When Ethereum turned into a proof-of-stake blockchain last month, many people expected that Ethereum Classic would be one of the biggest winners, given that miners would be inclined to switch to it, employing their expensive mining hardware rather than throwing it out of windows. I still remember a friend of mine who said something like "it will be the year of Ethereum Classic", and frankly, I somehow agreed with him. As is often the case, however, winds blow counter to what ships desire...
What happened?
Well, can you believe that the Ethereum Classic official account on Twitter which has been around for over 6 years with over 600k followers is all of the sudden gone, or more precisely, it turned into an entirely different project overnight!! No, it is not a hack as you might think, it is just that the "owner" of the ETC Twitter account has unilaterally decided to repurpose it for another benefit!!
In case you missed the memo, allow me to quickly bring you up to speed...
It all began with Charles Hoskinson who is the founder and leader of Cardano and was a co-founder of Ethereum in its earliest days besides Vitalik and others, and last but not least, was an active supporter of the Ethereum Classic since its inception way back in 2016. He was also the custodian of the Ethereum Classic Twitter account which had over 600k followers. Most of the ETC community was welcoming on the grounds that Charles Hoskinson is a trustworthy man who could lead both projects for the better or so they thought. However, the honeymoon period didn't last long, as a dispute arose between Hoskinson and ETCCooperative (a public charity focused on ETC development) over funding issues for the project.
After long months of back-and-forth arguments between both parties, Hoskinson decided to take over the Ethereum classic account and renamed/reused it as Ergo_Platform (an entirely different crypto project related to Cardano) !!
As you might have imagined, the ETC community got shocked with many of them asking Hoskinson to return, donate, or even sell the account back to the community, but to no avail.
Return? It's my account. As for return, I can't get back the millions of dollars of development we spent nor the years of time supporting a blockchain that didn't seem to want to do anything other than preserve a status quo. We'll call it even
My point of view
Now, to be honest, I'm not really sure who's right and who's wrong about the initial issue that arose the dispute in the first place nor am I aware of its details. What really shocked me, however, is the fact that someone of Charles Hoskinson's reputation abused the trust that people placed in him to rob them of their community account and used it for his own benefit. It is not just me either. From what I've seen, even the Ergo community (or most of them) didn't really like the way there've been dragged into a fight in which they didn't have a dog. They didn't like to be part of a feud they had nothing to do with. Not to mention that the Ergo community already had a community account with about 64k followers, and out of nowhere, they were told to switch to another one they knew nothing about!
Charles Hoskinson insists that the ETC account belongs to him, not to the community! But the fact of the matter is that Hoskinson wasn't even the one who created that account. In fact, it was a user called ChuckSRQ who then handed it over to Hoskinson as a "trustworthy custodian"
In my opinion, though, it doesn't really matter who created the account. Since it holds the ETC brand then it should belong to the ETC community, not to the person who created it, right?
I wonder how the Ergo community felt when they were suddenly funneled to another Twitter account they knew nothing about and were told "this account has now become your representative". How would they be able to post about Ergo from an account which has a 6-year history of posting about ETC?
The ETC community has created another fresh Twitter account with the same handle and some of them tried to reach out to Twitter support to ask them to intervene, but I think it is an issue that Twitter has nothing to do with. So far, it doesn't seem to make sense, but I at least hope that a reasonable compromise occurs to avoid both sides of a pointless toxic fight.
What do you guys think about Charles repurposing the ETC account? I'm keen to hear your opinions and thoughts.
Thank you for reading :))
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