What you are saying is sort of analogous to me suggesting you donate your bitcoins to charity so no one can accuse you of bias?
i hope you can see that isn't even close. there's a mighty big difference in me taking a chance on a risky investment by pouring in my own hard earned fiat back in 2011 when Bitcoin was on death's door step. you were nowhere to be seen at the time
everyone was accusing me as a "speculator" for being the problem, believe it or not. nowhere in their brains was the alternative word of "investor" apparent. for reals as price descended from 32 to 1.98 there was all sorts of allegations being thrown about. the argument went something like "b/c you're not a geek or techy, you don't truly believe in what we're doing here and the price must be falling b/c you're manipulating!" i kid you not. they even accused me of being a "hoarder" back before the term "hodler" became popular. hoarders were generally viewed as bad at the time b/c geeks insisted that BTC had to circulate or have monetary velocity for Bitcoin to become successful. as a self admitted hoarder (i prefer saver) at the time, i took enormous flack for that position. fortunately with time, and guys like Daniel, that position has softened.
contrast that with what Blockstream is doing. sure, you say you're forgoing income via pay cuts to be a part of BS. first off, we can't verify that and there is really no risk like i took in possibly losing it all. at least you have the salary. there's a part of me that thinks that gmax and lukejr are unemployable due to their recalcitrance as evidenced by the now well know Press Center debacle where he misbehaved even by Andreas's standards. that's pretty hard to do and that's not the only incident.:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.org/pull/162https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1973084from what you're saying, this isn't the case, so i'll have to take your word on that. but the fact still remains that BS is for-profit and you've all been awarded stock options and decent pay which could go ballistic depending on how well BS does profit wise. so there is really no risk on your part and plenty of incentive to do bad things. lots of ppl besides me are worried about the perverse incentives that might develop as a result. even to the point of subverting any backports of successful SC tech to Bitcoin Core due to profit incentives. it's quite unbelievable that the high profile investors you've attracted, some of whom heretofore like Schmidt & Kosla (iirc) have publicly disavowed Bitcoin to a degree, will be in a all out philanthropic mode towards Bitcoin. i'd expect that none of them have made any profit from Bitcoin to this day even if they started personally investing a year ago as they've probably been caught by the unexpected year long decline in the price. i'd even expect you have been caught similarly and might be in a loss position. this to me is a red flag. the key for BS to turn that all around is to insert a source code change that benefits your profit model via the marketing and selling of SC's to any willing taker.
I dont think a kickstarter or donations would've raised enough money to do it. Mark Friendenbach has first hand experience of trying to work for a year on bitcoin donations, that didnt work out very well. We could probably have implemented the core part in our spare time, but we figured that isnt enough for people to actually use it. You need mining software, wallets that understand sidechains, you need a sample sidechain or two, a sidechain explorer, tools to issue assets (if thats in the sidechain feature set), etc etc. Thats a ton of work and in our estimation if you drop a library or patch over the wall it lands with a thunk and sits there unused. You have to minimally demonstrate a useable system.
You should view blockstream as a sort of hybrid. We are developing FOSS open IP much as a not-for-profit would. But we are also aiming to make a profit by selling services, doing partnerships, advising integrators etc this is all complicated stuff and people need help to make it work. Like was said its kind of like Mozilla.
will you sell SC's to govt's if asked?
We also had opinions about the correct uses, and maintaining bitcoin ethos. If you drop a patch you dont have any strategic input into maintaining bitcoin ethos in the deployment.
We're also individuals with a community voice independent from the company. I dont think you see most companies nor individuals working for companies in the bitcoin space giving the kind of detailed rationale or insight into plans.
i posted above that there are several venture funds that have invested. how can they not want the std 10x return of their investment? those fund constituents do not just represent the viewpoint of their founder.
Not to OpenTransactions, not conformal/btcd, not bitfury, not 21e6 etc. I understand we're the only company to propose actually extending the core so there's a higher standard - but really btcd is kind of opaque which to my mind is a bit of a concern given that its proposed as a full node and creates risk of network fork as it has a reimplementation of consensus critical code.
Adam
yeah, the spvp insertion is a sticking point for me. it's clear this is the critical piece for your success as a company. i'd really prefer to see SC's implemented through the federated server model first though to get a better sense of how this is all going to work out. couching it as "us" trying to "prevent" you from offering something
you perceive of as valuable to the community is counter-productive though, imo. it's not "us" wanting to change the ruleset. it's you; and for a for-profit.
Chortle. Thats actually what I said about what I was doing and you still bit?