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Nearly a year ago I made the comment -- "Who are these people[1] and what credentials do they have to build and run a cryptocurrency platform?" [1] https://ang
by AJ007 10y ago
Nearly a year ago I made the comment --
"Who are these people[1] and what credentials do they have to build and run a cryptocurrency platform?"
[1] https://angel.co/ethereum-1 https://angel.co/ethereum-1
Today, not a single cryptographer, mathematician, or anyone with software security experience is listed on the Ethereum Foundation member list[2]. I am not attacking any individuals by themselves, but as a group this says a lot.
For the record, what I see listed online today is a: consultant, magazine founder, a programmer, and a lawyer. On the advisory board a sales person, a psychologist, a leveraged debt consultant. On the "special advisors" list, which I have no idea what this means, maybe someone who answered a phone call a few times, one person with a bunch of business credentials, something "fintech" related with little explanation, and a tech CEO.
Maybe the Ethereum Foundation doesn't need anyone with deep experience in cryptography and security?
[2] https://www.ethereum.org/foundation https://www.ethereum.org/foundation
- heliumcraft 10y agoyou are looking at a page listing boards and advisors, of course those wouldn't be the technical people. Look at the core teams behind the different tools (too many to list here quickly), as well as the devs working in companies in the ecosystem such as consensys and ethcore, they are all quite qualified and smart people. Two examples come to mind are vlad zamfir and Dr. Christian Reitwiessner.
- djcapelis 10y agoI'm not really familiar with either of them so maybe there's ton of security experience that they have that I'm not aware of... but I sure wasn't able to find any when I looked up the history of either of those two people. If you wanted to make the case that they had programming experience, sure, totally. But software security experts? How do you figure either of them being one of those?
- jsprogrammer 10y agoWhy would boards and advisors of course not be technical?
- malandrew 10y agojust for a point of reference: https://www.torproject.org/about/board.html.en https://www.torproject.org/about/board.html.en granted a few people with the right background, but also a bunch with backgrounds like those you listed.
- djcapelis 10y agoYou may want to read that list again. Over half of Tor's board of directors have deep experience in software security. And even their attorney has given talks at hacker conferences and is very, very well respected. Tor's board shows precisely the opposite: a deep list of well qualified people to run an organization that works on an important piece of security software.
- malandrew 10y agoI did read it, which is why I said " a few people with the right background". I counted less than half, but my point was that it's okay for people without technical background to sit on the board of well known crypto projects.
- geofft 10y agoThey've claimed the involvement of Ralph Merkle and Neal Koblitz. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/463794004492951552 https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/463794004492951552 https://twitter.com/ethereumproject/status/433376261449457665 https://twitter.com/ethereumproject/status/43337626144945766... Of course, I haven't seen anything other than those two tweets to indicate their involvement....
- homakov 10y agoThis is unfair to banish a company for not having enough "security experience". It could happen to anyone (i mean making such a design mistake), plus they afaik had some external audits. "Aha, no security background!" is wrong.
- mjfl 10y agoIt is absolutely fair to banish a company for security credentials if it's dangling $150 million out in the open air.
- heliumcraft 10y agoThe Ethereum Foundation had nothing to do with the creation of the DAO.
- burkaman 10y agoThat's like saying The Pirate Bay has nothing to do with piracy.
- heliumcraft 10y agoIt's like saying the WEB and HTTP protocol have nothing do with a SQL injection on some website.
- dang 10y ago> What are you talking about? Please don't be uncivil. It's damaging to collegial conversation, and it's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Please edit such stuff out of your comments here.
- mjfl 10y agoedited.
- lotsoflumens 10y agoYou're making the mistake of believing that the CV's of token board or foundation members have anything at all to do with quality, reliability or integrity. Such beliefs lead to the Appeal to Authority fallacy, and others.
- zmanian 10y agoYou see a common pattern in crypto projects. The core of the project is passionate autodidacts and the experts are in periphery. Tor and Ethereum have ample access to experts via academic research, security auditors and academic consultants. Tor worked hard to build up this pattern by encouraging a robust outsider community to form around Tor. Ethereum has done the same from the get go.
- drcode 10y agoYour comment from a year ago was pretty much entirely wrong: The ethereum platform has so far been stable and without exploits to this date. The exploits of theDAO and the exploits described in the article are smart program exploits, not exploits in the underlying platform. Could the solidity programming language have some more features to protect inexperience smart contract programmers from themselves? Certainly, nobody is disputing that.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Inthenameofmine 10y agoGenerally speaking the longer someone has been in a specific field, the lower the probability of them thinking of a new method or agreeing with new things. This is a general pattern across the board with anything ews, startups, projects, etc. As somebody working with a lot os startups, having somebody with 30 years of a specific core competency on the founding team is a huge red flag.