I'd like to add my comments to the discussion on burst.
I've not been very active on here so I'll start by saying a little about myself.
I have been mining burst for quite a while. Not from the very beginning but from a few weeks after it started. I am only mining with disks that were laying around unused at home. I have not sold any coins since October last year so I am holding a decent amount. I am mining solo but I have mined on devs v1 and v2 pools. My miners are all running on fedora but I have mined in the past on XP and w7. I am a professional sw engineer and I have been writing code since the sixties.
OK, that is me, this is what I have to say:
We should not change the way in which block rewards are allocated. We all knew what the rewards were when we started out and we accepted that but there is a stronger reason than just that. If an outsider looks at the coin, what will they think if the elite few running the coin feel that it is OK to change something that basic just one year in? It does not look like the trustworthy foundation that is needed. The same goes for the idea of a dev fund. The coin's elite just arbitrarily saying that they will have ten percent off the top because they want it? What might they do next? This will deter newcomers to the coin whether they are miners, investors or developers.
We should not be looking for some fairy godmother lead developer. First of all as crowetic discovered, somebody like that is hard to find. Furthermore, the coin would then be hostage to that new lead dev's personal situation and wishes. The existing team should work to build a group of devs who can all put in a little time and the core team should work hard to attract and encourage such people.
Some months ago, I made a post on here about using burst as a storage network. Burst is better than the other coins that are trying to do this. We have miners with lots of storage who could repurpose their disk space between plots and storage as the market required. We also have a coin with ATs which could be used to govern the storage contracts. We could use them to make sure not only that clients can pay for storage and that disk farmers can be rewarded but also to ensure that neither party can carry out a "nothing at stake" attack. In my earlier post, I offered to pitch in with development effort to help set that up but none of the coin's core team responded. My offer is still open and I would suggest to the core team that they should consider that and any other offers.
@Irontiga: I believe that you are in godzone. If you are in Ak, perhaps we could meet and chat and if you think that I can help out, you can talk to the rest of the core team.
I would propose the following as action items for the short term:
1) Try to recruit developers who will commit a few hours of their time as and when they can. Create some kind of on-boarding process for these volunteers such as getting the sources off github, making some trivial change and rebuilding all of the files that would make up a release. Just to check that they have the basic technical ability to contribute. Then establish a set of procedures for code reviews before changes to the burst software are accepted. Document that whole process.
2) Build a set of unit tests. We need these if we are going to have a number of devs working on different parts of the code. Any dev who wants to get involved should start there. It's not going to add features but it will make it a lot easier and safer to roll out new features in the future.
3) Setup a group to thrash out a roadmap of new features that will be implemented by the new dev-team over the next 12 months.
4) Perform a review of burst's POC algorithms. I understand that the security of these has been questioned so we should address that. I have a fair understanding of cryptography and I have access to people who work at the bleeding edge in that field so I can help there.
5) Lighten up on the abuse. Name calling and the use of disrespectful miss-spellings of folk's usernames should stop. It does not make the coin any better and it does not make people look any better if they do it.
I have not written anything about PR or white-papers but if we got through the five points above we would have lots to tell the world about and most of what we would need for a white-paper would have been sorted out.
That's it.
I've not been very active on here so I'll start by saying a little about myself.
I have been mining burst for quite a while. Not from the very beginning but from a few weeks after it started. I am only mining with disks that were laying around unused at home. I have not sold any coins since October last year so I am holding a decent amount. I am mining solo but I have mined on devs v1 and v2 pools. My miners are all running on fedora but I have mined in the past on XP and w7. I am a professional sw engineer and I have been writing code since the sixties.
OK, that is me, this is what I have to say:
We should not change the way in which block rewards are allocated. We all knew what the rewards were when we started out and we accepted that but there is a stronger reason than just that. If an outsider looks at the coin, what will they think if the elite few running the coin feel that it is OK to change something that basic just one year in? It does not look like the trustworthy foundation that is needed. The same goes for the idea of a dev fund. The coin's elite just arbitrarily saying that they will have ten percent off the top because they want it? What might they do next? This will deter newcomers to the coin whether they are miners, investors or developers.
We should not be looking for some fairy godmother lead developer. First of all as crowetic discovered, somebody like that is hard to find. Furthermore, the coin would then be hostage to that new lead dev's personal situation and wishes. The existing team should work to build a group of devs who can all put in a little time and the core team should work hard to attract and encourage such people.
Some months ago, I made a post on here about using burst as a storage network. Burst is better than the other coins that are trying to do this. We have miners with lots of storage who could repurpose their disk space between plots and storage as the market required. We also have a coin with ATs which could be used to govern the storage contracts. We could use them to make sure not only that clients can pay for storage and that disk farmers can be rewarded but also to ensure that neither party can carry out a "nothing at stake" attack. In my earlier post, I offered to pitch in with development effort to help set that up but none of the coin's core team responded. My offer is still open and I would suggest to the core team that they should consider that and any other offers.
@Irontiga: I believe that you are in godzone. If you are in Ak, perhaps we could meet and chat and if you think that I can help out, you can talk to the rest of the core team.
I would propose the following as action items for the short term:
1) Try to recruit developers who will commit a few hours of their time as and when they can. Create some kind of on-boarding process for these volunteers such as getting the sources off github, making some trivial change and rebuilding all of the files that would make up a release. Just to check that they have the basic technical ability to contribute. Then establish a set of procedures for code reviews before changes to the burst software are accepted. Document that whole process.
2) Build a set of unit tests. We need these if we are going to have a number of devs working on different parts of the code. Any dev who wants to get involved should start there. It's not going to add features but it will make it a lot easier and safer to roll out new features in the future.
3) Setup a group to thrash out a roadmap of new features that will be implemented by the new dev-team over the next 12 months.
4) Perform a review of burst's POC algorithms. I understand that the security of these has been questioned so we should address that. I have a fair understanding of cryptography and I have access to people who work at the bleeding edge in that field so I can help there.
5) Lighten up on the abuse. Name calling and the use of disrespectful miss-spellings of folk's usernames should stop. It does not make the coin any better and it does not make people look any better if they do it.
I have not written anything about PR or white-papers but if we got through the five points above we would have lots to tell the world about and most of what we would need for a white-paper would have been sorted out.
That's it.
Thank you for the comments, but I disagree on the modification comment. We noticed, that after a year, the reward decrease happened too fast for what else was going on in the coin. The ability to modify it a little, and make it be able to work out better over an extended period of time would be the goal here, while allowing miners to have either more profit if they dump, or more long term profit if they don't.
Also, the tax wouldn't go to a single person, and discussions would happen with the community as far as ideas on how to spend the money, multi-sig held, etc. Maybe even an AT controlled account. There are many ways we can setup this type of thing.
The idea of an open community development project makes a lot of sense as it IS open source afterall, so that is what we're going to do at this very point in time, people can clone the git, make their suggested changes, and post for approval, then we can implement into a new main git when a few coders have approved it and it all looks good to go.
I would love a review of the algo. Please do this if you can.
Also, get as many devs as you can, greatly appreciated, then if we want to go back to a core team style development, we can do that. But for now, with all the reactions I got when suggesting the structure I did, open community development is where we will be until something better comes along.
