On Whistleblowing – Linzhi ASICs
Linzhi and Hudson Jameson
We surely made many mistakes in our whistleblowing journey. We may have construed connections with our bias. We followed dead-end leads. We used over-emotional language.
There was also a positive side: New friends, finally understood the power of FUD and that FUD must be rejected the same way we reject hate speech.
Learned a lot about bias
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
We can say nothing but positive things about Hudson. Hudson is the greatest guy that could chair the all core devs. Hudson leads with integrity in an environment of horrendous intensity, like an ongoing F1 race.
If Hudson thinks Linzhi is not to be trusted, we can accept that. We will try to earn his respect the same way we try to earn respect from anyone.
We communicate with Hudson for 9 months now. None of us has ever met him. Our communication was 90% public, 99% one-directional (from us to him), plus some attempts to start an email conversation, basically repeating
the same things we said publicly and maybe a few more speculative (to him) thoughts. I believe Hudson never replied.
He was and is faced with a very difficult situation: A team of malicious actors is attacking Ethereum, and the format of publicly recorded all-core-dev calls with a 100% engineer ratio is the perfect entry point for the attackers.
He wants to be neutral because Ethereum wants to be a neutral platform, but a team of collaborators cannot be neutral when faced with a predator, see Rick Falkvinge’s thoughts on that in the next section.
To maintain our own integrity, I will reply to Hudson’s tweets about Linzhi here, rather than taking it to Twitter.
A: We are protecting our investment into an Ethash miner via the fight for the viability of the entire platform. The two motivations are inseparable for us.
A: At some point neutrality and decision-making are mutually exclusive. If you are neutral forever you are setting up the perfect environment where a hidden agenda will succeed. Doacracy cannot work, in a doacracy the bank robber will just claim to be the CEO of the bank and get away with the robbery. Please point out what you believe our lies were so that we can reconsider the messaging or correct mistakes. We maintain a list of all substantive contributions to the debate at https://linzhi.io
A: There was no other known person that offered themselves as a recipient of whistleblowing-like information. We tried to contact people at the Ethereum Foundation, I believe noone ever replied. Big credits go to you for coming to our Telegram after seeing the Coindesk article. If you feel we pressured you unduly, I apologize. Same as before, please find the time to point out what you believe was flatly untrue so we can reconsider and correct. Thanks!
A: Our Telegram chat from this time is archived, with permission from Hudson, in “LWP5 Linzhi Telegram January 7 to 29, 2019. Lessons Learned.”
We were emotional, and the attackers were in our Telegram in full force. Today we have banned any and all accounts we believe to be associated with the attackers, and it’s much nicer again.
You are still in the group Hudson, if you have ASIC related questions — just ask.
A: That is true. Before the core developer meeting January 4th we had not been in contact with core developers. Exactly as the Coindesk article says, we were shocked by the move of only working with one hardware company. That’s when we started to reach out.
Thanks Hudson for everything you do for Ethereum! You are trying hard to maintain neutrality and we would be the last ones to criticize you for that.
Published at Sat, 21 Sep 2019 11:08:05 +0000
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