An open letter to the Ethereum community

If you missed yesterday’s fireworks you should catch up by reading my “Open letter to Gavin and EthCore” and the subsequent discourse that occurred on reddit. Both are important context for this letter.

I begin with an apology. I normally give myself a 24 hour cool down period before proceeding with a post such as yesterday’s. I know myself well enough to know that I don’t make the best decisions when emotions are high. I failed to do that yesterday and the result was a letter containing more rhetoric and emotional arguments than I’m proud of.

I believe there still would have been conflict, but I expect it may have been less contentious were I to have taken the time to distill things down to a more factual accounting of events with minimal subjectivity and conjecture.

Going back and reading it, I also dislike my tone of moral superiority. I don’t have the market cornered on right and wrong. Everyone gets to make their own judgement call as to where they draw those lines.

Public disagreements can damage communities and failed to do everything in my power to minimize the damage that yesterday’s post caused. For these things I am sorry.

My friends and I have a thing we say to acknowledge when one of our actions had a negative effect on someone else but that we feel the overall good still ended up outweighing the bad.

“Sorry.. Not Sorry”

So here is the “Not Sorry” part.

I’m not sorry for posting these issues publicly. As I read and re-read the entire comment thread one thing stood out to me. There is information asymmetry within our Community. As to why this asymmetry exists, that is a topic that could likely fill its own blog post.

I’d be curious to know how many people learned about the following things because of yesterday’s discussion.

• That when the effort to re-license cpp-ethereum began Gavin communicated that he would support the effort.
• That Gavin later blocked the effort to re-license cpp-ethereum.
• That the Parity team had an easy opportunity to include the go-ethereum team in the Kovan testnet but didn’t.

It feels prudent to highlight that these are not accusations or conjecture. These are all things that happened.

So while I take full responsibility for the shortcomings of how this information was presented, I’m not sorry that it spawned a public discourse about these topics. Information asymmetry is power asymmetry. I hope our community moves forward from this ordeal better equipped to make decisions, form opinions, and interpret events from a more informed position.

Thanks to everyone who was a productive part of yesterday’s discourse. Productive discourse isn’t always easy in the blockchain space and I’d like to think the Ethereum community did pretty well yesterday.

And now, back to writing documentation for Populus. Happy Tuesday everyone.

P.S. Someone posted this excellent conspiracy theory in the comment thread.