Transparency within the Dfinity Foundation

You would not need to recreate the IC, even if Dfinity disappeared overnight. Only a small proportion of servers are owned by Dfinity, so all subnets would continue running, even if those servers also disappeared overnight.

The only reason why one may want to recreate the IC from scratch is e.g. if the NNS blockchain (the inputs to the NNS subnet’s state machine; which is being backed up by Dfinity) also disappeared along with Dfinity and for some reason you didn’t trust the NNS at the time. (With the blockchain at hand (and all the replica binaries deployed in the past year and a half) you can replay the whole NNS history, similar to more traditional blockchains.)

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The increase in voting power stems from an increase in staking, reflecting the continued commitment to the further development of the IC. The voting power is exercised collectively by a small group of professionals voting on proposals on behalf of DFINITY and the ICA.

The ICA was founded under Swiss law as a membership based organization. Its purpose is to allow IC community members to unite their activities and represent their interests. Its highest decision body is the General Assembly of members, typically meeting annually. Admittedly, such activities have to date not taken place under the formal header of the ICA. This should improve as the community develops and comes forward with proposals of how it wishes to organize.

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@free this is fantastic, granular information which makes technical sense, and goes a long way toward addressing some of the worst case scenarios I could envisage otherwise. It does suggest that technically IC is pretty much loosely coupled even if cohesive with Dfinity, which bodes much better than I feared for its resilience.

I still think Dfinity’s governance holes represent a strategic risk of grave and potentially existential proportions to IC given its strategic, marketing and political centrality, but it makes a huge difference to know it doesn’t make it a technologically existential risk. It also demonstrates the work the Dfinity team has been doing to decentralise and decouple is substantive and significant. And for that credit must also go to Dom, who has the entire ultimate responsibility.

This discussion, and your contribution in particular, have helped me reconsider my own involvement and given me much to think about. If the strategic as well as the technical “stack”, the ability to set the direction of the IC can also be decoupled and de-risked, then the potential might still be there for some form of take-off. It is hard to see how this happens however without a financial reorientation of Dfinity toward building community capacity to drive and execute the roadmap, or without fundamental governance reform to ensure the direction Dfinity drives the project is more democratic and certainly incomparably more accountable to the community on whom the future of IC depends.

Thanks again.

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Context:

Since this is Paul’s first post on developer forum.

@paulaitubi is the VP of Finance at Dfinity.

https://twitter.com/paul_meeusen
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulmeeusen

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Your contribution is very appreciate for the community. Thanks :pray:
I love see people so intelligent join the community

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Aaaand here we go again. Just as hope was dawning for me again: sigh. Back to even more outrageous, unethical and blatantly dishonest dodginess. Clumsy too, since it is so easily verified.

My first question to myself was, if the ICA is meant to be representing the community as a membership organisation, how can “a small group of professionals” vote on behalf of both, Dfinity and the ICA? Isn’t that yet another even stranger conflict of interest, when Dfinity represents a single man, and a membership organisation is meant to be entirely accountable to its members, of whom I would assume Dom or Dfinty aren’t members, or it would not be “independent” or a community body?

But hey, this is Dom Williams and Dfinity of (in)famous constitutional shenanigans. Assume nothing. So I doule checked. I went to the ICA site:

“The Internet Computer Association (ICA) is a Geneva-based independent members organization that advocates for the Internet Computer network while supporting and coordinating ecosystem participants.”

Fantastic! Exciting! The IC is decoupling. We even have an independent members’ association representing the community with serious voting power. There’s a General Assembly. This is proper accountability at last. Hey, I might even join, personally or via my foundation. Then I’m not just pointing out critical flaws but can do my best to do something about them, with and for the community. This is legitimately my thought process at this point.

OK, so who would be my fellow members, and how do I join? Hmm… Lemme see.

“Members consist of geographically distributed and diverse businesses and nonprofit organizations, including data centers and node providers, startups building decentralized services and their investors, participants in decentralized finance, enterprises migrating to the open internet, universities and research organizatons, educators and many others. The ICA continues to welcome new members that support its mission of stewarding the adoption of the Internet Computer.”

Cool, that sounds like I might be able to contribute and help: let’s check their charter. Nope. Nowhere in site. Off site? Took a while, but I found the association incorporation number, in Geneva. Found their documents. Discovered

“Steering Committee: Dominic Williams, from Great Britain, in Oxford, GBR, president, with collective signature of two, with a director, and Bochsler Gian, of Neuchâtel, in Chéserex, director, with collective signature of two, with the president.”

And then a statement of institutional “mutation”:
" Internet Computer Association, à Genève, CHE-132.001.501 (FOSC du 16.08.2021, p. 0/1005271910). L’inscription no 19857 du 11.08.2021 est complétée en ce sens que le membre Williams Dominic est nommé président."

The member is being made President as mentioned above: henceforth… Dominic Williams.

It turns out, I’m sorry to say, that @paulaitubi seems to be, on a charitable reading, disingenuous. Less charitable souls might say outright deceptive.

No, from what I can see, the ICA is NOT a members organisation as suggested in the website, at least not constitutionally. No, there is no publicly available charter, and the statutes of association do not indicate any requirements for a General Assembly, any process for registering members, any accountability to them, or any members’ voting process to establish the Board.

Instead, the board of these “independent members” is, once again, Dom (and his token swiss lawyer). Who now personally controls the voting power of Dfinity, openly, and the voting power of the ICA (behind smoke and mirrors). Unless I am missing something huge (truly happy to stand corrected as I have shown a mere message ago), this is Dom’s most scandalous governance outrage yet, worryingly aided and abetted by… Dfinity’s VP of Finance(!). To paint a cartel as an “independent members” body representing the community, is Kafkaesque.

So who is this, sweetly described, small group of professionals voting on behalf of Dfinity and the independent, non-dfinity community (wut?)? Why is the independent members’ association set to auto follow Dfinity? Might it be because that “small group of professionals” report to the same CEO, President (twice over), Chief Scientist and sole board member of both boards (with his Swiss lawyer)?

And did you know that ICA gives itself the right to invest, take equity, buy businesses? And the funding from this second Dom front organisation, the advertised grants programme: where does it come from, go, who does it enrich? I wouldn’t bet on the General Assembly to inform us in its annual report to members. Because I don’t expect a General Assembly to happen at all. Because from what I can see, no General Assembly constitutionally exists.

And we now find that the defacto voting power of Dfinity, ahem, Dom, is double the nominal one, but by splitting it you manage public relations?

Can @paulaitubi show us the Charter? Can he show us where it provides for a General Assembly? Surely, at the very least, he can tell us whether Dom is the President and sole Board member (with his token Swiss lawyer)?

The fact is that if there was anyone else on the board, it would be reported as a “mutation” in the public records. The only such mutation is Dom becoming President.

For how familiar this is getting, it doesn’t stop being depressing.

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I apologise in advance if anything in my inferences above is incorrect and will gladly apologise if my words have in any way maligned @paulaitubi or the ICA. My words are not a negative agenda but a reflection of care, and how very sad and affecting it is when a project so full of potential benefit for the world is undermined at every turn by what appear to me to be scandalous governance issues with the voting power and roadmap control to shape, and sink, the entire project, without community visibility, influence or redress.

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The code is publicly available on git but not everything is under Apache 2.0 license according to this tweet: https://twitter.com/dfinity/status/1391675345523200003?s=20

All code for the #InternetComputer is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, except for a few components licensed under the Internet Computer Community Source License and Internet Computer Shared Community Source License.

Would be nice to know why Dfinity chose to restrict those components under a different license, what IC’s proprietary licenses entail and have a concise list of those components.
If Dfinity disappeared overnight or went rogue, the code would be there but it’s ultimately pointless if the community can’t easily fork it and keep working on it.

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Hey @Zane I believe @free explained it well already. The licenses you refer to are still hugely permissive, but they protect the project from clone competitors by making the any such projects, if they use Dfinity, useable by Dfinity. It’s a good model I believe, and one I can see myself using in many instances. So much of IC is fantastically designed and I do believe the vast majority of the Dfinity team are good faith, technically brilliant individuals making largey the right calls in the areas under their control, Dom permittimg.

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You’re right I missed this part, but tbh I’m not relieved by it, Dfinity owns the repos and a majority of VP, so they can:

  • refuse to approve commits in the repos
  • vote against node upgrade proposals
  • stop anyone else from forking the project

I understand Dfinity wants to prevent random people from stealing their work and starting a competing project, but free software is part of the crypto ethos and with so much reliance on the foundation already not being able to compete with it just seems to further prove the centralization aspect many complain about. Dfinity’s lack of transparency and alleged control by Dom only makes it worse, the IC code is free to use as long as Dfinity, a company controlled by one man, allows. If it ever closed or went against the community’s will, there is nothing we can do other than rework all the code under stricter license, which is yet another obstacle on top of an already tough hypthetical situation.

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I see what you mean. In fact if Definity deleted or took a repo private, what would happen is that one of the forks, if they exist, would become the new parent repo, and all other public forks would be reassigned to it. Of course, if Dom were to make it private, and there be no community owned forks, then there would be no way to salvage it.This suggests it would be a good idea for the community to create and maintain a full fork (or several) of the repo outside the Dfinity organisation, that would mean the license constraints remain, but the code is free to use and modify.

It sounds like what the comunity really needs, is an equivalent to the ICA: but real. An independent, member led, transparent and accountable Foundation or DAO whose purpose is to genuinely decouple IC from Dfinity/ICA, not as competitors, but as an independent, complementary force, and a backstop in case anything were to happen to Dfinity, to ensure the IC can survive both Dom and Dfinity in worst case scenarios. That side of things, code only, would be pretty easy to achieve and maintain. The infrastructure, data, etc, is another matter, but first things first.

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You put a lot of time digging all this about ICP and the foundation. This must be a full time job. What’s your agenda and end goal here? Are you a concerned investor or developer? I am curious to know what drive you.

All this talk about decentralization makes me think about my recent reads of the famous philosopher Nietzsche. In some of his famous works Nietzsche explores the concept of good or evil vs good or bad. Here is one of the links I have been exploring The Concept of Evil (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Why this matters is because the community at large is trying to paint a picture that dfinity is not good without understanding how the world works.

Just take a look at Twitter, and see how their recent poll played out :clown_face: By allowing Trump back on Twitter America and the rest of the world is likely to be more polarized.

But isn’t that what the community voted for.

So all this talk about decentralization is not really what most of you think it is, stop putting all your energy in forcing things and go read and explore more about how the real world works.

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I am assuming you have deep investigations into other projects and crypto. I would like to read more on your critique of them.

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Unfortunately, oft-repeated shared illusions like “DAO democracy”, “trustless”, “permissionless”, “decentralized”, “autonomous”, “independent”, etc. are far more appealing to our Web3 hopes and dreams than the messy reality of a persistent concentration of power. As is common in all DAOs, the gap between illusion and reality is far greater than most individuals have the courage to realize. Instead of the ideal of atomized power that is implied by a vast “network nervous system” making all important decisions, what we have in reality is the equivalent of a single, dictatorial brain cell still making all of those decisions.

Until we can cast aside some of these well-packaged illusions of democracy and try to understand why dictatorial decision making is so difficult to displace, we cannot even begin to take the first step towards true decentralization of power. So far, I haven’t seen any inclination by DFINITY to evolve in that direction, let alone any roadmap to get there, which is disappointing.

Instead of the IC becoming an oasis of true decentralization and Web3 democracy, it will likely remain just a mirage that our imaginations live in. I can only hope that enough IC supporters eventually see the reality before it is too late. I fear that the IC will become completely compromised and absorbed by centralized power just as it gains mainstream support. We’ve all seen this story play out exactly the same way with all big tech platform companies. Any single point of failure or reliance on centralized control will ultimately be exploited and leveraged by centralized power.

Perhaps being a blockchain-based Web2 platform is all that the IC is meant to become. And perhaps it is too ambitious to try to achieve the next iteration of a networked humanity, with decentralized network ownership and control. Maybe we should just put off that lofty goal until the 22nd century instead. For now, it will be far easier just to settle for making the Andreessen Horowitz folks, the founders and other whales richer given the much more reachable and perfunctory goal of just reducing cybersecurity costs and risks. So don’t worry, all won’t be lost! /s

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The real world works consistently via dictatorship and centralized power in nearly every large organization. However, that does not mean this is how the world should work. We can do better.

As for Trump, cancelling entire human beings from public discourse is not something any dictator should have the authority to do, which is what you are implicitly supporting. Other than never permanently banning anyone, which is what I would support, the next best option would only grant this extreme power to a decentralized community.

:joy::joy: You don’t have an idea about what you are talking about. You failed the assignment.

If Hitler was alive I could ban him from my social dApp indefinitely.

That’s how the real world works

“I could ban him from my social dApp indefinitely”. Indeed, that’s how the world currently works - but doesn’t have to - as I already stated. Ironically, so many want to play the same Hitler they are permanently banning, as you so aptly demonstrated.

I am neither a developer nor investor, but I would like, in principle, to be both, certainly a developer. You can see my earliest post history to see my motivations. I began this journey enthused by the IC vision. I have a passion and some expertise in green software patterns and wanted to query what the environmental impact of the IC was and how I might be able to help in this area. I also had general concerns with almost all web3 around speculative bubbles and power and coin centralisation.

My hope was that I would ask those due diligence questions, the answers would make sense and I could put my energies into it. I even got a couple of others interested enough to join and start building dapps. Then I found some lose threads and when I pulled, I found more to worry. And the more I pulled the more I marvelled at many of the responses, specially from my fellow devs and the more I knew and wanted to know. I eventually left things at that for what, 8 months?

I was recently a bit ill, looking at my emails and saw notifications on my responses, so I visited the thread again. I was drawn in, and @free’s response gave me hope again of being able to contribute, without having to worry about Dfinity’s technical monopoly. Then I read @paulaitubi’s reply on ICA and got even more excited, as an organisation in which I could help solve the IC governance issues I discovered in the “80% of cannisters” thread, and help build the IC, whose concept I still love. I did the basic due diligence of seeking ICA’s charter to see if I could join… and found Dom alone. Again, but this time behind a wall of promotion to the contrary.

So here am I. If a real ICA came to be from the community, and independent members’ organisation with transparency, influence accountability and real voting power, without any ties to dfinity or VC backing, I’d very likely dive into building, and eventually investing. As it is, I find myself in the middle of a fascinating, web3 story bringing together the best and the worst of the ecosystem in a hypnotic way, like watching people build a stunningly beautiful building on the edge of a precipice, with brilliant materials and lose foundations.

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Incidentally, people here seem to think it has taken a huge amount of time to investigate, like a deep investigation or full time occupation. The truth is I’m long-winded (Noooo, really? I hear ya, i hear ya). So most of my time has gone into writing. To the community. To this Forum. To you. And you find it nefarious, where I would find it civic. I write to you because I appreciate your work, and would love to find a way of joining you without cancelling my critical thinking faculties.

The investigation itself, you can duplicate (@tsetse did at the start of this thread!). It took me 5-7 minutes to google my way to both, Dfinity and ICA’s legal registration papers. It took me about 30 minutes to google my way into the lawsuit submissions on PACER, and I shared my findings on BOTH sides of the issue. Hardly deep investigative journalism, although admittedly that’s 1 hour more due diligence than many here have done before pouring their heart and minds into this beautiful project.

As to my research into other coins, I did share a good amount in my earliest postings, since it was that research that alerted me to the kinds of systemic issues and risks across crypto. I shared the stats on financial inequality, coin concentration and risk distribution in BTC, ethereum, doge, etc. I believe I may have shared some of my environmental findings too. Hope that clarifes where I’m coming from.

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