The Full History Behind Monero Nobody Wants You To Know: From the Bitmonero Hijack To Dero Stargate
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The whole story starts with a Bitcointalk thread on March 12th 2014 announcing the existence of a secure, private, untraceable since 2012 cryptocurrency called Bytecoin that was unknown to the Bitcointalk community up to that point.
Bitcointalk was the largest miner community at the time where all new projects would announce their launch to attract users. Strangely this 2014 post was the first one to ever mention Bytecoin in the forum. Also, despite never being announced on Bitcointalk, the number of transactions in Bytecoin blocks and the number of machines connected to the network indicated that this mysterious coin already had an active but what seemed to be secret community. Bytecoin’s whitepaper was the Cryptonote 2 whitepaper. Bytecoin lacked any code documentation and was not based on the Bitcoin codebase.
Thankful_for_today
Among the first respondents to the thread is another user called thankful_for_today (TFT). TFT is fascinated right away by Bytecoin and seems to start learning everything about Cryptonote very fast. Less than a month after he found out about Bytecoin, TFT does some calculations (cit) on emissions and informs everyone that over 80% of Bytecoin’s supply had already been mined.
Is this good or bad he asks, adding that it depends a lot on the people holding these 82% of all coins. He then closes the April 8th post announcing his plan to fork Bytecoin and restart it from scratch, from block zero, because very little was known of its existing community and stakeholders. The next day, April 9, TFT posts a new thread pre-announcing the launch of Bitmonero, a fork of Bytecoin that would be launched 10 days later the 18th of April 2014. Bitmonero was a Bytecoin clone but thankful_for_today shows to have already grasped a deep understanding of the underlying Cryptonote protocol by successfully rebuilding the genesis block. Something nobody else was able to do.
Aside from pre-announcing the new blockchain launch both in the Bytecoin thread and in the Bitmonero thread, TFT went to great lengths in every occasion to make sure the launch was as fair as possible for everyone in the forum. For example, the original launch date was scheduled for April 17th and by April 17th TFT had Linux binaries ready but the launch was postponed by another 12 hours to give time to others from the community to prepare Windows and Mac binaries (I don’t have a Mac to test on, cit).
Bitmonero was launched with Linux & Windows binaries the 18th of April. After the launch TFT was active in listening to community feedback and in pushing fixes. We can tell from how Bitmonero was launched that TFT took user feedback seriously and also had a deep understanding of the Cryptonote protocol because not only was he the only one capable of building the genesis block but he’d also fix other Bytecoin inherited bugs.
The Bitmonero Hijacking
A few marketing oriented users in the Bitmonero thread started discussing marketing efforts such as changing the name, building a website, a GUI wallet or creating a logo. Most of these users didn’t have any technical skills, but they wanted to help in other ways that could grow the coin. I think the following quote by NoodleDoodle best captures their spirit:
I can't help with anything else but I can donate 2000 BMR towards various projects relating to the coin. I hope it helps.
Eventually 1 week after TFT’s relaunch of Bytecoin from genesis, someone announced a hardfork of Bitmonero called Monero. The people behind Monero didn’t have the understanding of Cryptonote required to be able to launch with their own genesis block like TFT had done, so instead they hijacked his chain with a hard fork and took advantage of the perceived lack of marketing. The reason this is a malicious hijack is that if these people were acting in good faith they would have simply contributed to TFT’s work, or encouraged others to do so, with their marketing efforts instead of starting a new project where the codebase was under their own control. The group that hijacked Bitmonero called itself Monero Core and would include people like the aforementioned NoodleDoodle and Riccardo “fluffypony“ Spagni who was notoriously incompetent at coding.
Riccardo Spagni stepped down from Monero Core in December 2023 after the community wallet under his control was drained of 2675 XMR ($468K). Spagni and Luigi (another core maintainer) were the only ones who had access to the wallet’s seed phrase.
As TFT would later declare in one of his latest posts on BitcoinTalk, a coin without engineers, coders & mathematicians is doomed. Monero Core delivered no improvements on the code for a long time and it took them almost 3 years to build a simple GUI wallet.
Considering that over 65% of Monero’s supply was to be mined in the first 2 years, and the lack of integrity of the individuals involved, one can’t help but wonder if there was an early plan in place to concentrate supply. For example, was the GUI wallet intentionally delayed to keep the project’s profile as low as possible in order to allow these early contributors to mine a huge chunk of those early 15 million coins (~65%)?Numbers sure seem to suggest so.
Pertaining TFT, on the other hand, today we know that that brainpower would later re-emerge as Captain Dero. There is no definitive proof that Captain is TFT but there are a lot of things making it highly plausible. The strongest piece of evidence to suggest so is that both TFT and Captain have proven to be a notch above everyone else in their expertise and understanding of Cryptonote. Another element is the continuity between TFT’s work in Bitmonero and Captain’s Cryptonote inspired work in the early stages of Dero.
Early Dero is where for the first time we saw some real innovations in the Cryptonote protocol. Captain built (in Golang) the first blockDAG implementation of the Cryptonote protocol (Dero Atlantis) and even created an iteration of Atlantis with smart contracts on testnet. The Cryptonote lineage of Dero was eventually abandoned for a superior account model with homomorphic encryption and interpreter VM known today as Dero Stargate. An episode where Captain showed unmatched Cryptonote expertise versus anyone else working on Monero was the release of Dero’s rocket bulletproofs (ahead of Monero’s audit report release). To everyone’s surprise, Dero’s bulletproofs did not have the double wallet accounting bug found in Monero and all the other Cryptonote forks.
And then there are also some cues in certain posts by Captain on BitcoinTalk. None of this is definitive. For that we would need Captain to admit it which I don’t think is ever going to happen. The considerable overlap between these 2 identities, however, makes it highly likely.
Final Thoughts
I’m aware that there are a lot of concerted efforts online to censor the early history of Monero and its real coder(s). I wrote this article for information purposes only because I’ve come across a lot of Monero enthusiasts who are not familiar with Monero’s history. Since connecting the dots can be hard for newcomers as most of this information is buried in old forum threads, I hope putting everything in one place can make it easier for everyone to see the big picture and where Monero and Dero stand with respect to each other in said picture.
