Sound familiar?
Many of you may have seen the article in Bitcoin Magazine published by Arceris (Colin) and many of you recognized my ideas and my project but the fact I was not mentioned anywhere left you wondering what was going on. To be honest, I was too.
Arceris and his wife were applicants in the cattle co-op that I matchmade with an investor from our portfolio for the purpose of them building their citadel ranch. The goal with the early matches has always been to pick people with the skills to help me build the pieces as we iterate.
Plebs build together right?
During the early iterations with the clients of the cattle co-op we realized that there needs to be a war chest of sorts to help solve some particular tactical problems. The matchmaking between the land investors and land stewards is brilliant, it totally works, but the agriculture industry and food chain system is so broken that I’m having to solve a shit ton of things in parallel in order to scale it.
GP / LP funds is something Colin and his wife expressed to me that they have competence in. They pitched the cattle co-op on the idea that I should build a fund to serve as our war chest. The more I came to see the way our adversaries are playing this game I realized this needs to be bigger than just a nonprofit, we need a group of companies that engage together strategically.
While in Miami for Bitcoin 2021 I had multiple people ask me to build a fund for them. When I asked what kind of returns they wanted, they literally said they didn’t care and just wanted to have their money in something they believed in like this. Perfection. 7-8 figures now unlocked with an anti-cantillonaire mission mandate for me to fight the Bill Gates agenda at scale. Hell yeah.
With the understanding we were building a fund to serve the nonprofit, I, in good faith, shared all of my big picture ideas on how the value props could work as well as all my expertise on the details. Things began taking shape, Colin’s wife Deanna sampled the investor I introduced them to with an Untapped Growth branded pitch deck and everything was going well. We didn’t have the authority structure of who are the ultimate decision-makers, nor the fund’s relation to the nonprofit, finalized yet. We didn’t even have a fund charter, but were working on it up until a few weeks before Miami when all collaboration suddenly stopped and a meeting in Austin was scheduled post Miami.
This is where the surprises started.
While in Miami, I shared with the group how much interest I was getting on the idea and that I was really getting the pitch refined. Upon sharing that, I was told Arceris had been pitching too…for a fund beneath the cattle co-op that he didn’t even have my consent to yet…that was my first shock.
My second shock came in Austin. Arceris and his wife Deanna disclosed to me that all future help with the fund, and all of the investors they had raised while using the UntappedGrowth name, was predicated on me giving Deanna full control of the fund, rather than her being on the team in an operational role as I had been expecting to this point
The original plan had been to place the fund beneath the authority of the non-profit, or me, but legally it was sticky for me to do both. Collaboration stopped while trying to find a way to resolve this with a satisfactory authority structure.
After getting over that shock, I decided I was willing to compromise and allow her to run the fund if she was willing to write the charter of the fund with me in a way that protected the interests of the organization as a whole. She gave verbal assent to my requests and I thought we were back to building.
Next came shocks 3 and 4, which happened when I got back from Austin. I sent a message in the group chat signaling that I was ready to begin co-authoring the charter. She told me that my messaging about ESG was a liability to “her” fund and that she didn’t want me involved in it anymore beyond providing ranchers for her and helping source the right cattle.
It was at this point that I fully realized I was dealing with bad faith actors. They had, without permission, done a raise using my name, social capital, and story, all of which was branded beneath me from the beginning and were then attempting to consolidate me to a corner where they can leverage affiliation because I work for them providing ranchers? Yeah, that is not okay. That is NOWHERE near what we were building, nor what I had agreed to and in good faith collaborated on.
At the same time as this I received pleb report on individuals getting private DM’s from Arceris after interacting with me publicly on the topic of citadel building. Over time it became clear there was a pattern of covert, subversive behavior where they were actively poaching from my network. It was at this point that I dissociated from them fully and posted the public tweet stating that if someone is not using my logo then they are not affiliated with me and do not have my support.
It was a mistake not being more direct than that.
My gut was telling me this situation warranted a more direct, transparent, and detailed approach, but my advisors thought maybe this was simply miscommunication and not actually bad faith, until they saw the Bitcoin Magazine article, that is.
Arceris was careful not to make any legal mistakes in claiming authorship, which was smart as the article was nearly exactly the thesis I had already released publicly in the ESG podcast with Marty. But there was an outcry, and rightfully so, because plebs don’t care about legality; plebs care about integrity. We know we are building a new world together, and reputation is EVERYTHING.
When Arceris chose not to cite me at all in the article, plebs began to ask questions, and here is the response they got:
Many parts of this are complete lies:
1) I didn’t back off of carbon credits at all as I’m pretty sure Colin knows. They explicitly told me they were backing away from me due to the optics of my public statements which put their fiat investors at risk. My full intention from the beginning was to be honest about what ESG truly is. I’m aligning with investors who understand ESG and thus don’t need to be deceptive in order to finance the speculative attack.
2) So what do we have here? We have Colin, an IP lawyer, claiming not know the difference between academic citations and brand infringement. And this is his explanation given for providing no citation of my work??? To the contrary, here is what I stated:
This was me serving notice that they are no longer affiliated with UntappedGrowth in any way.
3) Arceris never contacted me about the article. I was never given the opportunity to accept, nor decline, citation contrary to his claims.
Which goes to my core concern:
They have forked my project and are launching a fund in bad faith. By lack of clear disclosure they have obfuscated that fact in a way that is confusing my allies and friends who are supporting me.
I have clearly placed my ideas in the public domain, so they are open sourced by definition, as promised from the beginning. So obviously they can not be taken captive by me nor anyone else.
The principle of my ask is simple; if anyone wants to fork my project, make it clear that you are forking it and why. And most of all:
Don’t deceive people about the nature of your relationship with me.
I am a truth teller. Truth is freedom. And freedom is worth any price. Anyone who creates confusion around me that diminishes the clarity of the signal inhibits the propagation of freedom, and thus is an enemy of all who love truth. This is why I have the vehement support that I do. My primary responsibility above all is:
Protecting that vehement support of those who believe in me by defending the clarity of the signal. No lies. No noise.
That is the story. You guys decide what to think for yourselves. I have already replaced Colin and Deanna with a new team for the fund that is much more aligned and experienced, but many other pieces need my attention too. I’m done with this bullshit. It is time to build.