Yeesh, they should've learned that you don't try to get cute in a legal document.
I remember asking about the Crockford License's clause "This software should be used for Good, not Evil" in my Noogler training. And then having Chris DiBona need to tell me "for the purposes of this particular license, Google is Evil". Because the problem is that "good" and "evil" could mean anything in a court of law; they are 100% up to the jury to decide. And so any sane firm that wants to limit its risk and stick to predictable areas of law will not use them.
Yes, it's pretty clear to me that ritual seppuku is not meant to be taken literally. Juries are instructed to consider the text of the contract carefully though: do you have confidence that 12 people chosen at random will reach the same interpretation you do?
Unpopular perhaps, but correct in my opinion. Rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin in terms of civic duty I think, if I was being tried for a serious crime I would much rather my jurors were people interested in seeing justice done according to the evidence than people who wanted it over with as soon as possible justice be damned. I suspect everyone in a country with juries would want that.
For what it's worth, I probably could have wriggled out of jury service on medical grounds but made sure to do the opposite.
I agree but after watching voir dire filter out anyone semi-literate on more than one occasion, I don’t think it much matters. The juries are full of morons because that’s what both the prosecution and defense want the juries to be.
Ah I think there might be a trans-Atlantic difference here and we're talking past each-other a little. I'm in the UK where jury selection isn't really a thing, selection is at random off the electoral roll and the filtering is mostly based on who has a good enough excuse to not do it.
In the UK, lawyers do not get to pick and choose jurors; jurors are entirely random. The only way a juror can be 'excused' is if it turns out they are related to the defendent or something.
Be careful confusing "has no opinion" with "moron". The voir dire process tries to select for people who have no opinion: it's specifically designed to filter for neutrality, because if the trial hasn't even begun yet and you have an opinion, that's a problem.
There are some people - oftentimes very literate people - that mistake having no opinion for being stupid. It's very far from that. Oftentimes being neutral and keeping your mouth shut is the smartest thing you can do. There's frequently a popular image of someone who is smart as someone who is very quick to form judgments and articulate them with little information; this can be a useful skill in certain situations but is the opposite of what our legal system wants in a juror.
Unless this was a case specifically related to the field your degree is in or there are a very limited number of people with college degrees in your area, I doubt that was the full story.
Having a degree is not an attribute that you can be dismissed "for cause" for, and the attorneys have a limited number of preremptory challenges available. At least in my area, where > 50% have college degrees, if they tried to strike everyone with a college degree they wouldn't have a jury pool left.
I have never been called for jury duty, but I doubt I would ever be chosen to sit on a jury. Despite the intent of the process, the lawyers on both sides are usually looking for jurors who are likely to be swayed by passionate arguments, not ones who will try very hard to make a logical decision based on whatever evidence is presented.
I thought the same and even told my boss "Oh, I really doubt I'll get selected", but then not only was I selected out of the first round (despite going through like 80 people in the 120-person jury pool), I ended up as foreman.
They're selecting for neutrality. What both lawyers and the judge all want to see is someone who doesn't have an opinion on the case before it begins. That neutrality could be a product of them being easily swayed by arguments, or it could be someone who is coldly logical and makes a decision purely based on the evidence presented.
I watched about 65 people get dismissed, and what they all had in common was they were visibly emotional before the trial had even begun. That is what gets you dismissed. Meanwhile, about half the folks in the jury box didn't even realize that the fact that we were still sitting in the jury box meant we would probably be serving on the jury, we were still like "Oh, I'm probably going to get dismissed because I'm X kind of person and the lawyers aren't going to want X kind of person." If you can think of it that dispassionately, you are the type of person the lawyers want.
The judge picked our foreman very quickly. He just came into the room after we had been selected, looked at the person, asked if she wanted to be foreman, and that was it.
The person was the oldest or second oldest in the room. I don't think that was a coincidence.
I was elected by the other jurors, and I have no idea why. Probably because I was willing to do it if nobody else wanted to, and nobody else wanted to.
(I was definitely not the oldest in the room - I think I was like the 2nd or 3rd youngest.)
To offer a counterpoint, when I did jury service the other jurors were one of the few parts of the justice system I left with more respect for. Everyone took their duty very seriously even those who were self-employed and thus directly losing out as a consequence of the jury system. If it were me in the dock, I would rather face twelve of my countrymen than officialdom alone whose shortcomings were thrown into relief by the conduct of the jury in my view.
Agree 100%. It was a minor criminal case, but I had a lot more respect for the law, the people sworn to uphold it, and the rights we have as citizens after participating as a juror.
Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company -- I don't want to embarrass the company by saying their name, so I'll just say their initials -- IBM [laughter] saying that they want to use something I wrote.
Because I put this on everything I write, now. They want to use something that I wrote in something that they wrote, and they were pretty sure they weren't going to use it for evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So could I give them a special license for that?
Of course. So I wrote back -- this happened literally two weeks ago -- "I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."
[laughter and applause]
And the attorney wrote back and said: "Thanks very much, Douglas!"
And the Ethereum foundation could simply argue in court that they obviously encourage any suicidal member of staff to simply quit.
They can enforce that all employees adhere to FOSS principles or would be subject to termination. Many for profit companies have the exact opposite policy.
I'd suspect that it's void for those reasons too but I'd also guess that any lawyer would say "You shouldn't have to suspect. Only write contracts with terms that have clearly-defined meanings that will be understood by the court and jury the same way you understand them." The point of the legal system is predictability, after all.
Also, if you require people to accept a "crazy belief" AND you have lots of spare cash, it's so easy to simply "buy people's contract". You don't fire people that's so stupid.
You can have "this mandate is so important to our mission that we want you to leave if you don't agree" or you can have "some of this mandate is literal and some is just jokes"
You can actually, and it's far worse as an employee. They can enforce the rules as if they are deathly serious while not being accountable for doing that to your employees because they are actually a joke. As an employee you'd much rather have the accountability to what they are saying in formal letterhead. Really not a place you want to be, and the words they wrote should be taken as seriously in court no matter the presentation.
> After demanding that employees agree to the mandate, Bastian Aue, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, defended the suicide pledge to employees as “part of the artwork of the mandate.”
This is insane. Is this something like a judgment or reverse loyalty test? “If you sign something like this, you’re too dumb to stay?”
What "contract"? They're referencing a meme on page 11 of the document, which looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/bSYTJb1
Are people seriously believing the Ethereum Foundation is looking for its members to commit suicide in case they don't publish full source-code? :P Either I'm massively misreading what the outrage is about, or I think this is the point I stop understanding how the world works. Are people taking that image seriously???
> The final published version presented the suicide pledge in an illustration instead of including it in the main body of the mandate, as it had been in the draft version.
ok, so I'm really curious what you think people are suppose to do in the world of "skepticism".
I mean, you've no doubt spent the last 10 years hearing about 4chan and donald trumps connection.
Just because something _could_ be considered some kind of satire, assuming we should all default to that interpretation basically dissolved the social system everywhere.
"its just a joke bro" is not a useful critical thinking skill.
I don't understand the concept of "a meme on page 11 of [a contract]". If it's in a contract, it's part of the contract. Decorations or jokes in a legal document are... Not a thing. Or at least must not be a thing.
The image is in a binding contract. Why would I not take it seriously? Do I think they mean it? No. Would I sign it? No.
This is like the typical nonsense when you're negotiating with a company where their actual practice has diverged from their standard contracts. You point something out, and the response comes back "that's just boilerplate, we don't enforce that." OK, that's cool. If you don't enforce it then you can take it out of the contract. At no point is my response ever to say "OK, I trust you, I'll sign as-is." Even if I do trust them.
>Nearly 80 of the foundation’s 250 or so employees voted to nix the suicide pledge after the draft was released, according to the lawsuit, but leadership at the Ethereum Foundation ignored their objections and included the pledge word-for-word in the final version of the mandate.
Contacts are still contracts even if you put pictures in it. You definitely don't understand how the world works if you don't get that.
I would probably sign if all of the following are true:
- The money is significantly better than my other options
- I believe the company not to be serious about the suicide clause
- I believe the suicide clause to be non-binding in any jurisdiction that applies to myself or the foundation
- I didn't believe the company / foundation would take my refusal to kill myself at a later time as a license to have me killed
The last one is a bit out there, but in the world of crypto, you can never be too sure.
Also, regardless of whether I would sign, I think it's in pretty poor taste and a bright amber flag (but not quite a red flag) if an employer thinks this is a funny or acceptable thing to put into a contract.
It's also in very poor taste and reeks of coercion to send out a manifesto or mandate like this on a Friday and expect people to sign or agree by Monday or lose their jobs. They likely wouldn't be able to have it reviewed by a lawyer over the weekend if they chose to do so.
> Also, regardless of whether I would sign, I think it's in pretty poor taste and a bright amber flag (but not quite a red flag) if an employer thinks this is a funny or acceptable thing to put into a contract.
How is this in any way NOT a red flag? In what universe is this a neutral signal about the health of an organization that manages a significant amount of capital?
> It's also in very poor taste and reeks of coercion to send out a manifesto or mandate like this on a Friday and expect people to sign or agree by Monday or lose their jobs. They likely wouldn't be able to have it reviewed by a lawyer over the weekend if they chose to do so.
In sum total, "this sounds very very bad but not necessarily a red flag". Absurd.
Yeah. Agreed. This is ALL red flags, all the way down. Might as well be cutesy anime red flags drawn onto an actual physical red flag. Suicide isn't funny and shame enforced ritual suicide for "failing" is even less hilarious, if that's possible. Reeks of sociopathy...
Of course it's a red flag? People only ever work for cryptocurrency companies in the first place because they're scammers themselves and think they can get rich while leaving suckers holding the bag. The whole thing is a red flag from the beginning so I don't know why anyone would expect otherwise.
That a wildly unhinged take, they could just work in payments or finance lol but yes it’s a red flag and with that much at stake an insane individual would “enforce” the contract.
Unfortunately I have worked with smart, nice people who would take this contract literally, are overly invested in their jobs and would be likely to take me out - even preemptive to any order from the company - if I violated my "contract".
I dont understand why you have all these requirements. A suicide pledge in a contract is unenforceable (both socially and legally), so signing it or not doesn't really matter.
> A suicide pledge in a contract is unenforceable (both socially and legally), so signing it or not doesn't really matter.
If it doesn't matter, it shouldn't be in the contract. I don't tend to have a lot of drafting power in employment contracts, but pushing back on meaningless contract provisions is a lot easier than pushing back on substantive ones.
It's at least worth getting them on the record, in writing, as 'we absolutely insist on this (bullshit) contract provision being in here, it is required for your continued employment'.
The one group of people that you should take literally in contracts are the Ethereum / smart contract folks. Code is law is the founding principle of Etherium!
It's worth clarifying, because you absolutely can sign away rights in a contract. You can even sign away constitutionally protected rights, like free speech. This regularly happens vis-a-vis NDA's.
I bring this up because I am (morbidly) interested in the technicalities. Like, could it just be an unenforceable provision to an otherwise valid contract?
> You can even sign away constitutionally protected rights, like free speech.
The text of the first amendment only asserts that "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech", so signing away your ability to speak isn't in conflict with the Constitution.
Wow, it's weird to think that people can be so proud of their terrible ideas. To go so far as to post it on their own website. Project 2025 was published this same way.
I thought the "seppuku" line was hyperbole, but there it is in black and white. You can jump directly to it with a Ctrl+F.
Everyone thinks their ideas are brilliant and that the ideas that run contrary to theirs are terrible. Your comment is tantamount to saying "I disagree with these ideas".
I agree with your sentiment, but something this big should have been run through a committee of not-yes-men before publishing. I feel like honest feedback would have stopped this.
I know there are people who believe there is no such thing as bad publicity and that it is better to be remembered as a monster than forgotten, but not me.
That is not true. Other people can have good ideas, bad ideas, kind of bad ideas, very bad ideas, terrible ideas and off the chart stupid ideas.
So, no the comment is not tantamount to saying "I disagree with these ideas". It is possible to disagree with an idea that is not horribly bad. It is possible to disagree with an idea that is quite smart, just with a trade off I dont prefer.
If you equate terrible with bad. Since most ideas at the far end of the scale are both emotional and the means to an outcome you feel very strongly about, yes,
I think it would be much less of a problem if there was an explicit, clear delineation between the legal text and the art. The HTML version is much worse in this regard as well: the license in question reads like part of the text of the document (though the meaning it has in that context is quite ambiguous).
This reminds me of anyone who went from normal life with normal funds to extreme wealth at a young age, not surprising, this is just the nerd version of rappers / ball players / young actors etc going through their own rendition of this.
It’s a cult, or at least, the leadership is trying to turn it into one. Cults have done weirder stuff, up to and including actual suicide.
39 members of Heaven’s Gate drank phenobarbital and died, believing this would allow them to escape Earth on the Hale-Bopp comet.
900 members of the People’s Temple (Jim Jones) drank cyanide-laced koolaid (actually FlavorAid) and died. That’s where the phrase “drink the koolaid” came from.
OK, but there's a lot of artwork in here: the opening-page image has lines like WE ARE ALL ONE IN LOVE -- is anyone taking this text too for a legal commitment?
Added: oh, the seppuku is in the HTML version without art, though you have to click to make it visible. Retracted.
> “If you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes inside of the EF,” [Bastian Aue] said, according to the lawsuit, which cited a recorded conversation between the pair.
except Fulton did not "make a stink" but only pointed it out, if Bastian Aue wanted to not continue rewarding those who actually make the stink, he should have fired whoever was involved with inserting the offensive memes and imagery into legal documents... this reflects very poorly on the Ethereum Foundation... any small sized team of cryptographers can recreate effective competition in this space, especially aided with LLMs.
Also, I don't think a contract prescribing a suicide pledge is a lawful contract. This means those people were fired for refusal to sign an unlawful contract! Imagine for a moment that instead of a suicide pledge it contained an assassination pledge, everyone signing it would be complicit (although the employees may point at fear of losing their jobs combined with non-chalance of governments looking the other way even as we speak). Unlike an assassination pledge the employees are probably not in fault, even though the contract is unlawful, but the employers drafting the unlawful contract even to 100% willing employees could very well be illegal. In the real world not 100% would sign, and the ~20% that refused to sign (53 of 250 or so) lost their jobs, that sounds like prosecutable crime: firing or bullying people out over refusal to sign an unlawful document.
I feel like it has to be a joke, but I wonder if such a clear "joke" would make other things in the contract possible to be invalidated in court given that if one assumes that part is a joke how can one tell what other parts are also supposed to be or not to be a farce in the contract.
nah, contracts sometimes even explicitly call out a severability or savings clause (where if one part is deemed illegal or unenforceable, it shouldn't impact the rest)
Contract law is surprisingly reasonable, typically focused on enforcing what people expect to be enforced and not standing on weird arcane rituals
tbf, severability clauses tend to be designed for *the rest of the contract is still valid even if clause 3b is ruled to be incompatible with state law or inconsiste with other agreements" not "the rest of the contract is still valid even if a prominent part of it so fundamentally unserious people could reasonably believe the wider document was a mission statement or joke rather than a legally binding contract".
I suspect a good lawyer in most jurisdictions could get someone out of a "breach of contract" suit by arguing their client reasonably believed that what they had signed was not actually a contract since it was decorated like a DnD manual and included an obligation to commit seppuku...
Weirdness used to be a charming aspect of the tech industry. Now it's death cults, fascism, accelerationism, "monarchists," "effective altruism" and whatever other brand of curdled dark perversion haunts Silicon Valley.
A great deal of the problems in the industry are systemic, not personal. If you rely on personalization to understand the problems of the world, you will always be frustrated, because there will always be people ready to step into the role of “evil” thanks to perverse incentives. You can only eliminate the evil by eliminating the incentives.
I have no power to do any such thing. I acknowledge that the system rewards sociopathy and seems to inspire it as well. These types seem to be the shepards of our industry and the world changing technologies its laborers develop, do you disagree?
I agree, but focusing on the personalities involved causes people to misdirect their efforts as a group, and they just end up with a different group of “bad guys” after getting rid of (or disempowering) the current batch.
The pattern that’s currently in tech already existed (and continues to exist) in the world of finance. Tech is just its latest expression.
Sure, for myself, the best I can do is make sure my day to day work does not involve these people, so I do focus on personalities regarding what companies/teams to work for.
To be fair, I find this weirdness much more interesting than the traditional "rapture will occur on X" or "I am Gods chosen fornicator". How cool would it be if there was still some fjord somewhere where they still sacrificed goats to Odin? Christianity really wiped out many the interesting cult themes, and new ones like Scientology have so far just been shameless cash grabs from the gullible and lost.
At least the AI death cults are offering a doomsday scenario which is somewhat plausible. A little more iffy on the details then straightforwards nuclear Armageddon perhaps, but not dismissable out of hand. And compared to traditional human perversions, afaik they haven't gotten much further than summer of love type stuff, just with a bit more of a pessimistic twist. They have nothing on an average crackhouse.
Overall, I think it all qualifies as a pretty fun and interesting weirdness on the scale of human experience, which regularly goes much...much darker than a bunch of kids living in sharehouses and worrying about the future.
If we could relegate effective altruism to the graveyard of terrible but well intentioned ideas to never rear its head ever again to haunt humanity that would be a small win.
Silicon Valley can be weird sometimes but this isn't Silicon Valley. Vitalik is based in Singapore but travels to Toronto, and European tech hubs like Berlin, Zug, and Prague.
I believe that a good reason why crypto got started was precisely because most people around the world got locked out of Silicon Valley. IE. they couldn't work or invest in high flying SV startups so they gamble their money in crypto rug pulls and shill for crypto shitcoins.
> “If you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes inside of the EF,”
Anyone in a position of power knows that. It’s fucked up, and that’s the kind of dynamic the workplace is built upon.
I'd never work for a crypto organization or company, but that aside as someone who long ago briefly worked for a company that turned out to be mostly staffed by Scientologists (1990s EarthLink, before the MindSpring merger), I'd have noped out before the suicide pact thing, when reading this:
> Outlining leadership’s vision for the foundation for the next 1,000 years
Spare me the weird culty stuff, even if it is a joke.
> And on page 11 — nestled between a winking anime woman and three yellow cats — was a suicide pledge.
Very curious is this pattern of infantilization and sensitive tech orgs and companies. It seems to have started around the dotcom boom-bust period. I remember when Google first came out with "Do no evil" and the primary colors and the whole cute cartoons, and all sorts of red flags went up for me. I truly wonder if somewhere the type of cognitive high performer coupled with requirement for being effectively chumps/controlable arrived at this formula.
If you go deep into the crypto world you'll find that this messaging resonates well with "degens" (as they sometimes call themselves).
They love this stuff, it signals how "pilled" you are. It may or may not have to do with a large proportion of them being high on drugs (weed, psychedelics, cocaine), in addition to obviously being terminally online and bubbled. They are also extremely anti-authority, because a lot of what they do breaks the law in bigger and lesser ways, especially tax/financial law.
And they often will drive millions and millions of dollars of crypto toward these ventures, often anonymously.
You have to read these kinds of things in the context of the target audience, which is very real.
Don't say it isn't so!? The community founded on circumventing existing financial structures are anti-authority? Next you're gonna tell me anarchists don't like individual leaders, or that socialists care about healthcare.
Source: I suppose also "made it out" although it wasn't hard, I left my job, like any other industry. Worth knowing as well that the cryptocurrency ecosystem isn't nearly as "internally" aligned as some people want you to believe, there is a large range in weirdness in the ecosystem, not just what parent above shared.
> Next you're gonna tell me anarchists don't like individual leaders, or that socialists care about healthcare.
There's an irony embedded in both positions. Everyone cares about government, anarchists care about overthrowing the existing government in order to replace it with their own version. Similarly, everyone cares about healthcare, socialists care about other people paying for their healthcare.
Ethereum in particular has some history with that. A long time ago they espoused this principle called "code is law", and then one time the code for something called "The DAO" did something they didn't like, so they overrode the code. To this day the Ethereum consensus rules specify that a certain hardcoded transaction ID should not do what it literally says it does.
The transition from PoW to PoS is another example, espoused the open ideals of Bitcoin mining, right up until the moment they had gathered sufficient power and members, at which time they closed the gates of ascension behind them.
I think "degen" for "degenerate gambler" refers specifically to those who make wild, all-in bets without any more research than a quick scan of twitter and telegram memes. Not those who would actually parse a multi-page manifesto document.
Alright we will see how long that lasts. If they want to enforce their “contracts” they will need a court (i.e. an authority) to order the opposite party to abide by their contract and if they don’t, police (i.e. an authority) will force them to court and enforce what the court says.
The idea with crypto is not to need courts, the court would be the "global computer", contracts (actual cryptocurrency term) are computer programs running in the Ethereum VM.
Bitcoin originally imposed this idea on payments, and Ethereum attempts to create this computational contract system for the non monetary consideration of contracts (the harder half of the contract).
There's a big difference between anti-authority and a-hole, knee-jerk opposition defiance disorder, but even if you're right wouldn't the people being asked to sign this contract be the last people to do so?
I can't express something better than this observation I read the other day:
>again, something of a banal observation, but i think contributing to the general feeling of powerlessness and rage in america today is the extent to which our elites engage in such flagrant, grotesque, even performative contempt for the rest of america
>i don't exactly think andrew carnegie loved the little guy exactly--he was, at best, the good cop to frick's bad cop--but he at least put on the appearance of charity, decorum, civic-mindedness
>meanwhile today's elites mostly seem interested in apocalypse bunkers and sex cults and getting real jacked on testosterone and ranting about the woke mind virus
>regarding the rest of us as, at best, hogs bound for the slaughter, and not even particularly hiding it
Fits with Crypto philosophy. To let working class people to die so billionaires can use crypto for tax avoidance and crime payments. Not surprised at all.
> working class the means to avoid tax and pay for illegal things
Peanuts. It is still the rich that spend the most in illegal things from bribes, tax evasion, etc. even for countries trying to avoid international sanctions.
The bigger the more they profit from crime and lack of accontability.
This a famous dynamic where phishing/scam emails are often obviously scams, with the idea that scammers only want to hook people who are going to continue falling for the scam until they actually lose their money. It's interesting that the Ethereum Foundation has independently evolved the same internal dynamic.
> To take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license, or upon modification or removal of any part of this license.
So, by walking back and removing this pledge from the document, isn't that "removal of any part of this license"? I guess that we're about to find out what the pledge really means now that the authors have violated it.
> If you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes
> "Authors, maintainers, editors and distributors of “this software” would pledge to ensure the software remained free and publicly accessible, and would also vow to “take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license,” the illustration read. It was labeled “Source Seppuku License,” an apparent reference to a traditional Japanese ritual suicide.
When the document went out on that Friday in March, employees were told to commit to the principles in the mandate by Monday or quit their jobs, according to the lawsuit brought by Kayleen Fulton, a Boulder woman who was fired from the Ethereum Foundation after she led employee resistance to the suicide pledge."
.. wow. When your employer starts posting like Yukio Mishima of course you sue them. I have a new entry in "most unprofessional thing I've ever seen". And no, using the "should not be taken seriously" defense is also hugely unprofessional.
Seppuku is a two person job. Does accepting the contract mean you volunteer to be the second (the person finishing the job by decapitation) for someone else’s ritual suicide?
I don't care about "being professional" all the time. The most skilled people I know were also the most weird, eccentric and quirky. I've only skimmed the document, but it looks exactly the kind of organization I'd like to work with.
...well, except the fact that they fire people over it, and don't listen to concerns where people don't feel comfortable with some of the clauses. Yeah at this point this crossed into a cult behavior and is unacceptable. But the problem here is not memes, at least for me.
In their defense, I'd say that in the world where is more ideological companies where your motivation is to bring good and not earn numbers, we might have much had better conditions for everyone instead of the constant race to the bottom.
Maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be a rat and actually follow your words no matter how profitable it is to break it and, you know, be sure to pledge your life for it. If you say you make it for public good, then do it and never lie. While I understand the discomfort, I don't understand why people are so protective about being thieves and liars. In theory such a pledge must never affect you if you behave like a proper human being.
A suicide clause is obviously illegal and ridiculous but I’m curious if they would get away with a clause that requires paying something like $1M per day per violation or some other crazy amount of money.
It's not decentralised. If it was, it wouldn't have a maintainer. It's centralised in that every X months (I don't remember, 3 or 6) the chain just increases difficulty without bound, grinding to a halt if the latest consensus rules update hasn't been installed that pushes back the deadline another X months. This is how they make sure everyone is using the consensus rules that Vitalik currently prefers.
The difficulty bomb was a mechanism to ensure eventual migration from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake, which happened in 2022. PoS no longer needs a notion of difficulty.
My falling out of love with crypto was due to the realization that these 'foundations' were effectively governing bodies participating in the minimum level of decentralized theater to grant them plausible deniability in a court of law. Bitcoin is still extremely interesting, as it has no such body, only a bunch of anarchy minded anti-social but very smart group of volunteers fighting each other. At least they practice their anarcho libertarian experiment in the mailing list, to its huge detriment.
EF are not the ones in charge. They have a lot of influence, to the point them rejecting a proposal can be enough to bury it, but very little hard power. Kind of like the Stroustrup and C++26 situation.
The people who actually control Ethereum are client dev teams. There are two groups, one for the execution layer that runs code and the other for the consensus layer that handles the actual blockchain part. No proposal can get marked as stable and entered into an official hard fork unless they approve it.
The foundation has no say over these decisions. In fact they decided not to make their own consensus client on purpose, to make sure everyone is running non EF controlled code after the merge. And they do everything they can to encourage client diversity. It's not perfect but you can't compare it to Tezos or Polygon where one company runs everything.
> “If you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes inside of the EF,” he said, according to the lawsuit, which cited a recorded conversation between the pair.
Well she was too effective at organizing a resistance. Can't have that.
Given that the text reads like it was written by someone inhaling a lot of NO2, I wouldn't take it 'seriously,' but I wouldn't take it as a 'joke', either. I would take it as 'sign of insanity.'
> Chancellor Adolf Hitler today proclaimed the arrival of the Nazi millennium, predicting that the next 1,000 years would not witness another revolution in Germany.
Yes it's the same people who retroactively changed the blockchain consensus rules in order to undo someone else's transaction that was financially damaging to them. (The DAO incident)
> An email to the foundation seeking comment on this story was not immediately returned Thursday, but a foundation leader at the time told employees the suicide pledge was not meant to be taken literally, according to the lawsuit. After employee pushback, managers updated the commitment form to clarify that the form had “nothing to do with literal seppuku,” according to the lawsuit.
Oh see it was just a joke - a joke, get it? ha ha, see by watching how many employees were complaining, we retracted it - just a "joke", right? after we put it out there saying nothing whatsoever and demanding a yes/no loyalty pledge.
it was boundary testing. this company should go out of business.
That is insane, but totally believable in modern corporate cultures. I have heard of lawfirms in the 90s organizing non-optional hunting weekends, to identify any manager not a sufficient "meat eater". I cannot imagine anyone getting away with such things today. This sounds like another crop of perpetual teenagers thrust into management positions who think they can do whatever they wish with "their" employees.
>the author, maintainer, editor or (re)distributor… shall uphold the following… to take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license, or upon modification or removal of any part of this license.
> to take his or her own life with a sword [commit seppuku] upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license
This is obviously a joke, not a legally binding "suicide pledge". Signing this is a culture fit test and did its job at filtering out people like this Karen.
"Oh, that bit was just a joke" in a legally binding contract invites the question of what other bits were, which isn't a conversation you want to have in court.
Generally, clauses that involve illegal acts or can’t be construed in any legally feasible way are not legally binding. A pledge to commit ritual suicide is obviously not legally binding, whether you signed some piece of paper or not.
And sure, they can have that conversation in court. But my understanding is that this contract (that was never signed) is not even what the parties are arguing about in this case. It is a piece of evidence presented to discredit the Ethereum foundation and makes for a good news article.
> Fulton, who had earned a salary of $195,000 in her role at the Ethereum Foundation, sued for disability discrimination, retaliation, interference with her rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act, unfair employment practices and related claims. Her lawsuit notes that the Ethereum Foundation “does not hire or pay its United States staff in its own name,” but instead uses employer-of-record service companies.
> Generally, clauses that involve illegal acts or can’t be construed in any legally feasible way are not legally binding. A pledge to commit ritual suicide is obviously not legally binding, whether you signed some piece of paper or not.
You're looking at this from the wrong direction. The suicide pledge is clearly unenforceable.
"We put jokes in our contracts" invites questions about which other provisions are subtler ones.
Yeesh, they should've learned that you don't try to get cute in a legal document.
I remember asking about the Crockford License's clause "This software should be used for Good, not Evil" in my Noogler training. And then having Chris DiBona need to tell me "for the purposes of this particular license, Google is Evil". Because the problem is that "good" and "evil" could mean anything in a court of law; they are 100% up to the jury to decide. And so any sane firm that wants to limit its risk and stick to predictable areas of law will not use them.
Yes, it's pretty clear to me that ritual seppuku is not meant to be taken literally. Juries are instructed to consider the text of the contract carefully though: do you have confidence that 12 people chosen at random will reach the same interpretation you do?
> do you have confidence that 12 people chosen at random will reach the same interpretation you do?
The first time I sat on a jury, all of my idealism about juries went out the window.
The one jury that I sat on behaved impeccably. YMMV.
The one that I was on did not. Jumped to a lot of conclusions without evidence to support them.
Did you bring it to the attention of the judge?
The (very serious criminal case) jury I was on was encouraged to report anything like that to the bailiff, who would relay it to the judge.
And someone else's cynicism about juries went out the window.
There's no avoiding defenestration.
Same. Working together to put a murderer in prison is one of my favorite memories.
Unpopular opinion but we should all try to get jury duty instead of getting out of jury duty.
I'd be fully support this if the jury allowance makes up for 90-100% of lost income (for any jurors that lose income).
Unpopular perhaps, but correct in my opinion. Rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin in terms of civic duty I think, if I was being tried for a serious crime I would much rather my jurors were people interested in seeing justice done according to the evidence than people who wanted it over with as soon as possible justice be damned. I suspect everyone in a country with juries would want that.
For what it's worth, I probably could have wriggled out of jury service on medical grounds but made sure to do the opposite.
I agree but after watching voir dire filter out anyone semi-literate on more than one occasion, I don’t think it much matters. The juries are full of morons because that’s what both the prosecution and defense want the juries to be.
Ah I think there might be a trans-Atlantic difference here and we're talking past each-other a little. I'm in the UK where jury selection isn't really a thing, selection is at random off the electoral roll and the filtering is mostly based on who has a good enough excuse to not do it.
That's essentially the exact same system as in the US.
Oh no it is not!
In the UK, lawyers do not get to pick and choose jurors; jurors are entirely random. The only way a juror can be 'excused' is if it turns out they are related to the defendent or something.
This is a good thing.
Be careful confusing "has no opinion" with "moron". The voir dire process tries to select for people who have no opinion: it's specifically designed to filter for neutrality, because if the trial hasn't even begun yet and you have an opinion, that's a problem.
There are some people - oftentimes very literate people - that mistake having no opinion for being stupid. It's very far from that. Oftentimes being neutral and keeping your mouth shut is the smartest thing you can do. There's frequently a popular image of someone who is smart as someone who is very quick to form judgments and articulate them with little information; this can be a useful skill in certain situations but is the opposite of what our legal system wants in a juror.
I got booted for having a college degree.
Unless this was a case specifically related to the field your degree is in or there are a very limited number of people with college degrees in your area, I doubt that was the full story.
Having a degree is not an attribute that you can be dismissed "for cause" for, and the attorneys have a limited number of preremptory challenges available. At least in my area, where > 50% have college degrees, if they tried to strike everyone with a college degree they wouldn't have a jury pool left.
I have never been called for jury duty, but I doubt I would ever be chosen to sit on a jury. Despite the intent of the process, the lawyers on both sides are usually looking for jurors who are likely to be swayed by passionate arguments, not ones who will try very hard to make a logical decision based on whatever evidence is presented.
I thought the same and even told my boss "Oh, I really doubt I'll get selected", but then not only was I selected out of the first round (despite going through like 80 people in the 120-person jury pool), I ended up as foreman.
They're selecting for neutrality. What both lawyers and the judge all want to see is someone who doesn't have an opinion on the case before it begins. That neutrality could be a product of them being easily swayed by arguments, or it could be someone who is coldly logical and makes a decision purely based on the evidence presented.
I watched about 65 people get dismissed, and what they all had in common was they were visibly emotional before the trial had even begun. That is what gets you dismissed. Meanwhile, about half the folks in the jury box didn't even realize that the fact that we were still sitting in the jury box meant we would probably be serving on the jury, we were still like "Oh, I'm probably going to get dismissed because I'm X kind of person and the lawyers aren't going to want X kind of person." If you can think of it that dispassionately, you are the type of person the lawyers want.
The judge picked our foreman very quickly. He just came into the room after we had been selected, looked at the person, asked if she wanted to be foreman, and that was it.
The person was the oldest or second oldest in the room. I don't think that was a coincidence.
I was elected by the other jurors, and I have no idea why. Probably because I was willing to do it if nobody else wanted to, and nobody else wanted to.
(I was definitely not the oldest in the room - I think I was like the 2nd or 3rd youngest.)
I was elected to be the foreman because I went to the bathroom at the wrong (right?) time.
The judge picked our foreman very quickly.
May I ask in which state?
In every state I've been on a jury, the foreman was chosen by the other jurors.
The person was the oldest or second oldest in the room. I don't think that was a coincidence.
This was never the case in any of the juries I was on.
Massachusetts.
Seems it's 1 of the 3 states where that happens.
Reminds of it's stance on insanity defense (it's 1 of 5 states where prosecutors have to prove the defendant was sane).
the lawyers on both sides are usually looking for jurors who are likely to be swayed by passionate arguments
How do you know this, when in the previous sentence you admitted:
I have never been called for jury duty
I've been on juries three times so far. The lawyers absolutely did not filter for people who could likely be swayed.
Or perhaps you confused "people who are likely to be swayed" with "people who have an open mind."
To offer a counterpoint, when I did jury service the other jurors were one of the few parts of the justice system I left with more respect for. Everyone took their duty very seriously even those who were self-employed and thus directly losing out as a consequence of the jury system. If it were me in the dock, I would rather face twelve of my countrymen than officialdom alone whose shortcomings were thrown into relief by the conduct of the jury in my view.
Agree 100%. It was a minor criminal case, but I had a lot more respect for the law, the people sworn to uphold it, and the rights we have as citizens after participating as a juror.
Try going to a PTA meeting.
You will feel like an intellectual titan.
> Because the problem is that "good" and "evil" could mean anything in a court of law;
https://youtu.be/-C-JoyNuQJs?t=2386
And the Ethereum foundation could simply argue in court that they obviously encourage any suicidal member of staff to simply quit.
They can enforce that all employees adhere to FOSS principles or would be subject to termination. Many for profit companies have the exact opposite policy.
That seems like a pretty crappy way to deal with a mental health crisis.
Anything around this is likely a legal minefield.
I'd draw your attention to last year's article... "Employee commits suicide after MongoDB fired her during mental health leave" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403128 (for any wondering, it went to arbitration - https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/62342462/Surman_et_... )
An agreement doesn’t stand above the law. I’m pretty sure that clause is void for, basically, being illegal. Not a lawyer though.
I'd suspect that it's void for those reasons too but I'd also guess that any lawyer would say "You shouldn't have to suspect. Only write contracts with terms that have clearly-defined meanings that will be understood by the court and jury the same way you understand them." The point of the legal system is predictability, after all.
> And then having Chris DiBona need to tell me "for the purposes of this particular license, Google is Evil".
Good to see they've successfully expanded the scope since, and lifted the restrictions on the purposes for which they could be considered evil.
This provision wouldn't survive a pre-answer motion to dismiss because it's void for vagueness.
Also, if you require people to accept a "crazy belief" AND you have lots of spare cash, it's so easy to simply "buy people's contract". You don't fire people that's so stupid.
Everyone's happy and no one can fault you.
Was the requirement to sign the agreement or resign also not meant to be taken literally?
Sarcasm, irony, or hyperbole are all fine in a joke. Less so in a binding document someone is required to sign to keep their healthcare and income.
do you have a picture of you with this stupid hat ? this humiliation ritual is so brutal much less degrading having to sign this anime pledge
You can have "this mandate is so important to our mission that we want you to leave if you don't agree" or you can have "some of this mandate is literal and some is just jokes"
You can't have both.
You can actually, and it's far worse as an employee. They can enforce the rules as if they are deathly serious while not being accountable for doing that to your employees because they are actually a joke. As an employee you'd much rather have the accountability to what they are saying in formal letterhead. Really not a place you want to be, and the words they wrote should be taken as seriously in court no matter the presentation.
> After demanding that employees agree to the mandate, Bastian Aue, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, defended the suicide pledge to employees as “part of the artwork of the mandate.”
This is insane. Is this something like a judgment or reverse loyalty test? “If you sign something like this, you’re too dumb to stay?”
You can't sign away your rights like that in a contract. The contract is invalid.
What "contract"? They're referencing a meme on page 11 of the document, which looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/bSYTJb1
Are people seriously believing the Ethereum Foundation is looking for its members to commit suicide in case they don't publish full source-code? :P Either I'm massively misreading what the outrage is about, or I think this is the point I stop understanding how the world works. Are people taking that image seriously???
> The final published version presented the suicide pledge in an illustration instead of including it in the main body of the mandate, as it had been in the draft version.
ok, so I'm really curious what you think people are suppose to do in the world of "skepticism".
I mean, you've no doubt spent the last 10 years hearing about 4chan and donald trumps connection.
Just because something _could_ be considered some kind of satire, assuming we should all default to that interpretation basically dissolved the social system everywhere.
"its just a joke bro" is not a useful critical thinking skill.
> I mean, you've no doubt spent the last 10 years hearing about 4chan and donald trumps connection.
No, what is the connection?
> ok, so I'm really curious what you think people are suppose to do in the world of "skepticism".
Have an healthy amount of it, but not too much. Lagom skepticism, if you will.
> I mean, you've no doubt spent the last 10 years hearing about 4chan and donald trumps connection.
I have not, I'm not American and only follow news out of the country from afar, unless it's about Trump, then i try to avoid it.
> "its just a joke bro" is not a useful critical thinking skill.
Agreed, but being able to read the context is a useful critical thinking skill.
-----------
What does anything of this has to do with some "suicide pledge" or the Ethereum Foundation?
Read it again. It was in the contract. What skepticism do you have? What aren't you getting?
I don't understand the concept of "a meme on page 11 of [a contract]". If it's in a contract, it's part of the contract. Decorations or jokes in a legal document are... Not a thing. Or at least must not be a thing.
The image is in a binding contract. Why would I not take it seriously? Do I think they mean it? No. Would I sign it? No.
This is like the typical nonsense when you're negotiating with a company where their actual practice has diverged from their standard contracts. You point something out, and the response comes back "that's just boilerplate, we don't enforce that." OK, that's cool. If you don't enforce it then you can take it out of the contract. At no point is my response ever to say "OK, I trust you, I'll sign as-is." Even if I do trust them.
>Nearly 80 of the foundation’s 250 or so employees voted to nix the suicide pledge after the draft was released, according to the lawsuit, but leadership at the Ethereum Foundation ignored their objections and included the pledge word-for-word in the final version of the mandate.
Contacts are still contracts even if you put pictures in it. You definitely don't understand how the world works if you don't get that.
I would probably sign if all of the following are true:
- The money is significantly better than my other options
- I believe the company not to be serious about the suicide clause
- I believe the suicide clause to be non-binding in any jurisdiction that applies to myself or the foundation
- I didn't believe the company / foundation would take my refusal to kill myself at a later time as a license to have me killed
The last one is a bit out there, but in the world of crypto, you can never be too sure.
Also, regardless of whether I would sign, I think it's in pretty poor taste and a bright amber flag (but not quite a red flag) if an employer thinks this is a funny or acceptable thing to put into a contract.
It's also in very poor taste and reeks of coercion to send out a manifesto or mandate like this on a Friday and expect people to sign or agree by Monday or lose their jobs. They likely wouldn't be able to have it reviewed by a lawyer over the weekend if they chose to do so.
> Also, regardless of whether I would sign, I think it's in pretty poor taste and a bright amber flag (but not quite a red flag) if an employer thinks this is a funny or acceptable thing to put into a contract.
How is this in any way NOT a red flag? In what universe is this a neutral signal about the health of an organization that manages a significant amount of capital?
> It's also in very poor taste and reeks of coercion to send out a manifesto or mandate like this on a Friday and expect people to sign or agree by Monday or lose their jobs. They likely wouldn't be able to have it reviewed by a lawyer over the weekend if they chose to do so.
In sum total, "this sounds very very bad but not necessarily a red flag". Absurd.
Yeah. Agreed. This is ALL red flags, all the way down. Might as well be cutesy anime red flags drawn onto an actual physical red flag. Suicide isn't funny and shame enforced ritual suicide for "failing" is even less hilarious, if that's possible. Reeks of sociopathy...
Of course it's a red flag? People only ever work for cryptocurrency companies in the first place because they're scammers themselves and think they can get rich while leaving suckers holding the bag. The whole thing is a red flag from the beginning so I don't know why anyone would expect otherwise.
That a wildly unhinged take, they could just work in payments or finance lol but yes it’s a red flag and with that much at stake an insane individual would “enforce” the contract.
Unfortunately I have worked with smart, nice people who would take this contract literally, are overly invested in their jobs and would be likely to take me out - even preemptive to any order from the company - if I violated my "contract".
Playing fast and loose with the words "smart" and "nice" there.
Getting taken out by an autistic hitman with a namshub installed by a cryptocurrency company IS on my 2027 bingo card.
I dont understand why you have all these requirements. A suicide pledge in a contract is unenforceable (both socially and legally), so signing it or not doesn't really matter.
> A suicide pledge in a contract is unenforceable (both socially and legally), so signing it or not doesn't really matter.
If it doesn't matter, it shouldn't be in the contract. I don't tend to have a lot of drafting power in employment contracts, but pushing back on meaningless contract provisions is a lot easier than pushing back on substantive ones.
It's at least worth getting them on the record, in writing, as 'we absolutely insist on this (bullshit) contract provision being in here, it is required for your continued employment'.
I would be extremely wary of tying a big part of my life to a company that insists on me signing an unenforceable contract.
The one group of people that you should take literally in contracts are the Ethereum / smart contract folks. Code is law is the founding principle of Etherium!
If code is law, does that imply law is not law?
No, because it wasn’t claimed that only code is law.
You wouldn’t say “Dogs are mammals. Therefore mammals are not mammals.”
It's worth clarifying, because you absolutely can sign away rights in a contract. You can even sign away constitutionally protected rights, like free speech. This regularly happens vis-a-vis NDA's.
I bring this up because I am (morbidly) interested in the technicalities. Like, could it just be an unenforceable provision to an otherwise valid contract?
> You can even sign away constitutionally protected rights, like free speech.
The text of the first amendment only asserts that "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech", so signing away your ability to speak isn't in conflict with the Constitution.
Actual document: https://ethereum.org/foundation/mandate/
Wow, it's weird to think that people can be so proud of their terrible ideas. To go so far as to post it on their own website. Project 2025 was published this same way.
I thought the "seppuku" line was hyperbole, but there it is in black and white. You can jump directly to it with a Ctrl+F.
Everyone thinks their ideas are brilliant and that the ideas that run contrary to theirs are terrible. Your comment is tantamount to saying "I disagree with these ideas".
I agree with your sentiment, but something this big should have been run through a committee of not-yes-men before publishing. I feel like honest feedback would have stopped this.
And then it would have been as lame as every other document, and we wouldn't be talking about it.
I know there are people who believe there is no such thing as bad publicity and that it is better to be remembered as a monster than forgotten, but not me.
Monster? What are you talking about?
this is not yet another document, rather a contract with all the legal baggage that comes along with that - like this lawsuit.
That is not true. Other people can have good ideas, bad ideas, kind of bad ideas, very bad ideas, terrible ideas and off the chart stupid ideas.
So, no the comment is not tantamount to saying "I disagree with these ideas". It is possible to disagree with an idea that is not horribly bad. It is possible to disagree with an idea that is quite smart, just with a trade off I dont prefer.
Would you say there's a correlation between how strongly you disagree with an idea and how terrible that idea is?
If you equate terrible with bad. Since most ideas at the far end of the scale are both emotional and the means to an outcome you feel very strongly about, yes,
"We cannot force hard forks or protocol changes. We are opinionated only so as to advocate and propose what’s best for the mission."
Lol, did the perpetrators commit seppuku after the illegitimate DAO fork?
"What's best for the mission" means making sure they don't lose money, obviously.
It also links to this pdf version, which has the pictures https://ethereum.foundation/ef-mandate.pdf
Wow, this is actually amazing. A lot of art in here.
It looks like a pretty decent layout for an RPG manual, but not for a serious document I'd expect to see at work.
Yeah, they missed their calling. Should have gone into ttrpg design instead.
IMO, this means we should change what we should expect to see in work environments. I'd love to see bold vision and art become the norm.
I guess art is subjective and people are into different styles, but to me, this just looks juvenile.
I think it would be much less of a problem if there was an explicit, clear delineation between the legal text and the art. The HTML version is much worse in this regard as well: the license in question reads like part of the text of the document (though the meaning it has in that context is quite ambiguous).
I'd love to see more work documents like this, or that at least aren't boring.
That said, a lawyer really should've reviewed it and told them a contract isn't the place for jokes.
It definitely gives 'cult manifesto' vibes
Is this document sincere or just AI generated and dressed up in something that people are meant to relate to...?
wtf is that, cant be real
This reminds me of anyone who went from normal life with normal funds to extreme wealth at a young age, not surprising, this is just the nerd version of rappers / ball players / young actors etc going through their own rendition of this.
It’s a cult, or at least, the leadership is trying to turn it into one. Cults have done weirder stuff, up to and including actual suicide.
39 members of Heaven’s Gate drank phenobarbital and died, believing this would allow them to escape Earth on the Hale-Bopp comet.
900 members of the People’s Temple (Jim Jones) drank cyanide-laced koolaid (actually FlavorAid) and died. That’s where the phrase “drink the koolaid” came from.
OK, but there's a lot of artwork in here: the opening-page image has lines like WE ARE ALL ONE IN LOVE -- is anyone taking this text too for a legal commitment?
Added: oh, the seppuku is in the HTML version without art, though you have to click to make it visible. Retracted.
milady on hackernews lmao
Interesting, it's still there (end of Section III), though sadly without the winking anime girl and yellow cats.
> “If you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes inside of the EF,” [Bastian Aue] said, according to the lawsuit, which cited a recorded conversation between the pair.
except Fulton did not "make a stink" but only pointed it out, if Bastian Aue wanted to not continue rewarding those who actually make the stink, he should have fired whoever was involved with inserting the offensive memes and imagery into legal documents... this reflects very poorly on the Ethereum Foundation... any small sized team of cryptographers can recreate effective competition in this space, especially aided with LLMs.
Also, I don't think a contract prescribing a suicide pledge is a lawful contract. This means those people were fired for refusal to sign an unlawful contract! Imagine for a moment that instead of a suicide pledge it contained an assassination pledge, everyone signing it would be complicit (although the employees may point at fear of losing their jobs combined with non-chalance of governments looking the other way even as we speak). Unlike an assassination pledge the employees are probably not in fault, even though the contract is unlawful, but the employers drafting the unlawful contract even to 100% willing employees could very well be illegal. In the real world not 100% would sign, and the ~20% that refused to sign (53 of 250 or so) lost their jobs, that sounds like prosecutable crime: firing or bullying people out over refusal to sign an unlawful document.
I feel like it has to be a joke, but I wonder if such a clear "joke" would make other things in the contract possible to be invalidated in court given that if one assumes that part is a joke how can one tell what other parts are also supposed to be or not to be a farce in the contract.
nah, contracts sometimes even explicitly call out a severability or savings clause (where if one part is deemed illegal or unenforceable, it shouldn't impact the rest)
Contract law is surprisingly reasonable, typically focused on enforcing what people expect to be enforced and not standing on weird arcane rituals
...like suicide.
tbf, severability clauses tend to be designed for *the rest of the contract is still valid even if clause 3b is ruled to be incompatible with state law or inconsiste with other agreements" not "the rest of the contract is still valid even if a prominent part of it so fundamentally unserious people could reasonably believe the wider document was a mission statement or joke rather than a legally binding contract".
I suspect a good lawyer in most jurisdictions could get someone out of a "breach of contract" suit by arguing their client reasonably believed that what they had signed was not actually a contract since it was decorated like a DnD manual and included an obligation to commit seppuku...
I have to imagine this would conflict with some California law. Any CA residents in the Ethereum Foundation?
People are joking around to much these days with respect to serious things like legal documents.
I don't think the fact that it's in a legal document is as relevant as what's being said.
If employees were told they were to agree to seppuku for violation of a company principle during an onboarding meeting, would it be any different?
Weirdness used to be a charming aspect of the tech industry. Now it's death cults, fascism, accelerationism, "monarchists," "effective altruism" and whatever other brand of curdled dark perversion haunts Silicon Valley.
All a flavor of lust for power and influence from very bitter, angry, and jealous people.
I don't think that's a very good description of the ethereum foundation document that we are discussing.
A great deal of the problems in the industry are systemic, not personal. If you rely on personalization to understand the problems of the world, you will always be frustrated, because there will always be people ready to step into the role of “evil” thanks to perverse incentives. You can only eliminate the evil by eliminating the incentives.
I have no power to do any such thing. I acknowledge that the system rewards sociopathy and seems to inspire it as well. These types seem to be the shepards of our industry and the world changing technologies its laborers develop, do you disagree?
I agree, but focusing on the personalities involved causes people to misdirect their efforts as a group, and they just end up with a different group of “bad guys” after getting rid of (or disempowering) the current batch.
The pattern that’s currently in tech already existed (and continues to exist) in the world of finance. Tech is just its latest expression.
Sure, for myself, the best I can do is make sure my day to day work does not involve these people, so I do focus on personalities regarding what companies/teams to work for.
To be fair, I find this weirdness much more interesting than the traditional "rapture will occur on X" or "I am Gods chosen fornicator". How cool would it be if there was still some fjord somewhere where they still sacrificed goats to Odin? Christianity really wiped out many the interesting cult themes, and new ones like Scientology have so far just been shameless cash grabs from the gullible and lost.
At least the AI death cults are offering a doomsday scenario which is somewhat plausible. A little more iffy on the details then straightforwards nuclear Armageddon perhaps, but not dismissable out of hand. And compared to traditional human perversions, afaik they haven't gotten much further than summer of love type stuff, just with a bit more of a pessimistic twist. They have nothing on an average crackhouse.
Overall, I think it all qualifies as a pretty fun and interesting weirdness on the scale of human experience, which regularly goes much...much darker than a bunch of kids living in sharehouses and worrying about the future.
If we could relegate effective altruism to the graveyard of terrible but well intentioned ideas to never rear its head ever again to haunt humanity that would be a small win.
Silicon Valley can be weird sometimes but this isn't Silicon Valley. Vitalik is based in Singapore but travels to Toronto, and European tech hubs like Berlin, Zug, and Prague.
I believe that a good reason why crypto got started was precisely because most people around the world got locked out of Silicon Valley. IE. they couldn't work or invest in high flying SV startups so they gamble their money in crypto rug pulls and shill for crypto shitcoins.
> “If you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes inside of the EF,”
Anyone in a position of power knows that. It’s fucked up, and that’s the kind of dynamic the workplace is built upon.
https://archive.is/3OWzE
Why would you do this? There’s nothing to gain from jokingly suggesting your employees kill themselves, especially in a document they’re signing.
Cryptocurrency is not a serious thing, the people behind it have demonstrated this time and time again.
> Why would you do this?
Good question.
I'd never work for a crypto organization or company, but that aside as someone who long ago briefly worked for a company that turned out to be mostly staffed by Scientologists (1990s EarthLink, before the MindSpring merger), I'd have noped out before the suicide pact thing, when reading this:
> Outlining leadership’s vision for the foundation for the next 1,000 years
Spare me the weird culty stuff, even if it is a joke.
> And on page 11 — nestled between a winking anime woman and three yellow cats — was a suicide pledge.
Very curious is this pattern of infantilization and sensitive tech orgs and companies. It seems to have started around the dotcom boom-bust period. I remember when Google first came out with "Do no evil" and the primary colors and the whole cute cartoons, and all sorts of red flags went up for me. I truly wonder if somewhere the type of cognitive high performer coupled with requirement for being effectively chumps/controlable arrived at this formula.
You want the high performers to not realise their employers are evil. It's even better if they never grow their own moral compass at all.
If you go deep into the crypto world you'll find that this messaging resonates well with "degens" (as they sometimes call themselves).
They love this stuff, it signals how "pilled" you are. It may or may not have to do with a large proportion of them being high on drugs (weed, psychedelics, cocaine), in addition to obviously being terminally online and bubbled. They are also extremely anti-authority, because a lot of what they do breaks the law in bigger and lesser ways, especially tax/financial law.
And they often will drive millions and millions of dollars of crypto toward these ventures, often anonymously.
You have to read these kinds of things in the context of the target audience, which is very real.
Source: I made it out.
wtf I love ethereum now
> They are also extremely anti-authority
Don't say it isn't so!? The community founded on circumventing existing financial structures are anti-authority? Next you're gonna tell me anarchists don't like individual leaders, or that socialists care about healthcare.
Source: I suppose also "made it out" although it wasn't hard, I left my job, like any other industry. Worth knowing as well that the cryptocurrency ecosystem isn't nearly as "internally" aligned as some people want you to believe, there is a large range in weirdness in the ecosystem, not just what parent above shared.
> Next you're gonna tell me anarchists don't like individual leaders, or that socialists care about healthcare.
There's an irony embedded in both positions. Everyone cares about government, anarchists care about overthrowing the existing government in order to replace it with their own version. Similarly, everyone cares about healthcare, socialists care about other people paying for their healthcare.
> The community founded on circumventing existing financial structures are anti-authority?
But that's the thing; they aren't. They just want to be the authority.
Ethereum in particular has some history with that. A long time ago they espoused this principle called "code is law", and then one time the code for something called "The DAO" did something they didn't like, so they overrode the code. To this day the Ethereum consensus rules specify that a certain hardcoded transaction ID should not do what it literally says it does.
The transition from PoW to PoS is another example, espoused the open ideals of Bitcoin mining, right up until the moment they had gathered sufficient power and members, at which time they closed the gates of ascension behind them.
Hopefully we can agree that PoW is bad
I think "degen" for "degenerate gambler" refers specifically to those who make wild, all-in bets without any more research than a quick scan of twitter and telegram memes. Not those who would actually parse a multi-page manifesto document.
> They are also extremely anti-authority
Alright we will see how long that lasts. If they want to enforce their “contracts” they will need a court (i.e. an authority) to order the opposite party to abide by their contract and if they don’t, police (i.e. an authority) will force them to court and enforce what the court says.
The idea with crypto is not to need courts, the court would be the "global computer", contracts (actual cryptocurrency term) are computer programs running in the Ethereum VM.
Bitcoin originally imposed this idea on payments, and Ethereum attempts to create this computational contract system for the non monetary consideration of contracts (the harder half of the contract).
>> They are also extremely anti-authority
There's a big difference between anti-authority and a-hole, knee-jerk opposition defiance disorder, but even if you're right wouldn't the people being asked to sign this contract be the last people to do so?
> You have to read these kinds of things in the context of the target audience
No, this is a legal document. You need to rip subculturally-driven context out of your mind and read it as a legal document.
H O L Y B A S E D
don't worry about it
milady
milady
I can't express something better than this observation I read the other day:
>again, something of a banal observation, but i think contributing to the general feeling of powerlessness and rage in america today is the extent to which our elites engage in such flagrant, grotesque, even performative contempt for the rest of america
>i don't exactly think andrew carnegie loved the little guy exactly--he was, at best, the good cop to frick's bad cop--but he at least put on the appearance of charity, decorum, civic-mindedness
>meanwhile today's elites mostly seem interested in apocalypse bunkers and sex cults and getting real jacked on testosterone and ranting about the woke mind virus
>regarding the rest of us as, at best, hogs bound for the slaughter, and not even particularly hiding it
https://bsky.app/profile/sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com/pos...
"Crypto foundation" in headline is Ethereum Foundation and I do not like them.
Fits with Crypto philosophy. To let working class people to die so billionaires can use crypto for tax avoidance and crime payments. Not surprised at all.
Billionaires have plenty of other means of tax avoidance; crypto gives the working class the means to avoid tax and pay for illegal things.
> working class the means to avoid tax and pay for illegal things
Peanuts. It is still the rich that spend the most in illegal things from bribes, tax evasion, etc. even for countries trying to avoid international sanctions.
The bigger the more they profit from crime and lack of accontability.
This a famous dynamic where phishing/scam emails are often obviously scams, with the idea that scammers only want to hook people who are going to continue falling for the scam until they actually lose their money. It's interesting that the Ethereum Foundation has independently evolved the same internal dynamic.
"independently" - we don't know that.
> To take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license, or upon modification or removal of any part of this license.
So, by walking back and removing this pledge from the document, isn't that "removal of any part of this license"? I guess that we're about to find out what the pledge really means now that the authors have violated it.
> If you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes
I wounder what this guy would think of unions...
> "Authors, maintainers, editors and distributors of “this software” would pledge to ensure the software remained free and publicly accessible, and would also vow to “take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license,” the illustration read. It was labeled “Source Seppuku License,” an apparent reference to a traditional Japanese ritual suicide.
When the document went out on that Friday in March, employees were told to commit to the principles in the mandate by Monday or quit their jobs, according to the lawsuit brought by Kayleen Fulton, a Boulder woman who was fired from the Ethereum Foundation after she led employee resistance to the suicide pledge."
.. wow. When your employer starts posting like Yukio Mishima of course you sue them. I have a new entry in "most unprofessional thing I've ever seen". And no, using the "should not be taken seriously" defense is also hugely unprofessional.
"Don't take it seriously" especially doesn't work when you start firing people who won't sign it.
It's got to be figurative speech, right? Added for dramatic effect knowing that upholding the license may not always be verifiable or enforceable.
Was the firing figurative, too?
Seppuku is a two person job. Does accepting the contract mean you volunteer to be the second (the person finishing the job by decapitation) for someone else’s ritual suicide?
Tbh the seppuku thing is the one thing I wouldn't pay attention to among all the other red flags, because of how obviously impractical it is.
I don't care about "being professional" all the time. The most skilled people I know were also the most weird, eccentric and quirky. I've only skimmed the document, but it looks exactly the kind of organization I'd like to work with.
...well, except the fact that they fire people over it, and don't listen to concerns where people don't feel comfortable with some of the clauses. Yeah at this point this crossed into a cult behavior and is unacceptable. But the problem here is not memes, at least for me.
In their defense, I'd say that in the world where is more ideological companies where your motivation is to bring good and not earn numbers, we might have much had better conditions for everyone instead of the constant race to the bottom.
Maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be a rat and actually follow your words no matter how profitable it is to break it and, you know, be sure to pledge your life for it. If you say you make it for public good, then do it and never lie. While I understand the discomfort, I don't understand why people are so protective about being thieves and liars. In theory such a pledge must never affect you if you behave like a proper human being.
A suicide clause is obviously illegal and ridiculous but I’m curious if they would get away with a clause that requires paying something like $1M per day per violation or some other crazy amount of money.
The people who would agree to this have exactly the kind of mental illness that I want in maintainers of decentralized financial infrastructure.
It's not decentralised. If it was, it wouldn't have a maintainer. It's centralised in that every X months (I don't remember, 3 or 6) the chain just increases difficulty without bound, grinding to a halt if the latest consensus rules update hasn't been installed that pushes back the deadline another X months. This is how they make sure everyone is using the consensus rules that Vitalik currently prefers.
The difficulty bomb was a mechanism to ensure eventual migration from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake, which happened in 2022. PoS no longer needs a notion of difficulty.
I wish I had been surprised by what I read in this article.
"I personally commit to the direction" doesn't sound like committing to seppuku.
My falling out of love with crypto was due to the realization that these 'foundations' were effectively governing bodies participating in the minimum level of decentralized theater to grant them plausible deniability in a court of law. Bitcoin is still extremely interesting, as it has no such body, only a bunch of anarchy minded anti-social but very smart group of volunteers fighting each other. At least they practice their anarcho libertarian experiment in the mailing list, to its huge detriment.
EF are not the ones in charge. They have a lot of influence, to the point them rejecting a proposal can be enough to bury it, but very little hard power. Kind of like the Stroustrup and C++26 situation.
The people who actually control Ethereum are client dev teams. There are two groups, one for the execution layer that runs code and the other for the consensus layer that handles the actual blockchain part. No proposal can get marked as stable and entered into an official hard fork unless they approve it.
The foundation has no say over these decisions. In fact they decided not to make their own consensus client on purpose, to make sure everyone is running non EF controlled code after the merge. And they do everything they can to encourage client diversity. It's not perfect but you can't compare it to Tezos or Polygon where one company runs everything.
Has the EF ever pushed something that failed to gain miner/staker consensus?
> “If you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes inside of the EF,” he said, according to the lawsuit, which cited a recorded conversation between the pair.
Well she was too effective at organizing a resistance. Can't have that.
Crypto is the original LLM, "do anything but improving the product", "do anything but make it better to use for regular people".
Just take the money and funnel it into useless already rich people that do crap like this and are incapable of doing anything useful
If that's your definition then I think LLMs and crypto are the exact opposite.
LLMs are helpful to regular people from the start with the ChatGPT launch.
They are both very useful to me personally but I mean to point out the people that vacuum the vast majority of the investment from those sectors.
"a 38-page document outlining leadership’s vision for the foundation for the next 1,000 years."
This would by itself be enough to start packing all your office things into a cardboard box.
OK, but 900 years from now you’re gonna wish you had stayed at the ground floor.
A thousand years. I wonder how they settled on that number. Let me guess, it was a joke that shouldn't be taken too seriously.
Given that the text reads like it was written by someone inhaling a lot of NO2, I wouldn't take it 'seriously,' but I wouldn't take it as a 'joke', either. I would take it as 'sign of insanity.'
I was referring to a well known political party that also had a thousand year plan. I wonder if Eth Org will get cut down to just 12 years.
That's not a very good joke. 'We're comparing ourselves to the Third Reich! Hahahaha!'
https://www.nytimes.com/1934/09/06/archives/hitler-forecasts...
> Chancellor Adolf Hitler today proclaimed the arrival of the Nazi millennium, predicting that the next 1,000 years would not witness another revolution in Germany.
probably in binary
This really changes the meaning of the catchphrase "HODL"
Is this the same foundation/people that decided to revert the blockchain in order to protect their interests? Suicide pledge my ass...
Yes it's the same people who retroactively changed the blockchain consensus rules in order to undo someone else's transaction that was financially damaging to them. (The DAO incident)
A: Do you agree to suicide pledge? B: Sure . . B: Buddy
>vision for the foundation for the next 1,000 years.
I would nope the fuck out at that alone. That's some "billion year contract" cultist shit right there.
> An email to the foundation seeking comment on this story was not immediately returned Thursday, but a foundation leader at the time told employees the suicide pledge was not meant to be taken literally, according to the lawsuit. After employee pushback, managers updated the commitment form to clarify that the form had “nothing to do with literal seppuku,” according to the lawsuit.
Oh see it was just a joke - a joke, get it? ha ha, see by watching how many employees were complaining, we retracted it - just a "joke", right? after we put it out there saying nothing whatsoever and demanding a yes/no loyalty pledge.
it was boundary testing. this company should go out of business.
This is some toxic corporate cult-like bullshit. Can we have fewer cults now pls?
What if they changed it to something friendlier, like a pledge to drink a refreshing glass of Kool-Aid should management request as such?
as I always say when my employer requests this...
You go first!
Where is the endorsement? I see a corporate mandate, not an employment contract.
Corporations put out all sorts of fluff. If employees took it seriously then everyone working at facebook should have a VR helmet on their head 24/7.
Employees were required to agree to the document or be fired, with only a few days to decide.
That is insane, but totally believable in modern corporate cultures. I have heard of lawfirms in the 90s organizing non-optional hunting weekends, to identify any manager not a sufficient "meat eater". I cannot imagine anyone getting away with such things today. This sounds like another crop of perpetual teenagers thrust into management positions who think they can do whatever they wish with "their" employees.
A weekend, told on Friday, had to decide before Monday. Absurd.
Neurotics do neurotic things.
>the author, maintainer, editor or (re)distributor… shall uphold the following… to take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license, or upon modification or removal of any part of this license.
Remember when this here orange website thought that Buterin was a magical super-genius, as opposed to some sort of crazy person?
Like, seriously, what the hell? Did he get jealous of all the attention the Zizians were getting or something?
this is cringe, but less cringe than having to wear the nooglers hat
I'm instantly suspicious of anyone who thinks a 1000 year ~~reich~~ plan is a good idea.
> to take his or her own life with a sword [commit seppuku] upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license
This is obviously a joke, not a legally binding "suicide pledge". Signing this is a culture fit test and did its job at filtering out people like this Karen.
"Oh, that bit was just a joke" in a legally binding contract invites the question of what other bits were, which isn't a conversation you want to have in court.
Generally, clauses that involve illegal acts or can’t be construed in any legally feasible way are not legally binding. A pledge to commit ritual suicide is obviously not legally binding, whether you signed some piece of paper or not.
And sure, they can have that conversation in court. But my understanding is that this contract (that was never signed) is not even what the parties are arguing about in this case. It is a piece of evidence presented to discredit the Ethereum foundation and makes for a good news article.
> Fulton, who had earned a salary of $195,000 in her role at the Ethereum Foundation, sued for disability discrimination, retaliation, interference with her rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act, unfair employment practices and related claims. Her lawsuit notes that the Ethereum Foundation “does not hire or pay its United States staff in its own name,” but instead uses employer-of-record service companies.
> Generally, clauses that involve illegal acts or can’t be construed in any legally feasible way are not legally binding. A pledge to commit ritual suicide is obviously not legally binding, whether you signed some piece of paper or not.
You're looking at this from the wrong direction. The suicide pledge is clearly unenforceable.
"We put jokes in our contracts" invites questions about which other provisions are subtler ones.
I find it gross and misogynistic to call someone who refuses to sign a suicide pack a "Karen".
Nobody takes cryptobros seriously and you're beginning to understand why.