Dear Charles Hoskinson,

Few days ago I tried to contact you via Twitter but you did not notice my message, this open letter is another attempt.

My name is Sergey Ivancheglo, currently I work on hardware for IOTA. According to https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/967929408508932097 you are considering to cover legal fees for Ethan Heilman if “IOTA sues” him. First of all I would like to clarify that IOTA Foundation is not involved at all, it is a personal business between me and Heilman. This is an important detail and in the future, talking about the matter, mention it, please.

If I got your words correctly, you suggest to give an equivalent of judicial immunity to researchers analyzing cryptocurrency protocols. This is an interesting idea, but it ought to be improved to protect the others from researchers mistakes which may lead to thousands people losing substantial amounts of money. In our very case Heilman published a research report containing inconsistences (see #3 and #5 in https://medium.com/@comefrombeyond/intermediate-summary-of-heilman-et-al-add87228efab). As a scientist you know that even a single inconsistency is enough to raise doubts about the validity of the research results. Unfortunately, Heilman refuses to cooperate with me on clearing the doubts up so I have to use lawyers help.

General tone of your words makes me think that you do not have a clear understanding of what really happened, if my guess is correct, please, take a look at https://coincentral.com/leaked-emails-seemingly-exonerate-iota/ which gives a good summary.

One employee of your company stated the following (https://twitter.com/dionyziz/status/967601833689612288):

Given the shameful behavior of the IOTA organization against Matthew Green and Ethan Heilman threatening legal action against reputable researchers, I pledge not to responsibly disclose any security findings I’ve been looking into regarding IOTA and urge people to stop using it.

I suppose because of the char limit he did not add that he would still do his best to ensure that ordinary IOTA holders would not be harmed. It may still be a good idea to add these words as another tweet, without that the others may be thinking that he will act irresponsibly towards the innocent people thus being a proof that your judicial immunity idea is actually bad.

Come-from-Beyond