On ETC, the Treasury, and Other Concerns

Opens August 7th 2021 noting IO works on many products beyond Cardano including Ethereum Classic, which they have worked on twice.

Recounts the 2016 DAO hack and fork decision where as an Ethereum founder he saw most founders support the fork despite a weak social contract, versus a code-is-law group who invested believing in Gavin Wood's illegality, while Stephen Tual marketed the world computer, and code-is-law said move on like Mt. Gox while world-computer said bail them out.

Since only the pro-fork side had capital he backed the other so investors had both options, hiring a Scala team to write the first Scala Ethereum client, a full node connecting both networks.

Recalls funding Let's Talk ETC with Christian Seberino and Carlos Fakari, community management and conferences, and bringing in Grigore Rosu to be the first to formalize the Ethereum Virtual Machine with K.

Vitalik and he agree Ethereum's original design is unstable, too complicated for what it wants yet not enough to do what it needs, which is why ETH2 exists with proof of stake, sharding, and optimistic rollups.

Code-is-law was never explicitly codified with a Thomas Aquinas doctrine, so in 12 to 24 months ETH2's advances will not be compatible with ETC, cutting off its innovation budget, and unlike Bitcoin ETC cannot revel in simplicity since Ethereum's design is not fit for the code-is-law purpose.

Without a new funding source from volunteerism, a patron, or a treasury, there will not be the tens of millions needed to make ETC its own chain.

Recalls proposing a treasury years ago while ETC preferred Bitcoin-style volunteerism, so his team retired the Mantis project and ETC saw three years of no progress and 51 percent attacks, then returned to propose checkpointing via the Advocate and BFT checkpointing papers and ECIPs while being brutally attacked.

Anything can be done with an innovation budget, from new network algorithms and useful sharded proof of work to formal verification and writing the code-is-law doctrine, but a complex project's specialized team cannot work for free, like an open-source volunteer skyscraper of variable quality never completed.

The patron model where one or two rich people fund everything hurts decentralization even though he is wealthy enough to be that guy, so he argues for the third option, a treasury.

Rebuts the anti-treasury lie by explaining a blockchain mints money through inflation to pay for a service, and that money belongs to all ETC holders who pay via inflation, not automatically to miners.

Miners show mercenary behavior with 51 attacks while ETC's other facilities go uncompensated under volunteerism, causing no dapp adoption, no development, and a negative dead-chain brand.

A treasury takes some inflation into a decentralized account to pay for commercialization, innovation, and growth beyond security, as with Cardano Catalyst funding 50-plus projects every 6 to 8 weeks with 600 million dollars.

Zcash pioneered ensuring core infrastructure companies get funding since ETC had no ICO, letting them formalize the code-is-law principles and a 3-to-5-year roadmap distinct from ETH2, citing Viveck Cadambe's 2018 Prism sharded-proof-of-work protocol that is 10,000 times faster.

ETC cannot stay static with no innovation budget, and the dapps that supposedly disagree with proof of stake will not migrate to ETC since they never did over five years despite lower fees, while miners migrate to the greatest ROI not philosophy, so with the Mantis team back and partner Lunatec and him on the ETC Cooperative board this is a crossroads.

Says if the treasury proposal passes via a hard fork three independent companies get infrastructure budgets to build a roadmap, but if it fails ETC will not die but will linger like Feathercoin and NXT.

He has invested millions with no return and was even accused of being the DAO hacker for supporting ETC, but believes code-is-law deserves to exist on the menu of ideas even if not mainstream.

Asks why dapp developers would build on second-generation technology that refuses to improve, since rising complexity raises the chance of catastrophic bugs and no adoption means a slow heat death into a calcified dead chain.

A balanced proposal is three independent infrastructure companies with funds to build and write the philosophy differentiating ETC from Bitcoin, ETH2, and Cardano, and that disagreement should not mean calling him a corrupt sociopath.

Even if the treasury passes they likely will not profit unless ETC hits the top five, so it is not about money but leaving behind something sustainable where token holders get value for the inflation tax they pay.

Gives a thought experiment that miners care about the dollar value not the token count, so they would rather mine a stable growing chain where they hold tokens and behave less mercenary.

Laments the toxic shrinking ETC club that turns on its own, and says building a 100-percent-handwritten full Scala Ethereum client taught them how Ethereum works under the hood.

Building from the ground up without relying on Geth gave a clear path forward, and he would like to continue with formal verification and sharding, but it needs independent funded companies via the ECIP process.

Signs off with his last ETC video until the treasury proposal, having met good people like Barry Silbert, planning to use Mantis technology for a Cardano proof-of-work side chain, and being blunt because he does not have time to lie.