Blurt is a carbon copy of nothing, and is in fact a new chain with balances from Steem's block 43,256,969.

We do not have a higher moral ground-- except maybe in that HIve chose to exclude some individuals based on their vote history and affiliations. I've been on-record saying that was a mistake, and I'm pretty sure that the majority of the folks working on Hive know that was a mistake too.

Thing is, when you're doing something difficult and complex, you're going to make mistakes.

Lord knows we're going to make mistakes with Blurt, I just don't know what those mistakes will be yet :).

And I'm not going to condemn hive "OMG they made a mistake it's so terrible, hive bad, burn down the bees and their hive!" -- cause fact is, overall hive is pretty good and they put a lot of effort into it.

For the record, Steem is pretty good overall, as well.

We do have different software, a different blockchain altogether, and a different development direction from both Steem and Hive.

importing balances

Initally, Blurt was going to fork off of steem in the same manner that HIVE did-- basically preserving the chain of blocks.

But then Steem's HF23 happened, and if we used the "hive technique" we would have had to accept HF23 in our codebase, so that was a non-starter.

In the end, we chose to import balances from 43256969 and basically nothing else.

Thanks for your questions and feedback.