Crypto foundation demanded employees endorse suicide pledge | Hacker News Reader

Crypto foundation demanded employees endorse suicide pledge

denverpost.com

62 pointsceejayoz61 comments

You can't sign away your rights like that in a contract. The contract is invalid.

What "contract"? They're referencing a meme on page 11 of the document, which looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/bSYTJb1

Are people seriously believing the Ethereum Foundation is looking for its members to commit suicide in case they don't publish full source-code? :P Either I'm massively misreading what the outrage is about, or I think this is the point I stop understanding how the world works. Are people taking that image seriously???

> The final published version presented the suicide pledge in an illustration instead of including it in the main body of the mandate, as it had been in the draft version.

ok, so I'm really curious what you think people are suppose to do in the world of "skepticism".

I mean, you've no doubt spent the last 10 years hearing about 4chan and donald trumps connection.

Just because something _could_ be considered some kind of satire, assuming we should all default to that interpretation basically dissolved the social system everywhere.

"its just a joke bro" is not a useful critical thinking skill.

Read it again. It was in the contract. What skepticism do you have? What aren't you getting?

I would probably sign if all of the following are true:

- The money is significantly better than my other options

- I believe the company not to be serious about the suicide clause

- I believe the suicide clause to be non-binding in any jurisdiction that applies to myself or the foundation

- I didn't believe the company / foundation would take my refusal to kill myself at a later time as a license to have me killed

The last one is a bit out there, but in the world of crypto, you can never be too sure.

Also, regardless of whether I would sign, I think it's in pretty poor taste and a bright amber flag (but not quite a red flag) if an employer thinks this is a funny or acceptable thing to put into a contract.

It's also in very poor taste and reeks of coercion to send out a manifesto or mandate like this on a Friday and expect people to sign or agree by Monday or lose their jobs. They likely wouldn't be able to have it reviewed by a lawyer over the weekend if they chose to do so.

> Also, regardless of whether I would sign, I think it's in pretty poor taste and a bright amber flag (but not quite a red flag) if an employer thinks this is a funny or acceptable thing to put into a contract.

How is this in any way NOT a red flag? In what universe is this a neutral signal about the health of an organization that manages a significant amount of capital?

> It's also in very poor taste and reeks of coercion to send out a manifesto or mandate like this on a Friday and expect people to sign or agree by Monday or lose their jobs. They likely wouldn't be able to have it reviewed by a lawyer over the weekend if they chose to do so.

In sum total, "this sounds very very bad but not necessarily a red flag". Absurd.

Yeah. Agreed. This is ALL red flags, all the way down. Might as well be cutesy anime red flags drawn onto an actual physical red flag. Suicide isn't funny and shame enforced ritual suicide for "failing" is even less hilarious, if that's possible. Reeks of sociopathy...

Actual document: https://ethereum.org/foundation/mandate/

Wow, it's weird to think that people can be so proud of their terrible ideas. To go so far as to post it on their own website. Project 2025 was published this same way.

I thought the "seppuku" line was hyperbole, but there it is in black and white. You can jump directly to it with a Ctrl+F.

Everyone thinks their ideas are brilliant and that the ideas that run contrary to theirs are terrible. Your comment is tantamount to saying "I disagree with these ideas".

I agree with your sentiment, but something this big should have been run through a committee of not-yes-men before publishing. I feel like honest feedback would have stopped this.

And then it would have been as lame as every other document, and we wouldn't be talking about it.

I know there are people who believe there is no such thing as bad publicity and that it is better to be remembered as a monster than forgotten, but not me.

That is not true. Other people can have good ideas, bad ideas, kind of bad ideas, very bad ideas, terrible ideas and off the chart stupid ideas.

So, no the comment is not tantamount to saying "I disagree with these ideas". It is possible to disagree with an idea that is not horribly bad. It is possible to disagree with an idea that is quite smart, just with a trade off I dont prefer.

Would you say there's a correlation between how strongly you disagree with an idea and how terrible that idea is?

"We cannot force hard forks or protocol changes. We are opinionated only so as to advocate and propose what’s best for the mission."

Lol, did the perpetrators commit seppuku after the illegitimate DAO fork?

It also links to this pdf version, which has the pictures https://ethereum.foundation/ef-mandate.pdf

Wow, this is actually amazing. A lot of art in here.

It looks like a pretty decent layout for an RPG manual, but not for a serious document I'd expect to see at work.

Yeah, they missed their calling. Should have gone into ttrpg design instead.

It definitely gives 'cult manifesto' vibes

Is this document sincere or just AI generated and dressed up in something that people are meant to relate to...?

Interesting, it's still there (end of Section III), though sadly without the winking anime girl and yellow cats.

"Crypto foundation" in headline is Ethereum Foundation and I do not like them.

I feel like it has to be a joke, but I wonder if such a clear "joke" would make other things in the contract possible to be invalidated in court given that if one assumes that part is a joke how can one tell what other parts are also supposed to be or not to be a farce in the contract.

nah, contracts sometimes even explicitly call out a severability or savings clause (where if one part is deemed illegal or unenforceable, it shouldn't impact the rest)

Contract law is surprisingly reasonable, typically focused on enforcing what people expect to be enforced and not standing on weird arcane rituals

Fits with Crypto philosophy. To let working class people to die so billionaires can use crypto for tax avoidance and crime payments. Not surprised at all.

If you go deep into the crypto world you'll find that this messaging resonates well with "degens" (as they sometimes call themselves).

They love this stuff, it signals how "pilled" you are. It may or may not have to do with a large proportion of them being high on drugs (weed, psychedelics, cocaine), in addition to obviously being terminally online and bubbled. They are also extremely anti-authority, because a lot of what they do breaks the law in bigger and lesser ways, especially tax/financial law.

And they often will drive millions and millions of dollars of crypto toward these ventures, often anonymously.

You have to read these kinds of things in the context of the target audience, which is very real.

Source: I made it out.

wtf I love ethereum now

> They are also extremely anti-authority

Don't say it isn't so!? The community founded on circumventing existing financial structures are anti-authority? Next you're gonna tell me anarchists don't like individual leaders, or that socialists care about healthcare.

Source: I suppose also "made it out" although it wasn't hard, I left my job, like any other industry. Worth knowing as well that the cryptocurrency ecosystem isn't nearly as "internally" aligned as some people want you to believe, there is a large range in weirdness in the ecosystem, not just what parent above shared.

I think "degen" for "degenerate gambler" refers specifically to those who make wild, all-in bets without any more research than a quick scan of twitter and telegram memes. Not those who would actually parse a multi-page manifesto document.

Weirdness used to be a charming aspect of the tech industry. Now it's death cults, fascism, accelerationism, "monarchists," "effective altruism" and whatever other brand of curdled dark perversion haunts Silicon Valley.

All a flavor of lust for power and influence from very bitter, angry, and jealous people.

I don't think that's a very good description of the ethereum foundation document that we are discussing.

A great deal of the problems in the industry are systemic, not personal. If you rely on personalization to understand the problems of the world, you will always be frustrated, because there will always be people ready to step into the role of “evil” thanks to perverse incentives. You can only eliminate the evil by eliminating the incentives.

I have no power to do any such thing. I acknowledge that the system rewards sociopathy and seems to inspire it as well. These types seem to be the shepards of our industry and the world changing technologies its laborers develop, do you disagree?

I agree, but focusing on the personalities involved causes people to misdirect their efforts as a group, and they just end up with a different group of “bad guys” after getting rid of (or disempowering) the current batch.

The pattern that’s currently in tech already existed (and continues to exist) in the world of finance. Tech is just its latest expression.

Sure, for myself, the best I can do is make sure my day to day work does not involve these people, so I do focus on personalities regarding what companies/teams to work for.

To be fair, I find this weirdness much more interesting than the traditional "rapture will occur on X" or "I am Gods chosen fornicator". How cool would it be if there was still some fjord somewhere where they still sacrificed goats to Odin? Christianity really wiped out many the interesting cult themes, and new ones like Scientology have so far just been shameless cash grabs from the gullible and lost.

At least the AI death cults are offering a doomsday scenario which is somewhat plausible. A little more iffy on the details then straightforwards nuclear Armageddon perhaps, but not dismissable out of hand. And compared to traditional human perversions, afaik they haven't gotten much further than summer of love type stuff, just with a bit more of a pessimistic twist. They have nothing on an average crackhouse.

Overall, I think it all qualifies as a pretty fun and interesting weirdness on the scale of human experience, which regularly goes much...much darker than a bunch of kids living in sharehouses and worrying about the future.

I can't express something better than this observation I read the other day:

>again, something of a banal observation, but i think contributing to the general feeling of powerlessness and rage in america today is the extent to which our elites engage in such flagrant, grotesque, even performative contempt for the rest of america

>i don't exactly think andrew carnegie loved the little guy exactly--he was, at best, the good cop to frick's bad cop--but he at least put on the appearance of charity, decorum, civic-mindedness

>meanwhile today's elites mostly seem interested in apocalypse bunkers and sex cults and getting real jacked on testosterone and ranting about the woke mind virus

>regarding the rest of us as, at best, hogs bound for the slaughter, and not even particularly hiding it

https://bsky.app/profile/sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com/pos...

I'm instantly suspicious of anyone who thinks a 1000 year ~~reich~~ plan is a good idea.

Neurotics do neurotic things.

>the author, maintainer, editor or (re)distributor… shall uphold the following… to take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license, or upon modification or removal of any part of this license.

"a 38-page document outlining leadership’s vision for the foundation for the next 1,000 years."

This would by itself be enough to start packing all your office things into a cardboard box.

OK, but 900 years from now you’re gonna wish you had stayed at the ground floor.

A thousand years. I wonder how they settled on that number. Let me guess, it was a joke that shouldn't be taken too seriously.

Given that the text reads like it was written by someone inhaling a lot of NO2, I wouldn't take it 'seriously,' but I wouldn't take it as a 'joke', either. I would take it as 'sign of insanity.'

> "Authors, maintainers, editors and distributors of “this software” would pledge to ensure the software remained free and publicly accessible, and would also vow to “take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license,” the illustration read. It was labeled “Source Seppuku License,” an apparent reference to a traditional Japanese ritual suicide.

When the document went out on that Friday in March, employees were told to commit to the principles in the mandate by Monday or quit their jobs, according to the lawsuit brought by Kayleen Fulton, a Boulder woman who was fired from the Ethereum Foundation after she led employee resistance to the suicide pledge."

.. wow. When your employer starts posting like Yukio Mishima of course you sue them. I have a new entry in "most unprofessional thing I've ever seen". And no, using the "should not be taken seriously" defense is also hugely unprofessional.

"Don't take it seriously" especially doesn't work when you start firing people who won't sign it.

It's got to be figurative speech, right? Added for dramatic effect knowing that upholding the license may not always be verifiable or enforceable.

Was the firing figurative, too?

Seppuku is a two person job. Does accepting the contract mean you volunteer to be the second (the person finishing the job by decapitation) for someone else’s ritual suicide?

Tbh the seppuku thing is the one thing I wouldn't pay attention to among all the other red flags, because of how obviously impractical it is.

I wish I had been surprised by what I read in this article.

This really changes the meaning of the catchphrase "HODL"

> “If you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes inside of the EF,” he said, according to the lawsuit, which cited a recorded conversation between the pair.

Well she was too effective at organizing a resistance. Can't have that.

My falling out of love with crypto was due to the realization that these 'foundations' were effectively governing bodies participating in the minimum level of decentralized theater to grant them plausible deniability in a court of law. Bitcoin is still extremely interesting, as it has no such body, only a bunch of anarchy minded anti-social but very smart group of volunteers fighting each other. At least they practice their anarcho libertarian experiment in the mailing list, to its huge detriment.

Where is the endorsement? I see a corporate mandate, not an employment contract.

Corporations put out all sorts of fluff. If employees took it seriously then everyone working at facebook should have a VR helmet on their head 24/7.

> An email to the foundation seeking comment on this story was not immediately returned Thursday, but a foundation leader at the time told employees the suicide pledge was not meant to be taken literally, according to the lawsuit. After employee pushback, managers updated the commitment form to clarify that the form had “nothing to do with literal seppuku,” according to the lawsuit.

Oh see it was just a joke - a joke, get it? ha ha, see by watching how many employees were complaining, we retracted it - just a "joke", right? after we put it out there saying nothing whatsoever and demanding a yes/no loyalty pledge.

it was boundary testing. this company should go out of business.

What if they changed it to something friendlier, like a pledge to drink a refreshing glass of Kool-Aid should management request as such?

this is cringe, but less cringe than having to wear the nooglers hat

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