Leadership should be held accountable to the community

I usually hold back any complaints about Ethereum leadership because of the potential political fallout. However, I’m posting this anyway because I’m concerned that the core “inner circle” might be beginning to devolve into what Bitcoin Core is today.

The potential conflict of interest is an issue in its own right, however the response to those concerns is a larger issue. The criticism of Afri’s provocative Tweet in the last week has been met with little-to-no response, and now Afri has “gone dark” by wiping his Twitter account and posting “I will no longer respond on Gitter, Skype, Discord, Slack, Wire, Twitter, and Reddit”.

Regardless of whether the initial concerns had merit, the response to them is irresponsible — especially considering a huge fork is less than two weeks away. The decision of the Parity release manager to wipe his Twitter account and go dark 11 days before the Constantinople fork is a bad one. It’s a bad look for Parity, and it’s a bad look for Ethereum.

The voices of the community shouldn’t be ignored. We are the miners who support the network, we are the developers who give Ethereum its usefulness, we are the businesses who bring commerce to the public blockchain, and we are the investors who contributed money and time to make Ethereum possible. Without the community, Ethereum is nothing.

This isn’t a one-off event; it resembles the earlier EIP-999 mess (for those that don’t remember, EIP-999 was another proposal to unfreeze the Parity multisig-bug wallets). Afri’s unexpected pull request to change the EIP’s state to “accepted” over a technicality, despite heated disagreement, was widely criticised by the community. Similarly, it was never met with any public comment and I’m not aware of any response to date (except perhaps in private).

I believe the Ethereum leadership team should be held accountable to the community, and I don’t think this is a big ask. Ethereum is a multi-billion-dollar project to change the world, and it should be treated as such.

I'm looking forward to healthy disagreements and discussion.

Final notes:

1. Parity has done a great deal of good for Ethereum. I'm sure neither Afri or Parity are bad actors. I’m an active user of Parity, currently running eight full nodes.
2. It would be fantastic if more people followed Bob Summerwill in his approach to absolute transparency, especially if they’re involved in two possibly competing initiatives. I have always admired this approach.
3. As with any team working on promoting decentralization and/or free trade, I wish Polkadot success.
4. I have a financial and ideological interest in Ethereum succeeding.