5 facts that might make you view Peter's memo differently

5 Facts That Might Make You View Peter's Memo Differently 1. When Peter says his compensation in his first 6 years was 625k (in ETH), ETH was in single digits for at least a year or so of those 6, and then ETH was under $300 for about 60% more of that time. See screenshot below. While I can’t be sure, I have very strong reason to suspect that “the first 6 years at 625k” cuts off right when he got a very large (and overdue!) raise. It’s not that he has been getting paid $100k a year for the last couple years, as most of the engagement baiters tried to make people believe. 2. Geth was under 10% market share among miners in q3 2018. Parity had an absolute stranglehold on market share in q3 2018 among miners. Now, to his credit, the Geth team turned it around. It was a pretty bad situation to have 90% of block production be on a client whose leaders had already left for Polkadot. Anyway, the point here is that Geth was not dominant for most of the 6 years where Peter says he was making $100k a year. Of course under Peter's leadership, Geth did turn it around and become such a performant and reliable client that it’s STILL extremely underrated how it underlies most layer2s and alt-L1s. Certainly once the turnaround became apparent, Peter and the entire Geth team was extremely underpaid relative to the value created, but the turnaround didn’t fully come to fruition until around the back quarter of this 6 year period. 3. It was surprisingly hard for EF leadership to get Geth to take more money As part of EF leadership around this time (2019-2021), I always advocated for raising salaries for developers in EF. I’ve been consistent on this for years, probably because my dad was a developer for my entire life. I never dealt with Geth directly, but I asked lots of questions because I was continually baffled by how hard it was to simply raise their salaries. And then Peter's rants on Twitter were often taken out of context by engagement baiters, so Geth salaries was often the subject of conversation. One problem was that EF asked Geth to submit budgets with big raises in them, and every time i checked in, I was told that Geth hadn’t submitted them. This never made any sense to me. Why wasn’t it happening? Well among other factors, It turns out that some senior members of the Geth team were pretty against getting paid more and thought they were paid quite adequately. “Why didn’t EF just give Geth more money?” A valid question and one I asked at the time. One problem was that if we gave everyone a 50% raise, then it might actually offend some outperformers that they got the same bump as others and backfire and be counterproductive. Anyway, generally speaking, there’s a bunch of context here. Geth became such a great piece of software that it was indispensable not just to Ethereum, not just to the wider ecosystem of VC-backed ETH layer 2s, but also to most of the alt-L1s competing with Ethereum. Obviously the Geth team did not capture even 0.1% of the value created there (much of it outside Ethereum). That's a shame and I think one thing that stuck in Peter's craw. However: 4. Peter turned down millions from Avalanche As was widely rumored at the time, Avalanche (a Geth fork) was trying to poach Geth, and Peter specifically. I never really got the full story but multiple members of the Geth team confirmed to me at the time that they had offered Peter and/or Geth millions. Having observed Peter for years, and having heard reports of friends who talk to Peter and even reading his May 2024 essay that he published this week, my sense is that CryptoTwitter™ misunderstands Peter. It’s not that he is particularly upset about his own pay, it’s more that he is upset at how much money sloshes around crypto generally and particularly to people he doesn’t think are deserving. Especially investooors and VCooors 5. Peter is fine with ETH becoming irrelevant. Peter thinks we should be singularly idealistic and be willing to let SQLchains surpass Ethereum, rather than be pragmatic and continually improve Ethereum. I’ve often had this sense that Peter feels this. And then he recently said it explicitly in his talk at EthCluj: "that's one of the problems where if you're not willing to sacrifice- I mean Ethereum is kind of #2 blockchain forever and if you're always living in the fear that oh my god. I'm going to lose that status. I must never lose that status, then you're always going to make decisions where it's it's not the best solution, but it's the best we have now and just roll it out and then we'll just fix it later. And I think this is the mentality that I I would change a bit. I think it's better to fall down to #3, #4, fifth place" If you take Peter’s comments at face value, he thinks we should be happy if ETH went down to $800 right now - because that’s what we’d be priced at in fifth place. This mentality is insane and would put Ethereum’s very existence at risk. Why fight for decentralization if SQL is more valuable? Just use AWS and gaslight like all the SQLchains do. As I told Vitalik somewhere around the time of his memo, Peter got a lot of adoration from the Ethereum community. I can’t think of a single person not named Vitalik who got as much adoration. But Peter never seemed to care about it, he wanted attention from Vitalik. He never got it; we even saw as such this week. Sometimes good things just come to an end.