Regarding the above, I think we need to put together a nice document regarding the history of monero. There's the one scathing summary out there, but its full of very colorful (but hilarious) language. I think newcomers to monero would appreciate knowing the full story, in case they come across trolls barking over "de-optimized miner" this or "community takeover" that. I mean, I think someone new to cryptoworld wouldn't fully understand community takeover without first comprehending how github and forking works. Hell, come to think of it, how did the fork occur? The year in review document (i think) touches on some of this... sorry i can't do more digging (at work).
Are you talking about the original bitMonero fork from bytecoin?
Most of us didn't like the fact that bytecoin had already been 80% mined. An unknown individual named thankful_for_today announced he was working on a fair relaunch of bytecoin that would have a distribution closer to that of bitcoin, with shorter block times. A number of us showed interest and even attempted to collaborate with him.
We actually wanted a shallower distribution.
We were pretty unanimous that 1 minute block times were a
bad idea.
We were unanimous that some type of perpetual inflation was necessary on the tail end of distribution.
At the same time, crypto_zoidberg announced his fork, HoneyPenny (eventually to become BBR). This project had some interesting things going on, but wasn't planned for release for another 6 weeks or so.
When thankful_for_today launched bitMonero two weeks later (he was in a huge rush to be the first fork out the door, and might be the reason Monero always had the lead on BBR), he had pretty much ignored everything that was discussed and just did what he wanted. The block reward was considerably steeper than what everyone was expecting. He also moved forward with 1 minute block times despite everyone's concerns about the increase of orphan blocks. He also didn't address the tail emission concern that should've (in my opinion) been in the code at launch time. Basically, he fucked everything up. Then, he disappeared.
I, and others, started working on new forks that were closer to what everyone else was hoping for. David Latapie (IIRC) started PMing people and trying to get them to consolidate projects to not divide the community. I personally thought the best course of action was to fix bitMonero and relaunch it (I still think that would've been best). but instead it was decided that the bitMonero project should just be taken over. There were like 9 or 10 interested parties at the time if my memory is correct. We voted on irc to drop the "bit" from bitMonero and move forward with the project.
Thankful_for_today suddenly resurfaced, and wasn't happy to learn the community had assumed control of the coin. He attempted to maintain his own fork (still calling it "bitMonero") for a while, but that quickly fell into obscurity. The rest is history.
