I write this post to address a quote within the Coin Telegraph story "Legitimacy of Crytpoassets or App Coins, Their Real World Value" by Joseph Young (https://cointelegraph.com/news/legitimacy-of-cryptoassets-or-app-coins-their-real-world-value).

Within the article, this quote is misattributed to bitcointalk user cryptohunter. This quote is actually mine, posted as user Eclipse Crypto, and quoted in its entirety at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1410943.msg14404632#msg14404632. I am not the only Eclipse Crypto dev. I simply happened to be logged into the developer account when I started mining Steem, and never logged out, much to the eventual dismay of other developers on the Eclipse project. I deleted the original quote at the request of the Steem developers, although I knew copies persisted as quotes by other users.

The reason I deleted the original post from which Coin Telegraph took this quote is that I eventually felt that the rant was unfair. First, being used to so many launch shenanigans from other coins, I, like most other miners, am quick to throw around the word "scam". Given that Steem has been good for early miners and early exchange buyers, this label does not fit. The developers are still around, fully support Steem, and do very little selling of their coins from early mining, relatively speaking. Any selling that they do seems reasonable, given the scope of the Steem project and the size of the Steem markets on Bittrex and Poloniex. Additionally, the Steem developers have created and fully support the steemit.com website. Moreover, they have fully compensated users who lost funds during a limited site compromise in July. In short, no coin that has the benefit of support from a such an experienced and dedicated team could be a "scam". Time reveals whether projects fit this label, and I believe, along with many other users, that the label does not fit Steem.

My quote also claims the developers gave poor mining instructions. This was indeed the case for the original launch. Most of the instructions were accurate, but one in particular was not. It had to do with the format for the account name when issuing the mining command. Although explaining their error would require getting into the minutiae of JSON and command line parsers, this error turned out to be an honest mistake. Indeed, this mistake was corrected in the instructions for relaunch, and many clarifying instructions were added, making it less difficult (though not easy per se) for those who mined the relaunch.

Finally, as explained to me by the developers, the approximately 100 different accounts were required because their plan was to dominate the mining pool. Their intent was not to hide their mining presence, but to have enough accounts to accommodate their large hashing power. Steem uses a queued miner system, and each account may exist in the queue only as a single instance. Because the mining queue is generally about 100 in length, the 100 different addresses were reasonable to fully prevent wasted hashes. Several users, including myself, complained about the numerous accounts for the first launch. In response, the development team used very generic names, like steemit01, steemit02, etc., for the re-launch so that the team would not squat on good account names, many of which I claimed during subsequent mining.

In closing, I hope this puts the quote in context and clears up any misconceptions that reproducing it could propagate.