I am a quiet community member who has been a part of Rocket Pool since spring of 2021 and who actively follows the discord, but rarely posts outside of support. However, the events in our recent history are deeply troubling to me and I felt compelled to say something and open a discussion about invis’s membership on the GMC.
From my view as an outside observer a current member of the GMC maliciously griefed another prominent community participant they had philosophical disagreements with and intentionally blocked them from their assets. If that conduct wasn’t bad enough, the careless exposure of the exploit led to the locking of funds for hundreds of other node operators via a second party using the exposed grief. Regardless of intent the actions invis took resulted in direct harm to the protocol, which seems to be at odds with the function of the GMC and greatly impacts its legitimacy. Additional fallout of this action was the loss of a valuable voice in the community when Marceau felt compelled to leave because of the bullying. This departure further harms the power and legitimacy of our shared protocol. What invis did raises serious questions about his judgment and forethought and I believe violates the ethos of the Rocket Pool community.
The way the pDAO is structured now the members of the committees are in part elected community representatives by using our group allocated RPL as a collective mouthpiece. We entrust them to make sound judgments on what is best for the protocol and to incentivize and reward good work for Rocket Pool. They wield the greatest amount of power and hold the largest amount of responsibility within the pDAO and there should be a level of accountability for their actions, even if it is not strictly budget related. The GMC has declined to take unilateral action on this matter which I agree with, but this conversation is important to have in our community so we can properly shape the protocol and its governance for the better. There is little to no guidance on this type of issue in the RPIPs so it is up to us to determine what is appropriate behavior for the elected members of our community. I recognize this is a painful issue to discuss and infinitely complicated. Invis is beloved by many and has done an enormous amount of good for the community and I hope he continues to be active behind the scenes and return to the discord when the ban is lifted, but in my mind this incident has made me lose trust in him and his judgment and I don’t feel like he represents my values nor do I trust him to make sound financial decisions on my behalf. Ultimately, I would like to see him take ownership and resign from his current position. If that isn’t something he is willing to do I am leaning towards calling for his removal from the GMC by vote.
Prior to elevating this to a snapshot I am looking to get a poll on community sentiment to see whether to conduct a formal vote for removal of this member. Whatever the outcome I hope this will lead to a wider conversation about what sort of things we can agree to judge committee and community members by.
Please post your thoughts below and vote in the rough sentiment poll in the comments.
Thank you to Valdorff for posting it as I was getting a weird error.
Invis is one of the highest quality community contributors to Rocketpool.
Not only in the tangible act of spending hundreds of hours writing, maintaining and operating bots used by the community daily but also actively answering questions and giving informed explanations in the discord at every hour of the day.
There was a series of blunders made, first in carelessly revealing the griefing vector which cost him a sizeable bounty and secondly in the targeting of an individual operator with which there was some existing hostility to demonstrate. The latter is of course extremely serious and deserving of punishment.
Without excusing the act which is clearly completely unacceptable, I truly believe there was little thought behind it apart from an attempt to be annoying rather than a desire to be malicious.
While I can certainly understand people feeling troubled by the situation and subsequent aftermath, I would hate this one incident to define a long term contributor’s entire relationship with the protocol.
Personally I would be happy to have him continue on the GMC and hope to see his return to the discord soon.
Regardless of intent the actions invis took resulted in direct harm to the protocol
which I think is an unfair description of what happened. Yes, invis made mistakes, and yes, those had unfortunate outcomes for the protocol. But completely ignoring his intentions and only focusing on the outcomes leads to an unfair judgement. I don’t see any malice (which you allege) in his actions, so I have no reason to question his judgment.
Which brings me to the second point I want to make: I’m open to forgive people if they make mistakes, what matters most to me is how they act afterwards.
Invis owned up to them and was very open to me after I contacted him, and soon published an apology despite being uncomfortable writing apologies. IMHO, his response was better than anything I received from the team on the issue until now, I highly recommend his apology to anyone who hasn’t read it yet: apology.md · GitHub
If I felt like he shouldn’t be on the GMC anymore because of his mistakes, I would’ve asked him personally to resign. But if anything, his response following the mistakes has increased my trust in him, not lowered it. So I’m very happy to keep him on, and I don’t think a vote on his membership is necessary.
I haven’t personally spoken to either of the involved parties, but I would be curious to know if Marceau feels like it was malicious as he was the target of the initial grief. Considering their past disagreements it appears he was targeted. Online trolling, bullying, and targeting to me have an underlying component of malice even if it was “just a prank”.
I tried to contact Marceau at about the same time as invis in the aftermath of what happened, but he hasn’t responded at all, so your guess is as good as mine.
The two had an ongoing conflict, but I don’t think it’s right to only blame one side for that, both behaved in pretty unacceptable ways to each other.
I also want to point out that invis didn’t bring up Marceau on his own that night, it was someone else. So I fail to see it as targeted because of their history, it simply was the first person that came up (not trying to excuse anything, just to be clear).
I want to be clear I’m not advocating for invis to be completely exiled and banned from the community. I am more comfortable with him returning to the discord than remaining on the GMC in the immediate term. I am open to him getting reelected in the future if that is something he is interested in doing and what the community wants, but I think a “lock up”/“cool down” period would be fitting.
I don’t know many details about their past disagreements, but the issue at hand is using a protocol exploit against another operator. I am unaware of Marceau doing that.
I’m not denying the exploiting part, like I said. But I feel like you can’t prove he was maliciously targeting Marceau, either. So I don’t think it’s right to accuse him of doing that.
I have a good friend named Chris. His best friend, Dave, stole from him. They didn’t speak for a year until one day Dave approached Chris and sincerely apologized. Chris forgave him.
At the time, I advised Chris that it’s fine to forgive but things don’t have to go back to the way they were. There should be consequences: Dave should be kept at arm’s length.
Chris ignored the advice and they became best friends once more. A year later, Dave stole from Chris again.
Obviously, Invis didn’t steal but he did inflict damage. It’s good he apologized but there still MUST be consequences for bad behavior. Serving on the GMC is a privilege, not a right. He’s not irreplaceable. Invis should be removed.
I feel compelled to push back on this. It is firstly a service to the community.
I agree that nobody is entitled to selection, but the wording is a bit galling for what amounts to spending hours for the community in exchange for literally zero in return. I’m probably feeling this a bit personally as it would apply exactly to my position, which I also see as a service.
I agree that Invis has been an asset to Rocket Pool and someone I personally enjoyed interacting with but I think he should be removed from the GMC.
Committees should be reserved for members in “good standing” with the community and his decision to improperly disclose a bug then actively use it against a community member shouldn’t be overlooked. This then led to a protocol wide grief against many users with high collateral.
Full disclosure, I was not targeted by this so there is no personal animosity.
I appreciate all of his past contributions and if he were to stay on the GMC I do not believe he would act inappropriately but his actions showed a large lack of foresight and a removal from the GMC should be considered.
I have been thinking about this topic a lot, and I was one of the people who said there should be a vote on the matter of if Invis stays in the GMC or not.
I still do not know how I would vote on Invis remaining on the GMC, but I think it’s important for the community to talk about the matter in a thorough and detailed way.
It’s not malicious if the person hasn’t thought trough their action. By invis own apology, he didn’t think it much about it, he was just trying to do a proof of concept (and, as I may add, executed it on the first person who came up in the conversation).
This of course was a mistake and very bad decision making, but is not malicious. Halon’s razor applies, and I’m giving invis the benefit of the doubt that he was simply making stupid decisions while being seriously sleep deprived.
Again, I’m not trying to excuse any of his actions. I’m just saying it’s wrong to assume malice without proof, when there is a simpler explanation.
I think using it on anyone other than yourself or someone that agreed to it, no matter how that name came up in your mind, or how much thought was or wasn’t given to it, is malicious. I can’t believe he didn’t understand the action he was taking had at least the potential to negatively impact the person he chose.
I also acknowledge the apology and believe he feels contrition for the action, because he knows it was wrong, as he stated. The proof of concept part doesn’t wash with me though.
I haven’t voted above yet. Ideally, I think he should have resigned as part of the apology, I think it’d be a great gesture if he was open to it now, potentially forestalling a snapshot vote. A GMC nomination vote is coming up, and he may very well have been voted back in anyway. I’m not really looking forward to removal being a snapshot vote, immortalized as part of the pDAO for all time, I don’t think that’s great either.
