Topic: [ANN] Bitcoin Foundation - page 5. (Read 127634 times)

Great (and clear) summary of paid developers and unpaid volunteers in open source environment. I concur. It works best when there is a methodology and requirement for transparency of compensation.

You don't have to go through BF to volunteer

Developers may simply submit a pull request to https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/

Users may participate by helping out with testing.

Anyone feeling they can help one way or another can get in touch with BF and start volunteering.

*hides in corner of room* jk <3

For any open source project with a foundation, only a small subset of developers contributing to the software wind up getting paid.  Usually there are only a tiny few full time positions for lead developers like Linus Torvalds (who is paid by the Linux Foundation), or Gavin in this case.

The remaining contributors tend to fall into one of two categories

• Developers paid by a vendor in the ecosystem, who has a direct economic interest.  Example: My day job is working on the Linux kernel, and Red Hat (not the Linux Foundation) pays for me to work on that open source project.
• Unpaid volunteers

And there are plenty of reasons why one remains a volunteer dev.  As an unpaid volunteer developer, I am free to disappear whenever I want, ignoring all bitcoin related emails for 6 months when the day job gets uber busy, or while I backpack on the Appalachian Trail.  

In open source projects, the long tail tells you that you will always have 100x more casual contributors, than steady contributors you can depend on for a timely response to a critical security bug.

Bitcoin is a very small ecosystem right now, as open source projects go.  (Warning: my own predictions...  I've no BF insider info at all here)  As it grows, Bitcoin Foundation will probably hire another dev or two, another sysadmin, pay for some infrastructure.

Once the bitcoin ecosystem is large enough, you will start to see devs appear who are working for third parties.  For example, (again, prediction, no insider info) MtGox hires their own developer, who contributes work based on MtGox's interests.  Similarly, chipmakers Intel and AMD hire their own Linux kernel developers to represent their interests, and submit Intel/AMD-specific code to the open source Linux kernel.

But that is a ways off.

An open source project is a rich blend of paid devs and unpaid volunteers, everybody working together on one common piece of software, to make it better for everyone.  As the saying goes, you work on an open source project to "scratch your own itch."  That is the engineering equivalent of pursuing one's own economic self-interest, the essence of the free market.

RE lead dev:

Lead dev is not an elected position governed by rules and procedures.  Satoshi chose Gavin, and the community consents to agree by their use of software.  He has been a good steward of Satoshi's vision.

It might also be fair to say that lead dev is just someone who failed to say "not it!!" fast enough   Lead dev means not only wrangling releases, but also being a big fat target for any bitcoin criticism or paranoid fear.

The whole point of open source and git is to make it easy to fork the project, and go your own way.  The second any developer does something disliked by users, the software will be forked.

Thus, open source makes it easy to "fire" any dev.  If you make it easy for leaders to come and go, make it easy to change leadership, then that creates a powerful incentive not to piss off your userbase!

Leaders are simply chosen by the free market (of ideas and engineering output, in this case).


RE absence:

If Gavin gets "hit by a bus" -- the popular jargon for losing an open source project leader -- commits and releases will happen as someone steps up and the community accepts them.

I think most of us would run away screaming, if Luke-Jr were lead dev ;p

Indeed.

For the record, I do not have any mining operation nor even have thousands of bitcoins.    Not that there is anything wrong mining securing the bitcoin network.

In fact, I'm the one who gave away over 15,000 bitcoins attempting to jumpstart the bitcoin economy, and incentivize developers to join bitcoin.

RE: do I have gazillions of bitcoins:

I've said before that I have "thousands of bitcoins, not tens or hundreds of thousands of bitcoins." I have mined a grand total of 250 bitcoins-- electricity here is not particularly cheap, and I'm a software kind of guy, not a hardware hacker. So it always made more sense for me to buy bitcoins rather than mining them.

I would definitely be wealthier right now if I had been working as the CTO for a company for the last two years and had never heard of Bitcoin.

RE: what work will I do:

I will continue doing what I've been doing-- trying to focus on work that benefits all of Bitcoin and not one particular company. That is the kind of work that falls through the cracks-- why would one company pay for cross-implementation compatibility tests? Sure cross-implementation compatibility is really important for the stability of the Bitcoin network, but as long as the implementation THEY'RE using works properly then why would they spend extra to make life easier for other implementations?

Or a company might fund the development of anti-denial-of-service techniques, but once they do, why would they want to share that with their competitors? Being more denial-of-service-resistant might give them a competitive advantage...

TruCoin paid me a salary for a couple of months last year to do core development work (and paid Alex Waters to start doing Q/A for core development), but TruCoin ran into funding problems of their own and stopped paying us to concentrate on their own projects.

Creating a Foundation is a proven, well-established way for projects to solve the free-rider problem of funding core development that benefits everybody. Over time, I hope to be working less on the reference implementation and more on "Chief Scientist" stuff, like organizing working groups to write best practices documents or work out agreements on changes that might be necessary to the core protocol to support more transactions, better privacy, advances in quantum computing, hiring or recruiting experts to do security reviews of proposed new stuff, etc.

RE: voting:

Great ideas! I think I'll be pushing to start with a good old-fashioned "send you a letter with a PIN number to your mailing address" as the first step to preventing voter fraud. We'll have to have a much more extensive discussion of voting procedures before it is time to vote.  I'll probably push to follow the lead of other successful organizations, and to do the Simplest Possible Thing That Will Work-- which might be hiring a disinterested high-reputation company who specializes in running elections for organizations.

so true !!!

Quoted for emphasis.

You are welcome to become a member, and have a voice in how to best use the funds.

The focus on Gavin is simply prioritization:  if there are enough funds to pay a full time developer, they should go first to Gavin (IMNSHO).  It is better for the project if Gavin is working full time on bitcoin, rather than full time on $SomethingElse and scrambling for whatever remaining bitcoin time there is.  If there are Foundation funds left over, they should probably go Q/A, infrastructure, other full time devs, as the members decide.

As to myself, I already have a job I love, so I have self-selected myself out of any direct salary (as previously stated in this thread).  Like Pieter, I work on what I like to work on, and have the freedom to ignore boring stuff.  Obligation-free beer money donations are always welcome of course (hence the sig).

While I don't oppose Bitcoin Foundatoin in general, I think the crucial part of its survival will be the transparency of its voting procedure. Is it going to be a black box voting and no easy way for members to verify its integrity?

Although I trust current board and its secretary Jon Matonis with handling the voting (if he is the one handling that) we should always strive towards systems where no human needs to be trusted.

In my view the voting procedure must allow members to verify two things:
a) check that your own vote is correct
b) check that other votes come from legit members
(then those members can verify that their vote is correct on their own)

So I thought that the following approach might solve the problem:
Each vote needs to include a signed message from the Bitcoin address used to pay the membership fee to a fixed known BF address. Then the whole registry of these messages with their respective addresses can be made public so that each member can (a) check that his vote is correct and (b) that other votes originate from the addresses that paid the membership fee. This will prevent BF from creating phony members just to rig the voting.

PS: I haven't been following this thread closely, sorry if this was brought up earlier...

EDIT: Before this is teared apart... this approach implies the changes to the procedure of paying membership fees. It needs to come from a single Bitcoin address preferably never used for anything else.
Member would need to register that address with his profile and BF would need to use a single public address for collecting fees, while identifying its members payments by the originating address they registered.

Are you trying to prove a point by posting these links or debating what I said above?

I don't understand where you are going with this, please enlighten me!


He is asking to be paid


Of course he is doing this


This leads me to believe you still have no idea how the foundation and its governing body works.

No one has equity stake in the foundation, no one owns the foundation.

The board is elected every 2 years and can be replaced fully.


What purchasing power? What controls?

I think you fundamentally don't understand how the foundation works.

Gavin is friends with the CIA? Can you back that up with cited proof?
You can't, because its not true. So stop making things up, and be honest.

Such a double standard you follow.

Can you try to be more specific? Your beliefs are interesting, but facts would more useful for the discussion. For example: you don't like a particular piece of code that Gavin has contributed; or you don't like a particular action that BF has performed.

P.S. I hope you are right that we have just seen the end of Bitcoin as we knew it. Please have a look into the list of specific issues: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1230387

Then he should ask to be paid, and define the scope of work he will accomplish with time lines and milestones just as any other pay for work contract, with no equity state in the "governing" organization. Otherwise it can be suspicious as a conflict of interest.

Tread lightly, don't make a claim that you don't know to be true and then base your argument off that unfounded claim.

This is beside the point that your argument makes no feasible sense.


Wether it was his choice or not is erroneous.

If such foundation exists, and one which would like to pay Gavin and the other devs to keep the work of Bitcoin up to par with other emerging technologies, ahead of the hackers, and make sure the quality is fantastic, there is nothing wrong with that.

It amazes me that you were able to amass 1,500 posts without learning even the basics of how coins are generated.

And that was his choice.

Thanks for the response, I really appreciate it.

+1