
February 01, 2023
Various community members have stated that they would like to see some official pledge from the ETC Cooperative with regard to the new @eth_classic Twitter account which is currently in possession of its executive director, Bob Summerwill.
The background of this situation is that the previous account with the same handle had more than 600,000 followers, but it was in control of Charles Hoskinson, the founder of a firm called IOHK. After a fallout between Hoskinson and the ETC ecosystem, the account remained inactive for a long time and was eventually transferred by Charles to the community of another project (Ergo) which he actively promotes. This stripped Ethereum Classic of one of its most valuable social media assets, so it is only reasonable that the new @eth_classic account be managed under a sort of social contract in the form of this pledge to provide some guarantees that events like the mentioned here will not happen again.
Details about the fallout between Hoskinson and the ETC community may be found in this thread.
What happened with Charles Hoskinson could, technically, happen with the ETC Cooperative as well. Bob Summerwill, in his role as executive director, has admin key control of the account and could, technically and legally, as demonstrated by the previous event, do anything with it, however unlikely. So it would be responsible to see some social defense against that possibility in the form of a public statement of the ETC Cooperative’s intentions of being a good ETC community member and citizen with regard to the matter.
It is for the above reasons that we make the following statements:
We acknowledge that as with any kind of technological admin control, this pledge does not physically prevent errors, misdeeds, and negligence by whoever has admin control of the account in the present or the future, but at least there will be a clear violation of this social contract if that were to happen.
As an additional reassurance, legally, the ETC Cooperative is an IRS-reporting non-profit whose sole purpose is support of the Ethereum Classic protocol, network, and ecosystem, so its incentives are completely aligned with ETC.
Bob Summerwill
Executive Director
ETC Cooperative
Thank you for reading this article!
To learn more about the ETC Cooperative go to: https://etccooperative.org
To learn more about ETC go to: https://ethereumclassic.org