worked hard, and we’ve come this far- and we believe the best is yet to come. The core dev team did not join this worthy endeavor to make a quick buck; we believe in the technology and want to be part of a meaningful project that innovates and achieves industry-wide adoption. In order to do that, we need to not get sidetracked by schemes of forks upon forks, but maintain a laser focus on what is most important right now: launching the merchant platform to fulfill the dream of a truly usable cryptocurrency, addressing the PoW situation to maintain decentralization, and completing the rebase so we can maintain feature parity with Bitcoin Core, along with our best in the industry privacy features. But we cannot do this without the continued support and faith of the community. Ultimately, it is the community that decides where we go from here.
-BTCP Dev Team
