[laxatives]

I had been following Tezos closely since November and was really excited about the ICO. But it became incredibly apparent that the Breitmans were dishonest.

Firstly, the compensation structure was ludicrous. Many people were upset about an uncapped ICO -- I thought this was fine, until it became apparent that they would make hundreds of millions of dollars IMMEDIATELY. They have absolutely no incentive to continue the product or work another day in their lives. A huge portion of their new found wealth doesn't have a vesting period or depend on any tangible benchmarks.

Secondly, the background of Tezos is completely revised and modified according to their whims. They claim they had a large team working on the project for 4-5 years full-time. Even a cursory glance exposes that one person worked on Tezos while working full time for a major bank and that the team grew insignificantly 6-12 months before ICO. They even changed their LinkedIn profiles to revert this history.

Lastly, both Arthur and his wife are completely inept socially, or knew they would get rich enough to not give a fuck. I'm not one to judge a person, but its certainly not ideal as a manager and figure-head of a billion dollar project. I didn't even think it mattered until I heard they were incredibly rude to just about everyone in their Slack channel asking the most innocuous questions. I thought it must have been one bad experience. I joined the channel and the very first few words I spoke were met by flaming from Arthur himself. Not a couple hours later, he's raging on another person in the chat room at a time when there might be 100 messages/week. Every interaction he had over the next week oscillated between flaming and get rich memes. Later they would delete channel history and eventually shut them down completely under the guise of "preventing fishing attempts", though I never saw a suspicious link anywhere. Arthur stepped down as President because of these issues, but his wife did not fare much better (although I never interacted with her directly).

The ICO seemed worse than burning money. It would be like giving money to organized crime or the opposition party.

IMO they have no intention of delivering anything, except maybe to save face. If the past is any indication, they don't give a shit about saving face either.

[atomical]

> They claim they had a large team working on the project for 4-5 years full-time.

There are two repositories. A public one and a private one. The Breitmans contracted with an OCaml shop

> They have absolutely no incentive to continue the product or work another day in their lives.

The article disproves your point. They haven't walked away. I think it's commonly accepted that if you pay someone upfront they either don't do the work or do a shitty job. That isn't always the case.

> I didn't even think it mattered until I heard they were incredibly rude to just about everyone in their Slack channel

I was there for most of its existence. They weren't rude. He never posted memes and wasn't that active in the chat compared to others and their community manager. It was pretty cool to see him respond to questions, but they were mostly short answers because A) he's busy and B) the questions tend to be quite repetitive because no one reads the white paper.

> Later they would delete channel history and eventually shut them down completely under the guise of "preventing fishing attempts", though I never saw a suspicious link anywhere

I was there for the end. Because of the way Slack is setup anyone can join and message other members. The scammers were messaging everyone telling them the ICO started and they should contribute at a fake URL. Because there is a lot of FOMO in this space their strategy works quite well.

The scammers also tried to take control of incoming webhooks. I'm not sure if the configuration was wrong or whatever, but I was quick to point out who was causing the deception. They were banned but the channel was shutdown shortly after that. I can dig up the screenshots if necessary.

> IMO they have no intention of delivering anything, except maybe to save face. If the past is any indication, they don't give a shit about saving face either.

The commits on Github prove that isn't true. They have put a lot of work into this blockchain and smart contracts that can be formally verified.

These are a lot of untruths in your comment.

[laxatives]

> They claim they had a large team working on the project for 4-5 years full-time.

https://www.tezos.com/static/papers/Tezos_Overview.pdf cites development began in 2014 and with a full staff of 10 core developers. I suppose I misread and was wrongly under the impression that they always had those numbers. But it doesn't change that Arthur and the gang modified their LinkedIn pages after the fact to remove full time employment at their day jobs and replace it with full time employment at Tezos.

> IMO they have no intention of delivering anything...

>> The commits on Github prove that isn't true.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tezos/comments/7791ex/the_path_forw...

Yes development continues, but they've downsized the now unnecessary development team to from 10 to 4 and instead are relying on 3 outsourcing shops. They more or less have to spend the money they raised that belongs to the foundation, which requires significant public auditing and transparency while reducing their own involvement and spending their own windfalls as they please. The entire team except the leadership is gone. And now they are removing the head of the foundation.

> They weren't rude.

You're wrong. Arthur made everything conversation personal and used 4chan style name-calling all the time. Really obscene insults flowed from him almost everytime I heard him speak. He used memes to respond to questions he was probably admittedly tired of answering. But the content was ludicrous. They were Shkreli-like get rich or die trying memes. It might have been tounge-in-cheek, but its impossible to tell with him because he couldn't handle a normal conversation.

[atomical]

Please post proof of "obscene insults." I find this impossible to believe. Arthur didn't engage in that way on the Slack server.

[touchofevil]

I think you are incorrect about how much the Breitman's would make from the ICO. The Breitman's company DLS would get 8.5% of the ICO funds once the main net launches and then their company would also get 10% of the genesis block, but that vests over four years.

So 8.5% of $232 million would be about $20 million and it's hard to say what 10% of the genesis block would be worth over the course vesting. Below are the details about the payments to the Breitmans.

https://www.tezos.com/dls

Payment Structure and Contrast to Common fundraising practices It has become common in fundraisers, or in token generation events (TGEs) for founders of entities selling tokens to reward themselves, in addition to their token allocation, via salaries with little or no accountability and oversight and in a manner that doesn’t reflect the viability of their product.

In contrast, payments to DLS are contractually prescribed via the following criteria, which are being shared publicly and in advance of the fundraiser:

No payment will be made unless and until the terms in the preceding section of this document have been met. Once met, DLS’ shareholders will receive 8.5% of the contributions made during the fundraiser. In addition, DLS’ shareholders will receive a 10% allocation of the tokens in the genesis block, placed in a smart contract that will vest monthly over a period of 48 months. These criteria represent a far more transparent and equitable reflection of the reality of the transaction.

[kirillseva]

who controls the rest of the money? Could be the same people, just indirectly, via friends or shell companies incorporated in Switzerland

[trhway]

>who controls the rest of the money? Could be the same people, just indirectly, via friends or shell companies incorporated in Switzerland

you're absolutely right :

" The idea, according to documents on the Tezos website, was that the foundation would raise money via the ICO, then acquire DLS, the Breitman-controlled company that has been developing Tezos. "

So it seems that the plan was that Breitmans would take as much money as they want (can we say "all the money"? :), and probably the foundation guy that Breitmans are fighting now did bait-and-switch reneging on the agreement to buy the company (as it would be hard to believe that even in Switzerland such agreement can exist in a legally binding form) and chose instead to have all this money to himself. $400M of free money can do that to people :)

[touchofevil]

The ICO funds are controlled by a Swiss foundation. See my other comment in this thread regarding the board members of the Swiss foundation.

[relyio]

>They claim they had a large team working on the project for 4-5 years full-time.

Can you cite that claim please? just curious :)