Major Chinese miner, bitcoin and Ethereum Classic investor Chandler Guo failed to meet the target of his US$32 million crowdfunding campaign initiated to launch a Bitcoin Unlimited pool.
As a result, all funds raised during the campaign, which accounted to nearly $4.8 million, were returned to the original accounts of investors.
Ambiguity on the Project itself
On February 5, Guo announced that a new 100 petahash bitcoin pool Exchange X, also known as EXX, was initiating an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) of its 21 million XBTC coins. At the beginning of the ICO, 1 unit of XBTC was equivalent to 0.5 Ethereum Classic (ETC). Over time, the value of XBTC increased to 0.7 ETC.
The plan of Guo was to raise 21 million XBTC in an ICO, or around 11 million ETC, and use that capital to develop EXX that would signal Bitcoin Unlimited. Essentially, the strategy of Guo going into the project was to create a global mining project based in China–due to its abundance of electricity and cold mountainous regions–and try to engage in a 51 percent attack against the current Bitcoin network to fork Bitcoin Unlimited.
Guo’s project was successful as it raised nearly $4.8 million in a span of two months. However, his campaign failed to reach the 11 million ETC or $32 million goal and thus, funds raised during the ICO were released back to the original owners.
Mass confusion on the project arose when representatives of EXX claimed that Guo was never involved with the project. In various social media platforms, representatives of the EXX Group stated:
“We EXX.com [are] an independent Hong Kong company that Mr. Guo is not or was not involved [with.] He is a volunteer promoter and thanks to that lots of people think we are owned by him. He has clarified [that he is a volunteer of this project already.] Again. We are the pool provider [and not] him. We have no decision to signal any [solution.] Mr. Guo already made clarification that it is his own opinion.”
It was later revealed that Guo personally volunteered to raise that capital single-handedly for the pool and convince the global bitcoin mining project to signal Bitcoin Unlimited after the funds would have been secured.
However, as EXX representatives clarified in the above-mentioned statement, EXX never had the intention of signaling Bitcoin Unlimited and strengthened their position on hard fork contingency.
Becoming More Difficult to Gain Support For Bitcoin Unlimited
It has become much more challenging for investors and miners like Chandler Guo to amass interests of miners convince them to support Bitcoin Unlimited, despite the alluring proposition that the activation of Bitcoin Unlimited will increase revenue for miners.
As miners said in the past, Bitcoin Unlimited’s large capacity of on-chain transactions and the elimination of off-chain solutions like Lightning will increase revenue of miners. But, this theory was disproved by experts and analysts in the bitcoin industry, as Lightning would actually allow miners to confirm transactions that would be otherwise be handled in private blockchain networks of exchanges.
More importantly, the discovery of the covert use of ASICBOOST by Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell led to the increase of support toward Segwit, as the community began to lose trust in Bitcoin Unlimited and miners that are signaling the software.
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