I don't agree with the way they went about raising funds, it was probably Charles Hoskinson's idea. I didn't purchase "ethers", considered it more a donation than an investment.
Despite spending months of my life trying to figure out the legal and tax implications of it and even moving to Switzerland for three months, I was always against the ether sale and wanted to take VC money. It made a hell of a negotiating point for valuation, but introduced a terrible moral hazard of having no fiduciary responsibility behind the enormous sum raised. Also no formal due diligence process would be applied to the core team.
If there was to be a sale, then I wanted two organizations to form with a VC funded for profit building the initial protocol and then a sale at the time of launch to fund a foundation with a separate board managing it. This would create a clear separation of concerns and avoid conflicts of interest. Second, the risk to ether purchasers would be substantially less and would have eliminated the need and justification for a premine altogether. Obviously that didn't happen and the project decided to use the sale to fund some sort of bizarre swiss NPO funding a pesudo for profit in England two months after I left in early June.
Since then they've apparently spent or lost 14 of the 18 million raised and have missed two launch windows for a command line barebones version of the software. Second, they've experienced terrible mission creep with a mandate to re-invent the internet as opposed to simply giving the space a much better foundation to build cool blockchain centric applications and protocols. I'm honestly not sure what ethereum is anymore? Whisper, Swarm, Golem, Holons, Open Org, 4 new programming languages, DAOs???
In any event, don't blame people you've never met for things you know nothing about. Ethereum would be a very different project if I was still there. I'm not and they don't even have me listed as a founder nor did Mihai even mention me once in his history of the project. Thus I suppose I never played a meaningful role.
