Cryptocurrency lawsuit: Ethereum Foundation required "suicide pledge"

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?

    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!"

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.

> 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?”

> “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.

You can't sign away your rights like that in a contract. The contract is invalid.

Actual document: https://ethereum.org/foundation/mandate/

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.

H O L Y B A S E D

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.

> “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.

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.

  haunts Silicon Valley.

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.

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.

don't worry about it

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

"I personally commit to the direction" doesn't sound like committing to seppuku.

> "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.

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

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.

I wish I had been surprised by what I read in this article.

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.

> “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.

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.

"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.

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...

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.

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.

Nobody takes cryptobros seriously and you're beginning to understand why.

[dead]

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.