Jeremy Rubin's Blog

Giving Money Away?

a version of this originally appeared on tokendaily.co, I still need to verify all edits match.

Give a Man a Bitcoin, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Mine Bitcoin, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime. – Ancient Proverb

Don’t snooze – many cryptocurrency projects are giving away coins for free – act fast and you can get some too! Whatever they call it: an airdrop, a share, a gift, a giveaway, etc, the idea is the same, noble intentions of correcting long-standing social iniquities by “giving money away” (in the form of cryptocurrency) to disenfranchised groups¹. The disenfranchised group varies project-to-project; sometimes it is F/LOSS developers, sometimes all internet users, low-income individuals, etc.

There’s a catch that subverts this good intention – even ignoring difficult issues around identification of real users – it’s really hard to effectively correct these iniquities by giving away cash.

Plans that simply give out assets are misguided, because they conflate money with a different, though related, concept: wealth.

There are many ways to define these terms, but in this article I’ll define wealth as an individual’s ability to instigate changes that improve their current situation in some capacity. For example, I am wealthy if I know how to fix my own car when it breaks down. There are also harder to quantify forms of this wealth which only exist relative to a group such as leadership ability.

On the other hand, for this article, I’ll define money as a tool for convincing others of an individual’s wealth when they want something. For example, I could get a mechanic to fix my car in exchange a service or good of equal value – perhaps I can give the mechanic some advice on her ICO pitch deck – but in many cases it’s difficult to find something the other party wants, values equally, knows I have, or that I am able to offer currently. Instead, I give the mechanic a fixed amount of money, which is an easier to agree on means of exchange, unit of account, and store of value.

In another sense, money is a symptom of wealth. Where there is smoke, there is fire. Where there is money, there should be wealth. If one has a valuable skill, such as knowing how to rebuild an engine, one can use it to acquire money. While having money might be a good indicator that one possesses some valuable skill, you can easily imagine situations where this would be a false indicator – like lottery winners.

Giving money to a person lacking financial responsibility is unlikely to increase their wealth; like trying to use a cloud of smoke to start a fire. Lottery winners exemplify the challenge of converting ‘unearned’ money into wealth, about a third or more quickly go bankrupt despite their winnings². Intuitively, if you wouldn’t invest in a slot jockey with your money before they hit the jackpot, what makes you think they’d do any better with their winnings?

Giving people wealth is more effective than giving them money. But is giving away wealth possible? And just how effective can giving away money truly be?

Let’s set those questions aside for a moment, we’ll revisit them later.

For now, we’ll construct a toy model³ for discussing giveaways. As with any model, this toy model is overly simplified for many reasons – I’ll do my best to clarify which things are simplified. The main purpose in presenting a toy model is to establish a common framework for how to think about giveaways.

Suppose we can represent everyone in the world’s assets as a vector \(v_a\) and their wealth as a vector \(v_w\). Assets are tangible things usable for transactions or ownership, and wealth is a measure of an individuals quality. For instance, a debit card uses assets and a credit card uses wealth.

We can model assets as a proxy for wealth, and model the efficiency of the proxy with a cost function such as Euclidean distance between the normalized vectors. We normalize the vectors to account for unit bias⁴, if everyone had $100 or $1M, it wouldn’t matter.

In reality, Euclidean distance may be a really poor choice of cost function – perhaps a better choice is cosine similarity, perhaps there is a regularization parameter that says cost should be higher if the distribution doesn’t fall along a power law, perhaps Gini coefficient⁵ should be included, etc. But we will get a lot of mileage out of using a simple cost function for discussing the general shape of the problem.

I posit you can only meaningfully give people assets insofar as the giveaway works to minimize the cost function subject to a regularization parameter (otherwise our giveaway might be too radical, which could destabilize the economy). For example, the following formula is one possible giveaway cost function:

In plain English, you want the smallest giveaway for the largest correction in wealth/assets disparity. If \(C_G(v_a, v_w, \Delta v_a) > 0\), then you destabilize the monetary supply.

Again, this cost function is only offered as an example. We may also care about other regularizations against different types of giveaways – for instance, we might want to penalize giveaways that are ‘unfair’ with high variance between amounts – but we can use this model a starting point to look at a few examples.

If you want to follow along, the model is in python below:

def norm(v):
  w = sqrt(sum(map(lambda x: x**2, v)))
  if w == 0: return v
  return [x/w for x in v]

def cp(m, w):
  return sqrt(sum(map(lambda (a,b): (a-b)**2, zip(norm(m), norm(w)))))

def cg(m,w,dm, eta=0.01):
  return cp([a+b for (a,b) in zip(m, dm)], w) - cp(m, w) + eta*sqrt(sum(x**2 for x in dm))

To work a quick, concrete example of correcting inequalities:

Suppose Alice has $10 and Bob has $20, but Alice is “worth” $10 and Bob is “worth” $12. I.e., \(v_a = [10, 20], v_w = [10, 12]\). To correct for the inequality, we either want Alice to have more money or Bob to have less. How bad is the current inequality? The cost function tells us \(C_P([10, 20], [10, 12]) \approx 0.23\).

Suppose \(\eta = 0.01\).

Let’s examine four plausible giveaways

What if we give everyone a small amount? \(\Delta v_a = [1, 1] \to C_G \approx -0.0046\)

Negative cost! It works! By increasing Alice’s and Bob’s assets, we made the overall efficiency of the monetary supply better.

What if we give everyone a lot!

Too much! Our money is less efficient.

What if we tax Bob a little and give to Alice?

What if we tax Bob a lot and give the tax to Alice?

What if we just destroy some of Bob’s assets?

Let’s look at these examples as graphs. In the below graphs of giveaways, the blue areas are efficient, the red is inefficient, and the white areas are neutral. On the X axis is the amount Alice is to receive, on the Y axis Bob. Mind the scales on the right.

Nice – there is a large blue region where we can improve the inequality! This region is roughly a line segment from \((-10, -20)\) to \((18, 12)\).

In reality, in this model we might want to pick \(\eta\) such that the regularization amount is 1 if the size of the giveaway is the same as the monetary supply:

Now, the blue region is much smaller, and the maximum magnitude of the benefit is several orders of magnitude smaller. The giveaway doesn’t work that well!

Finding cost-reducing giveaways may be impossible in many circumstances (e.g., with a slightly greater \(\eta\)). This is always the case if the cost-function \(C_G\) is positive semi-definite with respect to the initial condition.

It bears repeating: this model is heavily simplified. In a real scenario, the regularization is much likely much larger.

Major wealth transfers often involve war, death, and destruction. Intuitively, if I stand to lose $M dollars, I am willing to spend $M dollars to prevent that loss (even if the total loss may be larger – see war of attrition⁶)

We also can’t simply find the blue-zones easily – ultimately, we don’t know how wealthy everyone is exactly and there are billions of people, not just two. Wealth is not a fixed quantity. Just giving someone assets doesn’t make them wealthier, nor does taking away some of their assets in the short term. In the long term, however, people’s wealth drifts and moves.

There’s been a lot of research that’s been done on the efficacy various forms of giveaway. Here’s a run down on 4 cases:

Example 1: Finland gave away 560 euros/month to 2,000 randomly selected unemployed Finns for two years. Finland didn’t find an increase in employment, but did find increased happiness. When the recipients base was slated to increase, unsavory side effects such as increased nationalism manifested⁷.

Example 2: GiveDirectly gives unconditional cash transfers to impoverished areas in East Africa. GiveDirectly claims to have seen a large improvement in the earnings of those who received unconditional cash transfers several years after the transfer⁸.

Example 3: The EU Africa Emergency trust, which is referenced in the Economist⁷, set up gifts to give to residents of countries which were below a certain poverty threshold if the government would share key reports and data. The program faced budgetary issues.

Example 4: GiveCrypto is a brand new initiative which gives crypto wallets with coins (unclear which ones) to those in need. This is substantial because cryptocurrency also helps fill in with banking infrastructure, unlike previous programs like GiveDirectly which relied on existing analog systems.

A problem shared across these studies broadly is that they are not large enough. The amounts of money dispersed is significantly smaller than the magnitude of inequality between the sponsors and the recipients. Performing such socioeconomic experiments at scale may self destruct an economy and society unwilling to bear the cost of a non-experiment sized giveaway. Increasing nationalism, as seen in Finland, could be a precursor for increased violence or decreased long term global development.

A second issue is that these programs are targeted at increasing wealth, not decreasing inequality. As is often said, a rising tide raises all boats. If the global economy improves as a result of assisting impoverished individuals, the benefit is not clearly greater for the receiver than the giver. For instance, the giver may benefit greatly from having new agricultural trade, sources of cheap educated labor, advanced manufacturing capability, or from increasing peace in troubled regions defraying the risk of costly wars.

A third concern is that such programs create subversive reliance. For instance, in Gambia, when politicians wanted to stop passing on surveillance data to the EU, which would end the payments, mass protests erupted. The Gambian citizens were put into a precarious relationship with the EU, whereby the EU had the power to influence their politics and conduct – perhaps against their longer term interests. This emphasizes the importance of unconditionality, as promulgated by GiveDirectly. Unfortunately, the discretion to continue or not continue a giveaway itself constitutes a conditionality. It’s best to structure programs so as to minimize the chance of dependence or economic reliance for the independence and freedom of the recipients.

Let’s look examine some strategies in light of the real world research and our model.

Give Small Amounts, Frequently

Giving away a large amount should be mostly infeasible because of regularization. However, by giving away small amounts repeatedly, we have an opportunity to re-examine the money to wealth ratios for each individual, and we also give the money distributed a chance to impact wealth. This is reminiscent of gradient descent as used in Machine Learning⁹.

The down side is that if the distributions are too small then the economy can sufficiently absorb and dissipate the extra money without benefiting anyone, and if they are too frequent then it may not be different than a single larger giveaway, causing chaos.

Target Specific Groups with Bad Wealth : Assets Ratios

One way to improve the odds of our distribution working is by finding small communities with bad money to wealth ratios and focusing on them exclusively. This is essentially the GiveDirectly model for working in East Africa.

However, we must be careful. Because of the normalization of the assets vector, giving money to one person fundamentally takes money from everyone else.

Shown below, 90 people with 10 wealth and 10 assets each, and 10 people with 10 wealth and 1 assets each. We give all 10 asset-poor people X assets each. Y is \(\eta\), the learning rate.

This shows us that there is a range of reasonable giveaways, so long as we discount giving money heavily (above \(\eta \approx 0.01 \) everyone is made worse off giving away any money).

It’s also critical to ensure that this is somewhat Pareto Efficient – if increasing the wealth of one group puts them on par or above another, that other group may suffer. For instance, if supporting a poor community results in a flood of agricultural products, existing farmers quality of life may be made worse.

Self Determination & Currency Competition

One way to improve the efficiency of the money supply is to allow people to issue currencies at will for whatever group wants to.

The price discovery process for this currency on the open market serves as a feedback loop for if that distribution formed a good giveaway or not and the integrity of those who operate and hold the new currency.

Internally to the group self-determining, the new currency should be viewed as more efficient among the group itself.

In a parallel world, instead of GiveCrypto, there’s GiveLiquidity which buys and sells cryptocurrencies issued by communities to help them bootstrap internationally. This would help avoid colonialist influence because communities would have more autonomy over the new money supply they are adopting.

Increase Wealth Directly

This is a bit of a trick. Recall, our cost functions from our toy model are about optimizing our money supply – not our overall outcome.

Individual wealth can increase directly without a gift of assets. For instance, sponsoring educational programs is a way to increase the wealth of society – this is commonly done through subsidized school programs. There’s evidence that shows that unconditional cash transfers increase attendance at schools more than conditional transfers, but improving the quality of education available could provide an even larger boost.

Another take on this is to remove “wealth-conversion depressants”. An example of this is hair stylist licenses¹⁰, they ultimately serve as a barrier for entry based on assets available (not based on skill).

Counteracting Another “Giveaway”

If other contemporaneous events emulate a giveaway that redistributes assets in such a manner that there is a substantial worsening of wealth to assets ratio, a concurrent giveaway could counteract this. Two examples of this are giving resources to educated refugees and asylum seekers who left behind their property and assets (the conflict is reassigning their assets via violence) as is being done in Turkey¹¹ and proposals to use Bitcoin in Venezuela to counteract the instability of the Bolivar¹².

In writing this article, my hope was not to convince you that you can’t make people’s lives better – au contraire! Working to improve the human condition is something that each and every one of us should do every day, and I laud those trying, even if I disagree with their tactics.

I do hope that you are left understanding how difficult it is to give away money with good effect. Fully fixing the inequality would cause massive upheaval and disorder, increasing the fairness but decreasing the wealth. Peer reviewed experiments with promising results are unlikely to scale because they don’t run up against this societal regularization. They also, at scale, may cause an untold loss of liberty as more income is unearned and dependent on the discretion of the ruling class.

I’ll leave you with this: In setting up the dichotomy between wealth and assets, I’ve completely side-stepped the much more interesting question: wealth inequality. Is it an issue if someone else is, by natural virtue, exponentially better off than me? Should that inequality be rectified? Can it be? When a new disease breaks out, the immunologist’s value to society increases, maybe that’s how it should be. Maybe we could all attain equal wealth at the cost of our individuality. Or perhaps we could all be equal, but none great. Maybe our best bet is for each of us to ask, are we better off than we were before; and what can we do for those of among us who are not as fortunate?

Open Letter on Diversity & Inclusion at Scaling Bitcoin

ATTN: Scaling Bitcoin Participants and Sponsors

We started Scaling Bitcoin with a deep commitment to diversity and inclusion. Fundamentally, Scaling Bitcoin is about bringing together elements of the Bitcoin community that would not otherwise – many of the core contributors met face to face for the first time in Montreal. Meeting face to face was a fantastic opportunity to bridge divides and seek common goals; at Scaling Bitcoin spontaneous discussions broke out which would have never occurred online. Diversity and inclusion are key elements in pulling together different parts of our community to have the discussions fruitfully. Fundamentally Scaling Bitcoin exists to work towards eliminating any barrier to entry for any person to contribute to Bitcoin’s scientific and engineering ecosystem.

Diversity and inclusion are complicated multi-faceted topics – at Scaling Bitcoin, we do our best to address them from all sides. Our conference aspires to be in a different region every time, from our first event in Montreal, to Hong Kong, to Milan, and now, to Silicon Valley. Our participants and sponsors come from all over the world (18 countries at the last event!), speak many different languages, and have vastly different perspectives on how we’ll accomplish our shared goal of Scaling Bitcoin.

We help people attend Scaling Bitcoin who would not be able to otherwise as a part of our diversity and inclusion efforts. This help comes in multiple forms, including discounted tickets for students, as well as travel and accommodation assistance for those who require it. Our chief concern is getting the individuals most likely to contribute to Bitcoin’s scientific and engineering ecosystem to the conference. We also try to help those who face additional difficulties to better integrate into the community. In past Scaling Bitcoins, this has included efforts and special programming through our academic supporting organizations to better socially integrate low-income, minority, and female participants at Scaling Bitcoin. For example, at Milan one of our Academic partners (The MIT DCI) hosted a special dinner for the students from their summer bootcamp (you can read about it here) to get to interact with some core developers in a smaller group setting.

Bitcoin developers and scientists don’t just materialize overnight, it requires diligent study and effort. This is an intimidating prospect for almost anyone, and many capable developers drop out for lack of good support. Initiatives like Chaincode’s Hacker Residency and DGLAB’s BC2 workshop have been wildly successful in nurturing talented Bitcoin Core Developers. Scaling Bitcoin is simply doing our part to onboard more talent. Explicitly seeking to onboard talent from diverse backgrounds is a critical for engineering Bitcoin to be an empowering technology to meet the needs of users all over the world. The last several decades of research on the subject shows that seeking out social diversity leads to better decision-making across the board (read about the research here).

This year, as a part of our efforts to improve Scaling Bitcoin by better structuring our Planning Committee we created a Diversity & Inclusion Committee. This committee is comprised of individuals who were excited to help us to continue our efforts around diversity and inclusion. One of the main tasks for this committee is to help us review and process subsidy requests, which are awarded based on many factors, including, likelihood of contributing to Bitcoin’s scientific and engineering ecosystem, demonstrated need, and total cost (we have a limited budget, after all). Despite now having an explicit committee for diversity and inclusion, it continues to be the job of every volunteer in Scaling Bitcoin to work towards eliminating any barrier to entry for any person to contribute to Bitcoin’s scientific and engineering ecosystem. Different people experience different barriers to entry to a field like Bitcoin, thus, the kinds of support programs we offer are not always available to everyone (we can’t afford to give everyone student ticket pricing!). The Diversity & Inclusion Committee is there to ensure that our efforts are fair and sufficient.

Technology conferences like Scaling Bitcoin present a remarkable opportunity for building community. In light of recent reports of incidents of harassment and exclusionary practices at tech conferences, we’ve take a progressive stance on making sure that Scaling Bitcoin remains a respectful and safe space for all of our participants to build that community. Incidents of harassment and exclusionary practices negatively impact people of all genders, races, and backgrounds, as well as the conferences and their communities. We take such issues seriously and have required all participants to follow our Code of Conduct since the first Scaling Bitcoin event in 2015.

Part of what makes Scaling Bitcoin such a remarkable gathering is the intense level of focus on the technology during the event. Our CoC exists to minimize the possibility of distractions and to maximize the learning, shared understanding and technical advancement of one of the most important engineering projects of our time. We hope that our attendees recognize and support that objective, and the organizing committee will as well.

Additionally, the Program Committee, which handles talk selection, operates with complete autonomy from the rest of the Scaling Bitcoin organization, including the Diversity & Inclusion Committee. No one is excluded from the conference as a result of our diversity and inclusion efforts. The main goal of the Program Committee is to unbiasedly select talks with the highest potential impact on Bitcoin. The majority of tickets are sold openly to the public. We welcome any suggestions and ideas from the Bitcoin community as to how our efforts can be more effective and we will continue to do our best to make Bitcoin a more diverse and inclusive environment.

We’re excited to be hosting what we expect to be the best Scaling Bitcoin yet this year. To increase our reach and impact in the community, we’re hosting a 2 Day tutorial preceding Scaling Bitcoin called Dev++. This is a wonderful opportunity for those just entering the space to get fast-paced high-quality instruction on becoming a Bitcoin Engineer. Following the conference, we will have a Career Fair and an event for startups to pitch to investors. You can read more about these new initiatives at BitcoinEdge.org.

Sincerely,

Jeremy Rubin

Scaling Bitcoin Planning Committee

With special thanks to Byron Gibson, Neha Narula, and the rest of the Scaling Bitcoin Planning Committee for reviewing and editing this letter, and for maintaining a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion in Bitcoin.

United States Government Censorship of Fuck Nazis Virtual Lapel Pin

My Right to Say "Fuck Nazis"

When I woke up in the morning of September 1st, 2017 I immediately began my morning ritual of lazily glancing through emails. On this morning, one particular email stood out — the Fuck Nazis Virtual Lapel Pin had been censored by the United States Government.

Let’s jump back a minute for some context.

On August 19th, 2017 I began a new project, the Fuck Nazis Virtual Lapel Pin. The project’s goal was to raise funds to resist the recent uptick in Nazism and other forms of violent racist extremism in America. The Fuck Nazis Virtual Lapel Pin is a unique fund-raiser because donors quid-pro-quo receive a digital asset in return for their contribution, I hoped this would harness the excitement around the emerging “Initial Coin Offering” phenomenon.

The reception was not as positive as I had hoped it would be — earlier in the week, I had been subject to some minor censorship by the Ethereum Maintainers and Community Moderators.

On September 1st, 2017 at 2:40 AM Pacific Daylight Time Neustar initiated a transfer of my domain. One hour and 29 minutes later Neustar sent me an email explaining the transfer.

I’ve sent Neustar an email requesting that they reinstate my registration, but I’ve not yet heard back from them.

Neustar is a contractor hired by the U.S. Governemnt to operate the .us TLD. Because they are managing a federally owned property, I beleive they are obligated to follow the First Amendment with respect to registered names. Otherwise, I do not think the FCC may legally continue to use them as a contractor. To quote ICANNWatch:

[W]hile a private entity like Neustar is under no intrinsic obligation to respect the First Amendment, the fact that they did this under government consultation, and pursuant to a government-granted charter to operate the country code registry for the United States, raises serious issues of Constitutionality.

It’s not a strange expectation to hold that contractors of the United States Government must abide by constitutional provisions. For instance, private prisons are not at liberty to exact cruel and unusual punishments. Kimberly N. Brown delivers a thorough treatment of this in “We the People,” Constitutional Accountability, and Outsourcing Government. While there are controversial cases, it is generally clear that public actors must hold accountable private actors that they delegate their constitutional powers to.

Notwithstanding the concern over whether it is the FCC or Neustar who is legally culpable, we can safely assume that the FCC is bound to ensure that Neustar respects constitutional rights in fulfilling their duties as a government contractor, and therefore examine Neustar as a government actor.

Neustar’s management policy document can be found here. The relevant sections are B-78 and B-98. Neustar claims that they will review domains which contain the “7 Words” and possibly delete them (presumably, ensuring that they are not violating the registrant’s First Amendment rights). Their claim is that the domain fucknazis.us violate’s the “7 Words” policy enforced by Neustar. (This is a reference to George Carlin’s infamous Seven Dirty Words skit) In this case, the presence of “fuck” in the domain is what alerted Neustar to need to review my domain. However, in failing to waive fucknazis.us I believe they violated my First Amendment rights.

There are three major relevant Supreme Court cases here, Cohen v. California (1971), Miller v. California (1973), and FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978).

In Cohen v. California, a man was arrested for disturbing the peace for wearing a “Fuck the Draft” shirt. In this case, the speech was found to be protected by the First Amendment for multiple reasons. Most relevantly, the court refused to recognize the speech as “Fighting Words”, or speech intended to elicit violence. This is because Cohen’s voiced dissent of the draft was not intended to elicit any violence, it was simply to voice an opinion. Similarly, the material published on the Fuck Nazis site was clearly in support of non-violent action, e.g.

As a first measure, and irrespective of what is most effective, I want to use funds raised ensure that it is possible to protest these Nazis as safely as possible. No one should permit the Nazis to intimidate them out of their freedom to speak against them.

along with a list of other non-violent actions I would use the funds raised to support. The court went further to find that

Finally, and in the same vein, we cannot indulge the facile assumption that one can forbid particular words without also running a substantial risk of suppressing ideas in the process. Indeed, governments might soon seize upon the censorship of particular words as a convenient guise for banning the expression of unpopular views. We have been able, as noted above, to discern little social benefit that might result from running the risk of opening the door to such grave results.

This makes it clear that the censorship of Fuck Nazis Virtual Lapel Pins by revocation of the domain fucknazis.us is unconstitutional.

Miller v. California is a case of a very different nature involving the distribution of pornographic content, but it established a simple three-prong test for unprotected explicit speech. If you pass all three tests, then the work is considered obscene.

(a) whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest.

Fail: Fuck Nazis is clearly non-pornographic and elicits no sexual response.

(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law.

Fail: Fuck Nazis is clearly non-sexual.

(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. If a state obscenity law is thus limited, First Amendment values are adequately protected by ultimate independent appellate review of constitutional claims when necessary.

Fail: Fuck Nazis is a political and artistic project, and is presented cogently.

Having clearly failed all three tests, Fuck Nazis is non-obscene protected speech by all measures.

Critically, both Cohen v. California and Miller v. California are both rulings with regards to the state’s ability to restrict speech. Only FCC v. Pacifica Foundation deals with the federal government’s ability to restrict “obscene” speech, which established the “7 Dirty Words”.

The critically relevant part of FCC v. Pacifica Foundation is that the measures enforce by the FCC (to only broadcast during hours children are unlikely to be awake) did not prevent adults from accessing and finding the content. In this case, Neustar’s actions against Fuck Nazis does prevent adults from accessing the content unadulterated (whereas the time restriction enforced by the FCC permitted identical material to be broadcast at a reasonably later time). Furthermore, based on Neustar’s enforced policies I would be able to register the domain “nazis.us” (if it were available — it’s been held since 2014) and use the subdomain “fuck” giving me the “fuck.nazis.us” domain. This makes the case that there is zero benefit from the measure taken by Neustar, at the expense of the significant burden of forcing me to change a domain that I have already linked to in numerous communications. Of greater concern is the general freedom of speech risk established by this enforcement mechanism.

Based on the above, Neustar, acting as an agent of the United States government, plainly violated my First Amendment rights causing damages to my project that are difficult to quantify given that the fund-raiser I was hosting on the site is ongoing.

Censorship by Ethereum Maintainers

The Ethereum Maintainers and Moderators inexplicably took actions to censor the Fuck Nazis Virtual Lapel Pin.

When I posted the project to the Ethereum subreddit on August 26th (here) it faced an immediate barrage of negative attention from the Ethereum community. I can tolerate negative reception, but I can’t tolerate censorship.

One of the negative response I noticed a few days after posting was Vitalik Buterin (the infamous founder and lead maintainer of Ethereum) liking a libelous tweet which called my project “a shameless attempt at scamming people”. I typically interpret a like on Twitter as at least a weak endorsement (the twitter-meme “RT not endorsement” can be taken to imply that while retweeting is not endorsement, maybe liking is).

From my perspective, Vitalik’s implicit endorsement of a libelous message claiming that I am perpetrating fraud with Fuck Nazis is the only shame-worthy action! From day one Fuck Nazis’ course of action has been focused on many charitable causes, including:

1. Donations to organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League.
2. Sponsoring guards for synagogues who are denied publicly funded police details.
3. Workshops on how to non-violently oppose Nazis in cities where they are staging demonstrations.

After Vitalik liked the above tweet, I noticed that my post was censored from /r/ethereum by the moderators (Vitalik is also the lead moderator of /r/ethereum). This censorship occured days after it had been on the front page, leading me to believe it was removed for no logical reason other than distaste for the issue involved.

I met Vitalik back in 2014, in the very early days of Ethereum, so I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the post removal. I shot him an email on August 29th and again on the 31st but he is yet to respond.

His lack of response to me signals, but does not confirm, that it was him who censored Fuck Nazis and he is unwilling to justify his actions to me directly.

The Ethereum Foundation and affiliated contributors have no legal requirement to grant me free speech as a private organization.

That said, they do have a moral responsibility to protect free speech and to be inclusive of many different kinds of people within their community. By actively censoring my post on Fuck Nazis, they have chosen to signal their alignment with a racist agenda and cause a chilling effect on future social impact projects on Ethereum.

Their attempted censorship runs counter to the philosophy stated on ethereum.org:

Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.

While certainly Reddit doesn’t attempt to make the same censorship guarantees as Ethereum, it’s difficult to imagine that if the leader of the development team behind Ethereum is engaged in censoring causes spitefully on Reddit that he will lead the team to fulfill the promises laid out in their statement.

Vitalik (and others in the Ethereum Foundation) must make clear their strong intention for building inclusive and tolerant community with explicit actions to improve the situation. Until sufficiently addressed, the entire community must continually push leaders of the Ethereum community for more information on how they plan to treat similar issues in the future.

This isn’t about getting an apology for censoring the Fuck Nazis thread, it’s about not building technologies that put power into the hands of hateful people who will use their power to infringe on your human rights.

Overall, this is the least of my worries currently: the Fuck Nazis Virtual Lapel Pin project is currently facing ongoing censorship from the U.S. Goverment as well. But I figured it was worthwhile for me to write up this post so that the Ethereum community can respond accordingly.

Drawing the Blockchain

One of my major pet peeves in presentations about the blockchain is that most people seem to draw the arrows/pointers in the incorrect direction.

Pointers should point from newer blocks to older blocks. This is because in a blockchain, each block is immutable so it would be impossible to update older blocks to point to newer ones. This is also in line with most singly linked list representations. Because it can be confusing, it’s always best to include reference heights for extra clarity.