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DCG Discussion Regarding Allegations & Ryan Taylor Resignation

AgnewPickens

Moderator
Staff member
Chief Sock Advisor
Copy/pasta from Discord:

What’s the deal with core and how did we get here?
Let’s start with some context. For a long time there has been a laundry list of of concerns about Core from the Masternode Owners and Operators: lack of transparency, accountability to the MN community, poor marketing, missing the deadline for Evo/Platform by several years.
None of this is new. Back in August the Trust Protectors put forward a governance prop: https://www.dashcentral.org/p/Decision-Proposal-Improve-DCG
The main thrust was they wanted the Core funding split into two, one for the Dev Team and one for everything else, (Business Development, marketing, and Admin). This proposal did not pass. That would have given the Masternodes more flexibility and tools to encourage constructive dialog and subsequent change to occur on the Admin side of Core. So, what changed all the sudden??? I’m glad you asked.



Mark Mason has been the head of the Dash Newsroom for quite a while. He had noticed that there were no press releases being sent to him (from Core) for the last 6 months. New partnerships and other exciting things were happening, but Mark found out through other sources, not from Core. Since that’s literally his job he became concerned. He sent various messages to the appropriate people on core about why there were no press releases. These were respectful, professional emails/Dms to get things working again. He did get some responses, but they were…..vague. And nothing changed or improved. I am paraphrasing here, “We forgot. The new partner wanted to do it themselves. We were busy. Oh...you didn’t ask us. (Note that it is supposed to work the other way, Core is supposed to send stuff to Mark, not Mark going to look for new stuff from core), Nothing to worry about, it’s nothing intentional.”


Then the shit hit the fan. Mark discovered that Ryan had specifically warned all the members of the DIF (and likely others on Core) that they were not to work with Mark. Mark was effectively blackballed and prevented from doing his job. Both Ash and Walter verified that this happened. All of the excuses were…...a lie. I hesitate to use that word, but based on the verified hard information I have seen (and you could go look at), that is the conclusion I draw. Many of us have been asking (through every available channel) why this happened. Although a number of Core people were willing to engage with us (thanks Strophy, thanks Robert!), there was no information or insight about why Ryan took this action. Ryan was pinged repeatedly to explain this himself. This started at about the same time that Arden was hired to do marketing in house (Core). Not sure if those two things are related or not. Arden has very recently been let go from Core, ostensibly for lack of results.


Here is my conclusion, which includes some of my opinions. Ryan had some beef with Mark. Rather than communicate that with Mark and work things out, Ryan works “behind the scenes” and intentionally sabotages Mark’s ability to do his job. But didn’t communicate that to Mark or the Masternodes. Clearly (funded proposals from the Masternode Community) Mark has a duty and an obligation to promote and market Dash. Clearly, Core should be helping Mark in any way that they can. Functionally, Mark’s services are free for Core to use since it is paid for by the Treasury, not out of Core’s budget. WHY WOULD YOU NOT USE MARK’S EXPERTISE??? He is clearly good at his job. It is my opinion that Mark and Joel have done more to promote Dash in the marketplace than all of Core’s efforts for the last two years. Show me I’m wrong!

And let’s suppose for just a moment that there was something legitimately wrong with Mark’s performance. Wouldn’t it be the normal and professional thing to do to talk to his employers (Masternodes) first? Or at least at some point along the way. That never happened. Done in secret…..Very Bad.
 
No opportunity given to Mark to address whatever concerns Ryan had….Very Bad and super unprofessional. Other members of Core making excuses and covering it up. Literal lying to us…...Very Bad. Doing a shit-tastic job of in-house marketing. I suppose, in some way, this would be less terrible if Core had come up with a new and very effective marketing strategy. But they didn’t...Very Bad. Dash has been directly damaged by this. Very Bad.

Going directly against the mandate of the Masternode Community to do publicity and marketing through Mark and the Dash Newsroom….Very Very Bad. WTF? Mark made several documented attempts to fix this internally, respectfully and professionally and Core’s response was…….nothing but false excuses. Very Bad. On top of all this, Ryan has been conspicuously absent for months, and our repeated requests for information about this event through every available channel have been met with radio silence. These are bold claims. I would encourage everyone to go read the original conversations on the Dash-Core-Group channel on the Dash Discord. It is an open channel available to anybody on that Discord. There is plenty of hard evidence from screenshots from Mark and comments from Ash and Walter. Is Ryan the root of all evil? No, he is not. Does Ryan have the best interest of Dash at heart? I believe that he does. Has Ryan done amazing and groundbreaking things for Dash? Yes, many. Will replacing Ryan fix everything that’s wrong with Dash and Core? No it will not.

But something has to change in the leadership structure, perhaps in addition to making key changes in personnel. Certainly it is time to have the difficult conversation about how to go forward from here. There are two very interesting posts, one from Joel V, and one from Andy F about possible changes we could make to the structure and/or the personnel on the admin side of core to improve or resolve the persistent problems we are having with transparency, accountability and marketing.
 
Relevant to this thread :

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Unless someone actually had access to the evidence of Ryan Taylor, i would not consider this (the grave concern that Mark was damaging relations with various Dash Partners) an outright lie. It is however something that needs to be clarified further by Ryan Taylor himself.

I also wonder if DIF members (the referred meeting was a DIF meeting) are bound to confidentiality / NDA's, which could explain Ryan Taylor's current silence on this matter.

Then there is the question if under-utllization of the Dash Newsroom (a PR outlet with Mark Mason as subcontractor for DCG) on itself is reason enough to downvote DCG budget proposals, in order to give some kind of disapproval signal to DCG. The dash.org/forum official announcements section has been under-utilized ever since tungfa left and nobody (including me) thought about downvoting DCG budget proposals because of that.

If people want to give a disapproval signal with the under-utilization of Dash Newsroom, then by all means launch a decision proposal and measure how serious masternode owners actually find this situation, instead of people making a lot of drama on various Dash channels and downvoting current DCG budget proposals that contain funding for DCG departments that are not even remotely involved with this situation.
 
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It's hard to make consistent decisions when Dash has such poor price performance against empty projects that outperform it in capitalization.

We all see projects capitalizing double or triple or four times what Dash does, without having a useful project or with a clear future projection.

At this point, we all look to blame. When a basketball team goes badly, the players are not fired, but the coach is changed.

How do we give a touch of attention to the leadership of DCG?

paying their wages religiously as if nothing was wrong?

I see clearly that a team should receive incentives according to the work they do or deliver. If DCG charged for work done or delivered, things would be very different.

Clarified this, I think that the hard core of DCG should resign if throughout these first two quarters of the year, does not deliver what was promised.

Patience is limited, and throughout Dash's recent history, a lot of money has been wasted on expendable items.

No one is perfect, not Ryan or the MNs who vote, as the future is uncertain.

I also don't think running ads in the NBA for Dash or calling in Mat Damon to spend his Dash using Dash Direct will attract eyeballs in the long term, even if we get a pump in the short term.

Let's think for a moment if the price of dash was $1000 if we would be thinking the same way?

We are concerned about the slow pace of the project relative to the funds spent. But let's remember that we paid a large sum of dash to ALT36, to Max Kaiser, to super sonic planes... and it wasn't all DCG's fault.

I've always said that sometimes it's better to destroy dash coins than to fund a garbage project.

Those of us here know how good Dash is... he has just about everything. I myself have done the shopping for the family this weekend using Dash in a few seconds.

Can I do that with Shiba Inu, or with ETC, or with NEAR, ELROND... ?

Let the dust settle. Ryan is not indispensable at DCG, nor is he, nor are we.

The important thing is that no one is essential... Satoshi disappeared, but BTC moved on... here Evan left, and Ryan came, and tomorrow it may be someone else, but dash won't stop.

I think now is the time for union and reflection. The wake-up call is necessary, for DCG and for all MN.

We are in a very tough market for Dash, but let's remember that in this world the currencies that fall the most, if they do things right, then they will be the ones that rise the most.

Let's try to attract attention with utilities like Dash Direct, like Crownode, like the new dash Platform...

ETH managed to fly thanks to Defi, NFT… and the need to use. Let's make Dash necessary for more than just arguing in a forum about who has it bigger.

Greetings to all and row in the same direction.
 
We just received a message from Ryan Taylor in the dash-core-group channel of Discord,which i will screenshot and show in here so anyone can get a sense of the other side of this story (more to be discussed during an AMA between Ryan Taylor and the Dash community apparently).

Screenshot

PxdXSZB.jpg

Zt3Bqym.jpg


Source : Dash Discord

Those that have registered to Dash Discord can find the post here : https://discord.com/channels/484546513507188745/855521238814687232/942859186650357800
 
Thank you. If you don't mind, I would like to see further updates / screenshots as they come out.
 
The most important quality/property for any DCG member is for him/her to have faith in the network, faith in the DAO.
Faith cannot be measured when money flows into some people's pockets.
The infidel will remain in the DCG, only in case the DAO keeps paying him generously.

Lets count the faith of the DCG members, by draining the flow of money.
Lets discard the infidels from the DCG, lets transform DCG to a place where only the faithful and the government's agents will survive.
Let the rats jump out of the boat.
Let the battle begin.
 
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I have added CEO / Presidential Rotation to The Dash Network Constitution.

In essence, given that DCG consumes more than 40% of the treasury, the CEO would be designated as President and he would be forced to retire as CEO / President after a two year term.
 
andyfreer02/12/2022
Hey @Robert Wiecko. Good to see you
Just to say here publicly, I joined the Afterparty call last night, after watching Quantum's presentations recently and becoming excited with the tech progress and considering coming back from my sabbatical to help them on the community side. But after reading these discussions it's apparent that the underlying problems that often undermine non-DCG contributions in the network (and actually in my experience inside DCG too) are still present, and in this case Dash is potentially going to lose a valuable contributor like Mark Mason, so I decided to join the conversation. As I recall what was discussed as a solution was the idea to restructure the top end of DCG to effectively remove the CEO slot and give the Board members full control of DCG together without a single party controlling the organization, fund raising or use of funds from a legal perspective. It would empower the current Board members and give them a direct relationship with the network whilst ensuring full continuity of DCG operations, especially development, without disrupting them or giving them any additional workload than they have today. (edited)

Secondly, the organization's principles should be restructured around principles of transparency, innovation and open competition. That ethos would be codified for DCG to operate as an open organization that works with the community not a centralized quasi-government body that many feel it's effectively become, that prioritizes openness over secrecy, promotes collaboration and competition not undermines it, and understands that transparency and accountibility are benefits to itself and the network and not something to be actively avoided - whilst ensuring that current DCG aspects such as paying members in fiat and respecting their financial privacy, and other factors key to keeping members in DCG from the current teams to work processes to infrastructure etc are all kept intact. From the conversation, its obvious many people feel these kinds of changes are needed, and it sounds like there will be a proposal to put this question to the Network, possibly via DTP, and I would hope that would be an open process. I think this is a fair proposition given the circumstances and I was asked if I would lend my support and i've said that yes I will support it.
Andy (edited)


andyfreer02/12/2022
...One thing I didn't mention is the change being proposed isn't actually focused on a particular individual because the underlying issue is structural. It's not replacing a CEO, it's changing the concept of the leadership from an individual to a group, because there would always be conflicts having a single, central leader in a decentralized project like Dash. Obviously @babygiraffe is currently in that spot meaning he'd have to move if the proposal passed either internally or the DIF was mentioned as somewhere people saw lot of synergy if he wanted it... but there was also credit given to him for his achievements & innovations including establishing the DTP, DIF, DashDirect, appointing the new CTO more recently and lot of other things. This shouldn't be about attacking any individual, we've tried the individual leader approach, this proposal as I understand it is about moving towards a more distributed leadership by the DCG directors and in a more open way. I don't know if you want to include those topics from the discussion in anything being prepared
 
BigR_Canada02/14/2022
....yup, exactly. We all.know that there are a few DCG supporting mno whale that control the vote...we are seeing 2 such whales flex...one with 88 and one with 94. And I'm sure there is frantic work going in the background to.bring another 2 or 3 whales on board. So let's see.. decentralized my ass

Theseus2302/14/2022
This is not a socialist movement, how is people with large stakes expressing their opinions through voting a bad thing. The more you invest the more influence you get, being vocal on forums is not a form of governance and we are also not going for a democracy here. Is a weighted vote model


BigR_Canada02/14/2022
I'm going to rephrase my question, are those giving thumbs up on your statement saying they are ok with a few whale holders controling the DAO, with the hope that these few powerful holders will make the right choices for the many? If so...DASH has more problems then I thought.
 
What? - all those words and nothing of substance. I learned nothing.

And then tomorrow we have one insider interviewing another insider, that will spend way too much time prefixing every question with 5 minutes of rambling and tiptoeing to nowhere.

Maybe I'm too old or something, "serious allegations" used to mean bank jobs and concrete coffins. I just want to get to the juicy bits!
 
I agree. I still want to hear Mark's side of things to a similar standard, but one of things I got from this was that conflict of interest - Trust Protector vs trying to work with DCG - was a real thing that many people said would not happen.

(and no, I don't want Joel questioning Mark, that would be too perverse)
 
FYI
605 YES - 26 individuals approx

186 NO - 51 individuals approx
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DCG_Compensation is supported by a whale who casted 220 yes votes.
DASH Proposal Analysis for 2022-02-18 17:40:01 (mnowatch.org)
MNOwatch - Diff 2022-02-18-17-42-26
We named the whale johhny or webull.

DCG_Compensation is also supported by a whale who casted 94 yes votes.
DASH Proposal Analysis for 2022-02-14 13:00:01 (mnowatch.org)
MNOwatch - Diff 2022-02-14-13-02-22
We named the whale spirit
 
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