Hey you’ve asked a lot of questions many of which are answered on the KAS wiki FAQ page https://wiki.kaspa.org/en/faq . I have followed KAS since the early days and was one of the first discord members of the project. I know the project was mentioned in cpu mining forums back in the early days but I came to recognize it from a 2017 coindesk article that mentioned the founders work and DagLabs. By following the work of DagLabs I was led to the eventual discord channel and maintenance launch. In the early days the devs were solely focused on deving (they still are) but at that time there was almost zero marketing and only a few post here and there about the project. Anyway check the faq I posted and if you require a more nuanced answer on any particular topic after doing your due diligence feel free to ask again.