[Phase 3] HIP-72: Removal of Clement Lesaege as mission board member

Same accusations, same answers. I’d advise you to look at this thread for all the conversation.
If some people don’t like us, let’s just agree to disagree and fork. But the way it’s going there is escalating to dangerous levels and even creating physical safety risks.
At the Devcon I got insulted by a known member of the community (saying “fuck off” multiple times and giving me the finger). Worse I even got physical threats of being “beaten up” by a person I never saw before.

As a PoH founder, I think it’s quite crazy to have to deal with sort of behaviour. But as a community leader (i.e. getting significant delegations) I believe that people delegating to me have the right to be informed.
I also think that the initial post highlights some point of the PoH which could be problematic.

In this post, I will in a first part answer all Luis accusations (but won’t spend much time after that as building is more important) and in a second part on how Luis accusations may be revealing or deeper set of issues with the current state of the PoH project.

This recent “proposal”, didn’t follow HIP-5. It didn’t have any option to vote against (no “make no change”), so people could not vote to reject. It was promising to give proposer role to people voting for it.

As a board member I was therefore mandated protect the technical implementation and the use of the resource that is the snapshot page. Here there was a misuse of this resource: using it to display fake proposals (which lead to people coming to me and asking why they were not put as proposer despite having voted the proposal).
Not removing it would have been antidemocratic (would violate the combined instructions of HIP-7 and HIP-34).

I didn’t restrict snapshot proposing. Santi did restrict snapshot posting initially. We worked on a way to have more proposer than the status quo.
Moreover I’m using the right of delegation given by HIP-34 to add as proposer everyone who:

  • Hasn’t made invalid proposals in the past.
  • Ask me to put a valid proposal to vote.

In order to increase the list of proposers.

I effectively recommended not to have Luis as admin of a telegram group that we run while proposing him that he makes his own telegram group (that he did and in which I even participate).
You can find this compilation of Luis behaviour which made me think that having him as a telegram admin was not appropriate.

This is far from being the case. As the result of some comments stating that it was a higher priority, we set up a tokenlog for people to vote on priorities using quadratic voting.

Note that when I qualified this of a “low” priority, this was in contrast with bugs and features not working. One of this feature being the in-browser recording which if used, solves the issue (if the interface makes the video, we would not run the risk of users uploading videos with metadata).

The “nice thing to have” obviously refers to removing metadata, not having the metadata public.

I did ask a Kleros dev to work on this but he concluded that it was quite difficult. Now the priority is more on Gnosis Chain expansion but I hope someone can figure out how to automatically strip metadata from uploaded images/video.

This is false, the linked post is an answer to someone proposing to penalize vouchers of incorrect submissions.

This is false, I never stated it’s the only way. I’m just pointing out that everything else being equal, lower challenger rates lead to higher security deposits.

Actually Luis is well aware of this, as in his governance call where he interviewed me, we discussed promising research path on how to have a challenger ecosystem even in the absence of mistakes (work on forced errors discussed with people of truebit).

I definitely think that mixing non HIP-5 polls with proposals is undemocratic, as it confused voters (don’t know if it’s a poll or proposal to be executed). But instead of unilaterally removing them, I proposed HIP-34 which restrict the main space to HIP-5 proposals.

This has to be seen from a protocol development perspective. When I designed the mechanism to withdraw a submission, I designed a mechanism to remove them in case that someone would not manage to find vouchers in order to make sure that deposits would not be lost forever.
No other TCR mechanism I designed allowed to remove a submission.
This has been used by some people to withdraw submissions to prevent the loss of a deposit. I believe this is great, but I didn’t have allowing people making mistakes the right to remove before getting challenged in mind when I designed this mechanism.

The thing is that disputes are a mean, not a goal. If there were no disputes, there would be no rampart against malicious submitters.
And no, I have no interest in making disputes for the sake of making disputes (and we worked to make/integrate pre-dispute mechanism in other projects like the escrow and reality.eth).

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” (see Hitchen’s razor)

So I did argue against voter fatigue in case of:

  • Creating a bunch of elections, even for non important stuff.
  • Posting invalid proposals.

HIP-18 was not proposal cloning. Most of my modifications were actually implemented in the original HIP and I think they wouldn’t have been if there were not this proposal.

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” (see Hitchen’s razor)

I’m more of a builder than a politician and do regret the drift of PoH to politics instead of building.
So no I don’t spend all the day discussing in telegram when building is more efficient. But even then, I believe that my participation in telegram/forum is significant.

Funny to be accused of stalling something that I was pushing. I actually even tried to spear fish candidates (contacting people individually encouraging them to apply) but finding talent in this market is hard.

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” (see Hitchen’s razor)

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” (see Hitchen’s razor)

I would also like to take this opportunity to alert on two potential issues that I’m seeing in the current PoH setup which Luis post has highlighted:

  • Focusing on PoH governance instead of PoH building.
    Sure, you want effective governance and a high degree of decentralization. But ultimately protocols that wins are protocols gathering builders.
    If we look at the HIPs, we have around 40% of them which are self centered, i.e. not about building something but about how we govern something.
    I’m not saying that it should be 0%, that would also be bad. But that at current rate, it’s too high.

  • Tending far too much on the vetocracy side.
    Luis accusations are also interesting as I can see the roots of it. Those are political and can be found in the
    bulldozer vs vetocracy political axis (see Vitalik article The bulldozer vs vetocracy political axis).
    Luis is probably a vetocrate. Even if the proposal clearly shouldn’t have been in the official page, he believes that we should have had a complex process to remove it (maybe even make another vote).
    While I’m comparatively more on the bulldozer side (I insist on the comparatively, if I was a full bulldozer I wouldn’t even have made PoH a DAO): There are rules for being on the page, those rules are not respected, it’s just an administrative task to have those rules respected, not a governance one.
    I believe that early stage projects have more to win being on the bulldozer side. There are way much to win than to lose. If we start seeing the simple tasks of junk removal as a governance issue, we will consume all the limited resources we have in discussions.
    If the majority believes that the project should be a harsh vetocracy, I’d happily remove myself from it as I am not interesting in spending all the time in politics instead of building and believe that it would not be successful this way.
    Other people believes the same and one candidate to PoH ended up making a competitive project instead. When asked why. One of the reason was that he believes it would be hard to get things done in the current PoH setup (too much on the vetocracy side).
    Fortunately I hope that most people there are interested for the project to be in the right balance of vetocracy-bulldozer and that we can all work to make it successful.

This is false. I protested when Santi was falsely introduced as having launched Proof Of Humanity. I didn’t interrupt any talk.

This is a lie, after the talk which wasn’t following what Santi had announced, a Devcon organizer came and asked to talk to Santi about his talk not matching the description. I asked the Devcon organizer whether or not I should join the conversation and she asked me to join. Santi then left refusing to talk with the Devcon organiser and myself.

After that, there was a group of people (approximately 10 people, including people both from “founder side” and “Santi side”) debating the talk, I joined. Santi and another person on their side were trying to prevent me from talking. Santi shouted me “Shut up” multiple times and gave me the finger before leaving.
I reported this behavior to Devcon organizers which advised me to avoid Santi which I did.

As accusations of harassment are (and should) be taken seriously, if those accusations are not removed, I’ll consider with my counsel whether or not a defamation lawsuit should be engaged.

Note that it is not the first time Santi has been falsely accusing people of harassment. He also accused Cooperative members of having harassed him at the conference as seen in this chat:

However this picture taken during the alleged “harassment” tells another story:


(Also after that, Santi asked for an invite to the Kleros party and went there. If you get harassed by a group of people, asking to take happy pictures with them and coming to their party is one of the last thing someone reasonable would do)

I’m not gonna pretend I’m a fan of Santi, but for example I wouldn’t try to kick him from the mission board. People can be political opponents while still being respectful.

This respect can take two form:

  • Agree on some points and work on those together.
  • Agree to disagree and peacefully split (fork).

Here I think the first point is not possible anymore and that we should focus our efforts on the second and peacefully fork.

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