I had been following Tezos closely since November and was really excited about the ICO. But it became incredibly apparent that the Breitmans were dishonest.<p>Firstly, the compensation structure was ludicrous. Many people were upset about an uncapped ICO -- I thought this was fine, until it became apparent that they would make hundreds of millions of dollars IMMEDIATELY. They have absolutely no incentive to continue the product or work another day in their lives. A huge portion of their new found wealth doesn't have a vesting period or depend on any tangible benchmarks.<p>Secondly, the background of Tezos is completely revised and modified according to their whims. They claim they had a large team working on the project for 4-5 years full-time. Even a cursory glance exposes that one person worked on Tezos while working full time for a major bank and that the team grew insignificantly 6-12 months before ICO. They even changed their LinkedIn profiles to revert this history.<p>Lastly, both Arthur and his wife are completely inept socially, or knew they would get rich enough to not give a fuck. I'm not one to judge a person, but its certainly not ideal as a manager and figure-head of a billion dollar project. I didn't even think it mattered until I heard they were incredibly rude to just about everyone in their Slack channel asking the most innocuous questions. I thought it must have been one bad experience. I joined the channel and the very first few words I spoke were met by flaming from Arthur himself. Not a couple hours later, he's raging on another person in the chat room at a time when there might be 100 messages/week. Every interaction he had over the next week oscillated between flaming and get rich memes. Later they would delete channel history and eventually shut them down completely under the guise of "preventing fishing attempts", though I never saw a suspicious link anywhere. Arthur stepped down as President because of these issues, but his wife did not fare much better (although I never interacted with her directly).<p>The ICO seemed worse than burning money. It would be like giving money to organized crime or the opposition party.<p>IMO they have no intention of delivering anything, except maybe to save face. If the past is any indication, they don't give a shit about saving face either.
Oddly enough, even Reuters picked this up: <a href="https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-funding-tezos-specialreport/special-report-backroom-battle-imperils-230-million-cryptocurrency-venture-idUKKBN1CN35K" rel="nofollow">https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-funding-tezos-spec...</a>
It's still an interesting project, even if drama like this sucks.<p>Of course, I'd have preferred to see a technical article about the engineering backing the project. Rather than one about a bad apple making its way to a foundation board member sit and caught self-dealing by the rest of the team. But, it's not the end of the world. I hope people will move on soon. Guy was caught. He has been suspended. I guess his removal is pending modulo some legal process.<p>That being said, I'm a bit surprised the project hasn't had much more interest from HN readers though. Why is that?<p>It's going to be one of the largest commercial application of OCaml, alongside Jane Street's. There's lots of cool hacking going on and software engineering challenges associated to it e.g replacing wasteful Proof-of-Work with PoS, hot-swapping protocol upgrades (voted on by stakeholders) safely, figuring out constitutionalism etc. (<a href="https://github.com/tezos/tezos" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tezos/tezos</a>).<p>Among the thing that I'm most excited about is the inflation-funded innovation.<p>Every voting cycle, you can submit an amendment to the protocol alongside a potential token issuance (i.e an amount of tokens that will be issued to you if the amendment is accepted). That means you get directly rewarded for the added-value you bring to the protocol.<p>That's a great positive feedback loop. Right now, I believe that there can only be one amendment approved every cycle. So, the "great engineer quits menial technical job to work on state-of-the-art amendments to the Tezos protocol" scenario isn't quite feasible on the short term horizon. I'd wager that is a limitation that will be eventually engineered out. It has so much potential.<p>Disclaimer: author donated to the Tezos fundraiser.
At this point I wonder if people will soon be doing ICOs and then skipping the country. Why are people investing in random things at such a ridiculous rates just because they are cryptocurrency based? You invest in things hoping it pays off for you, not handing out free "money". The Mafia must be envious.
You can bypass the paywall with this link, <a href="https://outline.com/WthVfn" rel="nofollow">https://outline.com/WthVfn</a>
After the ICO, I started trying to figure out who was on the board of the Tezos Foundation. I found it strange that there was very little info about who was on a three person board that controls hundreds of millions of dollars. What I found was that one person seems to be a company formation agent, Mr. Schmitz-Krummacher. Another is, Gevers, who is now being accused of self-dealing by Arthur Breitman. And the third is a virtually unknown software engineer named Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons.<p>I'm assuming that Diego Pons is a friend of Arthur's because they are both from France and both lived in NYC. I also have a hunch that there is a secret agreement in writing in place that compels Mr. Schmitz-Krummacher to vote according to someone else's wishes, perhaps Mr. Pons. If there is such an agreement in place, hopefully Mr. Pons is staying loyal to Arthur Breitman.<p>Handing over 200-400 Million to a three person foundation that is 1/3 company formation agent, 1/3 alleged crook, and 1/3 random software engineer seems like it may not have been the best idea after all. But the reason for this is probably to take advantage of the lack of know your customer laws in Switzerland.<p><a href="https://forums.tezos.community/t/who-is-running-the-tezos-foundation/649" rel="nofollow">https://forums.tezos.community/t/who-is-running-the-tezos-fo...</a>