Ethereum Classic Brand Promise, Positioning, Personality, and Communications

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What Is the Problem of Referring to Ethereum Classic as a “Community”?

It all started when Ethereum started to promote “community” ethics as the way of governance and control of what is good or bad in Ethereum. This happened during theDAO crisis and debates.

Conservative vs Progressive Blockchains — Vitalik Buterin and other supporters arguing for community ethics, therefore weak subjective blockchain security.

My argument is that Ethereum Classic (ETC) (or any secure blockchain for that matter) is socially scalable therefore a global ecosystem of strangers who run nodes, wallets, miners, pools, invest in, and use the network. They are in many regions and cultures, and that is the security model.

It is not a group of friends and family who take care of each other. Nor a group of enlightened elitist technocrats who somehow know what is good or bad for humanity like Vitalik Buterin and Vlad Zamfir think.

So, the rhetoric of “community”, “friends”, “family”, or “brotherhood” that has been used in many cases is not only a conceptual mistake, but is maliciously used to drive the ecosystem to believe in a philosophy of trusted third parties (the “ethical community” in this case) to guarantee security, when the truth is the security is just its internal design, cryptography, incentives, and proof of work based consensus mechanism.

From a marketing perspective, not only “community” gives the wrong idea, but it also communicates “exclusion” as “if you are not part of the family, you are out” and “smallness” as “this system is so small it is not suitable for big things”.

What Is the Solution?

However, I acknowledge there are no day to day, simple terms to replace “community”, “members”, “family”, “us”, or “we” for marketing materials and communications.

As a solution, in the last year, for my blog posts on Etherplan, I have tried to replace that terminology like this:

• Community -> ecosystem
• Member -> participant
• We/us -> ETC

I understand it is totally against normal marketing communications, where even big corporations treat customers as “community”, “we are a global family”, “our planet”, “the power of us”, “we are together in this”, “we are one”, and all that collectivist nonsense corporations use to trick people and their little primitive brains.

The truth is that ETC is millions, if not billions in the future, of strangers worldwide that can coordinate on the network with money, property, and agreements because it is totally trust minimized, socially scalable, and permissionless.

That should be the Ethereum Classic brand promise, positioning, personality, and communications.

IMHO!