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Comment by danjoc | Hacker News Reader

>Things I have done for Aeternity

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.

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It seems as if the author might possibly own the IP here, having not been paid, nor contracted away copyright and other interests AFAICT.

Also:

"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."

The irony. He rants about the unethical behavior of his associates and then clearly states that he will himself engage in unethical behavior. The only thing this rant proves is that the ICO space is over run by ethically challenged scammers much like the Bitcoin ASIC space was 3 years ago.

It may be ironic, however it's not unethical to engage in unethical behavior specifically against unethical actors.

Depends on your ethics. In mine that is absolutely unethical.

Sounds like they broke, or tried to break, his leg. Seems reasonable to me to want to fight back.

Honestly to me, it sounds like a junior (or at least, a non-business-savvy) person tried to extort somewhere in the area of $3.5 million from the owner of their company.

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.

Junior? He has worked on the codebase since 2015 alone, then Aeternity stole his code and raised 77 million USD entirely based on his own work. He is the sole reason the company even exists so definitely not junior. And they stealing his code and starting a company based on it was how they got started so they are clearly not nice people.

Junior/younger/etc. Don't need to get too caught up in the terminology.

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 don't care about terminology/title. That's irrelevant. My point is that the company raised 77 million of dollars based entirely on technology invented by this developer. Him asking to own a small part of that is totally reasonable.

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.

Yes, I agree about stealing the code. They did not literally do it as it seems they had some verbal agreement and he worked on the code for them voluntarily. But still they haven't paid him anything and I think if he actually decided to get a lawyer and sue he has a pretty strong claim on the company ownership as the whole funding round was based on his IP.

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.

I was kinda more thinking the other person kicked a garbage can or chair and it banged the authors knee or something. Had similar happen at a start up years ago and seems more plausible than being attacked.

If he were attacked like I think he wanted it to sound then a lawsuit would probably get him the money he wanted

I agree. Doesn't mean I wouldn't engage in that unethical behavior though, I just wouldn't try to justify it as ethical.

> it's not unethical to engage in unethical behavior

OK.

Yeah because history always treats kindly those who believe the ends justify the means.

I never said or implied ends justify the means. I simply said it is not necessarily unethical to to engage in what would otherwise be unethical actions against actors who engage in unethical actions against ethical actors.

And yet on the other hand many times the history is written by the victors.

Well... isn't that is whole thing about it? I mean, ICO is a vehicle for scams, just another way to nicely package a Ponzi scheme? This is why they exist.

He hasn't said that he will. He stated it is his only way, which can also be read sarcastically as "there is no way i can get paid".

Angry people do dumb things.

Should of never written that one sentence, that is at the very least a plain as day admission and now he will hold any blame for any exploits used against Aeternity, whether involved or not.

Seems like author is in a completely different part of earth where that court system will not affect him.

While that is true, it is also alarming that he would have to relocate completely over this whole matter. Curious where in the world your own words involving Computer Misused (or similar law) being admitted are not legally binding, especially considering the implications.

If they did a token sale and already have $77M from it in the bank... there will be very little need for a moat. Many of these teams are out to get a quick buck with little accountability.

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