Interesting project, my favorite aspect is the ability of the coin to directly fund development (and not just to c0 folks, but anybody).
Questions for Decred team:
- Will there be support at any exchanges on genesis launch day?
The expectations is that there will be at least one exchange up within the first 4 weeks after launch. It may happen sooner, but it cannot be made a priority without it affecting the mainnet launch date. There is a lot of work that needs to get completed before mainnet launch on January 18th. Launch may be delayed by up to a week in order to get a final few important items completed, and this is without even thinking about the exchange issue.
- Is there a privacy policy regarding the identities you're collecting for the airdrop? (I couldn't find mention of this on your website)
Good point. The project forgot to put up a privacy policy for the airdrop. This was a bad oversight, however the information will not be used for any purpose outside the Decred airdrop. Your signup information will never be shared with anyone else and will only ever be used for the purpose of including people in the airdrop.
- can you expand on what the constitution will look like? who will write it? I ask because you already mentioned a private entity that receives the 10% dev funding, but how will it decide who deserves to be awarded contracts?
The Decred Constitution is a document that will describe the governance system, the process for doing paid work for Decred via the dev org, and the guiding principles of the project. It was drafted with input from a wide number of sources, including the developers, and this draft document will be made public in the near future. It is not an exhaustive and long document, but is intentionally compressed in form to be clear in wording about the process, and for it to be accessible to all users. It will be put up on GitHub for community input and proposed changes for further development.
- given the undeniable technical skill of your team as well as the team's history with bitcoin, why an alt coin? Have you considered the possibility of implementing the decred feature set as a 2 way peg sidechain [1] ? If you considered this but decided against it, can you say why?
To expand a little on my motivation for the last question: I ask because it seems odd to me that the btcsuite team would choose to compete with bitcoin when there are other options (potentially, maybe you can tell me why there aren't). In other words, you could potentially prove the design decisions behind decred in a sidechain, and bitcoin users could vote with their feet (i.e. coins) by moving to your chain.
[1] for an example of a simple sidechain design, see Paul Sztorc's proposal here:
http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/drivechain/Sidechains are an interesting addition to Bitcoin for testing new features, but there are a number of reasons that contributed to Decred not being developed as a sidechain.
- There is no financial incentive to develop a sidechain for developers unless they are paid by a 3rd party to create it. Since sidechains are designed to preserve the value of bitcoins transferred to them, it is not possible for developers to create a sidechain and derive a financial benefit directly, i.e., you put in work to make a great sidechain and you cannot benefit from that directly by increasing the number of bitcoins you have. If your sidechain positively affects the price of Bitcoin, you can indirectly benefit from the sidechain.
- The project believes there are fundamental problems with Bitcoin that will never get fixed with the current governance structure and social contract. In order to fix these problems, the project has substantially altered the incentive structures in Decred. Mapping these changes onto a sidechain would be complex work, make it so that developers cannot benefit from creating a successful project, and bind them to what the project considers an effectively broken governance model.
- Even in the event that the project made a popular sidechain for Bitcoin and many people switched to it, developers would stand to gain nothing to continue development in real terms. Bitcoin has shown that a donation-type model is not sustainable and a difficult burden to place on users, which has prompted reliance on outside funding that does not necessarily come from users directly involved in the process. So even in this extremely unlikely case where a project suddenly becomes popular, the development work is still unfunded or underfunded, which jeopardizes the future of the project.
The project certainly understands the motivations behind Bitcoin sidechains, however, the view is that they are not suitable for use when developing another cryptocurrency with Decred's goals.
