Freedom Fighter or Fool? Jury's Out on Arrested Ethereum Developer Virgil Griffith

Virgil Griffith speaks at Consensus: Singapore 2018, photo via CoinDesk archives.

Did Virgil Griffith go too far with the idea of ethereum as a "World computer"?

Across the ethereum community, the jury is still out as to whether Griffith's choices are heroic, reprehensible or just plain foolish.

Griffith said he was one of the first people to see Buterin's early drafts of the ethereum white paper, when Griffith was still a Ph.D. student at Caltech.

"Most of them I can't tell you about," Griffith said during an interview in May about his efforts to promote ethereum in places like Saudi Arabia.

Griffith owns and operates Ethereum Research, a website the entire ethereum community relies on.

Following his arrest last week, the Ethereum Foundation released a statement saying Griffith's trip was a personal vacation taken without any support from the nonprofit.

Some ethereum fans are already comparing Griffith to the late computer legend Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in 2013 after the U.S. government indicted him for illegally publishing academic research.

Entrepreneur Enrico Talin described Griffith as a "Man of peace" whose controversial DPRK talk was titled "Blockchain and Peace." In a blog post supporting Griffith, Talin recounted a conversation where the researcher allegedly described ethereum as a road to peace that the U.S. government "Can't stop."

Beyond ethereum diehards, even early bitcoin evangelist and bitcoin cash investor Roger Ver tweeted Griffith's actions were a form of anti-war activism.