Very scary indeed and #Dfinity needs to do something about this. The IC needs a more diverse group of node ownership.
One thing to note, at least the IC is transparent about who owns the nodes. For most networks you have no idea how many unique persons are actually running the networks.
Well, one last time, thank you to all who patiently shared their perspective. I have decided that at the systemic level, everything points to a repeat of all the things that make crypto a speculatorsā dream.
I think thereās an illusion of decentralisation, but 1% or less will always have way disproportionate power to shape the NNS, and the rules of the system. The economics of voting incentives all play to big whalesā disproportionate advantage. It is only by autovoting for every proposal that you make most money, and only those with serious resources can do so.
In spite of so much hope from so many, I think there will be awesome innovation, but the vision is highly unlikely to land, and if it does, it will be with beneath the surface monopolies and oligarchies. There are too many exploitable loopholes, and too much focus on monetary incentives.
Beneath the hood, I see huge emissions issues ahead as IC scales, and I canāt see the node provider concentration changing until patterns have set in. Data storage is hugely inefficient without inter-node queries, and the discussions around content moderation suggest to me that this will prove an immensely divisive faultline as the system unfolds.
Above all, I think trust is needed to invest in, and itās a different thing from faith. I see lots of believers, just like in BTC, but I see almost no transparency, a history of dishonesty, and a lot of money coming into very few hands. I am pretty confident the big investors are not, like most in the forum, believers: they are speculators. And I think we havenāt seen the last of pump and dump bubbles, but they will now transfer to the apps and projects and ventures in the ecosystem, rather than ICP itself, which has already been milked.
I wish you all luck, and that your faith in the storytelling and the visions and the dreams, proves well founded, and the custodians of your dreams, about whom you actually know so little past their storytelling, will hold that precious trust more responsibly than they have.
I guess it is goodbye for me. I will be watching developments with interest, but I will not be joining you in your leap of faith in processes which to me seem immensely fragile and exploitable and where the facts are either not available, or not commesurate with dreams and claims.
you talk a bit too much, good luck, goodbye
Thanks for stopping by. Goodbye and good luck to you.
ānot consumerate with dreams and claimsā.
Who the hell talks like this. Brevity is the soul of wit donāt you know.
Haha, bilingual autocorrect changed my original. Should have said commesurate. But I suspect that doesnāt change your point. And yes, whatever strengths I may have, brevity definitely isnāt among them.
Add to the transparency list:
As always, happy to be corrected. These are just the instances Iāve come across in less than a week of due diligence. I imagine more time would reveal more. But they are serious enough.
?? 
what happened ??
nothing noteworthy. Just a guy putting his essays through google translate citing points from the Arkham report yet claims he never read the report.
Haha, google translate. 
I donāt believe itās quite at that level yet. And I did say I would follow developments, just not invest. The fact I got 2 likes suggests thereās at least 2 people who find my essays useful. Thatās good enough for me. Feel free to ignore me! Itās the best way to avoid my writing.
As to Arkham, I find it strange youād resort to conspiracies when I actually shared the screenshot of my main source! I havenāt read Arkham. What I really did read closely is the class action lawsuit around insider trading. Valenti v Dfinity USA Research LLC et al | 3:21-CV-06118 | Court Records - UniCourt
You can also find the pdf on Scribd. The standard of evidence is higher in a court of law than in a piece like Arkhamās, and the lawsuit finds corroborating evidence in ic.rocks, a dfinity aligned initiative. Which I also mentioned. You could use faith to tag me as an Arkham heretic, or just look at the actual sources I shared and make your own mind up based on facts rather than hope. Iām easy with either.
Edited for two missing words, typing on mobile as I walk.
And for the sake of balance, let me just say I look forward to hearing Dfinityās side too. If youāre interested, their motion to dismiss is due on the 8 of September, so just over a month. They will either provide counter evidence, or more likely try to quash the lawsuit on procedural grounds. Hope itās the former. When itās out, Iāll share Dfinityās side as well, so people defending them at least have some more facts to draw on than belief!
Further in the path of balance here is, not the motion to dismiss, but essentially a countersuit, arguments wise, from Dominic Williams against Arkham and NYT. It does give their side of the story which Iāve been looking for and Iāll take time to read and digest it.
On a very quick reading however, and in context of the evidence from locked seed investors, the evidence in this lawsuit that at least some senior management were not locked, and the fallback into semantics to explain the transfer (not sale) of ICP, which then people could choose to transfer again, and then sell, seems prima fascie to overall not really refute the narrative of the case against Williams. But will have to look more closely to confirm. It shows chutzpah, but may turn out to be an own goal discovery wise. OTOH, if Dfinity prevails on both lawsuits, they will definitely have gone some way toward regaining my trust.
Watching this space.
Iāve lost good money on ICP so far, but I also think that its value is greatly underestimated based on the tech, team, and vision of the IC.
Thus far Iāve given money to people who cashed out their ICP based on the idea that it is worth less than my analysis. Iām not upset about that; I simply think they are mistaken.
Whether they are insiders, investors, or anyone else, theyāve given up a coin that I think holds greater value than they sold it at. At some point, I think they will either reinvest or lose out. In the meantime, Iāll accumulate at a discount.
Thereās some storytelling involved. How else can we discuss the future? But I like the IC story, and I enjoy being part of it.
I agree, it may be old news. However, I have not seen one post from an IC community member answering their actual questions or clarifying with factual evidence. All I have seen is a community ganging up on an individual seeking clarity prior to dumping their life into a project. I do not think what this individual is asking for is honestly too much to ask for. In fact, Iām rather shocked that the community again sidesteps these individuals, and just shoving them into a box labeled FUD. This person has valid concerns. They should be treated as such. If you want this individual to stop, or be informed. Why are you not informing them? Why are you ignoring the direct questions they are asking? They seem very willing to accept their position is wrong. Yet, all they are getting is silenced. This is a problem for me. Too many people on here are claiming to have the answers he seeks and just say dig around. If you have proof that this individual is wrong. They are directly asking you for that. Not around about questions interrogating his faith to the IC. If these reports are fake news (beyond a Twitter post saying itās fake news, and eventually the reporter will be sued) then why is so damn hard for an individual to ask for the proof that anyone inside a courtroom or fact-checking org. would ask for and then receive. This is what concerns me. Then, moving further, those who want full transparency from the foundation refuse to come to the table to discuss tax optimization moving forward so the entire community can be ātransparentā. If you ask me the community is enabling this behavior from the IC.
I want to end this off by apologizing to @Leamsi for the outright disrespect given to them on this thread. You have valid questions and concerns. Not everyone in the community is like that. You have every right to continue asking and learning. ANYONE who tells you otherwise can simply ignore you. Keep asking questions and keep learning. Forget the rest!
Of course he or she has the right to ask questions but he doesnāt have the right to be given an answer.
A lot of people here just want to build their projects in peace. I personally come here to read on the progress that the developer community is making as well as the foundation. I am not shocked that many people are not interested in conspiracy theories that may be valid or not.
Thank you @jsull9 for your support, and no need to apologise. I am happy to contribute questions, and as you say, the lack of answers speak for itself.
@Sormarler it remains puzzling to me, the incuriousness of many devs in web3, when our work as engineers generally requires and hones the instict to look critically at all the systems we interact with, and code defensively even against our own selves, because we know that if your system allows errors, they will come.
In this case you refer to conspiracy theories with indifference, and want to just build your projects in peace. In the companies Iāve worked for, that peace is not assumed, itās conquered. We check for security vulnerabilities. We have pipelines to inspect our code. We create unit, feature, integration and e2e tests. We log behaviour for observability. We fail gracefully. And THEN we sleep with one eye open to that vulnerability or bug we will have missed.
Now here you are building your dapps, and totally unconcerned that there are no privacy or security provisions required of node providers, even though it has been demonstrated you can access node state without secure enclaves? Fully relaxed that the sole controller of Dfinity also has an ICP VC able to invest and profit from obviously privileged knowledge. You are excited by the promise of decentralisation, but completely relaxed about the concentration of node providers, ICP owners, datacentre co-locators, ICP voting power, ICP owners, etc., etc.
None of these things are conspiracies. These are all verifiable facts you can check for yourself.
The only question currently in the air, is whether the confirmed billions in ICP transactions from a tiny pool of people when everyone else was locked out (all parties agree on that), was a fraudulent example of insider trading, rug pull or pump and dump, or whether it was an above board, good faith, legitimate way of doing business. The courts will decide this.
The factual issues above (just a sample) are not awaiting confirmation: they are facts sourced from Dfinity itself.
Now for retail investors to just say āI believe!ā, that is understandable. For software engineers to say: āI donāt care about vulnerabilities or exploits in the system, I just want to code my appsāā¦ that I find bizarre.
But hey, to each their own. The problem, hinted at by @jsull9, is that when you shut out or ignore all your critical friends, when you choose to go with groupthink, your feedback loop gets compromised, a constant source of confirmation bias. Thatās when the big errors that break a system tend to happen.
I am not an expert in technology, the vision of decentralizing the Internet conquered me and I have invested too much money in ICP, I think that things happened at launch that should not have happened and consequently some have gotten rich because of others in an obscene way and unethical that would be enough to delegitimize Dfinity Iām tired and disappointed. But when I see the passion with which Dominic defends his vision, something tells me that not only money moves him, in his eyes I see something else, I see the fire of Prometheus. Money doesnāt satisfy the heart, changing the world when you were born to do so. Dfinity has the resources, vision and talent to see it through. We all make mistakes, perhaps they thought that the market could absorb the rug pull, perhaps ambition could, perhaps it was fate that the next day Btc puncturedā¦ letās go to the present, learn and continue. I think the team behind Dfinity is passionate about what they do. Do you think that Dfinity will be able to solve the problems you mention above? Greetings, it has been a pleasure to read you.
@Leamsi I would love to have an update on your view regarding this subject.
I have stepped back for a bit, and Iām currently exploring Kadena as the most promising alternative so far. Early days.
I would say that the structural problems I noted in my last post on this are still there. The security issues, the node centralisation, the environmental haphazardness, the constraints on scalability, the conflict of interest and commercial loopholes at the top, the several more vectors of sytemic centralisation, the political distortions of voting power distributions and following protocols. The inflationary pressures and diving value pose a more serious threat IMO than the bare numbers imply (Community Proposal: Assessing node inflation based on token price - #25 by bjoernek), precisely because of the huge vulnerability of ICP to insider manipulation, where the people that lose are the same boutique investors who lost to market manipulation at the beginning.
At least itās not just me saying this now, and the community seems less inclined to pushback than when I made the point that the evidence for early market manipulation to the benefit of Dfinity around genesis.
Where there have been development is on the legal side. The case against Dfinity was torpedoed by the exposure of unethical (not certain if illegal) and definitely dishonest shenanigans by opposing counsel. It turns out, as many here suspected and argued to me (from faith more than evidence) that there was a nefarious, compromised agenda behind the lawsuits for defrauding investors.
Ava Labs, a rival crypto basically colluded with a crypto-focused litigation lawyer (Roche) to sue its competitors at one remove. The goal was not necessarily to win the lawsuits, which was a bonus, but to expose commercially sensitive competitor secrets via legal discovery, which the shadow crypto partner could exploit. Dfinity managed to secure a leaked audio of Roche boasting about this, and the law firm leading the law suit on behalf of the early ICP investors alleged to have been swindled by Dfinity and a couple of VCs, immediately dropped out (September). The hearing on Dfinityās Motion to Dismiss, which contains its defence and explanations, was postponed.
Alas, this says nothing about the actual victims in all this, or at least the claimants, who were exploited by Dfinityās competitors weaponising their grievances. They have been left without legal representation, but not because the accusations were found to lack evidence or grounds. As I said in my posts, and people are realising more and more, the data to conclude a) market manipulation, and b) Definity insider benefits, is not from an article or a lawsuit, but from all the publicly available numbers that any reader here can verify without intermediaries.
In fact you can now read Dfinity and Williamsā defence.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/60120124/62/valenti-v-dfinity-usa-research-llc/
And for all the true believersā¦ itās not good. Far from providing evidence against early insider trading, they base their defence on the fact that even if true, the case is not prosecutable on the basis of the prosecutionās strategy.
āeven if the allegations in the Complaint are taken as true, it fails to state a claim under Sections
22 12(a)(1) or 15 of the Securities Actā.
The document, in an equally legalistic way, says Williams himself did not sell tokens then. But it acknowledges that right when everyone was locked in, the earliest investors and ex-employees could buy and sell freely at peak prices. The fact that this money could still find its way to other pockets, including Williams, is not addressed. Remarkably, in their motion to dismiss they cite a speculative article that likewise makes the point of privileged training by a few at the start.
Their point is that what happened may not have been fair, may not have been honest, but, it might not be prosecutable under the law as a class action lawsuit. If they win this lawsuit, it wonāt be because they have been absolved from the charge of insider manipulation and profit, but simply because such manipulation and profit is not covered by a specific securities law.
The reason why they havenāt mounted a stronger defence or denial, is because itās the nature of distributed ledgers to make flows transparent, so thereās no hiding or questioning the clearly unethical facts. Whether they are prosecutable or not.
And the same people at the top then, are largely at the top now.
As a lawyer I can tell you that this approach is standard litigation strategy and strongest way to win a motion to dismiss which in this case assumes all allegations as true and attempts to succeed as a matter of law. This means that the plaintiffās case is so weak that even if everything they say is true they still have no legal basis to sue.
Also, providing evidence at this early stage would be a huge mistake and in fact impossible since āevidenceā appears only at trial; not during motions.
Accordingly, there is nothing improper to infer about the defense. Before doing so, you should learn more about how the law works. Plaintiffs have no right to argue nonsense in a court and thereby earn the right to a full factual and ethical discussion of the issues.
There is no āprosecutionā by the way; you mean āplaintiff.ā Prosecution only applies in criminal cases not civil ones. That is one of the most basic distinctions in the law.
Keep us all posted on Kadena - Iād love to hear more about it.