Chief Scientist and one of the founding members of The Bitcoin Foundation, Gavin Andresen has called the fellow founding members Charlie Shrem and Mark Karpeles “a disgrace to the cryptocurrency industry.”
At the recently concluded DevCore London conference, Gavin Andresen called the actions of the two co-founders highly damaging to the Bitcoin Foundation.
“That was a huge, deplorable, terrible hit to the foundation – a huge black eye. If I could go back in time, both of these people would not be on the foundation board.” Gavin further adds that, “We didn’t have enough money to support all of the planned projects and that combined with a huge decline in the Bitcoin price made it impossible for the foundation to continue doing all the things that it was doing at the beginning of last year.”
The Bitcoin Foundation has a history of being mired in controversy. In the first quarter of 2014, Mark Karpeles had to resign after the Tokyo-based world’ biggest Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox went bankrupt under his leadership. Circa April 2014, Charlie Shrem was indicted on charges of money laundering. Recently, a board member criticized the foundation for hiding the true financial health from the public, calling it effectively bankrupt.
There is no doubt that the co-founders failed miserably at justifying their job roles, and they are paying the price for it. Charlie Shrem is serving a two-year jail time after pleading guilty to the charges. But, these two were out of the inner workings of the foundation at least a year ago; isn’t this an enough time to put things in place at least professionally, if not financially considering that the Bitcoin price is still lingering around $200? Is Gavin right in making them the scapegoats for the controversies which still plague the foundation?
Image: www.paw.princeton.edu
