Why I left
github.com
github.com
That said, threatening to sell exploits on the black market is a terrible way to fight back. Everything up to that point suggested the author had a case he could argue in court. If he does indeed proceed down that path he would likely find himself on the wrong side of the law.
My guess is that this is a clever way of destroying confidence in the coin and subverting the organization. He need not exploit the vulnerabilities; hell, they need not even exist. If he was really going to sell 0-days, it's not in his interest to announce it.
As someone who once had the experience of being forced out of an organization by someone who thought software teams could be swapped out like the janitorial staff, I love this. It won't make you rich, but sometimes it's nice to just watch something burn.
Cheers to this. :)
I also wanted to look into its code and help, but I'm not an erlang programmer.
To be honest, when I checked Ae's official website and found out that only one member is a technical person, I thought the structure is weird. I too have been approached by non-technical people who wanted to form a team, but rely on me to come up with both the idea and the product. I don't trust people who can only talk.
As a programmer, I'd be happy in a team to be the only programmer as long as the rest of the team are experts in their domains.
As someone in that position right now, let me just tell you that it's not all roses (not that I think you'd necessarily assume it was!). For one, you have to deal with the stigma of being 'the nerd' in the team. You'll also end up doing a lot of menial tasks because "you're the technical one" (e.g. trying to fix the printer, explaining basic tech to other members of the team).
Finally, most importantly, other members of the team don't really understand what you do. They might devalue it, expect you to complete tasks in an unrealistic amount of time, or get frustrated when you're the bottleneck.
There can be benefits of course — you can probably plan your work yourself without being told, quite as much, what to do — but, contrary to expectations, I've found it quite problematic: you are in a very isolated position.
I like these words, especially "I don't trust people who can only talk."
OP is happy to spill some pretty high-level corporate beans, but not detail a physical assault... I don't really know what to take from this article in all honesty. I feel there's a lot being left unmentioned.
I can probably think of 77-million potential reasons that he might not be able to / want to.
> my only way to get paid is by selling zero-day exploits for people who want to attack Aeternity.
could seem like a Mafia goon saying "nice shop, shame if something happened to it" but it can also be read as "it's terrible that the employer has shafted the employee so hard there are no lawful ways for the employee to get paid".
The relevant parts:
> There are no zero days. And we are not using any of Zack’s code in the new repo. Take a look at our Github. Zack’s leaving has zero effect on our technology and we are not using any of his code.
> We have been working alongside Zack for quite some time now and understand the code. We felt that this is the right time to dump some accumulated and unwanted technical baggage. We are starting with a clean source code repository and will be bringing in pieces of code from the old repo as needed.
Highly unusual to start over with an empty repo when your lead developer quits. Which makes me suspect that the answer to the asked-but-unanswered question:
> Is this down to IP issues / lack of any contracts or legal agreements?
Is "yes".
A bit of story, might entertain someone:
It started with them started asking somw weird questions, and generally behaving odd in our meetings about fixes and new features. Somehow, I came to the conclusion they had to be working on a clone, which I told everyone on the team. They were quite surprised by that, especially as I wasn't myself present at the strangest meeting. Que a year or so later, when my boss walked in. One sentence that said it all: - How the hell did you know ? Turned out I was right. But truth to be told, I couldn't answer his questions. It was simply the only possible reason I could imagine.
It sounds like a typical situation where a startup screws over a key early employee. Typically there are legal avenues to pursue if the author truly was taken advantage of. Threatening to sell 0-day exploits smells of immaturity and anger though. I'm not sure how the tech stack works or how long it was developed but $3.5MM to keep working there exclusively sounds either like the author insanely overvalues his work and skills or the technology is revolutionary in which case, they'll likely get huge and he could sue them for far more.
Talk about blaming someone for slapping a guy ready to shoot you.
If this really was implemented entirely by one person, they have no moat.
>Instead the anonymous owner of Aeternity is deciding how the money is spent.
Yeah, that's how capitalism works. The person with the capital owns you. And now, I look into my crystal ball... I see the anonymous owner is going to sue you for running off with his intellectual property and starting a competitor with it.
Never heard of Aeternity, but this isn't going to end well for the author.
"If Aeternity is going to use the technology invented, and they wont pay me to make their software secure, then my only way to get paid is by selling zero-day exploits for people who want to attack Aeternity."
OK.
In this instance, "trying to break his leg" may have been more like "got shoved and fell over" (Which to be fair, could be a reaction someone might have if their employee came into their office demanding several million dollars - who knows).
I don't know, I'd like to hear the other side of the story.
If he were attacked like I think he wanted it to sound then a lawsuit would probably get him the money he wanted
They also didn't 'steal' his code from the sounds of it. It sounds like he was in some form of verbal partnership to help develop a company (which they were clearly fairly far along with) but hadn't signed any real contracts. After two years someone isn't stealing your code, and you should be savvy enough to realise that the business world isn't really about being nice people - you need to cover your bases.
I agree that he should have signed a proper contract with them and not rely on verbal agreements (but after reading little bit about him online he seems to be some sort of extreme libertarian, he doesn't believe in lawyers and contracts, just in voluntary exchanges).
But that doesn't mean it's not a bit evil for the company to just throw him away after using his name and technology to get people invest in them.
The company has hastily deleted all his code and replaced it with new repositories starting from scratch so apparently they are also at least little bit worried he might legally be entitled to own part of the company.
My question is what/where is the legal void that this company existed in?!
No sane or honest person would ever write that.
You're jumping to wild conclusions that say more about you than you're trying to say about him.
What's also interesting is I was approached by Aeternity at the end of June to join their team. Wonder if the timing coincided wtih the author's troubles
> August 17- Aeternity finally makes an offer to hire me that I am comfortable with. In the process of negotiating my employment, the owner of Aeternity was asking me technical questions, and the honest answers I gave made him angry. He wished that universe worked differently, and he blamed me, the messenger of bad news. The owner of Aeternity was so upset by the technical limitation, that he did something to me that both scared and injured me. I no longer feel safe working with this person. I am walking with a limp a week later.
He implies that a violent struggle took place but without saying so explicitly. Which is odd since a detailed description of a physical assault would draw immediate sympathy from we, the public-at-large.
I can only really imagine something similar happened in this case too
So if someone walks into your office and demands $3.5 million or they walk, and you don't think they're worth it, two reasonable responses are to laugh in their face or to calmly explain why their expectations are unrealistic.
Kicking something across the room, punching the wall, yelling and screaming, or other displays of violent temper are not. I think it is reasonable to be scared for your physical safety if someone becomes violently angry around you, even if they do not initially direct that violence at you.
After countless examples where tech people have been exploited by business people, Tesla pops into mind as the most famous one, we still haven’t learned our lesson!
1. Never, ever accept a cofounder arrangement where you deal with the code and someone else deals with all the money.
2. If someone starts trying to exploit you, get a lawyer. The last thing you want is for the law to be on your enemy's side.
3. If this is your hard lesson in the first two rules, and the bad guys offer you a substantial chunk of cash to walk away (and $300,000 is a substantial chunk of cash), take it. It's by far the least bad outcome for you.
https://medium.com/@yanislav/king-of-bitcoin-godfather-of-et...
Alternatively, if you don't know how ownership is to be divvied up, don't raise tens millions of dollars until you iron out the details.
The missing piece is why he doesn't feel pressing criminal charges and suing for IP is an option. The language seems to imply that the answer is for his physical safety. If he's writing this article because he feels safe enough to, then maybe he thinks battling in court requires people to be present and closes the distance safety net.
He's able to list pretty concretely his contributions but is suspiciously vague about the cause of his fear. I'm inclined to believe that it's because he might not think the public would unequivocally agree his fear is sound.
Fortunately, I had written proof that I'd told them this was going to happen (the bottom of the previous invoice), so I did get paid, but I never did see those shares. Shares are a gamble anyway, and if the CEO doesn't read invoices I don't see them lasting very long — I don't loose sleep over this mistake, just use it as a lesson for the future.
A scalable blockchain for financial derivatives. Optimized for scalability via smart contracts inside state-channels. Has a build-in oracle for integration with real-world data. Written in Erlang.