There is a lot of misunderstanding about basically everything, from the finances to the tech. Please read the following links to get up to speed:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.16149001https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.16171231For some reason the BTCD community feels entitled to 100% of all the results from all the work I have done and what SuperNET has paid for. How much has BTCD community actually donated to me or SuperNET for iguana?
Answer: 0
I know people have put money into the BTCD, I have too, but that doesnt pay for the expenses. I am working without getting paid, but it turns out that few others are willing to do that and servers they always cost money.
There is actually the ability for me to stop volunteering my time for BTCD and just say goodbye, and use the GPL codebase in any other project. Now that would be a betrayal, even if I refunded all the BTCD funds I received for all the development work: 0
So maybe the price will go up after the iguana release, or maybe the 'buy the rumor sell the news' crowd will sell and the price goes down. The market is unpredictable so it is hard to base future expenses based on potential market prices. Plus to take advantage of any price increase, BTCD would need to be sold and after that, then what?
The reality is that if I came begging for 500 BTC to fund expenses, it would have brought in how much? With effort we probably could have raised 10,000 BTCD or so. However, that means I need to stop coding and become a fund raiser? And how long does the 10,000 BTCD last, especially if it has to be sold to pay for expenses?
Also, the full solution with BTC fees and notary nodes would have ongoing costs and I would need 10 years worth to make sure it is funded for long enough to get self-sustaining revenues from transaction fees. With 500 BTC as the max possible that could be raised and likely much less, this means BTCD could not afford dPoW.
However dPoW is needed for the full SuperNET solution of interoperating chains loosely coupled via atomic swaps. The reason is weak chains are too insecure for storing large amounts of funds, so it is not a viable long term solution.
SuperNET investors have put in thousands of BTC worth of crypto and if you read the link above, you will see that it hasnt been exactly the carefree path of infinite money. To have to pay for operating expenses from portfolio gains is ok in a bull market, but what happens when this bull market gets tired?
If there are no more trading gains, then even the SuperNET workforce becomes reduced back to just me.
Contrary to the FUD there has NOT been dozens of ICOs for all the assets. Most of them were dividended out for free to establish a trading market, no funds were raised from any ICO type of sales for anything other than SuperNET which operates as a hybrid fund. I have paid more for pangea assets than I have received from selling it. So without this fantasy ICO funds from all the assets, many of which are projects from other devs, where does the money come from?
I could have come here and asked for thousands of BTC, but instead I designed the komodo ICO to allow a decent conversion into the ICO. A smaller piece of a larger pie.
yet, the feeling is that there is some giant betrayal that there is a fixed price conversion into komodo. In order to offer a conversion right, there has to be some sort of fixed price. In order to get a market based price uncontaminated by the ICO knowledge, we used a 50% bonus from trailing month. Not perfect, but better than any alternatives that exist.
That was my assessment. However maybe I was wrong and the community prefers to not have a conversion right for the ICO? That seemed like nonsense, so I didnt even bother investigating such things.
Maybe one way to look at it is that instead of having to come up with new funding to pay for expenses, the contribution from BTCD is to convert into the komodo?
Is that really too much to ask for?
I have asked for some solution to the "unfairness" to long term holders and finally there was a post with a possible solution:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.16170817people have expected me to do everything as evidenced by the lack of active contributions. how many of you have installed iguana? tested it? helped in any active way?
That is fine, I dont complain. I do what I have to do, but it does take longer if I am the only one doing things. (I do get help from the SuperNET project, which is paying for servers, testers, config managment and GUI devs). But that means I am forced to make executive decisions and in this case knowledge of the future would have contaminated the result. I decide that is not the right way.
Some have said it is in BTCD holder's interest to have the komodo ICO raise as little as possible. If you understand tech, then you will realize that is not the case at all, as without enough funding, BTCD might end up with 80%+ of komodo, but there wont be enough funds to properly do dPoW and pay for continued development.
It is a fine balance, if the terms are too preferential to BTCD holders, then it is against ICO investors. As a large BTCD holder, I had to err on the side of being conservative to avoid conflict of interest and maybe I went a bit too far, though using what is near the 1 year all time high price and 50% premium doesnt seem such a big sacrifice.
That being said, I am open to a bonus payment to long time BTCD holders based on a community agreed formula and data as per the third link above. If the community cannot agree on how to allocate any bonus, then I certainly dont feel that I can just decide it after the reaction to my recent decision.
Now the bonus would be earned only at the higher end of the ICO result as clearly if no funds come in and BTCD already ends up with all of komodo it makes no sense to bonus out more. However, until I get an idea of whether the community can even agree to any bonus plan, I really cant make any decisions. The bonus amount would come out of the 10% reserved for ICO expenses.
Remember there is also the revshare asset snapshot, so it is not like I have neglected the BTCD, I had to make a determination of a fair exchange rate to be able to offer an exchange. If the requirement to have an exchange to komodo is removed, then this problem goes away. I have been and continue to work on my single project, which is to create the tech that allows crypto to go mainstream. I have done my best to enable BTCD -> komodo to be a key part of this solution at a decent conversion price. It seems many do not like this at all and so I am open to alternate proposals.
If the BTCD community does not want this future path, then we need to figure out an alternate plan. I can help bring a new dev team up to speed to take over the BTCD 1.0 development without dPoW and LP nodes, but of course the community would need to find/fund such a dev team.
What is needed is a solution and not just a general complaint of unfairness.
Let me know what you decide, I will honor the community decision. And if there is any alternate solution that solves the issues presented, of course I am open to that.
James
