[This is my response to criticism of Igor Artamonov and ETCDEV on the Ethereum Classic community Discord]
I think this fragmentation of the community is good for ETC. It is very likely a sign of growth: as the community gets larger there are more diverse interests. That means that more groups will be fighting for control, but it doesn’t matter because all have to go through the ECIP process and the fact they are fragmented creates incoordination, which minimizes the probability of passing insecure changes to the blockchain.
I am also ok [Anthony Lusardy of ETC Cooperative] doesn’t like Igor or me. What is more human than disagreeing on things or everything!!
Again, it is also normal business stuff (bad when it happens to you, however) to copy other people’s work and to hire other people’s employees as they are so talented, especially to offer them more money. All the devs at ETCDEV are so talented that they deserve to be valued like that. The ETCDEV/ETC core team reminds me of the high quality of Bitcoin Core. I always say that.
I have seen that at ETCDEV where Igor has assembled such a great team and guided them to re-write parts of Classic Geth, make incredible improvements, in the process of modularization, and add features that make it much more stable and reliable for exchanges, wallets and business in general to build on top.
As biz dev, I’ve spoken to exchanges using Classic Geth and they were impressed with it as compared to Parity and even Geth of Ethereum. One even asked us to suggest our features to other core teams.
ETCDEV team also built Emerald platform which is highly visible for ETC, everybody is talking about it, and is, in fact, an incredible solution for developers to go from product vision to MVP in a fraction of the time and using the best practices in blockchain dapp development.
Of course everybody knows about SputnikVM is the best virtual machine in the ethereum compatible industry, period.
Not only has Igor led a team with very little money to build all of the above, but he is the main visionary creating and modeling Orbita, which is the definitive solution to blockchain scaling without compromising the security of the mainnet. Also with Orbita, ETC is greatly benefiting, not only for its technical soundness, but for the impact in the space. As with Emerald, everybody is talking about Orbita, and Orbita will be a concrete solution for dapp developer teams scaling their dapps, getting financing using true utility tokens, not scams as in ETH, and interconnecting safely and with high performance with other sidechains and blockchain networks.
Heck, evidently Igor’s work is so good that DFG and ETC Labs have decided to to take advantage of his and ETCDEV’s financial woes to steal all our technology and all our employees!
Does ETC need more Igors? Of course!!
It’s great DFG/ETC Labs is building a core team to compete with ETCDEV.
Of course it isn’t great for Igor or ETCDEV to run out of money, to get all their ideas copied, their business model, and all its engineers poached either. Who likes that??
Regarding, why we communicated the Github security breach it was because we evaluated that we had three crises at the same time:
1. We ran out of money
2. Our engineers are all being offered more money at ETC Labs by DFG executives
3. All admins in Github ETC organization were suddenly revoked by the same entity (DFG) who is doing 1 and 2 above
Our analysis was that 1 and 2 above were internal business problems that didn’t affect ETC at large, but that the security breach in Github was, in fact, a community-wide threat as people could be downloading a compromised Classic Geth. Also, the fact that the attack was part of the same effort to exclude Igor and ETCDEV is probably evidence of the intent: to control the ETC protocol. THIS is a huge problem and has to be known by ALL the community.
