Topic: [ANN][DCR] Decred - Community Governance | Bitcoin Devs | Lightning Network - page 550. (Read 1202015 times)

Hi I found out today about how CLAM devs are doing their voting. Is this similar to or exactly your process/code?

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13098673

Will we be doing it in similar way?

Also, We are using 5 min block time, how did you reach that number? Here is a talk by Dave Hudson, where he explains his research. Please do watch it. The slides are not visible in the video but there is link to all slides in description.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aBKLmJ2ebM

He talks particularly about block times starting at 50:55 (https://youtu.be/9aBKLmJ2ebM?t=50m55s). He says that blocktimes can be reduced as network speeds improve. Is it possible that like block subsidy we can also program either blocksize or blocktime to change so that scalability/tx per second is built in to the code rather than left to be solved later. Obviously we would need some kind of data or extrapolation about adoption rate, n/w speed increases etc to do that. I think if this can be done, it will make scalability not an issue left to consensus but based on how n/w evolves & hard forks will be required only to adjust the graphs based on new data. This is also an area where we can involve Dave Hudson to run some statistical models or do it ourselves if someone can do it.

Decred's goals are pretty simple. It wants to be open and progressive, and use community-based governance to make decisions. It wants to be self-funding and remain sustainable so it can continue its own development.


To be cheeky: btcsuite has been influencing Bitcoin Core development for years. It's been BC's red team. There are no plans for Decred to directly influence Bitcoin Core development. The relationship is between btcsuite and Decred, and it's a code relationship. If BC like what's happening, they can be part of it just like anyone else - or use the open-sourced code for their purposes.


Contentious issues need to be solved appropriately. The proposal put forward now is to conduct discourse and informal voting on a platform where anyone can participate with the issues - specifically geared for this purpose. Then issues move to the blockchain where it's handled by PoW/PoS, wherein PoS miners formally vote on each issue. That's a proposal for how Decred can deal with difficult issues and arrive at a solution. What we have now is just a starting point.

I'm posting most of the responses at the moment. The current process is to consult with all the devs and non-devs working on the project and construct responses together for the "decred" account. However, it isn't always possible to construct individual responses since the devs are focusing on developing and testing (understandable at this point in time). I distil what's being said and run back and forth. Once it's mainnet time people will have more time to engage publicly and directly - I suspect most devs prefer technical talk around their work. I don't mind, since we'd all rather have what we're talking about than just talk about it.

The other reason for using the "decred" account is nobody wants a cult of personality, so we'd rather construct responses together. Also remember we're custodians to get it live, it's not ours. So "we" can't speak for Decred, we can only put forward information and see if there are objections or support. Anyone here has as valid an opinion as anyone else. Maybe that's not always practical, but it's worth keeping in mind when interacting from any position. A key thing to get up is a platform where we can have discourse and vote on a range of matters and then perhaps move it to another formal layer for voting (blockchain) and integration into Decred, that would be worthwhile. Experimenting with the platform for discourse/informal voting next week too.

Funding:
There are basically three models we've seen in most free and open-source projects that want to remain sustainable (continue development over time). In these, funding comes from:

• Donation-type efforts, or hoping for goodwill
• Some type of initial offering, or selling influence to insiders
• Some external party, or selling influence to outsiders

Nobody here will tell you Decred is going to fix your world. Anyone who tells you that is a false prophet. What we can tell you, unequivocally, is that Decred is a project that will attempt to introduce a fourth option to counter the corruptive influence of funding we've seen destroy a lot of good ideas that started in an earnest way. By writing funding into a consensus rule, Decred attempts to put power back in the hands of its users. Some people will stop reading here and say it's a terrible idea. Others will come along on the journey and see where it goes. The fact remains, if the network dislikes the direction development takes, they now have a direct voice to communicate that - stop mining and staking and the funding stops. That's the fourth option.

All the other options we've seen are suboptimal. Donation-type efforts are limited in scale. Selling air to you saying it'll be worth something "if you just trust us" is sick. And finally, Decred won't accept a situation where it's owned by a handful of corporations astroturfing the community and manufacturing consent in its name. By putting funding into the hands of users, Decred attempts a representative democratic model where nobody owns it. Decred isn't for sale - and you can't inquire within about sale. And if anyone messes with that in the future, scream from the hilltops and burn the whole damn thing to the ground - it's our duty as a community.

btcsuite:
btcsuite has been funded by a single guy, relatively unknown, who is crazy about freedom. There's no selling and no venture capital. There have been attempts to buy influence, and they have been chased away. Bear in mind btcsuite is the backbone of a great number of Bitcoin businesses and organisations now. There isn't a number because many close off their code - so we don't know. You may be interested to know that Ethereum's most popular client (geth) is based on btcd, for example. The point is btcsuite is high quality software written in public view over years. That is what you will see from Decred from a development perspective - you need not look further than btcsuite's history.

That type of situation is obviously quite unique. A single source of philanthropic funding is both rare and a problem for a project like Decred. It's been sustained fine for a project like btcsuite, but Decred intends to build a multi-stakeholder development environment where anyone can come contribute and be rewarded for their work fairly when it becomes part of the codebase. 100% of funding goes to the benefit of Decred's development - in full view of the public. So funding isn't going to go to btcsuite as a separate project unless that code clearly and directly benefits Decred, goes into its codebase, and is part of a Decred feature. It's clear now how that can be confusing - what we mean is actual code contributions accepted into Decred's codebase will go to btcsuite too if it's applicable. Similarly, Decred gets free contribution from btcsuite where applicable. So the symbiotic relationship between the two is based on code, not funding, aside from the fact Decred gets free code from btcsuite's ongoing work. The word applicable is used because they're different systems and Bitcoin is more constrictive on what it can accept - chances of a hybrid PoW/PoS change are 0.

As for Decred, the community is beholden only to itself. If someone (person or organisation) wants to build a feature put up as a development proposal, and there's sufficient support from the community, it can built by that party, reviewed, merged, and becomes part of Decred's codebase. c0, for example, is a competent development stakeholder interested in continuing work on Decred, so it'll be doing work for Decred as a team. They don't own it, and anyone can be a development stakeholder if they are good - that's the meritocratic element of the system.

What's the matter?

No one is knocking BSD. I'm impressed developers would bother to make a wallet for it due to the "tiny user base". The "gui" may have been a dig towards a popular coin with no gui wallet.

Btw, I use BSD although I am still at the noob state with it right now.

^^^ Looking forward to reading the answer (not the made up word part, but other).

Also, since it looks like more than one person is using the Decred user account, could post authors sign their name at the end even if it's just their first name?

if I understand it right you guys don't want to establish an another altcoin in the first line but want to add value to the development of Bitcoin if you still maintain the "Btcsuite" and improve the development of "Btcsuite" thru "Decred" in a practical way. is this right?

and for shure you have the same issue as the Core Developers have. your work has to be funded and you need something for living.

is the word "Degred" a made-up word of "decrease" and "greed"?

At very least Decred will enter into a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with Bitcoin. That's the goal. Improvements in one will feed into the other (where possible). Development has a lot more freedom in Decred because it's new, so there's room for innovative ideas and experimentation. Hopefully a foundation can be built where it can be kept that way - that's the other goal.


There's already been some press coverage. There will be some more next week, but as you can imagine, it's an uphill battle. A lot of people in the Bitcoin camp see anything alternative as an attack or a threat. That's not what this is about at all - it's not about competing, but about growing in parallel. Maybe that's just spin on "competition", but you get what's meant by the ideal.

Make sure you guys are signed up for airdrop on the site. Going to sound like a broken record, but the project will benefit from as diverse a group of people as possible.

I wouldn't say it's a defining feature of the project, but some of the people developing Decred come from an OpenBSD background (more specifically bitrig). So even though it's a small userbase, Decred runs on *BSD too. That may have been a more accurate way of describing the GUI statement.

That's mostly because the developers had great difficulty in getting the Bitcoin Core client ported to *BSD back in the day, so they started building btcd (which is now a package in btcsuite) from scratch. They then used that opportunity to improve on a bunch of areas where the Bitcoin Core client is lacking - i.e., documentation and test coverage to name two. There's an older CoinDesk article about this called "Developers redo Satoshi software" from early 2013.

Not to start a flame war, but in this case Go (golang) shows a lot more promise for the long-term maintainability of a complex and modular codebase than C/C++ without sacrificing performance. Makes it the perfect foundation for a serious alternative if we want to look beyond the scope of a few years.

It's just nonsense: *BSD are variants of "Unix" as is linux, openstep (os X), etc.

That's bullshit. FreeBSD runs a generic daemon and Qt GUI just as good as Linux. Devs don't bother to release binaries for these because of tiny user base.

That is interesting. No one that I know of has bothered to make a wallet for BSD let alone a gui wallet. Watching.

The potential of this coin is really high, lets see how Dev manage it and above all how they make a cheap  marketing campaign that arrives outside of the still small Bitcointalk community, it is the time to go beyond

ohh, will Decred become Bitcoin 2.0 ? watching with full attention.

To give you a quick rundown of what Decred will need to work on immediately after launch:

- Sync from btcd (there is a new db branch that brings impressive gains - substantial overhaul of the database layer)
- Native wallet GUIs for Windows, OS X, *nix, and *BSD (there is a native framework being worked on)
- Payment processing from dcr to fiat and support for dcr exchanges (e.g., ShapeShift, Poloniex, etc.)

A key point to remember is that these targets shouldn't take more than a few months, otherwise it's easy to get bogged down if the initial roadmap is too lofty in real terms. Building out from the fundamentals will be a lot more interesting once it's multi-stakeholder too - see what other development parties bring to the table and setting up a communication platform to see what the community wants done (where voting can occur as well).

Thanks for replying, i am quite curious about how we can engage most of the community instead of just techies, i mean it has to be some sort of tiered approach so that anyone can come in with a crude idea w/o any technical/coding perspective and then community can help convert it into something like a BIP for bitcoin. Although we need lot of explanatory material to bridge the gap between tech & non-tech crowd because one has to put effort into understanding how things work to make a good proplosal. Without good articles/how-to/video of inner working of things we might easily alienate a lot of people.

One thing the project is experimenting with is setting up a proper web platform geared toward discourse and voting so we as a community can engage and interact in a constructive way - all around the specific notion of software development. There are some really great open-source development efforts in this space, so it's likely Decred will draw on some of these actively maintained packages. Will post an answer to CoinHoarder's question since there is a proper roadmap of things the software absolutely needs, that will share nearly unanimous agreement. That may be a good starting point. But you can imagine with a proper platform, any other development party (or individual) can come along and choose a feature implementation proposal - and get paid for that work. No need to rely on donations and see it stagnate. The project will have continued development from day 1. Finding a way to connect the community to that process using a platform in a constructive way will be excellent, since that'll mean there'll always be a public and transparent pulse of the community-technology interface in the system.

watching closely

I think that people confuse innovation with new technology rather than solving existing problems. IMO this field of cryptocurrency is still very new and evolving. This is a complex technology which has many layers, so there is lots of innovation to be had in optimizing already existing code/technology. My view would be to involve Dave Hudson from HashingIt (http://hashingit.com/about-hashingit-com) or someone similar, who can provide right direction or at least some scientific data to decide right direction. We can't make decisions based on idealogy/emotions/greed & speculation but on data & Constitution of decred that is already available.

Also, I don't think any cryptocurrency should try to become a quick payment method if it conflicts with the core principle/strength of bitcoin/decred because its simply inefficient for that purpose by design. If a solution can be found that works alongside what we already have i am pretty satisfied with my tx times. As the decred blog says, some people invested in bitcoin have there own agenda/vision for it which conflicts with decentralization. I don't understand obsession with adoption/payment processing without proper scaling solution. There has to be some profit, financial or not, motive for this crazyness.