Short versionI'm currently a graduate student who is planning to move into hacking on cryptocurrencies full time. I've been an active member of the community for approximately 3 years now and have conceptualised cryptocurrency ideas through the input of the community on a working project called
MC2. I have the backing of
Conformal Systems, owners of
Coinvoice and creators of
btcd, who will provide quality control for code written in the implementation of these ideas.
(1) What models work for the community to fund cryptocurrency development and make it worthwhile for you to contribute? One model explored so far is the idea of stake tickets redeemed for coins in the developed cryptocurrency. Are there any others that work better?
(2) What do you want to see from a project like this? What kind of engagement do you want to see? What kind of structures should we build to accommodate what's lacking in the community?
I will be at the Texas Bitcoin Conference if anyone would like to meet up with me there and discuss things with me, and I'm trying to be more active in my IRC channel (#mc2) and -wizards on freenode. As I live in the greater Toronto area, I will also be making an effort to attend the local meets at Bitcoin Decentral on a regular basis if this becomes my full time work. I haven't had the opportunity to delve into cryptocurrencies nearly as much as I'd like to, and I'm hoping with the support of the community, I can make this into a career.
Long VersionMost of you here know of me, have seen me post over the past couple of years, have heard of my specifications for
MC2, or have used
GUIMiner-scrypt.
I'm hoping that the end of this month will mark the beginning of a transitioning period in my life: the move away from graduate school and into professional cryptocurrency development.
After much review of my situation over the past month, I have decided that I would prefer to drop out of my graduate program and code for the community if possible.
Likewise, I don't want this money to come from a company -- I want it to come from the community. There has been a large amount of interest lined up in the early donation of BTC to me and my developers to create MC2, with the promise of stake tickets (eventual coins) in return. This is somewhat similar to the
Ethereum fundraiser, but I don't know if it's considered the ideal situation for you guys, or what you consider to be a fair and balanced initial distribution in exchange for the input required to pay the developers. Most certainly I did not want something like 5% or 10% of the total quantity of coins being in a central foundation's hands by 5 or 10 years time. I intended to cap individual contributions to $5 k USD, to allow group buys on the forum for smaller quantities through some of these eligible individuals, and to cap contributions by developers themselves to $10 k USD.
I want you guys' feedback on what you think is far and reasonable, for instance, the premine perhaps being 3% of the total amount of coin issued after 10 years, whether or not the code should be initially released FOSS to prevent forking, and so on. If it's not released FOSS, we will allow periodic audits by security firms and trusted members of the community prior to and after release, until the period it becomes FOSS.
Basically, though, the people who offered to help me in the beginning and who've stood beside me and supported me and my ideas will be the first ones allowed to donate. And, I think that's fair.
There are many ways this money could be stored. I think the best idea is to put it in
P2SH multisig addresses, where the sender transmits it to this address and in order for it to be spent the sender, myself, and whoever other trusted members of the community we choose
will all have to sign for the money before it will be sent anywhere. To mitigate volatility, we can also transfer a small amount of BTC to a P2SH address to use as a deposit, that goes towards the full amount required in fiat later. In this way, we can use the blockchain as the escrow for the community funds, so that even if you send us the money, we can never spend it to fund ourselves without your consent later. In this way, we can also schedule the transmission of funds on an as needed basis.
If/when I start working on full time development, I would give major contributers a phone number with which to contact me, and ready access to communicate with me over IRC as well to keep the development process as transparent as possible. Distribution of funds would be on an as needed basis: if one of my developers needs to get paid for the month, we would contact the sig holder of the multisig address, and move a small amount of money at a time in exchange for a small amount of tickets at a time, and people would know exactly where their money was going.
Even though my quoted starting wage was $60-80 k USD, I'm not comfortable starting at the high end for the community's sake, because I don't know how this will turn out. I will commit to these things:
1.) I will request a starting wage of $60 k USD via donations to begin work on this project in March for a 1 year duration. As I want some stake in MC2 as well, I'll only ask for $50 k USD and myself assume $10 k USD of stake tickets (as if I had donated $10 k USD myself).
2.) I will be the lowest paid programmer on my team.
3.) If for some reason the project falls through, any code generated non-publicly will be released to the community and remaining funds will be returned to their original owners.
I want to make the stipulation that the community will be hiring me through donation, and that there is
no promise of future value for any prospective premine system, and no promise that working code will be delivered at the end of this. It's a donation to help fund innovation in the community and to help generate more cryptocurrency developers with the experience required to maintain the financial systems of the future.
To leave my graduate studies would be a gigantic leap for me, and leaves me with no real guarantee of financial stability beyond the next year (at least, from my current vantage point).
So, how do you all, as a community, feel about me working for some of you for the quantities of funds? How do you feel about small premines distributed over a series of years being used to fund a new coin? What else do you want to see in launches of funding for new coins? What do and don't you agree with?
I'm not a marketing person or really even a businessperson, so I'm not going to sell this to you as anything but what it is -- a system of donations that goes to funding some research and implementation in the cryptocurrency community. It's my dream to work modestly for the benefit of the community, and to learn progressively more about cryptography and novel decentralized payment systems.
------------------------------Contact me via BitMessage: BM-NBKELZ4Ri3paEF71Yr2xxp3wFB7uioZ9
or by IRC:
irc.conformal.com:6697 (SSL required) in #mc2 or freenode #mc2
Original MC2 thread:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/mc2-a-cryptocurrency-based-on-a-hybrid-powpos-system-169204