Justin Bons@Justin_Bons
The Ethereum Foundation's new insane mandate: "Reject temptations around flows of value"
Thirty-eight pages of quasi-religious communist drivel that totally neglects users' needs, products & scaling
Completely going back on the pivot!
The EF is now anti-growth & anti-value: 🧵
Destroying any & all hope we might have had of returning to a sane roadmap: ETH is now fully committed to remaining uncompetitive forever
Throwing pragmatism out of the window, ETH is instead taking an extreme left turn into weird, quasi-religious & cult-like thinking:
Using their own language: ETH is adopting a "network spirituality" to tend the "infinite garden" until the day the world needs a "sanctuary" against tyranny...
The practical result of such thinking will be excessive caution when it comes to scalability. Creating the necessary cultural backdrop for continued stagnation
The quote we started this with makes this abundantly clear & the full context makes it even worse:
"We reject temptations around flows of value, even when they are framed as reasonable rewards, or as necessary for alignment or self-perpetuation. We consider them antithetical to our mission and our legal constitution"
Fees are vital to long-term security, decentralization & scarcity. They acknowledge this & are prepared to let ETH die over THEIR principles, & that is exactly what will happen. This also explains why there is a literal "Seppuku Licence" in the mandate, making ETH "fall on its own sword"
These principles are forever too, like a proper cult, it is perfect now & can never be changed as the supreme leader states:
"Our Mandate is written for a thousand-year horizon ... we do not expect any material compromise within our lifetimes"
This type of insane language is reminiscent of something between a religious cult & the Communist Manifesto. Only suited for niche & toxic internet communities. Not mass adoption & especially not for institutional adoption! As it comes across as incredibly unprofessional, unreasonable & dangerous. Severely hurting ETH's long-term prospects
The EF is literally forcing its employees to sign the mandate, which includes a "source seppuku licence" pledging their "Ethereum alignment" or get fired! Unbelievable, weird & scary stuff
It is clear that the cult leader is now fully back in charge, as the mandate also explicitly speaks out against stakeholder governance:
"Security also means governance minimization; no social layer should override protocol guarantees lightly"
That means the status quo continues & the decision-making in ETH remains a "GitHub Dictatorship", a form of governance totally inadequate to stuart in a cypherpunk future!
To make this even clearer: ETH governance/decision-making is extremely centralized & particularly vulnerable to capture. Which is deeply hypocritical, especially for a community that claims to value freedom so highly
A benign dictatorship can work sometimes, but the problem with all forms of dictatorship is that the leadership eventually changes & when it is bad, it gets very bad!
That is exactly where we are today; the dysfunction within ETH's leadership is clear to all now. From the insane ideology, but more importantly, also from the results: Four years wasted on a mistake of a roadmap (L2 scaling), only for it to waste the next four years on another totally uncompetitive roadmap (ZK-EVM)!
Unlike most of ETH's competitors. The owners of ETH have no say over this roadmap, as they cannot even vote with their stake. They can only vote with their feet, something I suggest everyone should do with great haste at this stage!
Leave ETH! Adopt scalable & decentralized alternatives instead, such as SOL, NEAR, SUI & many more. There, we can actually build competitive products that will change the world for the better
That is far more cypherpunk than anything ETH is doing now, which, as a reminder, pushed most of its users onto centralized L2's that can censor & steal all user funds without delay, while their ivory tower leadership virtue signalled their moral superiority
The best cypherpunk alternatives are chains like SOL, NEAR, SUI & more, where performant, competitive, & world-changing applications on decentralized, censorship-resistant, & permissionless L1 rails can actually be built!
Abandon the sinking ship that is ETH, for the sake of the very cypherpunk ideals they falsely claim to uphold ✊