Afri Schoedon leaves Ethereum to Shitstorm

Afri Schoedon leaves Ethereum to Shitstorm
Poison barrel. Image by John Morgan via Flickr.com. License: Creative Commons

So far, the Ethereum scene was considered friendly compared to the Bitcoin community, which is often described as toxic,. The farewell of the Berlin developer Afri Schoedon now arouses doubts about this perspective. The Ethereum developers ask the community with an open letter for peaceful interaction with each other-but will probably not change anything in the social mechanisms that rule in the vicinity of every cryptocurrency. Cryptoanarchy, you could say, is not a pony farm.

Actually, someone like Afri Schoedon should be a profit for every community. The Berliner works as a release manager for the popular Ethereum client Parity and tirelessly does educational work when he explains again and again that the Ethereum blockchain is not a terabyte, but not even 150 gigabytes. The Bitcoinblog.de he explained in detail what exactly a full node is at Ethereum and why it is so different from a Bitcoin full-node.

However, Afri recently overturned with large parts of the Ethereum scene. The background is relatively interesting. The occasion was a short (now deleted) tweet from Afri:

“Polkadot does what Serenity should be. Change my opinion.”

This tweet was followed by a shitstorm on social media, in which Afri was accused massive conflicts of interest. On Reddit there was about reading:

“Afri became the Judas of our Ethereum community. He became a traitor, and instead of just walking like Charles Hoskinson or Dan Larimer and founding his own chain, he tries to sabotage us from the inside.”

Shortly afterwards, Afri explained that he would no longer work on Ethereum before taking a break from the social media circus. What was it about? How could a short tweet swing up to such a drama so quickly?

Serenity and Polkadot

Ethereum suffers from problems of scalability. The Smart Contract Blockchain is already working on its capacity limit. It is becoming increasingly difficult to do full nodes, and Afri is far from the only one who is worried about it. So that Ethereum (gigantic) potential as the world computer of the Web 3.0 unfolds, technical breakthroughs are required that overcome the previous limits.

This goal runs at Ethereum under the keyword “Serenity”, with which we would be the first keyword of afied controversial tweet: Serenity is the final state of the technical basis of Ethereum, in which Proof-of-Stake as consensus salgorithm replaces the previous mining and the blockchain is to be broken down into many parallel chains. At the same time, plasma-sidecins and the offchain network Raiden should take the pressure from the blockchain.

Now Serenity is still a long way off, and the pace of development there is continued to slow down how the Metropolis Hard Fork demonstrated: First, the features of the Hardfork-which should actually insert proof-of-stake-were shortened, then it was broken down into two parts, and finally the activation of the second was delayed. If Afri is now tweeting that “Polkadot” does what Serenity is supposed to do, he alludes to this rather stagnant implementation of the Ethereum Roadmap.

Polkadot Now is a project by Afound Employer Parity. It is said to be a kind of framework that allows different blockchains to coordinate the consensus and transactions. Above all, it should enable private and public as well as Main and Sidechains to connect smoothly so that a user can jump from Chain to Chain in the future instead of committed to a chain with his coin. So far, Polkadot is still in test mode, but the development seems to be progressing.

Against this background it becomes a little understandable, which is why Aied tweet was so provocative. He doubts a maximum of maximum, according to the Ethereum blockchain for everything, and suggests that a multi-chain environment can work better. Especially investors in Ethereum, who are bound to the success of the one Ethereum blockchain with their ether token, is likely to regain such an statement from the heart of the developer community.

A conflict of interest?

Afri rowed back a bit opposite the breakmag. Polkadot is “not a direct competitor to Ethereum, and Chains like Ethereum have always been an integral part of the Polkadot vision. My tweet was not about polar cadot or competition, but about Serenity, which, in my eyes, is getting too slowly, and I am afraid that it will no longer play a role if we achieve it once. People didn’t understand that, and I’m the only one who is to blame because I have not clearly expressed the message.”

In the scene, Aied Tweet was not only interpreted as a controversial technical statement, but as a tangible conflict of interest. Because as an employee of Parity, Afri also works on Ethereum and Polkadot. And in contrast to work at the client for Ethereum, Parity promises good income from the development of Polkadot. This shows one of the social core problems of cryptocurrencies: While the pure development of the core platform is usually not profitable, the developers often earn good money with advice or alternative projects.

The suspicion that you are trying to instrumentalize your influence on the protocol development in order to transfer the network effects of a successful cryptocurrency to your own project is obvious for many. Some commentators described this as the “blockstream” effect, since the startup blockstream has had a strong impact on Bitcoin development while trying to earn with side cakes for Bitcoin. The Bitcoin scene has shared the perspective on block stream alone for years. Now the same seems to be repeated with Parity and Ethereum.

The open letter

For Afri this is not the first time that it is in the center of controversy. After Parity had frozen a large amount of the polar cadot token taken in an ICO in the multi-digit contract, Afri tried to reverse the bow with the proposal-but this was rejected after a wave of outrage. Already here the (not absurd) accusation of the conflict of interest.

However, this in no way justifies the aggressiveness with which on social media – especially Twitter and Reddit – was suddenly shot against Afri. With an open letter to the community, more than 100 Ethereum developers have therefore tried to smooth the waves and prevent something like that repeated in the future. They ask both the community and the developers to “work on healthier discussion practices and to protect each other of threats and violence.“Again and again they had experienced how parts of the ecosystem fall into toxic behavior, which undermine open discussions through“ doxxing, threats with violence or brigading ”.

“We, the signatories, participants and employees of the project, and everyone who wants to form a better system find that these actions are beyond all acceptable standards for debates. However the circumstances are – threats against the well -preserved of a person can not be justified by anything and we categorically reject such toxicity in digital communities.“Ethereum is built up, serviced and scaled by humans, and you have to protect the emotional and mental health of these people.

An explosive social mix

This open letter indicates what a problem of all cryptocurrencies may be: the communities meet almost exclusively in the digital space. While personal, physical meetings are usually more shaped by harmony, conflicts on social media often break up with great violence. They are cheered on by the fact that anonymous “keyboard warrior” free from the gangs of social coaches lose all inhibitions and that it is possible to manipulate the discussion by sock dolls. Mass psychological effects quickly occur, in which it shows that people in the group often become much faster than than an individual if they feel that they have the backing of the majority with their hatred and anger.

It can be doubted whether this social problem can be solved through open letters and other conferences and meetings. In Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, anonymous internet communication, financial investment and ideology come together. This is an explosive mix that emanates almost inevitable poison. The developers of Bitcoin and Ethereum have decided to work in this environment – because it is also exciting – and to promote the cryptoanarchy of global anonymity, but now react with outrage and disbelief when this environment turns against them. Cryptoanarchy, one could say, is not a sugar slack, and the claim to power the developers represented in a system like Ethereum does not take place in a vacuum, but in a social context full of passion and financial investment. Anyone who does not give up here, what they sow will harvest a shitstorm.