in 2014 bitcointalk forum user known as thankful_for_today forked the codebase of bytecoin into the name bitmonero, which is a compound of bit (as in bitcoin) and monero (literally meaning "coin" in esperanto). the release of bitmonero was very poorly received by the community that initially backed it. plans to fix and improve bytecoin with changes to block time, tail emission and block reward had all been ignored, and thankful_for_today simply disappeared from the development scene. a group of users led by johnny mnemonic decided that the community should take over the project, and five days later they did while also changing the name to monero.