Due to the recent community decision on changing the way to reward contributors the week before the hatch, I’ve decided to step back from the TEC community stewarding.
My motivation to write this letter is that I cared about this community along all this time, and I think that when someone leaves it is better to say goodbye and explain why they took the decision, even if the reasons are difficult to swallow.
During the last weeks I’ve seen how an unpopular idea gained traction thanks to a small coordinated group of individuals, dividing the community by half, and finally being half-way accepted by the whole community, changing the previous agreements in a top-to-down manner.
I didn’t confront the reasons of doing such a thing, but the way it was proposed to be done. We had a similar experience at 1hive and I think the following Luke’s argument is very applicable to the TEC nowadays:
I think its important that we don’t create the culture or future expectation that if you contribute and play by the rules and accumulate honey, that at some point in the future some mob of people will decide that you don’t deserve it and coordinate to punish you for it. If we create that sort of culture or set that sort of precedent, there will be no reason to value the Honey now or in the future.
(Disclaimer: I didn’t talk with Luke about TEC’s particular conflict, these words do not correspond to his opinion on the matter.)
So during the voting in which these ideas were considered, I oposed to change anything, but didn’t end up gaining enough support. The other similar proposal did better, but ended up with a similar amount of votes than an interventionist one. You may ask why I was not present in the debates; I don’t think my presence would have changed anything, since other people was defending postures similar to mine, and I was busy doing the last tests and reviewing the smart contracts with an external developer to make sure it’s safe to launch the hatch. I don’t regret, I’m just a bad speaker, and I made a better use of my time.
One of my major disapointments with the community is the lack of responses rejecting the mis-information used to discredit the token distribution we had at the moment. Many messages such as:
5 people have over 50% of the current voting power (link)
Should 4 people in our community have more weight than the rest of the community combined? It feels like the 1%. We are trying to create better systems here. This doesn’t feel like my economy, my choice. It feels like the choice of 4 or 5 people. (link)
They are just not true, but they were repeated over an over even when @griff and me already had refuted them (link, link).
It’s unbelibable that I have to explain that again, but it seems like many people in this community didn’t understand it, so here I am explaining again. The voting had into account CSTK and IH tokenholders. The top 10 tokenholders of CSTK have 13,4967% 38.61% of CSTK. The top 10 tokenholders of IH have 11,03% 36.00% of IH. No matter how you combine them, the top 5 accounts holding those tokens can’t control the 50% of the DAO. Furthermore, the method used to count the votes was quadratic voting, which reduced the power of the whales in favour of the long tail. I think it’s important to recognize that the messages above were skewed, and they weren’t benefitial for the public debate. (Note: the original numbers were wrong due to an error in blockscout. After some research we found that the combining CSTK and IH tokenholders, the top 10 had 30.37% of the total supply.)
Keeping previous agreements and tell the truth are important, as it is also to be able to trust others. Trust is built day by day, and although I have had great interactions with many people of TEC during all this months, I can’t trust anymore the outcomes of the governance of this community.
For all the reasons above, I’m steping back from the stewards group, and will not be directly involved in the community after the commons upgrade. I hope you can understand my decission, as it is a reflected one, and I think it’s for the best.
Nevertheless, I still will finish the work I have been doing at Commons Swarm, because TEC still have great people that I love, admire, and want to support. This process has been hard for them, but I still see the determination in their eyes, recognizing that what TEC is building is much bigger than the results of these unsubstantial debates, and I think it’s honorable.
So to finish and sum up, I may not come along all the road with TEC, but I hope we all can learn from this and I wish you the best.
Sincerely,