Why are guys like Joe and Vitalik too weak to denounce the parasites at Paradigm?

Normally, when a company is found to have invested in an encrypted file-sharing app to profit off illicit data, including child pornography, people try to distance themselves from it. But putting the child pornography stuff aside for a moment, is there anyone looking out for Ethereum as an economy?

An economy is more like a biological ecosystem than a business. To understand the difference, it helps to look at history.

Up until the 1800s, people were not really paid for their work. Ideas were stolen and taken credit for by less-qualified people who were born into more wealth (nobles taking advantage of peasants). With the industrial revolution and democracy, people started demanding better wages and working conditions. They now had money to invest into themselves. The patent system also ensured that anyone - even a relatively small fish - could get paid for their work, without the intrusion of a benefactor. Since then, and entirely because of this change in economic structure, we have had an explosion of innovation and prosperity. Stealing from people may have been good for a singular nobleman’s business, but it was bad for the economy as a whole, because the talented person with the great idea could no longer capitalize on their future great ideas, since they were never paid for their work for the first one. The industrial revolution in the 1800s changed that. When you give the opportunity for people to accelerate upwards based on their *merit*, not their pre-existing wealth (or love for men), society prospers.

Paradigm was founded off the back of a medical student’s unpaid labor. Paradigm infiltrated and stole a project within the Ethereum community to create Rust-ETH (!), for no apparent reason. They continue to seek "ideas" from outside sources, with little-to-no likelihood of paying people once their idea has been shared with them. (Because to them, "everything is a remix".)

Shouldn’t Joe and Vital denounce Paradigm, so that qualified people know to stay away from them? This would benefit the Ethereum economy, as the qualified people would seek funding elsewhere, get paid for their work, and make future products for the Ethereum economy. Basic economics tell us that this new talent would produce far better products than Paradigm’s, who appear incapable of original thought. Paradigm is a parasite, because they are only capable of taking other people's work, and using their pre-existing wealth to capitalize on what can only be lesser versions of the original inventor's vision. This drives talent away from the space and stifles innovation, creating worse products for every potential user.

What would Ethereum be today if, instead of Lubin investing in Buterin’s platform early on, the geriatric had taken Buterin’s work and hired a bunch of Americans to run the platform instead? Not only would that have been evil (think of all the hours they put in), but I have no doubt that the engineering aspects of the final product would be much worse. Look at Cardano, a shitty platform made by the biggest fraudster of all the Ethereum co-founders. When you actually invest in people who know what they’re doing, and don’t give light to frauds, it comes back around.

If you want your economy to prosper, you have to ensure that there are ways to rise up for the most qualified people. One way to do that is to ensure that they are paid for their work. If you don’t actively do that, your economy, like the parasite, dies. If you are in a position of power in Ethereum and have done nothing to revoke Paradigm’s parasitism, it should be obvious to you now (if it wasn’t before) why crypto is in a downward spiral.

So the question is, what are Joe and Vital doing? They are the founders of Ethereum, but they allow Paradigm to damage the ecosystem. They know all of the information here already. Are they too non-confrontational to excise a tumor? Or is something else going on?