Hi guys,

I would like to discuss something that has happened the past week, first i’d like to talk about some history. I love cryptocurrencies. The fact while I’m writing this my spellcheck on my chromebook asks me to replace the word cryptocurrencies by ‘currencies’ annoys me more than you can imagine.

One of the biggest cryptocurrency I love at the moment is IOTA.

I love IOTA so much, that besides building a Tangle explorer, I’m also building teams where I work on real next level shit for IOTA (I’m under NDA so consider it stealth mode). Even though my love for IOTA is immeasurable, I can’t put all my money in 1 basket. So I also mine Ethereum (not on this site), build trading bots and do other kinds of stuff with cryptocurrencies.

But what do all those things have in common? It’s building things. That’s it.

I have to admit, things are going a little fast for me. I’m getting a lot of replies regarding IOTA related projects, investments, stuff. I’m becoming a semi-public figure. Yet, deep down, I’m a geek.

I’ll always be a geek. I started coding from 13yo, started doing projects from 16yo, I hacked my simcard to have free internet through facebook, I build a filecompression algorithm based on bloom filters,

I tried an online coin miner on the tangler explorer.

For those who don’t know what that is, the best explanation would be: it’s a script that makes your browser participating in the act of mining coins. It makes your PC go slower, though.

There is no excuse for that. I’m sorry about that. This is just me trying stuff out. I wasn’t thinking what kind of consequences this has on the community. This will not happen again.

While there is no excuse for this action, I will state my reasoning behind it, leaving it to your judgement.

So I came across an article on Reddit about an browser extension that blocks online coin miners on websites. I didn’t know that it became this big of a deal that blocking extensions were needed. Thinking about this makes me feel even more bad about it.

I wanted to see if this extension works on different mining scripts. When trying this locally I didn’t get much data back. So I configured NGINX to inject the mining script, to see what happens, for a short period of time. Without forseeing the consequences.

It is important to note that none of the projects had any mining scripts injected in them, it was done on the server-side.

Another reason for me to pick the tangle explorer, was because, at this time of writing, it doesn’t work anymore with the latest IOTA version. That’s why I thought it wouldn’t be a big deal, since there wouldn’t be much traffic anyway right? The only tangle explorer being used that I knew about was the testnet explorer (for IOTA Flash) which I didn’t inject.

It also served as a personal reminder for me to hurry up and fix the explorer so I can remove the injection and the explorer would be useful again.

Conclusion

This was just very bad decision making and a very inappropriate gesture towards the IOTA community. I didn’t mean to do any harm. I most certainly didn’t mean this to become a meme for the Monero guys to mock IOTA (or the other way around).

The only reason I did this, is to see how well it worked, I wanted to test the miner(s) and the blocking extension. That was it.

For anyone wondering, I didn’t make any money on this.

For anyone considering using a miner on their website, take it from me, it isn’t worth it. Scroll to the top, read this blog again, my god, hopefully conclude that it isn’t worth it.

What am I going to do about it

First of all, all traces have been removed.

I learned from this that at this point in my career, I can’t play around like this anymore. If a faceplant was needed for me to come to that conclusion, then so be it.