The IoP Community became an adult
Many people wanted some clarifications in my role of a recent turmoil around the Fermat Project and the Internet-of-People community. I cannot be involved too much in this, so I thought I share my view-point here.
I do not want to go back too much in time, so let’s start the story about a wonderful Fermat developer retreat hosted in Davos by the most wonderful angel investor I have ever met. Lan was not only so kind to pay the trip for the developers, but she shared her house and hospitality with us, too. Cooked for us, poured orange juice and wine to our glass. After many experiences with rich people in Hungary, one does not expect such a good treatment from her league and status, while I am just a nerd who codes for food.
There was a reason for that meeting of course. There were many fears, doubts and uncertainty surrounding the project at the time. Lots of people got disappointed in the progress and left the project with anger around that time. In Davos we had lots of discussions and decided that founder and visionary Luis Fernando Molina has too many roles in both the Fermat project and the IoP community, so he will step down from many of those roles and keeps the visionary, white-paper writing, investor searching, explaining-to-people tasks. Probably no people are able to manage such a complex project alone, therefore we decided to decentralize the government of the project putting different roles on several people. That was the time we discussed that Guillermo will be managing developers in the Fermat project and he organizes efforts there. We also discussed to leave space for new entrepreneurs to invest in projects surrounding IoP and co-operating with the Fermat project to drive direction of the IoP development. The IoP Consortium was founded exactly to be a conciliation body between these independent projects. We also discussed that an incubator for-profit AG will be founded in Switzerland to prioritize available investments so that the most important use-cases do not wither out without funding. I departed from that retreat so enthusiastically that I even wrote an article why I work for Fermat.
But actually, none of that happened in the last 4 months. Well, actually 1 thing happened: Markus and Daniel Csendes stood up as an entrepreneur and started application development projects that also advance the core infrastructure as a side effect.
Guillermo started his own project leaving the original Fermat development team unfunded. Even the most pressing issues on the blockchain were not fixed, because the original developer Rodrigo went off to a full-time job to feed himself. What happens around Guillermo is a mystery for old members of the community. I have not seen a single commit since Davos that was done by his team.
The incubator firm was not formed. As most of us already anticipated in Davos, even in this gold-rush that surrounds crypto-projects, it is difficult to get investors for a platform without demonstrating application MVPs that cover pain-points of actual users.
Luis was happy to hear that some of the old developers went on with the roadmap we discussed in Davos without any contracts and were still working on such an MVP. He even sent some tokens after we asked for it. It was my worst-payed job ever since I gave maths lessons to my schoolmates in the secondary school, but it was still a nice gesture without any official agreements or demands. You will soon see about the result of this development that in the end got some investment independent from Fermat, but we decided to go dark — like Guillermo did — to avoid building up too much expectation in the community that might be crushed by some delay.
It was difficult to sense, but Luis tried to step down from some of his roles. This was not proceeding fast, the old habits of micromanaging some development steps and harassing some guys for progress reports seemed to be difficult to dismiss, but changing habits is a difficult thing to do for a human. Giving up power that you already attribute to yourself leaves regular people with fear and distrust in others. Even those who did not read the New Testament in the Scripture know about Saul who had to be blinded by God for some days to crush him and let him think through what he did in the past. Then, only after then, he became Paul — with a new name — , the greatest apostle in the history who put himself always second.
This crushing moment came after Luis decided to threaten all chapters that he removes all of their mining licenses in the IoP blockchain in the public chat. This decision was autonomously done by him and was not a consensus built by all involved parties. This started an avalanche of events that happen quite fast in our days supported by electronic communication and 144-character messages.
- IoP chapters started renaming themselves to avoid association with the Fermat project itself.
- IoP chapters demanded protection against this removal of their licenses from the developer who recently has fixed bugs on the blockchain. They were reassured it cannot happen without their consent, but version 4.1 was released to make sure the Fermat trademark is not infringed by any means if there are some disputes between the IoP Community and the Fermat Project.
- The GitHub organization of the IoP was protected from one-sided influence of the Fermat project and the new blockchain release was done there. (this is the part I was heavily involved in)
By Sunday, 11th June 2017 the IoP Community drew a bright border between itself and the Fermat project, which border was quite clearly described in Part III of The Book of Fermat published recently by the Fermat project. No forking was done on the blockchain, nothing happened to the token balances of anyone, only the branding was changed as usual when an open-source project is maintained by another team.
What happened afterwards is not surprising to anyone knowing the psyche of humans. Accusations, threatenings, demands came from the members of Fermat to turn everything back to how it was. Luis even warned Bittrex that some people are planning to fork the token and tweeted that the Fermat project is under attack. So Bittrex locked trading while the dispute is being resolved.
What comes next from the Fermat project, I do not know. But I still believe in the vision and I participate in the coming release of some interesting and innovative applications that are built on top of the Internet-of-People public infrastructure.
I can just hope that the emotions will be vented out, all people get rational again and they start thinking about the current situation and the way forward. The community finally grew up from its centralized leadership. There are more development teams around IoP, all contributing to the goal of having a public infrastructure for these applications. When Bittrex resumes trading and the applications are released, the token price will reflect that also favoring the Fermat project members and the investors who still hold lots of tokens.
After this turmoil I expect the IoP Community will reestablish a relation with all entrepreneurs around it, including the Fermat project, but now in an adult way. Just like after the adolescent age boys start a new, more equal relation with their fathers. Respecting what they received in their childhood, discussing things with them, but rejecting control from their parents.
