The Zhao Archive & The Forgotten Dropbox
Giving everyone access to CZs past - and dropbox someone forgot it still exists in 2023.
Correction 7th March 2023: Corrected the hyperlink to the dropbox in part 6.
Disclaimer:
All information provided in this post were published by Mr. Zhao himself or made public by others. I kindly ask every researcher and journalist to respect the privacy of Mr. Zhaos family members.
The information aquired through the dropbox link where published by the owner/user himself for public use in 2015.
0. The Zhao Archive - Discovery and Origins
I was looking for some older versions of a webpage - and while searching for backups on the Wayback Machine - I got the idea to check for digital backups of webpages that are offline now, but got archived in the past. To understand todays development it is worth to take a look back in time - and for this reason I decided to search for Mr. Zhao and found the snapshots of his homepage cpzhao.com.
Instead of publishing this finding immediatly, I decided to archive, store and distribute these information inside the community to make sure this finding can be made public and accessable for every researcher and journalist.
1. Who created these Snapshots?
The information that are available to the public today are the result of projects archiving small webpages and making them accessable after some time.
Exemple 1: The snapshot made in 2006 was made by Alexa Internet:
”Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.” - Source
Exemple 2: One snapshot made in 2014 was created by Archive Team:
”Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.” - Source
It is almost certain that Mr. Zhao did not archive any of these information himself - nor had he shown any interest in talking about his life before Binance. The archived information were written and published by Mr. Zhao himself - for this reason Mr. Zhao is the only person responsible for the existence and availability of these information.
2. How to Download the Archive
The easiest way to download the full collection is to use the wayback-
machine-downloader published by hartator on github - thanks for this useful tool! This toll allows you to download the complete archive. This will make your research way faster.
The installation and handle is not complicated while the download could take some time - I will give my best to help you out on this, no expert but I will try:
Windows:
Open the <Run> box by pressing Windows + R
Before starting, make sure you have Ruby installed
You can test this by typing <
ruby --version
> if you don't get an error you have RubyIf you get an error go to
ruby-lang.org
and install it
Type <
gem install wayback_machine_downloader>
Type:
wayback_machine_downloader cpzhao.com
Mac:
If you got a Mac you got Ruby already.
Open the terminal by typing
cmd-spacebar
and typing "terminal”Type <
gem install wayback_machine_downloader>
Type:
wayback_machine_downloader cpzhao.com
This will take a while - 6713 snapshots to consider while 5309 will be available for download.
3. What can be found in the downloaded archive?
The archived information cover the period from 2005 to 2019 of the webpage cpzhao.com. Not all snapshots contain information, some only display that the webpage is not available anymore. The webpage was created by Mr. Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of the crypto exchange Binance.
Most of the information archived between 2005 and 2007 contain information on Mr. Zhaos private life.
The information published in 2014 onward are labeld as “A personal blog.” by Mr Zhao. The publications during this time are focused on Crypto Security and a “Bitcoin Charity Project.”
Exemple:
The perhaps most ironic finding, so far, is the following:
Great advice - I hope your followers and fans will follow the words of CZ himself.
The most dominating topic at this point is: BITCOIN.
The amount of available information made it impossible for me to write on the available content. I decided to not publish any personal information or stories in this article while I think it is important to make my finding available to the public.
4 What else can be find with the Wayback Machine?
6th Sept 2014 (CZ Archive) - you can see below, he mentioned his work at Blockchain.info in his personal blog.
The same information are still online in 2016 - while this timeperiod contains a “hole” in Mr. Zhaos current linked in Profile (the one mentioned and linked in the CZ Archive did not get archived)
So what did Mr. Zaho do between “Head of Development” at Blockchain.info and the founding of BijieTech in September 2015?
5 The OKCoin-Incident
On 12th June 2014, Coindesk reported:
”Blockchain Exec Joins Largest Chinese Exchange OKCoin -"Changpeng Zhao, a senior exec at one of bitcoin's biggest companies has jumped to one of its largest exchanges.” - Source
This bromance didn’t hold for long - in early 2015, a pretty ugly situation lead to the departure of Mr. Zhao from Okcoin and ended up in digital mud fight.
How do I know?
While doing research, I spend a lot time searching. And while doing so, i came across the webpage https://www.8btc.com/okcoin-cz - which contained the interesting ending cz - and got my attention for this, sadly, no article was available on the web.
While the wayback machine had the solution for this issue:
Tl;Dr (don’t nail me on this - read it yourself):
While working for OKcoin, CZ signed a contract with Rodger Ver about OKcoin paying Mr. Ver 10k a month for the use of Bitcoin.com.
OKcoin seem to have a bad relationship latest Jan 2015 and Mr. Ver did not recieve his 10k payment while OKcoin insisted on resigning a contract. The provided documents were the center of the following discussion between Ver and OKcoin who claimed that OKcoin had created fake documents. More below.
During this period Rodger Ver, OKcoin and CZ published statements on the situation. The following links contain the statement and articles published on 8btc.com during this time.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180528110050/http://www.8btc.com/okcoin-cz
https://web.archive.org/web/20150810013313/https://www.8btc.com/roger-ver-reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20150501000000*/https://www.8btc.com/roger-ver-and-okcoin
https://web.archive.org/web/20150531011914/https://www.8btc.com/roger-ver-and-okcoin-2
Statement CZ (!!!): https://web.archive.org/web/20150602002259/https://www.8btc.com/cpzhao-statement
Statement OKcoin on CZ (!!!): https://web.archive.org/web/20150829100921/https://www.8btc.com/okcoin-cz
The statement made by OKcoin on CZ made so fkn curious about the situation - so if you dont have much time at least read the statement by OKcoin - make up your own mind on this, some quotes, reading it in full would be best:
“First of all, we want to tell you that CZ has cheated the company many times during the few months he worked on OKCoin.”
🚩 if true: “2. CZ falsified his resume and was expelled from us.”
Quote: “But after he joined the company, we found that he basically didn't understand technology: When our database has performance problems, as a "CTO", he can only stand aside and wait for other colleagues to solve the problem” - Translated with Google
“As "CTO", CZ has not contributed a single line of code to OKCoin, and has not solved a single technical problem.”
“3. About reserves - CZ as "CTO" doesn't even understand how our system works. There is spot leverage in OKCoin.cn, and the leveraged funds come from P2P lending. Due to Chinese laws, we only allow a few large customers to lend. But these customers can still see the borrowed coins in their account net assets. If these lending accounts are not removed, the BTC they lent out will be double-counted. Therefore, these lending customers have been removed. CZ doesn't understand the principle at all, and making up lies is not professional. CZ has been interviewed himself about this issue, and whenever he's right, he's a liar!”
🚩🚩🚩 “5 about okcoin staff speculating - OKCoin prohibits employees from speculating in coins, which has always been one of the company's systems. But our product managers need to understand the transaction process, our customer service also needs transactions to learn how to answer customer questions, and our engineers also need to test the correctness of the program. We created some public accounts, and the company charged a small amount of money for everyone to test. This is a normal thing, don't the employees of Coinbase and Circle use their own websites? On the contrary, CZ has been violating the company's regulations and speculating in large amounts of coins. After he left, we found that his personal account on OKCoin used to have assets worth millions of RMB, and he had traded many times. We apologize to everyone for our "CTO"'s behavior of speculating in coins.”🚩🚩🚩
“6 About not agreeing to CZ to see the company's financing and bank information - CZ is not qualified to be a "CTO" and has a fake resume. We have decided to fire him. Why should we let him see the company's financing and bank information?”
6. The Forgotten Dropbox
End of May 2015, the Reddit user u/jmaurice published an analysis of the signed documents and came to the conlcution:
The post contained 2 links:
A not archived dead google docs link that shoud have contained
“Cryptographic analysis: https://docs.google.com/a/wiz.biz/document/d/12kYEn24Ypi1UlkXjS4js049SqitmyZQyFu_eQcV8P48/edit?usp=sharing”
And a dropbox link, that still works - in 2023 - named:
Original documents: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/wgmz9ofhq8kymhs/AADOd0QGEL8RvnKoeCKtPBKna?dl=0
After looking into the dropbox someone likely forgot about I mentioned something strange:
The folder <Various email exchanges with OKcoin> contained a doc dated back to 2015 - but ALSO documents that had been saved in 2019 - strange! While the documents contained a “different” amount of the mail conversation between Rodger Ver and OKcoin - it kind of looks like, if someone didn’t release the whole story back in 2015
The Folder <Ripple FinCEN Truth> was also added 2019 - an contained the following files:
So here are my questions:
Who tf is u/jmaurice?
Why did he add documents about an incidence that happened in 2015 in 2019 - providing us today with information that had no been public in 2015?
Why does the Dropbox used by u/jmaurice contain documents that are related to the Ripple Case with the contact of Mr. Steve Hudak?
Tl;Dr:
CZ accidently gave us the best advice regarding CEX: “Many people simply leave their bitcoins in online wallets or exchange account where others have access to their private key. This is a very very bad idea.”
The reddit user u/jmaurice who showed the world that OKcoin forged documents in 2015 added “Rodger Ver vs OKcoin” and “Ripple Case” Documents in 2019 to the dropbox he used to store the “og files” of his analysis.
Good hunt fellow researchers! Seal over and out!