More thoughts on the MyEtherWallet Scandal - Why I think MEW could fail and MyCrypto win, and why it could be for the best.

If you don't know what the scandal is (which you should update yourself on) read my post from yesterday first.

 

 

Short story. All of a sudden, MyEtherWallet's Twitter was hijacked by something called MyCrypto. Rumors said it was a hack. Slowly things unfolded, and it was clear that it was one of the main people of MEW, Taylor Monahan that had hijacked MyEtherWallet's Twitter handle and renamed it MyCrypto.

Now, everyone got really mad, including myself. But let's try to view this objectively now that we have some distance to it.

What happened to the lead developer kvhnuke? As you can see, he just stopped doing anything in June.

You have to keep in mind, that the creators if MEW were not a big company. It was a couple of people. And like Taylor writes in this article you should read; https://medium.com/mycrypto/mycrypto-launch-6a066bf41093 , things escalated fast in 2017. The number of people using cryptos and MEW, phising attempts, ICO's, new tokens. In other words, ALOT of work.

The facts are that all the people working on MEW - 19 people, have LEFT MyEtherWallet. I'm not sure if it's one dude (only Kvhnuke) or two..but most of the team has joined Taylor to MyCrypto.

This tells me a couple of important things;

1. Something was going on. Why did Kvhnuke stop working in June? It could be anything. Illness, family problems, mental problems, depression, who knows.

2. He (and perhaps the one other dude that's left) have to work like MAD to find a team and get back to work. A site like that needs to be kept up to date security wise, you have to answer 1000's of mails per day, you have to add tokens, and god knows. It's a LOT of work. Anyone who has run a business or even a small website knows how much work there is.

3. It's a game of momentum now, and MyCrypto will most likely win. A big part of that was the hostile takeover of the Twitter account. Maybe it was immoral..I don't know. But if Kvhnuke was impossible to work with, became depresses or otherwise hard to make him realize certain facts..well..I can understand Taylor's move.

I too have been in situations where in order to save a company or make a company better I have had to override another person. And sometimes you have to do things that could seem immoral in the now, for the greater good of the future.

"Imagine you start out with the same vision, but as the years go by you grow apart. Your vision becomes something else, something much bigger. You start focusing on the bigger picture..while the other person just continues to do what he/she has always done. She doesn't evolve, doesn't learn, doesn't acquire the same value set you have. She starts to drag you down, hold you back, hold the company back! You KNOW that you could be making millions, while she is just focusing on the small insignificant things that will never make the company great or you rich. What do you do?"

And this is where I think Taylor and the rest of the team ended up doing.

https://medium.com/@MyCrypto/mycrypto-launch-faq-d6ce1178e9a0

Going forward, the website we use to access the Ethereum blockchain and our funds must be run be qualified people who WORK. Who update security, who are active on social media, who answers mails, who grows.

"Can I trust someone who hijacked a Twitter account?"

Well, yeah, if that hijacking was done for the right reasons. And I believe that is a possibility.

Also, keep in mind that your Ethereum or ERC20 tokens aren't stored on any sites. You use MEW or MyCrypto to ACCESS the Ethereum Blockchain. If you use your Ledger or Trezor you should be safe anyway. Your Ethereum is "in" your passphrase, and not on some website. I understand that the concept is a little bit hard to grasp, and I see so many people fail to realize this.