Sam has gone on the record about his conflicts of interest. Matt AKA lightclient has not. Matt has played a much more aggressive and active role promoting EIP 3074, including abusing Geth’s power and authority behind the scenes to muscle past objections.
Apologies if I appear to be questioning the motivations of anyone that supported EIP 3074. I am sure almost everyone did that in good faith. But it’s that “almost” that gets me. If it sounds like I am entertaining financial motives being at play it is because I don’t understand where the energy to tirelessly campaign for EIP 3074 by hook and by crook comes from.
I don’t understand how good faith actors would be willing to go as far as exploiting Ethereum’s client diversity problem by throwing Geth’s weight around. Is “might makes right” the kind of culture we want?
I think we should be willing to ask these questions because refusing to entertain the idea that we may have bad actors amongst us makes it easier for bad actors to have their way. Of course, we also need to be careful not to take this to paranoid extremes.
I invite Matt to tell me I’m just being a silly conspiracy theorist thinking he may be motivated by financial interests. To clarify that he is not currently employed by Metamask/Consensys while also working for Geth, or otherwise exposed to the potential billions in upside for Metamask/Consensys from EIP 3074 getting in. That he has not been promised an airdrop of Metamask’s governance tokens and is perfectly willing to declare that he will be burning any such tokens they receive in the future if EIP 3074 gets in and the invoker gets tokenized.
To be clear, we should reject EIP 3074 because it’s a bad idea, not because we are unhappy with the campaign backing it.
On the other hand, how this campaign got through ACD is instructive for understanding where we need to beef up our defenses against capture. Without client diversity it doesn’t take a nation state to capture Ethereum governance and get contentious changes in, it just takes one person speaking for the majority client team in backroom sessions with the other execution client devs, critics are not invited.