Cloak doesn't need another Bob, we just need development and nice steady rise.
Overnight success is very hard to achieve but who knows we can hit mainstream very easy. PR team already assured us they are working hard and surprised us with few good videos @ Youtube. Price is much better than it was recently, you must admit it!
JosNekoKopa et al
I agree on the whales, that rarely ends well. The idea of taking outside investment makes me grimace due to the associated expectations and implications. Unless of course it was along the lines of "We love what you guys are doing, here's a bunch of funding with no strings attached", which is unlikely
We are tossing around a few ideas relating to funding at the moment, but we need to thrash things out a bit more. Personally, I'm happy to do this publicly as I feel we all have a stake in Cloak and these decisions affect us all. The reality is that if we want to work at a faster pace and develop more things simultaneously, we need extra development manpower and that comes at a cost. Finding people within the Cloak community to contribute to things like promotion is workable, but sourcing experienced developers is a lot trickier. I spend the majority of my time with the head in the engine and sometimes it would make far more sense for me to be doing interviews, writing articles and working on designs and implementation plans. Having one or two extra developers would enable me to concentrate more on that side of things, which as we've seen in the past, can generate a lot of buzz for Cloak. I currently have at least 5 people wanting me to do interviews about Cloak, I really would love to have more time to focus on that side of things too...
One idea that has been discussed is minting a 'superblock' and using this to kickstart funding of a Cloak foundation. The Cloak foundation could be a non-profit entity that manages funding for development, PR and technical expenses such as server costs. For this to be workable, all funds would need to be publicly audited. Such a 'superblock' makes me think of scammy pre-mines, but the benefits it would bring make me think it's worth some serious consideration. The end result would be that every Cloak holder/stakeholder effectively donates a percentage of their holdings to the funding of the Cloak foundation. I think this is a lot fairer than the same 10 or so people paying for costs, which has been how things have worked in the past. I'm very interested to hear people's thoughts on this and also any other suggestions people may have. This is the critical issue with Cloak for now and the sooner we can come up with a workable solution, the better.
Going forward, we could generate foundation funding during mining and also have the network generate some reward for cloakers/mixers (in addition to the sender fee, which could be reduced slightly). With the addition of community governance in future (via PoS voting or whatnot), the Cloak community could vote to dictate which future features get funded and developed. As we've seen with the current Bitcoin/Litecoin SegWit situation, governance is becoming very important in crypto projects. Ideally, we'd like to also have non holders (exchanges for instance) have some input going forward, but vote-by-stake is a good first step imho.
I've also been bouncing around the practicalities of micro-rewarding nodes that onion route traffic for others. This could be very neat and would really help Cloak get traction in developing markets where users may have Cloak wallets with a small balance. Increasing the number of active cloakers and relays on the network always helps. I envisage us having to make a few tweaks to how the onion routing within CloakShield functions as the Cloak network grows too. There's quite a clear distinction between the functioning of Enigma and CloakShield in terms of security and privacy and I think it's paramount Enigma remains decentralised with only the sender being aware of the final transaction structure (rather than entrusting some sort of supernode to take care of any part of the mixing - ahem).
Marketplaces are also something that needs some discussion. Personally, I've never been keen on the OneMarket idea for Cloak as I think it would be a huge developmental drain and would get limited usage compared to established markets such as Open Bazaar. Spending some time working to implement Cloak support in Open Bazaar (for starters) would probably work out a lot better in the long run. There's often little point in reinventing wheels and having Cloak support elsewhere should still work out really well. This is just one of the things we can focus on (in addition to the core wallet etc.) if we have more available developers on the Cloak project.
Cloak Strong!
Joe
already 101+ user 
