Buterin responded by saying that the meeting was organized without his permission or knowledge and that he did not attend. The meeting was not secret and not any rules were decided. Vitalik also claimed that he would use zCash if he was “doing anything seriously privacy-demanding.”

An accusation by the Catallaxy co-founder and Satoshi Portal CEO (Bylls) Francis Pouliot claiming that there was “secret meeting of Ethereum management committee” in which stakeholders reportedly decided on “blockchain governance rules” led to heated exchanges on Twitter recently.

Pouliot claimed on Monday through Twitter that the move to hold a secret meeting and decide on rules of governance was equivalent to “establishing a plutocratic government” which had failed even in Bitcoin. To which the Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin responded to accusations of “insane”, “plutocratic” governance of Ethereum network. However saying that he was not at the meeting and it was organized without his permission.

Coindesk first published an article about a “two-day meeting of top researchers” that took place in Toronto. The article said the meeting consisted of different members coming from different startups and non-profits to advance the technology. It added that the meeting had “with notable members including Parity Technologies, the Web3 Foundation, the Ethereum Foundation, Giveth, Aragon, Consensys, MetaMask and others.”

The event, which according to Coindesk is a “working group” and “invite-only” already caused some discomfort on Reddit with some claiming it would be against the openness of the platform. That is the point Pouliot was on.

Core developer Lane Rettig said in response to Pouliot that the event was not secret accusing him of intellectual dishonesty.

“The event was not secret, in fact we live streamed a lot of it. We also did a public AMA. There is no “Ethereum management committee” and no rules were made.”

Pouliot also took an issue with the fact that the article said the meeting discussed “how to better identify what constitutes a community member, or someone who should have a say in just how Ethereum develops, and how to accurately measure their sentiment.”

Rettig said,

“It’s discussion, not decision making. There’s a difference. We want to better understand community sentiment. Put another way, we’re trying hard to differentiate the signal (intellectually honest, informed dialog) from the noise.”

Surprisingly, Pouliot responded later that he was wrong to draw quick conclusions on the article.

“I was wrong to draw hasty conclusions on the article. Ultimately they didn’t manage to agree on any decisions. Since I used the word “secret” instead of “private” b/c it was invite-only but it was also streamed”.

The exchange escalated further when Buterin replied to a question on whether he likes Monero. He said that he would go for Zcash first if he was “doing anything seriously privacy-demanding.”

The comments attracted a harsher response from Rhett Creighton, who is also the Creator of Zclassic, Bitcoin Private, and WhaleCoin (https://whalecoin.org) and a Bitcoin Contributor. Creighton called Buterin a “paid Zcash advisor” and added. Although he was not against “people getting paid,” he thought many do not know the affiliations. He claimed further that “Zcash also took a lot of mining from Ethereum, which never bothered Vitalik” and “they were also paying him.”

Do you think is it important for any crypto community to seek ways to better understand community sentiments about projects etc.? Lets hangout on Twitter and Telegram.