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The Verge, a well-known American technology media, published an article to unveil Sun Yuchen's "work face".

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"In my opinion, Sun Yuchen is a genius and a demon. Nothing can stop him."

Chris Harland-Dunaway is a freelance writer for The Verge

Compiled by: Perry Wang

If The business of Silicon Valley is to move fast and break things, it is NBSP; BitTorrent Is an exception. Its employees like to tinker patiently with creative projects and go home at a reasonable hour, and the company sees no tyranny of an entrepreneurial culture. The company was founded in NBSP; 2004 While its eponymous deal helped shape the new face of the modern Internet in 2005, by 2018 the company was in financial trouble. After all, not everything that has influence makes money.

One BitTorrent employee told me that they liked the slower pace: "It's not crazy." Building new revenue streams is difficult, and the company is beginning to look like a toxic asset. There are rumours that someone is actively trying to buy it, suggesting that the only way management can get out of the doldrums is to resort to a rich buyer.

BitTorrent has a mixed reputation. Its core technology, a peer-to-peer protocol that allows quick downloads of large files, has a tarnished reputation because they are often pirated movies and music. It has been praised in part for its decentralisation idea-spreading the bandwidth burden and responsibility across many users, rather than one company shouldering it. The decentralisation philosophy has shaped BitTorrent's hands-off corporate culture. It provides a technology that assumes no responsibility for the illegal distribution of pirated content.

"Pull pan for coin"

It quickly became clear that BitTorrent's acquisition rumors were true. The buyer that has surfaced is Justin Sun, a young Chinese billionaire. It all seems to fit in. Like BitTorrent, sun Yuchen, who runs a Cryptocurrency company in Beijing called Wave Field, the overall philosophy of encryption is based on decentralization. Some of BitTorrent's employees are excited. One of them told me that their initial reaction was, "Oh cool, encryption, this is a neat area That I want to get into." BitTorrent's association with piracy has not deterred Sun. Later, the BitTorrent staff will find that he's more than willing to embrace it.

But Sun soon became a controversial figure among some BitTorrent employees. First, cryptography enthusiasts have noticed striking similarities between Sun's previous white paper on wavefield cryptocurrency and other cryptocurrency projects, including Ethereum, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency project. Twitter was rife with accusations of plagiarism over the document, borrowing heavily from two other white papers. Juan Benet, the cryptographic developer behind the papers, claims that three pages of the field's 44-page white paper also contain "the basic contract for Ethereum," while nine pages are copied from NBSP; Benet The decentralized encryption project in exactly the same language.

A former wavefield employee agreed that the white paper was conceptually indistinguishable: "It must have been plagiarized." Mr Sun defended himself in public, claiming that the white paper's similarities lie in the problem of hastily translating Chinese into English. BitTorrent staff watched the debate in silence, with no internal explanation from the new boss.

A former employee told me that new hires at Wave Field were brainwashed by Mr Sun's worldview within months, and that the company's internal business strategy was clearly to "copy Ethereum". Another strategy is to "pull the pan for the coin". This oft-used phrase means doing whatever it takes to make TRON TRX shine, and to persuade people around the world to convert their local currency (whether renminbi, rupee or US dollar) into the currency to raise the value of the currency TRX . Sun Yuchen's market value and his wealth.

If cryptocurrency and the BitTorrent protocol are technologies based on a decentralized ideology, then wave Field's purchase of BitTorrent seems like a carefully designed move to consolidate Sun's centralization power. Copying the Ethereum white paper was just the starting point for Sun's morally questionable moves: giving away Tesla cars and spending millions of dollars to win the Buffet lunch bid; To introduce products that encourage piracy and use of pornographic content. Then there was his alleged ill-treatment, which ranged from threats of violence to physical abuse at the office.

At the time of the purchase, BitTorrent's employees were divided. What none of them realized was that their stable, quiet working environment would be completely shattered by Sun's bold moves and self-hype, which had done their best to draw the company into the political tug of war between the United States and China -- the vortex of the trade war (or, as Sun yuchen put it, the pull of the wave field).

Anyone who has followed Sun yuchen on social media would not believe that his rule of Pochang was merely a triumph of abuse and continuity. In trying to separate the fact from fiction in Sun yuchen's many stories, I spoke with Chinese and American employees in various parts of the company, both senior and low-level. A total of & have spent Eighteen insiders, both current and departing, have spoken to me on the condition that they are not named for fear of reprisals, with the exception of one who is willing to divulge their names. Sun yuchen and Wave Field did not respond to my repeated requests for comment.

Sun yuchen's appearance is not intimidating. He was described as a self-styled "child prodigy". He is 30 years old and is known to have graduated from Hupan University, hosted by Jack Ma, the co-founder of Alibaba and one of Asia's top billionaires. Gen's autobiography Brave New World, Brave New World, says his meeting with Ma inspired him to become rich and successful. In sun's first Instagram post, he stands shoulder to shoulder with Ma, holding his hupan University diploma. It makes him look like a protege of Jack Ma.

Sun got his first money from an app called "Accompany Me," an audio version of NBSP; Tinder And a real-time chat room with 10 million users. The app matches users who send voice chats, but also features an audio chat room where hosts flirt with seductive voices, often beyond the scope of pillow talk. In fact, users may enter the chat room just to find the host who is sending the sound of orgasm. When app content is often borderline auditory porn, it's easy to understand why it works. Eventually, I was removed from the Apple and Android app stores, and Chinese government agencies included me in the cleanup of a batch of closed apps that "undermine socialist values."

On one of Sun's frequent trips between Beijing and San Francisco, he describes it as a cake; Bought BitTorrent for $140 million. Part of what sets the deal apart is the atmosphere of great power conflict surrounding it. The Pentagon claims that Chinese firms have penetrated America's vast intellectual property pipeline and are bringing it back to mainland China. And in the summer of 2018, some American experts said that trade policies with China had damaged the American economy while giving the United States little to gain, leading to cold War-style paranoia in the United States. But with the BitTorrent acquisition, Sun suddenly cut across the landscape of conflict, with one foot in Beijing and the other in San Francisco.

BitTorrent executives are concerned that the US government might review the acquisition. Sun was unmoved by the looming risk of a trade war between China and the United States. One former senior employee told me that Sun saw the obstacles and thought, "I can get around them." . "In some ways it's remarkable. It's the mindset of the entrepreneur," they said. But "it would also include breaking the rules on less stringent things." Setting aside these concerns, Sun yuchen famously said within the company, "I think it's okay."

After all, even Mr Ma's Taobao was once blacklisted as a "notorious market" by representatives of the US Trade office for intellectual property infringement. But BitTorrent has survived for so long precisely because its senior staff and lawyers steered clear of grey areas. They provide a technology. They are not distributing pirated content. "We want to make sure we're doing something legal."

Sun yuchen's imagination goes to the wild West, the cryptocurrency craze sweeping the world. Here, the rules are unclear and the regulations are not widely enforced. Since bitcoin's rise, a series of cryptocurrencies have sprung up to compete for dominance, and their value is often entirely speculative. Their selling point was to claim that their tokens could not be manipulated or controlled. Wave Field's official marketing slogan is "decentralised networks".

BitTorrent's old office (left) and its new office (right), from Vjeran Pavic/The Verge

Sun's purchase of BitTorrent brought benefits. BitTorrent moved out of its old building, surrounded by freeway ramps, into a skyscraper at 301 Howard Street. "The new office is beautiful, my goodness," says one former employee. They marveled at the beauty of San Francisco Bay. Lunch in the canteen has become the norm. At the time, BitTorrent staff knew Mr Sun only through video chat. As one former employee puts it: "He came in a very approachable way, a lot like a young man's casual way. I don't say nonsense, but at the time, it was a bit of fun. It wasn't coming in an aggressive way."

Sun yuchen finally flew to San Francisco to build his cryptocurrency empire, wearing his trademark NBSP; Gucci sneakers with big pineapple-shaped logos on them. The ICO of wave field currency TRX is going very well. Sun told employees that one day he would be richer than Bill Gates.

"When he sees him in real life, he thinks he's a celebrity. He doesn't laugh." He has an assistant who brings takeout into his office. Several employees claimed that Sun's arrogance was easy to exploit. One of Sun's deputies in the wave field would deliberately walk half a step behind him in the office, carrying sun's backpack. These moves further amplified Sun's confidence in her own reputation and power. Ordinary English speakers greet him casually, "Hi, Justin," but a former employee who grew up in China says ordinary Chinese workers address him as "Manager Sun," which is much more formal. "Like, I'm scared of you." They said, as another Chinese employee put it: "You can have a worse attitude when you talk to your own people." "We can tolerate higher pressure and expectations."

Sun liked one of the meeting rooms so much that he took it as his office. Outside, there are frosted glass walls that cannot be see-through, but employees occasionally enter the office while carrying out Sun's random tasks and often find what they see disturbing. They are occasionally piled high with cash on the table (" Piles of $100 bills! ) Confusion, and at one point an envelope of money (" Like cash for a stripper!" ). Notably, Sun yuchen's office was apparently unlocked. He hovered between more than five phones, sometimes disappearing for weeks in China, leaving them on the table and possibly containing proprietary company information. Some employees worry that if a phone is stolen, it could turn the company upside down.

"Only the Chinese government can tell you when you can take a vacation."

Sun Yuchen may be at ease with a pile of cash and his mobile phone, but his attitude towards his staff is quite different. One former employee said Mr. Sun once spent five to 10 minutes at the start of a meeting complaining that his driver had accidentally locked him in his car while he was in Beijing. It seems to have something to do with child safety locks. "Who hired this man?" "Asked Sun Yuchen. According to one former employee, the peak of his authoritarian behavior was when he fired his PERSONAL assistant just because she booked a doctor's appointment and ordered an Uber to take him to a doctor's appointment. Sun Yuchen was furious. He wanted the doctor to make house calls. The hr department explained to the assistant that she didn't know how to serve the rich.

"Why does he act like a spoiled child?" One former employee was confused. "He's like a man who's made a lot of money but doesn't know how to use it." One former senior employee said Mr Sun saw himself as coming from "China's elite, people who thought" I'm destined to be extraordinary ".

Employees had questions about wave Field's direction and submitted anonymous questions to company executives during BitTorrent's traditional q&A session. A former employee who was formally briefed at the meeting said that hours before the questions and answers, Mr Sun had the marketing team "send him a list of questions" so he could review questions he did not like. When Sun read about practical questions about the future of the wave field, such as "What if the wave field coin & NBSP;TRX returns to zero", his mood immediately turned dire. "He was extremely concerned," the employee said, and Sun began yelling and losing his temper. "Whoever asked this question, we're going to find out," and then threaten to "kill his or her family."

The after-hours question-and-answer session went well with Zoom. A long table in the central conference room filled with about 10 employees, with frosted glass walls outside. Sun Yuchen and Bo Field joined the conference remotely from senior executives in Beijing. The way one senior Beijing employee answered questions resurfaced concerns about the company's survival among U.S. employees. "Basically, no one should question Justin," the Beijing employee shouted. "He knows what he's doing and has built this company to this point, how dare you question Justin's abilities? That's too rude. Employees exchange views and ask about the unrestricted vacation policies they already enjoy. The answer was: "No one could tell you when you could take a vacation; only the Chinese government said when, you could take a vacation," recalls one former employee. "The corporate culture of BitTorrent began to shift from that moment."

"What if TRX goes to zero?" This question cuts right to the heart of every cryptocurrency dilemma. The people who actually use cryptocurrency derive its value, which is why Sun yuchen is spreading the Wave Field Gospel. "I'd say he's the hype king of the century," one former employee told me.

It was a strange approbation, on the one hand a praise, and on the other a warning.

Because Sun was born in Qinghai, a poor agricultural province in China, he always felt he had to prove himself.

"From the start, he dreamed of doing the seemingly impossible," one former employee told me. According to Sun's autobiography, his mother was an indomitable "tiger mother", while his father was extremely frugal and hated throwing away old things. Sun Yuchen left home when he was young to study Weiqi in Wuhan. Other articles said he had been studying at go school and that his parents were divorced but did not know about it until he returned home.

He overcame his weakness by intelligence and concentration. "He's a machine. He can work 20 hours a day." Sun yuchen began to believe that he should put his professional spirit into the company.

Sun sent to the San Francisco office a flood of pr articles produced by Beijing's pr department. "A lot of it was about Sun Yuchen, extolling his genius, his brilliance and his outstanding leadership. It was pure hymns to Sun Yuchen," said one former employee. "It was disgusting."

Others are about transformation, all about the new corporate culture: the "996 job". "Basically, a lot of Chinese Internet companies have 996 jobs," explains a former employee who grew up in China.

The first article that caught the attention of all American employees was about Sun yuchen's hero, Jack Ma. In the article, Ma called the 996 work schedule a blessing. "I Shared this article," one former employee told me. "The American office was really confused." "What does that mean? Is he saying we should start this 996 crap?" Some wave field employees in San Francisco have witnessed the 996 culture in the Beijing office. In a call at 5 a.m. Beijing time, San Francisco employees were surprised by the chief engineer's presence. "He turned on the video and looked like he had just got out of bed. He said, 'I slept in the office last night,'" one former employee recalled. "I feel very sorry for him."

"And now we're a threat?"

"The Americans, on the contrary, were lazier, but they were more creative," a former senior employee recalled Mr Sun saying. "So he basically gave the hard work to the Chinese team," they said. "Engineers, developers, no question about the 996 job." But there is also irony in the Beijing office. The engineers worked crazy overtime at 996, writing code all the time, and the rest of the Beijing office didn't follow the system at all. The employees' illusion is that Sun yuchen is in San Francisco anyway.

HR requires employees to use a Chinese-language app instead of Slack. Nailing has more monitoring features than Slack, and you can even use Apple Health to count employees' steps and ping users at any given time. "Nails are spyware," says one former employee. Another employee asked HR what would happen if they refused to install. HR replied that it was compiling a list of non-compliant employees and sending it directly to Sun. "Well, now we're a threat?" the former employee recalled.

IT is difficult for US employees to gauge which changes in the wave field work environment can be attributed to China's technology work culture, where management typically takes more control, and which changes are attributable to Sun's leadership style. Several former employees told me about their experiences working in Beijing. They saw every aspect of Chinese corporate culture in Sun Yuchen, but thought he was actually an outlier, "in a class of his own".

Sun has more in common with another powerful American, earning him the nickname "China's Trump". Sun has mocked Donald Trump's marketing efforts on at least one occasion. One former employee also thinks they both have a bias towards authoritarian power. Former employees explained that Sun's inner circle chose only "obedient people" because they had staked their future on him. Sun's choice of loyal followers was compared to Trump's control of the Republican Party, but she was "several levels higher than that."

Despite the clash of ideas and the triumph of sun's "decentralised" Internet, his close ties with his lieutenantsdictate that employees should be bossed around. His preference for control was also in the blood of the wave-field business operation.

When wave Field was ridiculed on popular Reddit posts, it paid topic managers "perogies" to allow the company to eliminate negative posts, a former employee said. "Perogies," says a former employee, were originally "a hardcore, free-speech Redditor." Freedom of expression is part of a decentralised idea, under which ideas can spread freely without censorship. Wave field starts to delete posts arbitrarily. Exasperated Perogies threaten to reveal the wavefield's payment to him. The Beijing office took over, the former employee said. "He disappeared into the night forever, never to be heard from again."

"Wow, that's actually illegal."

While Sun has done everything in his power to control The company's public image, Its app store & NBSP; Tron Network It's completely free. Users use wave field COINS to buy some apps, and the company sometimes gets a small portion of the revenue. The most popular, staff told me, were gambling apps, while Wave Field preferred to "squeeze" any app through shanzhai apps. Sun eventually opened an office in Shenzhen and hired programmers to develop shanzhai apps there. Meanwhile, suspicious developers swarm the wave field network like ants chasing honey. "We don't know who they are. We don't have any contact information for them. These people are going to come into our blockchain and run scams. "Said one former employee. Complaints keep popping up, such as: "I've been cheated out of my life savings!" One former employee recalls that Ms Sun and senior staff in Beijing ignored staff warnings about scams at weekly meetings, sometimes mocking the idea of staff who spoke only English in Chinese and then telling interpreters "don't translate".

Duped users trying to defend their rights. One month, Wave Field's San Francisco office received a letter from the Beijing Bureau of Industry and Commerce. "It comes very often," says one former employee. Pile up.

Despite its success in avoiding criticism from scam victims and the Reddit forum, the company has been unable to avoid self-inflicted, very public harm.

Sun had claimed to raffle off A Tesla as a promotional tool. Sun posted a pre-recorded video of the draw on Twitter, but people noticed a one-second "flash" on the screen and slowed down to see the winner's Twitter profile picture displayed before the announcement. Cryptocurrency watchers believe it is a forgery. Sun yuchen blamed Twitter's video compression, calling it a "glitch."

"Before Sun yuchen announced the winner, someone messed up and the winner's face appeared on the screen," said a former employee. "To any Internet conspiracy theorist, that's 'bullshit.' The winner hasn't been chosen yet, but the winner's face appears on the screen!" Wave Field employees insisted it was a real lottery draw, but amid the uproar online, Sun withdrew the Tesla. Sun held a new lottery and drew a new winner, but the debate continued. To that end, he sent out two Teslas, one for each winner.

One former employee insisted that Sun's leadership style was to blame for the crash. "Justin doesn't care how to run his business down to earth," they say. "All he cared about was making a big impact and getting paid." When employees recounted the Tesla lottery later in a meeting, they realized: "Wow, that's actually illegal."

There is another reason why the Tesla lottery rollover has an important impact internally. "It was probably his biggest meltdown ever," says one former employee. Several former employees could hear Sun screaming at people in his office, his screams echoing through the hall. Sometimes he jumped out of his office, slammed the door and let out an angry howl that was not particularly directed at anyone. The assistant sitting outside his office did not respond. Employees reported hearing him kick the door many times while he was in the office or reprimanding employees over the phone. Everyone is afraid of meetings. From then on, "there was always a rumor that he wanted to fire a bunch of people."

After the incident, a Wave Field employee met Ma Yun, the public relations manager who is Sun Yuchen's hero, at an event in the Bay Area. "I just mentioned Bo Chang and Sun Yuchen, and she said," Please tell him that we don't want anything to do with him."

Almost everyone I spoke to said the cornerstone of Sun's business was not necessarily technology, but marketing to make money from users. At a conference, Sun once compared the marketing team's business goals to a "brothel" business. After the Tesla lottery "flip," Sun responded by seeking something bigger and more glitzy: to be the highest bidder at warren Buffett's charity lunch auction and win the chance to have lunch with him.

"He was good at doing anything that attracted attention and influence," says one former employee. "It's like what kids say, the pursuit of influence."

Sun Yuchen won the auction and spent the money in NBSP; $4.57 million -- almost the price of 130 Tesla cars. When the Marketing Department asked him what the highest price he was willing to pay, he replied, "It's hard to get him to pay the bills, but it's easy to get him to spend the money."

The media frenzy surrounding the auction is considerable. But when a CNBC interviewer asked Sun, Buffett "once compared buying Bitcoin to going to Las Vegas to gamble," and said that "cryptocurrency is a potent rat poison." With a smirk, Sun yuchen would insist that the world's most successful investor did not have the right channels of information about cryptocurrencies.

Shortly after, US President Donald Trump tweeted that he was "not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies" whose value "rests on thin air".

"Mr. President, you have been misled by the fake news... Bitcoin and blockchain happen to be the best development opportunity in the United States! I would like to invite you, as well as the leading figure in the field of encryption, to have lunch with Mr. Buffett on July 25," Sun replied.

A week later, Wave Field's Twitter account announced that the lunch had been postponed because of Sun's kidney stones. The next day, Chinese media carried reports that Sun yuchen was suspected of not only illegal fundraising, gambling and money laundering, but might have been detained by Authorities in Beijing.

That afternoon, Sun streamed live via its Periscope account at his Apartment in San Francisco, with the Bay Area Bridge in the background. He repeated Wave Field's business plan, then said, "I'm fine."

"It's like the whole company has been ripped off."

The staff told me what actually happened. One former employee said Chinese authorities had been calling Mr Sun for weeks "essentially saying you can't go to this lunch because Buffett is" the symbol of the capitalist pig ". When Sun invited Trump, things came to a boiling point. In the midst of a trade war, a Chinese citizen lunched with the President of the United States was clearly intolerable. One former employee said Mr Sun had "effectively ignored warnings from the authorities".

Chinese authorities took action against the wave field. In Beijing, "they searched the office and took away six employees." They even tracked down Sun's estranged father and took him into custody. Their phones were confiscated and they were told that Sun was being investigated for financial problems. One of the detained employees was so terrified that he cried repeatedly. Six hours later, the official returned and said, "Give back your phones. When anyone calls Sun Yuchen, tell him he should not have lunch with Trump." They concluded by saying, "Not to give information to any media."

Sun yuchen finally spoke to his inner circle about the situation. "He kind of sneered and said, 'You know, there was a woman who cried,'" says one former employee. "I think I was freaked out. If the Chinese government came in, I'd probably pull my pants down."

Bo Field convened an emergency "war committee", which allegedly advised Mr Sun not to attend Mr Buffett's lunch on medical grounds. The end result was to nail down the reason for kidney stones. The stories reported by the Chinese media are also false. "The government decided to retaliate against him with the official newspaper," says one former employee, "essentially declaring him a liar."

Sun Yuchen held a meeting of the whole staff in the company. He strolled into the meeting, laughed and said, "Now I know why I'm talking about fake news," convincing the staff that the reports were false. "I was in complete shock," said one employee. Hours earlier, they had been told that Sun had kidney stones, and he turned up at the meeting with no health problems. "It felt like the whole company had been cheated."

The lunch was postponed indefinitely. Sun Yuchen on twitter, a day after tens of millions of media content posted a long strange, "the past period of time, this belongs to my disease to dark moment trapped, I experienced unprecedented turmoil in life, to question and pain, I was awake all night, I deeply reflects on his past actions and marketing for their excessive, keen to hype, feel guilty, then I want to to the public, the media, care for my leadership with regulators, express my most sincere apologies!" ", and said, "In the future, due to illness, there will be a period of rest, with fewer microblog voices, closed doors, and fewer media interviews. Everything will return to the deep development and research of blockchain technology from marketing hype."

It was the least Sun Yuchen style apology, and he quickly deleted the post.

While Sun was criticized in public, the work environment worsened: "Everything quickly became toxic." There are many reasons for colleagues to talk to each other, but instead there is an uncoordinated silence, and events within the wave field are well hidden.

A software engineer and recent graduate of SAN Jose State University and a newcomer to Wave Field; Lukasz Juraszek He arrived at the office early in those days, unaware of the shocking events he was about to witness. Juraszek grew up in Poland and came to the United States to work as an au pair. He met his future wife on a plane, and his precocious children helped him learn English. He ran up a lot of debt in order to get his bachelor's degree in computer software engineering. His new job in Wavefield is crucial to his career ambitions and compliance with U.S. visa requirements. That morning Juraszek sat at his desk,

Sun yuchen rushed out of a nearby office to argue with someone somewhere out of sight behind him. The argument escalated. Juraszek sees Sun yuchen and the head of the engineering department on the partition of his desk. Cong Li Stand facing each other a few metres apart outside the conference room.

"At one point they both looked at me," Juraszek told me, with his head down.

When Cong Li first joined Wave Field, he was a soft-spoken, people-friendly technical leader with an infectious smile. He has expanded his staff because "he has Justin's trust," says one employee. But there are other reasons for Li's success that have something to do with a slightly more Darwinian approach. He is the only one who can tolerate Sun yuchen's demands and threats from time to time. During a meeting with several employees, Sun only half-jokingly threatened to fire Li if he failed to do the promised job.

Juraszek sat in his office and heard Sun yelling at Li, unable to concentrate on his work. "My hands started shaking and I started sweating and then I heard spitting."

Li screamed. Juraszek stood up and saw from the partition that he was sitting back with his hand on the other arm. Sun Yuchen had just beaten him.

Almost every employee I spoke to recalled only hearing the rumor. But in reality, this is not surprising. Li later confirmed to another employee that Sun had hit him. The violence seems to have changed Li and the atmosphere at the office.

Justin Sun, Via Calvin Sit/Bloomberg Via Getty Images

The wave field adjusts its center of gravity to NBSP; BT Movie On the project. Sun pushed Li to launch the product as soon as possible, pushing him so hard that he was too miserable to spend time with his two young daughters. Sun called him sometimes at 4 a.m. only to make empty demands. BT Movie is a decentralized video and Movie distribution application. Uploaders can be rewarded with cryptocurrency. But one employee worried that the design might actually encourage the distribution of pirated films or be used by "hackers" to take money out of the company. The employee also said THAT BT Movie may have come to the attention of US regulators because Wave Field's servers may have transmitted other illegal content, such as child pornography.

Strangely, according to Juraszek, the discussion of the BT Movie project is not documented and is only informally discussed by pinning.

Juraszek's boss is a Chinese employee & NBSP; Zhimin He, who is also concerned about the BT Movie project. One day, as Juraszek was sitting at his desk, he heard a quarrel in a nearby conference room, very loud, even though he was wearing a NBSP; NBSP; NBSP; NBSP; NBSP; Bose noise-canceling headphones can still hear arguments while listening to electronic music. Across the frosted glass of the conference room, He could see two people in the room, Cong and Zhimin He. Inside was a loud bang as a laptop crashed onto a desk. Then Juraszek heard a sound "like a punch, a slap or a hand blow". Li rushed out of the meeting room and the door opened. Juraszek sees Zhimin He "obviously extremely disturbed, leaning back in an awkward sitting position".

Juraszek turns to his colleague. "What is happening in this company is crazy. It will go on forever." He walked to HR, shaking. He felt his job was in jeopardy, and so was his VISA to the United States. "It's hard for non-immigrants to understand my plight, but it's stuck in my mind: If I don't find a new job within a month, I'll be deported," he says. After detailing what had happened, HR told Juraszek that if there was any retaliation, "please let me know."

Soon after, HR introduced workplace harassment classes to employees.

When employees asked Li about the legality of BT Movie, he replied, "Don't worry." After all, we only deal with "engineering development". This is in line with Sun yuchen's catchphrase, "I think it" S OKAY.

Juraszek sees this as an excuse to ignore risk. At the time the software was said not to be operational yet, and Juraszek was skeptical. He went to start BT Movie to check. The app had been activated, and he was shocked by what he saw. Hollywood movie list is very long, available for download in the theater just have only a few weeks of the lion king, followed by including "Hollywood story", "the king of the monster godzilla", "fast and furious: special operations, hurtling after 3" avengers alliance: the infinite war ", "ant man and the wasp", "black panther" and so on.

"Utter betrayal"

Juraszek later learned that HR Mr Zhang had falsified his complaint against Mr Li, so he corrected it in writing but was warned that, according to the employee handbook, he was "destroying the workplace". "My heart went cold," he said. "It's against my values, my principles and what I want to achieve." That's not your place. Shut up and do your job." Juraszek threw the employee handbook directly back to HR, listing a list of violations of company rules. An hour later, the email HR had previously replied to disappeared. "Like I never did." That afternoon, Juraszek's computer stopped working. He was told there was a "server maintenance issue." Puzzled, Juraszek looked around and saw that others had accessed his wave field internal mailbox. More e-mails disappeared.

Juraszek felt the pressure growing. He opened the nail to capture the evidence. He browses the discussion of BT Movie and sees a long list of "Message deleted, message deleted, Message deleted". Juraszek rushes to the project manager & NBSP; Tom Mao There, and told him the nail on the message was gone, they needed to save the evidence. Mao agreed, but seemed hesitant. After their conversation, Juraszek glanced at Mao's computer screen and saw that he had deleted messages from the spare Slack post. "A complete betrayal," says Juraszek. (Mao didn't respond to a request for comment.)

On the train home that night, Juraszek filled out his FBI NBSP; IC3 from the FBI's Cyber Crime Reporting Center.

Inspired by whistleblower Edward Snowden, Juraszek tried to filter out emotions and set up a systematic process to gather evidence before time ran out. "There is no real sleep anymore," says Juraszek. A few days later, Cong Li, HR and Wave Field's lawyers called Juraszek to a meeting. They accused Juraszek of "sharing company information with at least one" third party. Juraszek was fired.

When I interviewed Juraszek, he wore a Wave field T-shirt. He showed me the source code for BT Movie on his computer, which is publicly available. The code shows that, by convention, the wave field receives all the documents the user sends to each other in BT Movie; 20%. The application's code also allows versioning, recording every change made to the code and who changed it. Each person who makes a change has an identifier -- a random string of letters and Numbers. But for Juraszek, they are not random. He identifies a list of unique identifiers that belong to the wave field staff of the BT Movie project team. He showed me the seeds uploaded by wave Field employees that directed users to servers hosting pirated Hollywood movies. Juraszek then notes a small piece of code showing the wave field extracting the remaining 80% of each movie they upload. But are there any pirated movies on wave Field's servers? There is no way to know, Juraszek said.

It is directly involved in one of the main issues in the us-China trade war: intellectual property theft. "It was a very unreal situation," Juraszek told me, recalling his last days in The Wave field. "It's a fusion of fiction and reality."

The FBI never responded to Juraszek's complaint.

Cong Li resigned from Wavefield in March. In a way, Sun treats his right-hand man worse than his whistleblower, Juraszek.

Sun never understood the real reason why Li, who like Juraszek is also on a US work visa, tried to satisfy all his demands. A former wave field employee said Li had been careful not to let Sun know about his visa status. If Li is fired, his family may be forced to leave the United States.

If BT Movie is a liability, but with NBSP; BT Live The project pales in comparison. The latter got former wave Field employees into trouble, and Sun clearly wanted the true purpose of the project to be kept strictly secret.

On the surface, it's just a live streaming app. It's actually the clever founder of BitTorrent & NBSP; Bram Cohen I originally wrote the code for this project. "It's been mothballed and put aside, so it can only be restarted." But when engineers don't really know what they're building, it's "weird." Mr Sun demanded "a very, very aggressive timetable". Employees thought the project was "great," but the market was flooded with real-time streaming apps like FaceTime, Facebook Live and Skype. "What's the selling point?" one perplexed former employee wonders. "It's not hard to stream video to people on their phones," said another employee. Then management added a familiar goal: "Decentralize it."

"So you make a decentralized, and said," now this is a very interesting question. "the idea is to use BitTorrent protocol to support real-time streaming media. Forward will not have a centralized system to control and real-time streaming media. A former employee said:" I think, man, if a few years ago the Arab unrest when the application is too good, Syria close shut down Internet service at the time. "" so that's the way we are enhanced."

It seems that Sun yuchen may be pursuing the software that dissidents around the world dream of. He attended most of the relevant internal meetings and made the decisions. Employees have never seen anything like this. "He gave us instructions, which was basically like, 'Go copy BIGO Live,'" says one former employee. "I can't say it's a direct quote because he didn't speak English in almost all the meetings I attended. There were translators."

BIGO Live is a Chinese streaming app that lets users access chat rooms to watch Live content. The audience tipped the anchor. BIGO Live sees India as a development bridgehead outside the Chinese market. So Wave Field appoints silicon Valley veterans, British expatriates and NBSP; Richard Hall Travel to India to study BIGO Live.

Employees who worked at the time said Hall was initially excited by his findings. He researched anchors and found that BIGO Live was in decline in India, and wave Field could easily beat it. Anchors earn so little that they are practically nonexistent. One former employee said Hall's vision was to "pay them a high price" for the large number of viewers they needed to bring in, and "give them a reasonable price for their Live time so they could easily switch to BT Live."

"It won't work out well for you."

Hall then began investigating BIGO Live anchors. Usually, they are female Indian university students who want to earn some extra money on the side. Day in and day out, he learned, these girls endure the lewd comments of trolls. The worst guns seem to come from the oil-rich gulf states. Several BIGO Live anchors, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that they had been sexually harassed and that the platform lacked censorship. One anchor recalled that her campus profile picture was transplanted into a naked woman and spread by a serial harasser. Shocked, Hall returned to San Francisco with only one comment: "We can't afford not to audit. We have to audit."

Hall continues to promote the review of multiple wave field projects. Later, when Hall was ready to take a $10,000 cruise with his family to celebrate his 50th birthday and 20th wedding anniversary, The city forced him to cancel the trip, even though it had been approved months in advance. When Hall Shared his memos of conversations with management, he was told, "This is not going to work out well for you." Hall was eventually summoned to a meeting and dismissed as "unfit for duty". He walked to a colleague's apartment, drank whiskey and vowed to Sue. (Mr. Hall declined to comment on the story.)

Sun was not concerned about Hall's discovery in India. But according to several former employees, The then-CEO of BitTorrent & NBSP; Jordy Berson Make a commitment (he is deeply involved in the BT Live project) : "We won't do it unless it's vetted." Moreover, the cost of setting up an audit office in India is negligible. At least in theory, without an audit, BT Live might not last a day on the Apple or Android app stores.

Sun yuchen was furious at the team's objections. "He's basically replacing the whole team with the China team. He said that, he told us," the San Francisco staff tried to communicate with Garlic, BT Live's head of engineering and product in China. Garlic called Ms. Sun and said, "The boss is welcome to do what he wants. Just do as she says." They questioned whether Garlic would resist Mr. Sun's worst instincts. As Sun pressed ahead with the project, no one knew that someone in the San Francisco office had discovered sun's deeply hidden plans.

I was told about a member of the BT Live team named NBSP; Oscar Ko The story of a product designer. He is a devout Employee of BitTorrent, an American firm, who has spent weekends washing the feet of homeless people in San Francisco. He has a secret skill.

"What he really wants is Pandora's Box!"

"Oscar Ko speaks Chinese," says one former employee. "I didn't know that. The rest of my team didn't know that either," Ko abruptly resigned one day. The bewildered former employee asked him what had happened. "I'll tell you offline," Ko said. When the two meet, Ko tells a story. Sun walked into the San Francisco venue one day, independently explained his idea for BT Live in Chinese, and got up to leave. Ko understood everything. "Justin Sun is like making it a porn app that bypasses Chinese regulations and the Firewall."

The key is to take advantage of the BitTorrent protocol. "Because of the decentralized nature of peer-to-peer sharing, it's very difficult to track and shut something down once it's sown and spread," explains one former employee. "In an ideal world, people would be able to talk about freedom and democracy and all that stuff." 'But it's a Pandora's box,' they explained. Anything can be streamed live, including images of child abuse and terrorist content. "Worse, it can be addictive. Governments and regulators won't be able to shut it down."

Now the team has been informed, directly against Sun Yuchen. But they were shocked by his reaction. "He wants is a Pandora's box! For him, because in China is restricted, his thought is open a Pandora's box, and then the government not to shut it down. When all goes well, he has irreplaceable position in the market, anything can flow in it. People can't spread before, can't see anything... now, anyone can do it, can't stop."

Everyone USES wave field COINS to buy admission into the network.

The BT Live team slammed on the brakes. At a meeting, they asked Sun to review the application. Sun Yuchen had an idea and went to the whiteboard. He drew a box and then drew a line in the middle that looked like the front page of a newspaper. Everything above the median, or "one screen," is the user's login page to BT Live. Fully subject to review. Sun then points to the bottom half of the box, the "two screens," where the uncensored content stays. All users need to scroll down to see it.

The staff who attended the meeting were shocked. The team has even developed value & NBSP;; The $9,000 suite of auditing tools automates tasks. Sun yuchen freely admits this. When the team leader informed his engineer of Sun's audit trick, an engineer slammed his notebook shut and "walked out in anger."

"In my opinion, Sun Yuchen is a genius and a demon. Nothing can stop him."

The team later demonstrated the application to Sun. "It was clear that Sun wasn't concerned at all. He was distracted and didn't pay attention at all," insisted a front Field employee. BitTorrent CEO Berson He sent an email praising the hard work of the BT Live team and announced his resignation the next day. "He was 100 per cent fired," says one former employee. Sun moved the project to his Office in China. "In my opinion, Sun Yuchen is a genius and a demon. Nothing can stop him," said one employee.

A few months later, Lucasz Juraszek and Richard Hall filed legal actions against Sun yuchen: from civil charges of fraud, harassment, and retaliation against the whistleblower. They demanded a public trial. Sun's lawyers asked for arbitration. The judge's support for Sun yuchen means details of the case may never be made public.

Juraszek and Hall's lawyers filed a 52-page complaint with Justice Department prosecutors in San Francisco, but they never got a response.

Decentralisation carries in principle the seductive spirit of the early days of the Internet, when it was less regulated and undisturbed by surveillance. The Internet was free at the time, but it still made the era seem like a touchstone of calm. Perhaps decentralisation does indeed make this kind of Internet possible. However, it is hard to believe that Sun yuchen is committed to this lofty goal. His business idea is not intended to be more decentralised, but to profit from it, regardless of the damage it may cause. Decentralisation has given Sun a reasonable ideological cloak under which he can continue to avoid being held accountable.

"He had no boundaries to achieve his goals," says one former employee. "He doesn't care about anybody. He doesn't care about anything." Employees quit or are fired in droves, exhausted by standing up for their beliefs. Most tragically, Sun yuchen destroyed idealists and made them lose faith. "I believe in the technology. I think it has a purpose," the former employee says, reflecting on the practical consequences of how Mr Sun hopes to implement it. "He won't even think about it."

"I can only see the human race paying the price for all this."