- Joined
- Jul 27, 2020
"We have a collaborative relationship with the people that run [Odysee]." - Ethan Ralph, June 21st, the Killstream
When he said that sentence last night, I posed a question in chat: "what did he mean by this?". The question was rhetorical; I knew exactly what he meant by it, and you're about to, too.
Welcome to LBRY Post 2. (Post 1)
Since my last post on this subject caught us up to the present, I'm going to get straight to the point: new information has come into my possession that shows that Tom has been working with Ethan for months to subvert LBRY's channel name allocation process in contravention of LBRY Inc's policies, and the evidence of this fact is encoded directly into the blockchain's metadata as visible through their own web API.
The crux of this post rests with LBRY's policy on naming accounts. Therefore, to briefly recap and expand upon a few relevant points that I discussed before: LBRY allocates usernames in an unusual manner. Multiple accounts can have the same name, and all names have an alphanumeric suffix added to the end of them upon registration. Users stake LBC on their claim to their username, and whoever has the most LBC staked gains temporary access to the short and convenient form of that username without any suffix. All channel names are always subject to an ongoing auction and can change hands at any time based on the current stakes (as we've seen with @thegatorgamer in recent weeks - an unknown party and Shannon Gaines have outbid each other on that channel name several times each).
As noted last time, LBRY makes a big deal about this system, placing a heavy and repeated emphasis on the fact that usernames are allocated based on the consensus of the LBRY/Odysee community as measured by their financial investment. On Odysee, you the viewer quite literally put your money where your mouth is in determining who gets what username. As discussed in the previous post, LBRY staff themselves repeatedly state that it is up to the users, not any central authority, to determine how these names are controlled.
Indeed, this system is so central to LBRY's ethos and protocols that it is directly referenced in the LBRY whitepaper itself:
That doesn't leave much room for ambiguity, does it?
(a whitepaper is a formal document outlining the various attributes of a blockchain-related ecosystem and/or cryptocurrency)
As I covered in my last post, Tom had placed a 1000 LBC tip on Ethan's username claim on May 21st, 2021, using his unlabeled staff account (which is still unlabeled at the time of this posting), essentially putting his thumb on the scale in determining who gets to hold "theralphretort" on Odysee in contravention of their stated policy. Of course, Ethan being Ethan, he almost immediately removed the tip and tucked it right into his pockets, but the act remained questionable at best.
As it turns out, though, Tom has done FAR worse than that, and has been doing it for far longer than I could have imagined.
At the beginning of the year, when Odysee was being promoted as the new front-end for the LBRY ecosystem, the channel name "theralphretort" was held by another user...Ethan himself had subsequently registered for the site but was not yet using it for anything. Ethan had nothing staked on his claim to "theralphretort", whereas the other user had 0.02 LBC staked on HIS claim, so the username was allocated to the other user. He used it to post the infamous Xander seethe video, which is still visible on his channel today if you access it with the full suffix:
In accordance with Odysee's username policy as outlined in their whitepaper and on their website, the community had spoken, and it had identified this user as "theralphretort": a reasonable conclusion, since that person registered the name first, bid more LBC on it than Ethan, and actually posted content on it (Ethan had 0 pieces of content on Odysee until February 25th):
Unfortunately, LBRY staffer Tom Zarebczan decided that these rules did not apply to Ethan Ralph, and on January 28th he personally placed a 1000 LBC support onto Ethan's claim on "theralphretort", essentially seizing the short form of this username for Ethan. This is NOT the 1000 LBC tip that I discussed in my previous post, but a separate and far more insidious support.
Supports and tips are two very distinct ways of bolstering a claim on Odysee. Both use LBC to augment a claim, but whereas tips involve sending the LBC to the claimant's wallet, supports do not actually give away any of the LBC, merely add it onto the claim temporarily until rescinded. I call supports more insidious in this context because they never actually interact with the claimant's wallet, making them almost impossible to track with the blockchain explorer or even know about unless you have a meticulous attention to detail.
Specifically, I'd had a weird feeling about Ethan's username claim for some time, but was unable to substantiate my belief that it was objectively suspicious until a few weeks ago. Ethan has repeatedly cashed out his entire stock of LBC, but every time he's done so, his username claim total has never dipped below 1000 LBC, even when all of his accounts combined did not hold 1000 LBC post-liquidation. Even when he dumped absolutely everything prior to Binance closing their LBC market, withdrawing even from his secret wallet, his username's support dipped down to, but never dropped below, 1000. I therefore had a high index of suspicion about this specific number, since it meant either Ethan had a second secret wallet or there was another party involved.
Here are some archives of his total username stake over the past few months, showing the trend I have just described:
March 16th:
March 30th:
April 3rd:
April 8th:
April 11th:
May 10th:
June 19th:
As you can see, it dips as low as 1006 LBC, but never quite gets below that basement level. Thus, the number 1000 was in my mind as I mulled over this mystery.
Tom actively guntguarding via malicious DMCA interpretation and seething about my forum posts on Twitter immediately made me suspect that he was more directly involved with Ethan than I'd originally thought, and it wasn't too hard to investigate that hypothesis since I'd already done the work of finding his primary wallet ID. Lo and behold, by examining the metadata of Ethan's username claim through LBRY's Chainquery SQL API, I was able to determine the transaction hash of the first LBC ever staked on Ethan's username claim, 3cad7bde031b5c05c2bbbf76920ac12ab73f4402c3a8727873dd52bff28bfd88:
(Archive)
Sure enough, that first transaction was for exactly 1000 LBC; however, the SQL API itself didn't output enough information to understand the nature of that claim. It could have just been a coincidence, but thanks to my previous work with the blockchain explorer, it was instantly clear that I was right: this transaction, 3cad7bde031b5c05c2bbbf76920ac12ab73f4402c3a8727873dd52bff28bfd88, was a 1000 LBC support made by bHi3b7diCyKSiCNvKSNQsMnbmvwS2MV7Sf, known wallet address of Tom Zarebczan:
(Here, the ledger shows Tom transferring the LBC to himself, which is the notation it uses to describe a revokable support; a tip instead shows it being transferred to the wallet associated with the claimant's username claim)
Furthermore, if you note the block height of this transaction, you see that it is 900589. Looking through Tom's entire transaction history, it is clear that this transaction is one of only two from his wallet that is part of block 900589:
(Archive)
What is the other transaction Tom made as part of this block? A 100 LBC tip to Ethan's original wallet, bJke1hUZdNGS7c7r3xXyXBZnNngod7uKhU:
This just so happens to be the transaction directly below the 1000 LBC support in the SQL table:
Taken together, this is conclusive, indisputable proof that Tom took "theralphretort" away from a legitimate active user and hand-delivered it to Ethan using his staff account.
And he did it while the state was still actively prosecuting Ethan Ralph for revenge pornography, weeks before the case was even transferred to the family court.
Worse still, the 1000 LBC support transaction is flagged as "unspent", meaning that it is still active to this day. Yes, that's right, Tom is actively and continuously manipulating the allocation of the channel name "theralphretort" using LBRY's institutional funds in direct contravention of their own policy to leave such decisions to the community.
Perhaps most strange is the fact that all of this was done several months prior to the Odysee livestreaming beta, meaning that LBRY was getting absolutely nothing in return for their "investment", if they even knew what Tom was up to at all.
And it gets even worse. While investigating this transaction, something else became apparent to me: there is a second LBRY wallet, bUfk4BTi34sFh96LhvyPk5wtyxHXcCp1KL, that is contributing 1 LBC to the 1000 LBC support (with 999 coming from Tom's known account, bHi3b7diCyKSiCNvKSNQsMnbmvwS2MV7Sf). This wallet also has an Odysee account associated with it:
Profile (archive)
This name has been changed, however, and used to be "Tom+laptop". It is therefore a second account belonging to Tom Zarebczan, and it is also not tagged as a LBRY staff account. This trend prompted me to investigate a little bit into the code of the blockchain explorer in hopes that I could find out who was in charge of determining which accounts get tagged as LBRY staff wallets, and the results may surprise you:
Site (archive)
Or, you know, not.
I then investigated further, checking back to see how Tom managed to end up with this role. As it turns out, back in 2018 the CEO of Odysee, Jeremy Kauffman, had instructed his staff to add a feature to the blockchain explorer so that it would denote which accounts belonged to LBRY Inc for the purpose of transparency, a value that the directors of LBRY Inc hold in high regard:
Site (archive)
Site (archive)
As soon as this request was made, Tom enthusiastically jumped in and volunteered himself for this role. It seems like nobody objected, and when you look through the commit history, all but the first commit updating the list of LBRY Inc's wallets were made by Tom:
Site (archive) / Site (archive) / Site (archive)
As an employee of LBRY Inc, Tom's staff account is an account that belongs to LBRY Inc, and yet he has not seen fit to include it in the list despite its prominent place on the rich list. Now, to be fair to Tom, the bHi3b7diCyKSiCNvKSNQsMnbmvwS2MV7Sf wallet did not exist back when he made these statements about the list being complete, so it seemed possible that the labeling of staff wallets had simply gotten backlogged and was no longer being updated...until I realized that the most recent update was dated February 2021, 11 months after the creation of bHi3b7diCyKSiCNvKSNQsMnbmvwS2MV7Sf in March of 2020, yet it's still not on there.
Between all of this, Tom's status as a documented viewer and fan of the Killstream, and his decision to personally involve himself in acting on Ethan's behalf in responding to Ethan's improperly filed DMCAs in a manner far exceeding what is required by law even for correctly filed notices, it is clear that Tom has an ongoing conflict of interest that precludes his impartiality in any matter concerning Ethan Ralph.
In my previous post, I stated that LBRY was about to learn what it was like to carry that gunt...but I was wrong.
They already know exactly what it's like to carry that gunt.
After all, they've been doing it for 145 days.
When he said that sentence last night, I posed a question in chat: "what did he mean by this?". The question was rhetorical; I knew exactly what he meant by it, and you're about to, too.
Welcome to LBRY Post 2. (Post 1)
-Tom Zarebczan used LBRY staff LBC to outbid an existing user for channel name "theralphretort" on Ethan's behalf back on January 28th, 2021
-Tom has maintained this bid via a 1000 LBC support on Ethan's claim that remains active to this very day
-This transaction was performed in a way that is almost untrackable and had evaded my notice until very recently
-This action directly violates the parameters for username allocation outlined in LBRY's formal whitepaper
-The transaction was made months before Ethan started posting anything to Odysee and predated their livestreaming feature by even longer (i.e. this could not have been some sort of payment for Tequila Sunrise)
-Tom has at least one additional unlabeled staff account that is contributing to Ethan's username stake
-Tom himself is currently in charge of labeling LBRY staff accounts in the blockchain explorer, and has been since 2018
-Tom has maintained this bid via a 1000 LBC support on Ethan's claim that remains active to this very day
-This transaction was performed in a way that is almost untrackable and had evaded my notice until very recently
-This action directly violates the parameters for username allocation outlined in LBRY's formal whitepaper
-The transaction was made months before Ethan started posting anything to Odysee and predated their livestreaming feature by even longer (i.e. this could not have been some sort of payment for Tequila Sunrise)
-Tom has at least one additional unlabeled staff account that is contributing to Ethan's username stake
-Tom himself is currently in charge of labeling LBRY staff accounts in the blockchain explorer, and has been since 2018
Since my last post on this subject caught us up to the present, I'm going to get straight to the point: new information has come into my possession that shows that Tom has been working with Ethan for months to subvert LBRY's channel name allocation process in contravention of LBRY Inc's policies, and the evidence of this fact is encoded directly into the blockchain's metadata as visible through their own web API.
The crux of this post rests with LBRY's policy on naming accounts. Therefore, to briefly recap and expand upon a few relevant points that I discussed before: LBRY allocates usernames in an unusual manner. Multiple accounts can have the same name, and all names have an alphanumeric suffix added to the end of them upon registration. Users stake LBC on their claim to their username, and whoever has the most LBC staked gains temporary access to the short and convenient form of that username without any suffix. All channel names are always subject to an ongoing auction and can change hands at any time based on the current stakes (as we've seen with @thegatorgamer in recent weeks - an unknown party and Shannon Gaines have outbid each other on that channel name several times each).
As noted last time, LBRY makes a big deal about this system, placing a heavy and repeated emphasis on the fact that usernames are allocated based on the consensus of the LBRY/Odysee community as measured by their financial investment. On Odysee, you the viewer quite literally put your money where your mouth is in determining who gets what username. As discussed in the previous post, LBRY staff themselves repeatedly state that it is up to the users, not any central authority, to determine how these names are controlled.
Indeed, this system is so central to LBRY's ethos and protocols that it is directly referenced in the LBRY whitepaper itself:
LBRY: A Blockchain-Based Decentralized Digital Content Marketplace
Despite the critical need of publishing and consuming content online, a centralized content platform such as Amazon or YouTube may not always have their policy and practice aligned with the interest of their users and could be rent-seeking, censorious, and frequently exploitative, whereas a...
ieeexplore.ieee.org
That doesn't leave much room for ambiguity, does it?
(a whitepaper is a formal document outlining the various attributes of a blockchain-related ecosystem and/or cryptocurrency)
As I covered in my last post, Tom had placed a 1000 LBC tip on Ethan's username claim on May 21st, 2021, using his unlabeled staff account (which is still unlabeled at the time of this posting), essentially putting his thumb on the scale in determining who gets to hold "theralphretort" on Odysee in contravention of their stated policy. Of course, Ethan being Ethan, he almost immediately removed the tip and tucked it right into his pockets, but the act remained questionable at best.
As it turns out, though, Tom has done FAR worse than that, and has been doing it for far longer than I could have imagined.
At the beginning of the year, when Odysee was being promoted as the new front-end for the LBRY ecosystem, the channel name "theralphretort" was held by another user...Ethan himself had subsequently registered for the site but was not yet using it for anything. Ethan had nothing staked on his claim to "theralphretort", whereas the other user had 0.02 LBC staked on HIS claim, so the username was allocated to the other user. He used it to post the infamous Xander seethe video, which is still visible on his channel today if you access it with the full suffix:
In accordance with Odysee's username policy as outlined in their whitepaper and on their website, the community had spoken, and it had identified this user as "theralphretort": a reasonable conclusion, since that person registered the name first, bid more LBC on it than Ethan, and actually posted content on it (Ethan had 0 pieces of content on Odysee until February 25th):
Unfortunately, LBRY staffer Tom Zarebczan decided that these rules did not apply to Ethan Ralph, and on January 28th he personally placed a 1000 LBC support onto Ethan's claim on "theralphretort", essentially seizing the short form of this username for Ethan. This is NOT the 1000 LBC tip that I discussed in my previous post, but a separate and far more insidious support.
Supports and tips are two very distinct ways of bolstering a claim on Odysee. Both use LBC to augment a claim, but whereas tips involve sending the LBC to the claimant's wallet, supports do not actually give away any of the LBC, merely add it onto the claim temporarily until rescinded. I call supports more insidious in this context because they never actually interact with the claimant's wallet, making them almost impossible to track with the blockchain explorer or even know about unless you have a meticulous attention to detail.
Specifically, I'd had a weird feeling about Ethan's username claim for some time, but was unable to substantiate my belief that it was objectively suspicious until a few weeks ago. Ethan has repeatedly cashed out his entire stock of LBC, but every time he's done so, his username claim total has never dipped below 1000 LBC, even when all of his accounts combined did not hold 1000 LBC post-liquidation. Even when he dumped absolutely everything prior to Binance closing their LBC market, withdrawing even from his secret wallet, his username's support dipped down to, but never dropped below, 1000. I therefore had a high index of suspicion about this specific number, since it meant either Ethan had a second secret wallet or there was another party involved.
Here are some archives of his total username stake over the past few months, showing the trend I have just described:
March 16th:
March 30th:
April 3rd:
April 8th:
April 11th:
May 10th:
June 19th:
As you can see, it dips as low as 1006 LBC, but never quite gets below that basement level. Thus, the number 1000 was in my mind as I mulled over this mystery.
Tom actively guntguarding via malicious DMCA interpretation and seething about my forum posts on Twitter immediately made me suspect that he was more directly involved with Ethan than I'd originally thought, and it wasn't too hard to investigate that hypothesis since I'd already done the work of finding his primary wallet ID. Lo and behold, by examining the metadata of Ethan's username claim through LBRY's Chainquery SQL API, I was able to determine the transaction hash of the first LBC ever staked on Ethan's username claim, 3cad7bde031b5c05c2bbbf76920ac12ab73f4402c3a8727873dd52bff28bfd88:
(Archive)
Sure enough, that first transaction was for exactly 1000 LBC; however, the SQL API itself didn't output enough information to understand the nature of that claim. It could have just been a coincidence, but thanks to my previous work with the blockchain explorer, it was instantly clear that I was right: this transaction, 3cad7bde031b5c05c2bbbf76920ac12ab73f4402c3a8727873dd52bff28bfd88, was a 1000 LBC support made by bHi3b7diCyKSiCNvKSNQsMnbmvwS2MV7Sf, known wallet address of Tom Zarebczan:
(Here, the ledger shows Tom transferring the LBC to himself, which is the notation it uses to describe a revokable support; a tip instead shows it being transferred to the wallet associated with the claimant's username claim)
Furthermore, if you note the block height of this transaction, you see that it is 900589. Looking through Tom's entire transaction history, it is clear that this transaction is one of only two from his wallet that is part of block 900589:
(Archive)
What is the other transaction Tom made as part of this block? A 100 LBC tip to Ethan's original wallet, bJke1hUZdNGS7c7r3xXyXBZnNngod7uKhU:
This just so happens to be the transaction directly below the 1000 LBC support in the SQL table:
Taken together, this is conclusive, indisputable proof that Tom took "theralphretort" away from a legitimate active user and hand-delivered it to Ethan using his staff account.
And he did it while the state was still actively prosecuting Ethan Ralph for revenge pornography, weeks before the case was even transferred to the family court.
Worse still, the 1000 LBC support transaction is flagged as "unspent", meaning that it is still active to this day. Yes, that's right, Tom is actively and continuously manipulating the allocation of the channel name "theralphretort" using LBRY's institutional funds in direct contravention of their own policy to leave such decisions to the community.
Perhaps most strange is the fact that all of this was done several months prior to the Odysee livestreaming beta, meaning that LBRY was getting absolutely nothing in return for their "investment", if they even knew what Tom was up to at all.
And it gets even worse. While investigating this transaction, something else became apparent to me: there is a second LBRY wallet, bUfk4BTi34sFh96LhvyPk5wtyxHXcCp1KL, that is contributing 1 LBC to the 1000 LBC support (with 999 coming from Tom's known account, bHi3b7diCyKSiCNvKSNQsMnbmvwS2MV7Sf). This wallet also has an Odysee account associated with it:
Profile (archive)
This name has been changed, however, and used to be "Tom+laptop". It is therefore a second account belonging to Tom Zarebczan, and it is also not tagged as a LBRY staff account. This trend prompted me to investigate a little bit into the code of the blockchain explorer in hopes that I could find out who was in charge of determining which accounts get tagged as LBRY staff wallets, and the results may surprise you:
Site (archive)
Or, you know, not.
I then investigated further, checking back to see how Tom managed to end up with this role. As it turns out, back in 2018 the CEO of Odysee, Jeremy Kauffman, had instructed his staff to add a feature to the blockchain explorer so that it would denote which accounts belonged to LBRY Inc for the purpose of transparency, a value that the directors of LBRY Inc hold in high regard:
Site (archive)
Site (archive)
As soon as this request was made, Tom enthusiastically jumped in and volunteered himself for this role. It seems like nobody objected, and when you look through the commit history, all but the first commit updating the list of LBRY Inc's wallets were made by Tom:
Site (archive) / Site (archive) / Site (archive)
As an employee of LBRY Inc, Tom's staff account is an account that belongs to LBRY Inc, and yet he has not seen fit to include it in the list despite its prominent place on the rich list. Now, to be fair to Tom, the bHi3b7diCyKSiCNvKSNQsMnbmvwS2MV7Sf wallet did not exist back when he made these statements about the list being complete, so it seemed possible that the labeling of staff wallets had simply gotten backlogged and was no longer being updated...until I realized that the most recent update was dated February 2021, 11 months after the creation of bHi3b7diCyKSiCNvKSNQsMnbmvwS2MV7Sf in March of 2020, yet it's still not on there.
Between all of this, Tom's status as a documented viewer and fan of the Killstream, and his decision to personally involve himself in acting on Ethan's behalf in responding to Ethan's improperly filed DMCAs in a manner far exceeding what is required by law even for correctly filed notices, it is clear that Tom has an ongoing conflict of interest that precludes his impartiality in any matter concerning Ethan Ralph.
In my previous post, I stated that LBRY was about to learn what it was like to carry that gunt...but I was wrong.
They already know exactly what it's like to carry that gunt.
After all, they've been doing it for 145 days.
Last edited:
since any post from this namefag's thread is better than a pig and horse gossiping about it.
HIS GATOR MIND