Christy Lee Minehan, creator progressive proof-of-work algorithm Ethereum (ProgPow) was not invited to the ETC Summit. Bob Summerville, organizer of the summit for the ETC Cooperative, said he withdrew Minehan's invitation because of her ties to Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre.
Relations with Craig Wright?
The Ethereum Classic Summit, scheduled for October 3, now lacks one speaker. Christie-Lee Minehan, current CTO at Core Scientific, was not officially invited to the summit by the event organizer due to her alleged involvement in some of the most controversial figures in cryptography.
Bob Summerville, executive director of the Ethereum Classic Cooperative and community leader for the Ethereum project, tweeted the news saying he was one of those who responded to Minehan. According to Summerville, he decided to withdraw her invitation after learning of her “connections” with Craig Wright and Calvin Eyre.
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 his blog Summerville explained that at Core Scientific, where Minehan is the chief technology officer and its CEO, Kevin Turner, acts as an adviser to the Canadian company Squire Mining.
Calvin Air owns 45 interest in the company and points to Craig Wright and Jimmy Nguyen as advisers. Summerville believes the ties were too strong to ignore.
He also said that Christie also spoke of at least two events created by Pro-BSV, the CoinGeek news outlet, “indirectly promoting and testing them.”
“Craig Wright is a fraudster, serial liar and perjurer, and Calvin Eyre isn't much better. I can't have an ETC co-op and an ETC summit associated with such influencers and companies, so I've decided to withdraw my invitation,” Summerville explained.
We asked Minehan about this. She had something to say:
“Core Scientific is a professional service provider. As long as our clients comply with US law, pass mandatory KYC checks, fulfill their contracts and pay their bills, they are allowed to use our services – just like any other client. As a company, we are independent of networks and political factions and believe that everyone deserves the right to participate in our services.”
Click to Uninstall ProgPOW from Next Ethereum Update
Minehan's connections with Craig Wright and Bitcoin SV support prompted Summerville to take a deeper look at her proposed algorithm, updated to Ethereum. A progressive proof-of-work algorithm complicates the development of specialized ASICs for Ethereum and makes general-purpose hardware (GPUs) more cost-effective when mining ETH.
However, after a discussion with Minehan on Discord, Summerville decided to oppose ProgPOW. The algorithm was partially created by a group of 40 people, according to its origin in open source, and only a few of the members were publicly known.
Minehan, meanwhile, is adamant about maintaining the privacy of these open source contributors:
“I will fight to the very end to protect people's privacy. Have you ever been in a situation where your life was in danger because of your contribution? I have it right now.”
However, Summerville claims that Minehan “does not understand who she is associated with”, that the risk of IP using such a code in Ethereum would be “not quantifiable”.
He then called on the Ethereum community to “strongly redefine” whether it should continue to implement ProgPOW, and called for more stringent IP safeguards.
“ProgPOW has been audited for security and potential backdoor issues, as well as hardware optimizations. This is a soft setting for Ethash to perform its proposed properties in the original yellow paper,” said Christie-Lee Minehan.
Not to mention his personal opinion, Summerville said that the algorithm has long been a subject of controversy in the Ethereum community. In light of recent events, there is a risk of using Ethereum hard fork if you implement ProgPOW.