Firstly, the compensation structure was ludicrous. Many people were upset about an uncapped ICO -- I thought this was fine, until it became apparent that they would make hundreds of millions of dollars IMMEDIATELY. They have absolutely no incentive to continue the product or work another day in their lives. A huge portion of their new found wealth doesn't have a vesting period or depend on any tangible benchmarks.
Secondly, the background of Tezos is completely revised and modified according to their whims. They claim they had a large team working on the project for 4-5 years full-time. Even a cursory glance exposes that one person worked on Tezos while working full time for a major bank and that the team grew insignificantly 6-12 months before ICO. They even changed their LinkedIn profiles to revert this history.
Lastly, both Arthur and his wife are completely inept socially, or knew they would get rich enough to not give a fuck. I'm not one to judge a person, but its certainly not ideal as a manager and figure-head of a billion dollar project. I didn't even think it mattered until I heard they were incredibly rude to just about everyone in their Slack channel asking the most innocuous questions. I thought it must have been one bad experience. I joined the channel and the very first few words I spoke were met by flaming from Arthur himself. Not a couple hours later, he's raging on another person in the chat room at a time when there might be 100 messages/week. Every interaction he had over the next week oscillated between flaming and get rich memes. Later they would delete channel history and eventually shut them down completely under the guise of "preventing fishing attempts", though I never saw a suspicious link anywhere. Arthur stepped down as President because of these issues, but his wife did not fare much better (although I never interacted with her directly).
The ICO seemed worse than burning money. It would be like giving money to organized crime or the opposition party.
IMO they have no intention of delivering anything, except maybe to save face. If the past is any indication, they don't give a shit about saving face either.
There are two repositories. A public one and a private one. The Breitmans contracted with an OCaml shop
> They have absolutely no incentive to continue the product or work another day in their lives.
The article disproves your point. They haven't walked away. I think it's commonly accepted that if you pay someone upfront they either don't do the work or do a shitty job. That isn't always the case.
> I didn't even think it mattered until I heard they were incredibly rude to just about everyone in their Slack channel
I was there for most of its existence. They weren't rude. He never posted memes and wasn't that active in the chat compared to others and their community manager. It was pretty cool to see him respond to questions, but they were mostly short answers because A) he's busy and B) the questions tend to be quite repetitive because no one reads the white paper.
> Later they would delete channel history and eventually shut them down completely under the guise of "preventing fishing attempts", though I never saw a suspicious link anywhere
I was there for the end. Because of the way Slack is setup anyone can join and message other members. The scammers were messaging everyone telling them the ICO started and they should contribute at a fake URL. Because there is a lot of FOMO in this space their strategy works quite well.
The scammers also tried to take control of incoming webhooks. I'm not sure if the configuration was wrong or whatever, but I was quick to point out who was causing the deception. They were banned but the channel was shutdown shortly after that. I can dig up the screenshots if necessary.
> IMO they have no intention of delivering anything, except maybe to save face. If the past is any indication, they don't give a shit about saving face either.
The commits on Github prove that isn't true. They have put a lot of work into this blockchain and smart contracts that can be formally verified.
These are a lot of untruths in your comment.
https://www.tezos.com/static/papers/Tezos_Overview.pdf cites development began in 2014 and with a full staff of 10 core developers. I suppose I misread and was wrongly under the impression that they always had those numbers. But it doesn't change that Arthur and the gang modified their LinkedIn pages after the fact to remove full time employment at their day jobs and replace it with full time employment at Tezos.
> IMO they have no intention of delivering anything...
>> The commits on Github prove that isn't true.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tezos/comments/7791ex/the_path_forw...
Yes development continues, but they've downsized the now unnecessary development team to from 10 to 4 and instead are relying on 3 outsourcing shops. They more or less have to spend the money they raised that belongs to the foundation, which requires significant public auditing and transparency while reducing their own involvement and spending their own windfalls as they please. The entire team except the leadership is gone. And now they are removing the head of the foundation.
> They weren't rude.
You're wrong. Arthur made everything conversation personal and used 4chan style name-calling all the time. Really obscene insults flowed from him almost everytime I heard him speak. He used memes to respond to questions he was probably admittedly tired of answering. But the content was ludicrous. They were Shkreli-like get rich or die trying memes. It might have been tounge-in-cheek, but its impossible to tell with him because he couldn't handle a normal conversation.
So 8.5% of $232 million would be about $20 million and it's hard to say what 10% of the genesis block would be worth over the course vesting. Below are the details about the payments to the Breitmans.
Payment Structure and Contrast to Common fundraising practices It has become common in fundraisers, or in token generation events (TGEs) for founders of entities selling tokens to reward themselves, in addition to their token allocation, via salaries with little or no accountability and oversight and in a manner that doesn’t reflect the viability of their product.
In contrast, payments to DLS are contractually prescribed via the following criteria, which are being shared publicly and in advance of the fundraiser:
No payment will be made unless and until the terms in the preceding section of this document have been met. Once met, DLS’ shareholders will receive 8.5% of the contributions made during the fundraiser. In addition, DLS’ shareholders will receive a 10% allocation of the tokens in the genesis block, placed in a smart contract that will vest monthly over a period of 48 months. These criteria represent a far more transparent and equitable reflection of the reality of the transaction.
Can you cite that claim please? just curious :)
Of course, I'd have preferred to see a technical article about the engineering backing the project. Rather than one about a bad apple making its way to a foundation board member sit and caught self-dealing by the rest of the team. But, it's not the end of the world. I hope people will move on soon. Guy was caught. He has been suspended. I guess his removal is pending modulo some legal process.
That being said, I'm a bit surprised the project hasn't had much more interest from HN readers though. Why is that?
It's going to be one of the largest commercial application of OCaml, alongside Jane Street's. There's lots of cool hacking going on and software engineering challenges associated to it e.g replacing wasteful Proof-of-Work with PoS, hot-swapping protocol upgrades (voted on by stakeholders) safely, figuring out constitutionalism etc. (https://github.com/tezos/tezos).
Among the thing that I'm most excited about is the inflation-funded innovation.
Every voting cycle, you can submit an amendment to the protocol alongside a potential token issuance (i.e an amount of tokens that will be issued to you if the amendment is accepted). That means you get directly rewarded for the added-value you bring to the protocol.
That's a great positive feedback loop. Right now, I believe that there can only be one amendment approved every cycle. So, the "great engineer quits menial technical job to work on state-of-the-art amendments to the Tezos protocol" scenario isn't quite feasible on the short term horizon. I'd wager that is a limitation that will be eventually engineered out. It has so much potential.
Disclaimer: author donated to the Tezos fundraiser.
Tezos intends to solve the contentious fork problem by incorporating the governing structure into the protocol. Whether this works better than what is currently happening in the Bitcoin community remains to be seen.
Back to your initial question. Ethereum is a good example, but most of the ICO's that raised money recently won't launch until 2018-2019 at the earliest. In fact, some of them have innovation gaps. It's a long road.
How? I have yet to see anything useful built with it. Except for more ICOs whose use for now is moot, what problem does Ethereum successfully solve today that makes you say it delivered on its promises?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-funding-tezos-spe...
> In pitching the story to Reuters, John O‘Brien, a principal of Strange Brew, had made claims about Tezos’ progress. He wrote: “The applications of Tezos, ranging from derivatives settlement to micro-insurance, are real and recognized by industry giants. Ernst & Young, Deloitte, LexiFi, etc. have adopted Tezos in their development environments and labs.”
> On Oct. 3, a spokeswoman for the accounting firm Ernst & Young told Reuters: “The statement is not correct. EY has not adopted Tezos.” A spokesman for Deloitte said Tezos’ code is “one of many technologies we’re considering” with blockchain, but it’s “still early stage and we haven’t used the technology for a client project.”
> Jean-Marc Eber, CEO of the French software company LexiFi, said, “The sentence, as stated, isn’t accurate and unfortunately exaggerated, to say the least.” While there had been “informal contacts,” he said, “at this stage, LexiFi has not adopted Tezos’ technology in its development environment or labs.”
Jesus.
Understand how the SEC works. They're complaint-driven. After a few "I lost money on Zowiecoin after they didn't do what they said they'd do" complaints, a case gets assigned to a staff investigator. They dig up the obvious stuff quickly, and if it looks like there's enough bad stuff, the slow process of doing something to the people behind Zowiecoin starts moving forward. The SEC announces about two enforcement actions a day.
We'll start seeing SEC actions once ICOs crash and there are angry investors.
> In order to reduce uncertainty regarding the monetary mass, addresses showing no activity for over a year (as determined by timestamps) are destroyed along with the coins they contain
It is, however, followed by this footnote:
> (inactive addresses will no longer lose their funds after one year as initially proposed in the white paper, they will only lose their staking rights until they become active again. What it means is that if an address is inactive, it will not be selected to create blocks (which would slow down the consensus algorithm), and it will not be allowed to vote until it is reactivated (to avoid uncertainty about participation rate).
1. https://www.tezos.com/static/papers/white_paper.pdf
Edit: Added footnote
Does it do anything to distinguish sham transactions from real ones? Or have any theory about the difference? If not, then it's not doing anything novel.
(I know you're not the advocate of this, just a general reply to technical solutions to low money velocity.)
Take a look at the stuff Ethereum is researching. Watch one of Vitalik's talks on YouTube.
I'm assuming that Diego Pons is a friend of Arthur's because they are both from France and both lived in NYC. I also have a hunch that there is a secret agreement in writing in place that compels Mr. Schmitz-Krummacher to vote according to someone else's wishes, perhaps Mr. Pons. If there is such an agreement in place, hopefully Mr. Pons is staying loyal to Arthur Breitman.
Handing over 200-400 Million to a three person foundation that is 1/3 company formation agent, 1/3 alleged crook, and 1/3 random software engineer seems like it may not have been the best idea after all. But the reason for this is probably to take advantage of the lack of know your customer laws in Switzerland.
https://forums.tezos.community/t/who-is-running-the-tezos-fo...
