There is a new startup in the Ethereum Classic space that has caused a bit of a stir with their initial actions and I would like to take a few minutes to comment on them. For brevity, there is no distinction made between etclabs, the “startup incubator” and DFG, the desperate speculator group. Some may remember them as they made presentations at the ETC summit and they have held themselves out to be a new development team in the space and hopefully they can recover from their recent missteps and join the other dev teams working in the space. Since they are struggling and need some air time, I am writing this open letter to ease the on boarding process.

Not like this

For clarity sake, github is the system many open source projects use for coordination and version control. It is one of about 5 systems in the CI/CD pipeline that are used to ensure distribution ETC related software. Individual repositories(repos) contain projects, and they are consolidated into organizations (orgs) for easy of search and moderation. There are two roles that are part of a github org, member and owner. “Owners” have the ability to add members, add/del new repos, and change members status (even removing other admins status), and more importantly add CI/CDapps and web integrations, You broke all of those because you are incompetent, please ask if you don’t know what you are doing. There are infact, and have always been, several ”ETC” orgs. IOHK, Parity Tech, BCRD, ETCDEV, etc. In the past, they work on code in their parent org and then merge it with the main branch in the ethereum project org for easy of coordination. Owners do not “own” open source orgs(google: foss), members do. Members are allowed to submit and merge code. Should the new dev group, ETCLABS, have been made members, absolutely! In fact anyone who wants to contribute can and should be made a member. After they foolishly removed all admins from the ethereumproject repo and lost control of the krykoder account, I added them as members to the back up organization ethereumclassic. I have transferred all of the projects I had created to the new repo and the chain moves on. Currently there are 4 “owners, and I will direct you to the volunteer page to see the new requirements that no admin can remove other admins without consent of all to prevent accidents like what had happened to the last org. We are more than happy to add more “owners” if the need arises. But you will need to actually produce work and be active in the community, money doesn’t matter.

ECIP processETCLABS has express concerns about not having a voice in the process of improving ETC. The first resource they should use is https://ethereumclassic.org . It will answer many of your noob question regarding testnets, wallets, dapps, etc. If your only concern is about price, I canât help you there other than saying ethereum systems work better when the price is closer to zero than 1 million, but as a speculator group you should have looked into that before losing everyone’s money. For anything else that can improve the ecosystem or network, you need to follow the Ethereum Classic improvement proposal process. This is the common way to make suggestions, you don’t need to strong arm a development team or even ask permission. The repo is located at github.com/ethereumclassic/ECIPs now that the ethereumproject repo has been deprecated. You may be interested to know that another development group with actual chops has proposed a universal set of status codes, I had proposed op code compatibility changes(which should be coming sometime after the Constantinople fork opcodes are tested in January), and several other exciting things that maybe etclabs can even try to help with.

In conclusion

Welcome to Ethereum Classic ETCLABS! I look forward to the day you actually produce anything other than bizarre press releases. Also, please try to refrain from using my name in your revisionist history unless it accurately reflects my contributions to your work. Aside from once conference call with the other development teams, in which you profusely apologized for screwing up the git org, I have never been in contact with you. Feel free to ping me on literally any social media channel as dontpanicburns or email me if you need anything.

https://medium.com/@dontpanicburns/on-recent-event-in-the-ethereum-classic-1e76e6e0bc38