Dear Community,

We understand that there has been some consternation caused by a leaving team member. We had trusted Anthony C. as a developer on the project, but now know that trust was misplaced. After a few red flags emerged, we looked into him further and realized things were worse than we could have imagined. We discovered Anthony was likely indicted on multiple criminal counts, including fraud. Moreover, he had repeatedly approached multiple members of the current team to join another fork he was proposing. He was rebuffed.

If that were not enough, our financial team had set up several donation wallets but Anthony attempted to circumvent them. Anthony, without informing anyone else, changed the wallet addresses on the website. We discovered this when a team member sent a test donation and realized it never arrived. Even further, his prior/current project, Decibels, has been engaged in some questionable activities, including continually restarting a bounty program to falsely increase their social media engagement. At the culmination of our investigations, the decision was made to remove Anthony. He did not take that well.

Of course, we want to address his claims to alleviate your concerns. First, Anthony claims that the team owns 1.6 million Primecoin. This is simply not true and based on a gross and fundamental misunderstanding of the facts. Let’s analyze his cited statement. Anthony refers to:

“This is encouraging on price btw to me. Total: 1158931.76349802 XPM down from 1.6M. the sells side. Going down faster every day now. But it takes time to eat it up, maybe 2 weeks.”

From this, he inferred that the team owned 1.6 million Primecoin. But the statement, to any reasonably intelligent person, means the opposite of what he asserts. The numbers actually referred to Poloniex’s order book — that the number of XPM on the sell side fell to 1.15M from 1.6M, an “encouraging” sign because people were “eat[ing] up” the sells, or positive price action. There is no reference to the team and it would take a strained and force interpretation to reach that conclusion. Rather, Rhett has already disclosed he owns less than 1% of the current supply, or less than 230,000 XPM and the rest of the team combined has nowhere close to Anthony’s proposed figure.

The censorship he referred to was our attempt to keep all announcements limited to public and official channels instead of disclosing them haphazardly and piecemeal via PM as Anthony was doing. We hope you understand we want to release full and thorough updates, not simply send snippets to favored members.

We apologize to our community for the consternation. We understand that Anthony currently controls what formerly was the Bitcoin Prime Announcement Channel. Please know that is no longer the official channel. We are continuing to work on Bitcoin Prime and hope to retain your trust.

Sincerely,

The Bitcoin Prime Team