Topic: [DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated - page 246. (Read 1058949 times)

 I think devtome is totally fine (I'm writting on it). First Isn't the goal of Devcoin to build its value based on peoples' work ? You compare Wikipedia with Devtome but the whole purpose of the crypto coins and even more Devcoin is to set a new paradigm. Devcoin is about paying anyone who put time in it. It's the best way to promote it mid long term imo. I saw logic flaws in previous posts. First many guys here seems to have a problem about peoples (writters) dumping coins as the paycheck comes. There is no dumping. The price is just correcting due to the fresh mined coins. Noone ever whined about BTC miners selling their coins on a daily basis or called them dumpers. It's exactly the same here but on a monthly basis. You call them dumpers because you are holding devcoins and the price is actually going down. The price isn't what you want and the only one who is right is the market. The good news for you is that overtime 180M new coins will impact less and less on the price.
You speak about Wikipedia not paying contributors but who said it should be the case ? First this argument is a sophism. Why do we pay peoples for their work as we can enslave them ? Evolution of social rights. Same here. Devtome can override wikipedia in few years just by paying contributors with Devcoin. Also devtome is on of the best way to attract more people to Devcoin (work required/efficiency). If you had to price wikipedia it will go at worst from 2-3 billions to nearly unvaluable. Then the price per word will be suprisingly high. A free lance writter earn 0.1 $ a word easily whereas writting for devtome provides actually less. Devtome is actually a good way to promote devcoin thinking about the amount of works it requires.

cliffs:
1) You totally underestimate what Devtome can become.
2) Dump doesn't exist.

what?? Then 99% of all existing gaming articles, 99% all articles in fact, don't qualify either.

Novacadian told me that when he tried to write on Devtome about his game, he was told such writing did not qualify because the game was not a free open source game.

So from the sound of that yes maybe the things being written about should be free open source things.

I have written a lot about my metagame, but it is all made up of free open source games so it qualifies.

-MarkM-

In regards to generating revenue, increasing the exposure of devcoin, and keeping it circulating in an economy, we need to be proactive and create our own solutions. One of the simplest revenue generating methods is to host an auction site.

There are open source auction packages such as WeBid http://sourceforge.net/projects/simpleauction/ and Xataface http://apps.weblite.ca/index.php?-action=view&-table=packages&package_id=1 that would allow us to make sellers out of anyone, and earn a percentage of each sale. It would also allow another entry point for newcomers that don't have any cryptocurrency.

In addition to accepting devcoins, it could accept other currencies, even fiat, and then buy devcoin with the income. With a decent advertising PR campaign - it could be the auction site that supports creative work. We talk about supporting artists, when and if a system is found that will enable that, well why not an auction site, and let the market determine the artists products worth?

If an auction site was to be considered, in addition to sellers there could be a 'Devcoin Store' that provides unique items, is operated by devcoin, with all proceeds going back into the community. Advertising could be on devtome to start.

EDIT: I am retracting this idea as I don't believe it is in the best interests of devcoin. It could be considered a financial service and attract regulation.

True, but it also had around 20-30,000 articles within the first year. Devtome has 2342. Wikipedia was the first such thing on the market, and right now, I don't believe devtome has even found a clear niche. It was clear from the start what wikipedia was - it's in the name. Is devtome a repository for open source software? Fictional writing? Opinion pieces? Encyclopedia? All of them? Tome is actually an ambiguous word, and refers to a particularly large "scholarly" book, which could be anything - although the dev part makes it more...developery. So does that mean it should focus back on open source / developer related things? Programming languages, code snippets for different algorithms, that sort of thing?


I personally have no problem with testing that, and think that's a good idea. Apart from reaching the bounty (or not), are there any other metrics that would be useful to judge it's comparative success to how it is currently? or is adwords the biggest and brightest indicator?

I've been making these points since I learned of devcoin. If someone assesses dvc -> btc -> $ payout at greater/equal what they think their work is worth they'll sell. If that worth is 'low' then the price will be in line, whatever anyone else's self-assessed worth may be. DVC like any other means of compensation should be paid in line with work done, value.
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Optimisation - market price acts as a good guide. Max per round pay was recently cut from 85 to 50 (I think mostly b/c the rating methodology now bounds from 0.5 to 1.5 rather than an absolute new appraisal). Selling is obviously everyone's prerogative but writers in particular need to be honest with themselves. How many people buy or have bought dvc to support devtome specifically? It's the writers who should be building and supporting devtome, so any subsidy should be from a devtome pot.

This could be done by giving devtome a fixed % of total generation. Then subsidy and any resolutions are forced upon those to who it should be directed. Another way (simplified) is to just cut the max-per-round until a level reached where no writers submit, then raise it a bit. I'd be fascinated to know how many submit b/c they want to share with the world vs how many know it's overpaid and act likewise. There's overlap there but just making a point.

My opinion is that devtome shouldn't pay at all, aside from perhaps a token sum for the effort to format & deal with syntax etc - compensation tied 100% to prospective revenue or simply for recognition and creation's sake. I think there'd be completely different quality, collaboration and marketing. Next best would be if developers get 1 share per round, writers should get the same. It cuts payments but as total shares would be lower not that much if at all for most. I'd be interested to hear why writing is worth more than programming, or software development, or graphic design etc. If it's just a marketing tool then (1) is it working? (2) why are those paying for it everybody except those benefiting?
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Leadership - agreed. Regardless of aspirations to total decentralisation that's just not workable. Bitcoin is basically managed by major holders and miners. Devcoin opens that to everyone with a decent contribution, effectively a mining-for-creation network. Achieving that requires a system, decisions and leadership - but ones that are always accountable because at the end of the day we could all just sell and log off.

I don't know if there are other goals. There's an inevitable conflict of interest in change. Writers don't generally want to change the status quo because it's a gravy train, others want change because without it everything's undermined and there won't even be a gravy train. I understand that current winners want to ride this for as long as possible (and I also understand that it's the 'system' so just availing oneself of the system isn't personally blameworthy) but as someone who ultimately pays for it (like every other dvc buyer, owner, earner, trader) it hugely bothers me. I would say exactly the same thing if the situation was with regards to programmers or artists or whatever, rather than writers.

People need to be honest with themselves. I'd like to contact some OS projects and people about devcoin. But I know one of the first things they're going to ask is how we account for and justify relative payouts - and I don't have a good answer. I appreciate that decisions taken are gradual and considered, but as I've said before if something isn't working then it should be changed. Massively changed.

Wikipedia never paid authors, did it?

So I guess it ran out of content/authors?

Even in relatively early days when pretty much anyone could give themselves a link or few from Wikipedia just by picking a relevant page and editing it to give themselves a link the links alone were valuable, worth becoming and author to get.

I think wikipedia pretty much proves that not paying authors doesn't lead to no authors and/or bad content.

How about we try a bounty system for the Devtome project as a whole?

Offer bounties such as "Devtome gets X number of DeVCoin shares if it manages to reach $#### paycheque from Adwords" ?

Have Devtome do its own sharing out of its DeVCoins to its authors any way it wants, but DeVCoin only award minted coins to it when/if it meets specific goals such as a certain sized ad-revenue cheque, a certain average pagerank of its pages, a certain pagerank of its highest ranked page, a certain amount of daily traffic to project X, a certain amount of daily traffic to project Y and suchlike?

Then the authors could work together to try to maximise such features of the Devtome as a whole...

-MarkM-

Just for my sake, I was referring to a shutdown of pay to ad-generated levels only...it would probably still grow, but it might take a very long time to become a world player. It's difficult to market that, though.

I think you raise a good point about optimizing the devtome payout...do you have any ideas (or anyone else) on other strategies to try? Are the elder admins willing to reconsider it? Do they already have goals in mind with pre-planned payout dropping to non-subsidy levels? Is any of this written down anywhere? Just how exactly are the high level decisions made at the moment? I understand UTB is founding administrator, and has the final nod on everything, but is that as intended? I'm not having a go or anything, just trying to understand what the process is. I know what devcoins are, but what is devcoins?

In that vein...are there any long term strategic pages (on devtome or otherwise) for the intended growth or public charter on the administration of devcoin?

One of the things I like about the devcoin project is that it actually has a system of leadership. It behaves like a benefit corporation, but even those have investors, shares and directors, and don't have their own currency. Alternatively, a regular government has its own currency, performs services for its members and charges a tax to fund it, which devcoins has elements of. Is it sitting in the middle of the two?

I think there are different issues. The one they're referring to is more about relative payment rather than denegrating writing (at least that's how I see it).

What doesn't make sense to me, or I think to devcoin generally, is that OS projects and developers on the regular payment list receive 1 share per round yet writing 1,000 words also accrues 1 share. That could be resolved really easily be just capping the monthly round payout per individual to a much lower amount - this would align devtome with all the other projects and recipients (because there's no actual limit on writing submission) and just roll over per word payments into future rounds. It would also force those writers to take more interest in how their work and that of others is sourced, presented, marketed and perhaps any revenue potential - rather than just post and wait for earnings.

For example, the post above about freeBSD - much more could be done in the way of external funding support (which would probably provide greater visibility and in turn devcoin support) if distribution was overhauled.

It comes down to the value of working. You may work on and value your writings at X value, so may I, but it only takes a few people who value their submissions near zero to undermine the payment mechanics and therefore the bigger effort. The monthly devtome per-share value is simply too high. Nowhere else does this exist, so all that's happening is that at some point each round market mechanics work to drop the price to a level commensurate with or closer to what 1,000 words may be worth.

For Devcoin to really evolve into a valued means for people to invest in and support ideas and developments they value and want (i.e. a payment mechanism) there needs to a much greater refocus on how to optimise that and show it works, rather than overly function on a round-by-round scramble for payout.

I say all that as someone who spends a lot of time on devtome, writes on devtome and think the concept is very worthwhile. It's just that the way it pays is counter-productive, very inefficient and the effective subsidy provided by all other devcoin ideas and projects is way too high.

People keep saying there'd be no writers if the subsidy was cut. I don't think that's true, and should be challenged. The world is full of ideas and artisans who value their art for its own sake without any pay, let alone ott pay.

exactly, i hope DVC finds the way back to a Dev(eloper)coin and not writer/dumper-coin

I think I can see why that original intention petered out. The idea, if I understand it correctly, was that the devcoin administration could create open-source websites (through bounties), which were chartered to turn all non-devcoin profits into devcoins on the open market, supporting both those who created the websites / businesses, and everyone else. There's a problem with this, from a money-making perspective, in that generally to succeed in business, the fewer people that know what you're doing and how you're doing it, the better. Having an open source gift card website (for example), means that everyone else who uses that open source software, along with any extra proprietary bits to get a business advantage, could more easily set one up too. It's going to always be a race to the bottom, in one form or another, by making it open source, even if it was done properly. It just doesn't make for good business, because with all FOSS, devcoins are paying people to produce value then give it out for free. It's very hard to profit from that - redhat did it through service and support, which is one consideration.

One alternative is to create a new genre of open-source licensing, whereby the source follows some existing form like MIT with a caveat; if it's used commercially, some small amount must be paid to the devcoin project. This may generate some significant revenue, but it's going to create other problems too, like not really being fully FOSS. It will essentially turn devcoin into a software producer that sells its wares, which may or may not make a further mess of things.

Another alternative is to have a "Members" structure, whereby companies can simply pay a fee to be official members of the devcoin project. They don't have to have run open source software themselves, but are still able to help everyone (and potentially themselves, if they end up with code that benefits them) and still run their business as usual. ICANN is a bit like this, the group who manage the domain names - member countries just pay a fee to come to conferences and the like plus a few reports, where there is some news or some member feedback given weekly/monthly/whatever. Perhaps they can also have a hand in suggesting bounties, or at least in the ability to add their own bounties to project created ones.

I think the devcoin project is in an unfortunate position where its objective (to increase open source development) is directly at odds with the ability to produce revenue. It could very well start businesses, as you say, or even provide clauses for bounties, that some portion of income earned after the bounty is awarded is repaid back for a year or something, so if profit is made from a bounty, there must be some return - this will hold up the price a little, as not as many coins will find their way to the open market. The bounty winner can still create the open source software and cover running costs a little, until everyone copies their code (which is freely available!) and competes them out of business.

Hmm...this requires more thought.

Can devcoin do something about OpenBSD funding problem?

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138972987203440&w=2


They will likely close up production if not funded, and they did so much for open source that they might deserve some help. Not to talk about the  HUGE opportunity of getting people to know about Devcoin by seeing it in action.

Yes well there is of course the idea that if a population is seemingly not generating enough income its curators / custodians / tourist-boards / someone should find ways to make use of / make valuable / make valued / value what it is they actually do, even if that means just admitting we are a nation of slackers who dribble a lot and making that a tourist attraction.

-MarkM-

I totally support Open Source software being funded in any way, but for those of us who have put just as many years as the developers, developing our skills and art its hard not to take a little offence at that..

I dont think the issue is the types of content, so much as how its accessed/managed that gives the impression there is less valuable work on there, than there really is. I think there is already a very credible collection of factual, developer works. They are just a bit hard to find some days

I am working on am idea for managing Devtome content that might help over come this, give equal value to any "original" work and still allow an awesome techy/geek/wallet/developer repository that I think might work (if reading the dokuwiki documentation doesn't do my head in first!) I will share when its readable

Its original importance was that it was the only even potentially revenue-generating project.

There were supposed to be lots of revenue-generating projects but we seem to have ended up giving people bounties for creating their own privately held and not even open source revenue generating projects (bounties for exchanges that exchange devcoins, for example; Open Transactions is the only free open source exchange I know of so far, yet it is not the only exchange that got a bounty for including devcoins among their currency-pairs, is it?)

I guess maybe somewhere along the line the idea of the project owning its own revenue-generating businesses got lost, so instead in some kind of despair or somethng bounties started being given instead to third party businesses that merely happen to use devcoins in some way.

Businesses which presumably ought to have been run by the project itself, if the idea of the project having income generators was still a goal. Instead we have rewarded people for creating competing businesses maybe, in effect.

e.g. Maybe an example of a revenue generating site would be one that sells gift cards; but instead of creating a bounty for developing the project such a site, the profits of which the project would use to buy devcoins on markets to support the exchange rate, we somehow ended up paying someone or someones else to create such sites of their own instead of to create such sites for the project to own and use in its supposed strategic plan of making a bunch of revenue generating free open source projects so that it would have revenue with which to buy devcoins thus to uphold devcoin exchange rates.

Presumably using the original idea as I understood it what we would do with free open source spaceships once we 3d-printed them ought to be to use them in a business such as maybe a space tourism business or asteroid mining or something in order to obtain revenue with which to purchase devcoins on exchanges so that devcoin exchange rates would be upheld. A kind of a central bank concept though in a way, this idea that the project would deliberately buy devcoins in order to make devcoins have value...

So presumably we would hire astronauts and stewards and such with DeVCoins, to run these businesses, but offering the products and services of these businesses not only for DeVCoins but for any currency we could use to purchase DeVCoins on exchanges.

-MarkM-

You can't treat devcoins as an unbeatable deflationary value to the moon coin that must be held at all costs, and expect everyone to follow that behavior - it's just not attractive enough to speculators to sustain that. It's geared towards paying people for doing open source development (ie a good cause)...but what good is that pay that they can't take out at will? Part of it being a free market and competitive is that everyone will develop their own motivation to contribute - create open source software or write on devtome (or whatever else - admin, marketing, etc), and the market price will be leverage to that motivation.

The issue with devtome you guys seem to be having is that it might be over-subsidized. I only joined the devcoin community several weeks ago, and I actually thought devtome was an intrinsic part of the whole devcoin project - this came from both the fact that it's talked about so much, plus the huge number of generation shares it gets per round.

Regarding over-subsidy, whoever is deciding the rate of pay seems to be treating devtome growth as a priority, since it's subsidized so heavily (ad revenue is way less than writer payout). I think having devtome authors only get paid ad revenue will kill it off completely, because very few people will actually contribute any more. So this leads to the question: what's the purpose of devtome? Is it important or trivial to the proliferation of devcoins?

It was explained to me that there is a method in the madness. The writing bounties have brought in a lot of new folks and interest. Many of those folks have moved on to other important administrative positions. The question is when is enough enough, for like you it seems to me that the writing bounties are out of whack.

Last split had me receive 100,000 DVC. It was for some testing done previously in DevTome. It was so inconsequential to me that my assumption was that something had gone wrong when testing a new faucet on the same day the split share arrived in my wallet. If an hour was spent on my 1000 word test entries it would be a surprise to me.

On the flip side over the last month a forum bounty has attracted my attention involving incoming and outgoing emails to a SM forum. The incoming aspect of the project was close to being finished when it was brought to my attention that if someone finished the first part then having the second part done was meaningless. Oddly, having the second part done seemed to have no relevance to the first part.

Obviously spending the month writing in DevTome would have been a much more secure endeavor, not to speak of less stressful. Once the SM Forum project is completed, either by me or someone else, my attention shall turn full time to DevTome until some degree of fairness is placed on programming bounties.

- Nova 

+100

This is what I have been saying aswell.. and the notion that devcoin will rise when devtome rises is pegging devcoin on the hopes of devtome, when it should be the other way around. Devtome will rise if devcoin rises, so when more people want devcoins they will write on devtome. (Is this the devtome project or devcoin? Are we a writing based project? Initial vision was for development, writing came secondary)

We have it the wrong way around right now. If we pay for software and hardware bounties, and they get done, then slowly devcoin will be more appealing, as more people write less drible because they want to "own" devcoins then the revenue generated by ads will be higher and an exponential cycle kicks off. Right now when the cycle starts the devtome writers are quick to dump, so no secondary buyers can sustain 180 million devcoin monthly for a sustained rise. If the writers got less, and developers got more there would be less dumping because I know for sure developers would not dump as much because they are working to "own" rather than to "sell" to bitcoins. I havent sold 1 devcoin since I owned any especially those I have earned through my software. I value it much higher, even though technically it is being held back.

Another thing when it comes to purposeful writing seems writers are nowhere to be found, if we have good writers atleast we can put them to good use and write some good documentation for our software manuals/tests so that we may attract others. The readme's in github, the verification tests, the general documentation that I suck at being a developer where a writer would flourish should be taken advantage of. Instead of categorized dribble we should leverage it to its advantages, pay for good work.

I think some of you took the wrong idea from "running out of content".

The point is that authors should not be getting shares of mined bitcoins, they should be paid from the advertising revenues earned by the Devtome site.

The "run out of content" idea is basically that if we take away the constant massive throwing of outlandishly high amounts of coin at Devtome, letting it work like it is supposed to work, which is by having ads on it and using the revenue it earns from the ads to BUY DeVCoins on markets and pay the authors with THOSE DeVCoins, NOT with freshly minted DeVCoins, then we might find that people spend less time thinking up drivel to post to Devtome, resulting in Devtome running out of content DUE TO the authors failing to produce revenue-generating content thus failing to get paid thus possibly, maybe, according to some theories, no longer providing content.

I do not think it need happen that way for certain though, because other things could happen, gosh knows exactly what but suppose being published on Devtome was a valued privilege, maybe people would even pay to have their material published there or something.

But there does seem at a glance a chance that maybe if authors ONLY got paid what their articles ACTUALLY EARN BY ADS, a whole lot less "content" would be produced...

And that might make DeVCoins go up in exchange rate DUE TO less idiots who do not value the coins they get because they get them for work they consider value-less, to wit the posting of drivel to Devtome, having coins to dump for low prices.

In short, maybe if the minted coins went to people who value them instead of to people who are getting insane out of line massive amounts of them for pretty much doing nothing, or for promoting themselves and their ideas on someone else's bandwidth-and-hosting bill, they wouldn't get thrown away dirt cheap on the exchanges all the damn time.

(The fact that authors dump their coins cheap is probably at least partly due to them getting too many coins for too little work thus not valuing the coins highly.)

-MarkM-

I think that is a 100% guarantee.

Who doesn't have $50 laying around the house available to use for cryptocurrency speculation? People will buy low  in blocks of 10k, 25k or 50k and hope it goes to a dime. Lots of folks have read the news on Bitcoin and know it started out in the pennies.

I am a firm believer that the cryptocurrency landscape will be vastly different in December than it is now in January.

Bittzy78