Buterin elaborates on that here:
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/120909416365814988...
A pre-mine doesn't stop being a pre-mine after you've sold it and lined your pockets with the proceeds. When they eventually finish[1] dumping the rest of their coins on misguided members of the public will the pre-mine be 0%? Obviously not.
Moreover, the self same people made purchases in the "crowdsale" and then immediately paid those funds back to themselves. E.g. Hoskinson extracted a million dollars the day the presale closed.
> the stake of the founders, including the non-profit Ethereum Foundation, was 11%
Check your math because 12 million out of 72 million isn't 11%... nor does that include the additional funds 'purchased' in their share offerings (in scare-quotes because it's not really correct to call something a purchase when it was paid back).
Ethereum was 100% pre-mined. They then sold about ~80% of the pre-mine to the public (and to themselves, with no known upper-bound on percentage of the self-sales) and pocketed the proceeds. After that they issued additional coins via mining to the public and diluted their positions but later substantially cut the supply of mining off when the price kept falling. The plan now is to soon eliminate the mining and award the coins that would have been mined to existing large position holders (parties with more than $20k worth of ethereum).
When this transition is complete the issuance will be extremely similar to ripple's -- e.g. a huge amount created by the system's operator, a large portion sold by that operator to the public over time, and a portion given away as lotteries. The primary difference is that in ethereum the lottery part was conducted directly by the system through diluting the operators shares rather than being handed out in airdrops as Ripple did, and -- of course-- the relative amounts of these groups. Ripple has been a lot greedier about it.
[1] Technically they'll never finish, because of the more recent plans to continue to award these massive pre-mine holders with additional coins in perpetuity in exchange for taking them out of circulation, they'll be able to largely preserve their position while continuing to dump on the public.
You should be ashamed of yourself for willfully spreading disinformation.
It's a perfectly reasonable argument, and only someone acting in bad faith would characterize it in such a baseless and inflammatory way, as "willingly committing fraud".
The tweet:
>>That includes the presale. Those coins were assigned in an open process anyone could participate in, like mining. It's arguably more accurate to say those coins were mined, the mining algorithm was just sending BTC to 36PrZ1KHYMpqSyAQXSG8VwbUiq2EogxLo2
The expanation found in the tweet stands.
>>Check your math because 12 million out of 72 million isn't 11%...
I'm assuming he's referring to the amount allocated to the Ethereum Foundation and founders as a share of the total amount issued at the time he posted the tweet.
But the primary point is, he's making a case that an amount allocated for an open presale is not a premine.
>>nor does that include the additional funds 'purchased' in their share offerings
The BTC spent went to a non-profit foundation, so not accessible to the founders for personal reimbursement, absent complex fraud.
Your conspiracy theories notwithstanding, the founders were on equal footing with every one else in the crowdsale.
Simply repeating a lie does not make it true. The creators of ethereum created 72 million ether. They sold 60 million of it to themselves and others and they benefited from the sale. This is precisely what a premine is, and it is almost identical in structure to other premined altcoins.
They subsequently paid the funds received from the presale to themselves in their entirety. The foundation's current funds come from selling a large portion ($100 million USD) of the pre-mined coins at around Ethereum's all time high in 2018. ( https://www.trustnodes.com/2019/12/13/ethereum-foundation-so... ).
> Your conspiracy theories notwithstanding, the founders were on equal footing with every one else in the crowdsale.
100% percent of the funds in the pre-sale were eventually paid back to the founders and their employees starting with a million dollar payment to their CEO the literal day the presale closed (and a few days before he left the org). Anyone who stood to be repaid from their own payments was in a substantially advantaged position.
The earliest presale participants also participated at significantly reduced prices.
"Salting" the tip jar by participating in presales at reduced rates or with rebates was an established fraudulent practice in cryptocurrency prior to Ethereum's creation, one that Ethereum's CEO previously also engaged in prior altcoins.
Moreover, the terms of their presale expressly prohibited the participation of US persons. There is no way in which you can claim there was a broadly equal playing field here.
Even if the presale had been an equal playing field that wouldn't have changed the fact that the issuers of ethereum conducted a security sale which directly enriched themselves to the tune of millions of dollars before the system was even running, and has subsequently benefited them to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Once again: a distribution established by a process with open access, with all parties on equal footing, can be reasonably considered to not be a premine.
Calling it a lie, and spouting other inflammatory accusations, doesn't change that.
>>100% percent of the funds in the pre-sale were eventually paid back to the founders and their employees starting with a million dollar payment to their CEO the literal day the presale closed (and a few days before he left the org).
I don't believe word you say. If you're claiming a massive embezzlement of the BTC funds, go ahead and prove it. The BTC address is known so you should be able to track every transaction.
Thus far you've exposed yourself as engaged in little more than a disinfo campaign.
>>Even if the presale had been an equal playing field that wouldn't have changed the fact that the issuers of ethereum conducted a security sale
The SEC has already said that since the pre-sale happened before the 2017 ICO bulletin they issued, it was exempt from enforcement action.
Maybe you could start helping crypto adoption instead trying to lord over people by claiming you know better than them what market options they should utilize, and that it's for their own good for those market options to be shut down and disrupted by government agencies.