After claiming he’d filed formal complaints with the FBI, the man who alleged that Ethereum is his stolen intellectual property says he is making his first attempt to contact the media about the theft.Although Vitalik Buterin is the identified brain behind the Ethereum project which has gained notoriety especially for its smart contract feature, Jared Mimms claims that Buterin stole his idea.
Mimms’ claim
In an email to CoinTelegraph on July 9, Mimms states:
“Ethereum is intellectual property stolen from me. I filed analogous property with Omega Genomics. Vitalik Buterin saw my company Peercover and a prototype I submitted to a Skype group. Jack Peterson worked with me on Peercover as a contractor. After rudely infiltrating my family, destroying my support group, and discrediting me to the point of involuntary mental health comitance, Jack and Vitalik illegally raised money over the SEC limit on a prediction engine that enables online gambling.
He claimed he presented the Omega Interpreter, a script submission platform written in Python, to the University of California, San Diego and to the Bitcoin community in 2013 over several Skype groups including the Ripple and Honorary Bitcoin forums and also submitted a provisional patent to the USPTO.He says:
“My history in Bitcoin is long. I was offered the initial investment in Bitinstant on a bitcointalk thread called Mt. Gox Fast Pay with the Omega Hedge fund (sn datz) but Charlie Shrem came in and declared himself sole investor. I have been the victim of dishonest behavior from the Bitcoin community.”
Why now?
And why only now is he claiming that Ethereum is his intellectual property?Mimms states in another email:
“This is my first attempt to contact the media about the theft. I filed formal complaints with the FBI. Vitalik is a Canadian and the proper American authorities have had trouble prosecuting. Thus, I have turned to the media to prosecute in light of the DAO hacking incident. I have been unable politically to claim Ethereum because I have been discredited by Jack Peterson, author of Augur, who worked for me. My company suffered from ACH fraud and I was unable financially to prosecute.”
To corroborate his claim, Mimms referenced his discussion with Paul Sztorc, who he says can “provide supplementary testimony into the dishonesty of Jack Peterson and Vitalik Buterin.” Sztorc published The Case Against Augur.Giving a background on Mimms, Tim Swanson, in his book, Great Chain of Numbers (2014), described him as the inventor of Peercover, the first contract client.Swanson writes in the book:
“In January I spoke with Jared Mimms who is working on Peercover, a startup that allows anyone to become their own decentralized insurance company. After months of work, they created one the first known smart contracts using a cryptoledger, interfacing with Ripple. According to him, Peercover's goal is to allow for a sandbox where people can chain smart contracts together and produce profit bearing assets (companies) without having to code.This means the companies provide valuable services and are simple for people to use and join once companies are founded. Peercover has developed a series of what they call “company types.” Each of these is really just an “algorithmic framework” for a company, including an “offer system” that allows founders to invest in companies by chaining 3rd party services to them to make them more attractive to join. Finally, a built-in trading system and soon to launch Simple Stock market allows founders to sell portions of their assets and investors to easily trade equity and reap automated or manual dividends.”
Mimms had claimed in Swanson’s book that Peercover is “the first true contract client in the space” which likely will increase competitive attitudes from other projects. With respect to smart contracts more broadly, he’d said that the instruments could provide a real opportunity for decentralized innovation specifically in how cryptocurrencies can allow for the automation of superfluous corporate functions.He started working with Peercover to accomplish the goal of providing customers and entrepreneurs with the ability to trade through gateways (via Ripple) without having to build and manage an entire backend.The book quoted Mimms as saying:
“For our first “smart contracts” we initially focused on peer-to-peer insurance companies – contracts – because of the new Obamacare mandates. That is to say, there is a noticeable absence of insurance startups in healthcare and our platform makes it easy for companies to build their own custom solutions. While we call them “companies” they are essentially a simple decentralized autonomous corporation (DAC). Furthermore, one of our current plans is to integrate social networking functionality within Peercover to allow people (developers, customers, merchants) to talk to one another. As a consequence, part of this process will require taking necessary steps to prevent fraud, thus we will verify people's identities. This may sound easy but as we have learned with working on various altcoin projects, if there is money involved some people will go to great lengths to commit fraud by forging and doctoring “official” photographs.”
Mimms’ claim has neither been confirmed nor denied by the Ethereum team. As at the time of publishing this piece, we still await their response