Ethereum ProgPOW author uninvited from ETC Summit due to Craig Wright association 🚨 This article is 5 years old...
Ethereum ProgPOW author uninvited from ETC Summit due to Craig Wright association
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Updated: Apr. 9, 2020 at 6:42 pm UTC
Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.
Kristy-Leigh Minehan, the creator of Ethereum’s progressive proof-of-work algorithm, was uninvited from ETC Summit. Bob Summerwill, the summit organizer for ETC Cooperative, said he withdrew Minehan’s invitation due to her connections with Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre.
Connections to Craig Wright?
The Ethereum Classic Summit scheduled for Oct. 3 is now one speaker short. Kristy-Leigh Minehan, the current CTO of Core Scientific, has officially been uninvited from the summit by the event’s organizer due to her alleged involvement with some of the most controversial figures in crypto.
Bob Summerwill, the executive director at the Ethereum Classic Cooperative and community leader for the Ethereum Project, announced the news on Twitter, saying he was the one to uninvite Minehan. According to Summerwill, he decided to retract her invitation after learning about her “connections” to Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre.
I have uninvited ProgPOW author @OhGodAGirl from #ETCSummit after learning of connections between @corescientific, herself, and Craig Wright / Calvin Ayre / Coingeek / BSV:
I also now strongly advise the Ethereum community against adopting ProgPOW.https://t.co/UFdsgnAS6l
— Bob Summerwill (@BobSummerwill) September 17, 2019
In a blog post, Summerwill explained that Core Scientific, where Minehan serves as chief technology officer, has its CEO Kevin Turner acting as an advisor to Squire Mining, a publicly traded Canadian company.
Calvin Ayre owns 45 percent of the company and lists both Craig Wright and Jimmy Nguyen as advisors. Summerwill believes the connections were too strong to ignore.
He also said that Kristy had also spoken on at least two events created by pro-BSV news outlet CoinGeek “implicitly promoting and validating them.”
“Craig Wright is a fraud, serial liar and perjurer, and Calvin Ayre is not much better. I cannot have the ETC Cooperative and the ETC Summit associated with such disreputable individuals and companies, so I chose to withdraw my invitation,” Summerwill explained in the post.
CryptoSlate reached out to Minehan about the matter. She had this to say:
“Core Scientific is a professional service provider. As long as our customers comply with U.S. law, pass mandatory KYC checks, uphold their contracts and pay their bills, they are allowed to use our services—the same as any other customer. As a company, we are agnostic to blockchain networks and political factions and believe everyone deserves the right to participate in our services.”
A push to remove ProgPOW from next Ethereum update
Minehan’s connections to Craig Wright and support for Bitcoin SV have pushed Summerwill to look deeper into her proposed algorithm updated to Ethereum. The progressive proof-of-work algorithm makes it more difficult to develop specialized ASICs for Ethereum and makes general purpose hardware (GPUs) more cost-effective at mining ETH.
However, after a discussion with Minehan on Discord, Summerwill decided to advocate against ProgPOW. The algorithm was partially created by a group of 40 individuals, in line with its open-source origins, with only a few of the members being publicly known.
Meanwhile, Minehan is adamant about maintaining the privacy of these open-source contributors:
“I will fight to the bitter end to protect people’s privacy. Ever had a situation where your life was in jeopardy because of your contributions? I have.”
Nevertheless, Summerwill argues that Minehan’s “lack of discernment about who she associates with,” that the IP risk of employing such code to Ethereum would be “unquantifiable.”
He then urged the Ethereum community to “strongly reconsider” whether it should proceed with implementing ProgPOW and called for stronger guarantees around the IP.
“ProgPOW has undergone audits for security and potential backdoor concerns, as well as hardware optimisations. It is a gentle tweak to Ethash to fulfil its proposed properties in the original yellow paper,” asserted Kristy-Leigh Minehan.
His personal opinion aside, Summerwill said that the algorithm has long been a divisive topic in the Ethereum community. In light of recent events, there is a risk of an Ethereum hard fork if ProgPOW is implemented.
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Ethereum
$3,331.30
Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain platform that enables the creation of smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps).
Ethereum Classic
$25.7604
Ethereum Classic (ETC) is a continuation of the original Ethereum blockchain – the classic version preserving untampered history prior to the July 2016 DAO hack..
Bitcoin SV
$52.7267
Bitcoin SV is a full-node implementation for Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
Core Scientific
Core Scientific is a leader in infrastructure and software solutions for Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain.
Kristy-Leigh Minehan has carved out a reputation as a prominent figure in the blockchain sector, focusing on the scalability and optimization of proof-of-work systems.
Craig Steven Wright, commonly referred to as CSW, is an Australian computer scientist and business professional who has been at the center of controversy within the cryptocurrency community.
Calvin Ayre was born on May 25, 1961, and raised on a pig farm in Canada.
