Mining Pool Tycoon Chun Wang: Blacklist Those Who Can't Distinguish Time Zones
Chun Wang, co-founder of the Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool, stated on social media that six years ago, he blacklisted an entire company after a member of the Zcash team repeatedly confused Eastern Standard Time (EST) with Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) during communications. Looking back six years later, he still believes it was one of his best decisions.
His reasoning is that if a person cannot distinguish between basic time zone notations like EST and EDT, they are likely to confuse other key details, such as Bitcoin and USD.
To support this judgment, he cited the 2021 BlockFi incident: BlockFi originally needed to pay about $700 in rewards to customers participating in a March promotional event, but due to an internal system error, it mistakenly credited some customer accounts with 701.4 Bitcoins, worth over $24 million at the time.
This error was discovered and disclosed by BlockFi in mid-May 2021, affecting fewer than 100 customers. According to media reports, the total value of the mistakenly credited Bitcoins was once estimated at around $35 million. BlockFi subsequently sought to recover the funds and issued legal warnings to customers who refused to return the money.
Chun Wang is one of the earliest operators in the crypto industry, and F2Pool, which he co-founded, is one of the longest-running Bitcoin mining pools in the industry. In 2025, he also participated as a crew member in a privately funded SpaceX polar orbit manned space mission, making him a well-known "veteran" figure in the crypto circle.
Such anecdotes are repeatedly shared on social media as a spontaneous risk control alternative mechanism formed in the crypto industry due to the lack of a unified compliance framework: investors and trading counterparts, unable to rely on mature regulatory reviews, use the meticulousness of handling basic details like time zones, units, and decimal points as a proxy indicator to judge whether they can trust someone with funds. By filtering out partners based on these signals in advance, they avoid potential operational errors that could lead to financial losses, while parties like BlockFi, which failed to establish sufficient internal controls, bear the costs of fund outflows and reputational damage.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Chun Wang is one of the earliest Bitcoin miners in China, and the mining pool F2Pool he co-founded has survived multiple bull and bear cycles. After the complete ban on mining in China in 2021, it successfully relocated overseas, making it one of the few infrastructure companies in the crypto industry that has operated for over a decade. In 2025, he participated as an individual in a privately funded SpaceX manned space mission, orbiting the Earth in a polar trajectory—his willingness to invest crypto wealth in such unprecedented high-risk projects reflects the same personality trait as his hardline decision-making style of completely blacklisting partners over minor details: a high tolerance for uncertainty but extremely strict standards for execution within controllable ranges.
The anecdote itself does not involve any capital flow, but the BlockFi incident he cited illustrates how a capital path can be rewritten due to a single operational error: an internal system or process mistake led to a payable that was originally worth a few hundred dollars turning into hundreds of Bitcoins flowing out of BlockFi's balance sheet directly into customer wallets. Subsequently, BlockFi had to initiate recovery efforts and even lawsuits, essentially trying to pull back funds that had already left the balance sheet—this indicates that in crypto lending businesses, what can instantaneously impact the balance sheet is often not market risk, but operational risk.
Similar "decimal/unit errors leading to large fund mispayments" have also occurred in traditional financial history, such as Citigroup mistakenly transferring about $900 million to Revlon's lenders in 2020 due to a flaw in its internal software interface design, which later became a classic case cited repeatedly in risk control and auditing fields. From an industry perspective, BlockFi in 2021 was in a phase of aggressive expansion in the crypto lending business, trying to capture market share (the company was later penalized by the SEC in 2022 for its interest-bearing deposit products)—this is a typical stage where "business expansion outpaces internal control capabilities," making both crypto lending platforms and any rapidly expanding financial intermediaries prone to exposing operational risks during this phase.
This phenomenon ultimately points to a structural judgment regarding regulatory changes: in a market vacuum lacking mature external regulatory constraints on operational processes, investors and partners will spontaneously develop an informal, experience-based alternative risk control mechanism—such as using the accuracy of time zone terminology as a trust proxy indicator. As industry regulation gradually matures and compliance requirements are formally incorporated into licensing and auditing standards, this type of "human-driven" risk control reliant on personal judgment will be gradually replaced by institutionalized compliance processes. However, until the regulatory vacuum is filled, individual experiential filtering effectively plays the role of a de facto "regulatory layer."
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Small oversights are often precursors to large risks.
In the absence of regulation, character becomes risk control.
In the details of execution, the foreshadowing of the outcome has already been written.