Topic: How can developers make a decent return for their work in crypto currency - page 3. (Read 2410 times)

Oh, I see, the developer, who spent weeks, coding, and testing and compiling, and recoding, and recompiling, and retesting, ect, ect, ect, then, after release, spends hours a day, of their spare time, promoting the coin, and establishing services, and taking shit from everyone on the forums, should get the same payout, as someone who spent a bunch of money on mining gear, flipped a switch, and sat on a couch watching TV? Hmmmm, makes sense. All buisinesses should operate that way

There is nothing wrong, with putting a small ammount of your creation, in your own wallet. If it takes off, you get what you deserve. If it doesn't, your premine is worthless anyways.

If you are a good developer, with a history of doing development work wherever needed, maintaining various coins, creating pull requests (patches) for various problems various coins encounter etc, maybe you will become a go-to guy that people will be more and more inclined to try to hire/bounty whenever some coin or other needs something or some useful software many many coins could all make good use of is not available yet as free open source code?

For a long time now all the merged mined coins have all been in need of an up to date copy of bitcoin with the "merged mine as a secondary chain" patches applied, for example. Maintaining coins is maybe even more important than cloning new coins, so to me the fact that so many coins are not being kept up to date, especially in this case where many coins will all get the benefit, leads me to expect that the cut and paste clonecoin kiddies are likely not to keep the new cut and paste clonecoins up to date, since they have not demonstrated any ability to update any coin at all.

We can look at the scrypt coins too, as soon as an scrypt coin based on the latest bitcoin is available, or even just an up to date bitcoin with only the change of hashing method applied, all the scrypt coins that are running older code can be updated. But that doesn't seem to be happening either.

So it seems pretty clear to me there are not enough developers active yet to even just keep the coins that have existed a long time up and running with recent code so spawning yet more clonecoins just makes more and more and more coins that need their code updated, increasing the backlog of chains that need updated code instead of actually doing the work of updating the damn things...

Show us you can bring up to date the existing coins, then maybe a new coin you come up with might have some hope of seeming credible as a coin that might keep up to date with the latest bugfixes and innovations in cryptocoin code/technology.

-MarkM-

There is no good way to do it

I'm working on a coin that will have a constant stream of grants built into the blockchain for developers.

To avoid hardcoding any addresses, the coin will use proof-of-stake voting to decide how to allocate grants.

You can read more about the proposal here - I'm looking for feedback on it.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/developer-grant-bounty-allocation-through-proof-of-stake-voting-254334

Roll out services and goods that can be bought with it? It looks like you just pre-mined took a cut of mining (we really need to have a term for this much worse practice of hardcoding a scamcoin to mine for you) and then used those free coins to pay users to make those services with ill-gained bounties. If you did make any of those services yourself and I missed that, no reason they couldn't have been for a non-scamcoin.

Yes, I'm a Real Developer©, and I can imagine all the work that goes into changing Litecoin's name and blockchain root. I guess re-doing the logo nicely probably took the longest.

Holy shit, people actually take the idea of "make a litecoin clone into a scamcoin and treat it as a business to make a living off of" seriously around here. Is this subforum where all of the developers went who saw bitcoin as a get-rich-quick scheme and completely missed the point of its crypto and decentralization?

You are free to pay the developers of any coin you choose to mine to do whatever updates/improvements/bugfixes you would like some/any coin you mine to have coded/developed...

-MarkM-

They can have the button ready on ./cgminer ... so they can mine from the very start
that is bound to be profitable

Isn't it pretty much like any other business?

Since you are it seems looking for a job, what you basically need is a business, company, corp or whatever that will hire you.

So it boils down to how do such entities afford to hire people.

That in turn can vary over time and in response to market forces.

For example when bitcoins are going up and up and up on average month to month, maybe a company holding lots of bitcoin can afford to hire someone by selling a few bitcoins, hopefully selling few enough that the value of their unspent bitcoins is still growing despite the fact they are spending money on an employee.

But when bitcoins are going down in value on average month to month, maybe such companies will have to lay-off their workers.

So maybe a company could also mine bitcoins? First off it would be nice to mine enough to keep the total value of their hoard of coins from falling even while the individual value per coin is falling.

Then maybe some companies might consider diversifying. Maybe hold and mine bitcoins and litecoins. Of course when I say mine bitcoins I mean mine all the merged mined coins, or at least as many of them as is technically feasible without the overhead of servicing lots of blockchains causing overall loss. (Some folks have claimed for example that because GeistGeld's blocks are so rapid they lose too many nanoseconds processing GeistGeld work, degrading the processing of other chains by more than the GeistGeld coins are worth to them in their system of assigning or evaluating worth.)

Do you have the skills to develop pool software that tracks all the merged mined chains and rewards all the miners with the correct amount of each of the merged coins?

If so maybe you could start a merged mining pool business, which if it is successful might be able to afford to compensate you for your coding and maintenance time writing and maintaining and updating and bugfixing such pool software?

For me since bounties have not resulted in anyone producing such software I am now moving on to the idea of a merged mining business, that would be the only user of a merged mining pool so that the problem of divvying up the mined coins would not exist. The company would own the pool and all the coins mined, presto no need for coders to code software for divvying up the coins. So I guess maybe coders put themselves out of a job by being so slow to respond to a coding need that the market moved on to look for ways to do business without needing new code.

There is of course a lot of overhead in running a merged mining pool, even for just one user (the company); already a third dedicated server is being set up because the two already in use just aren't enough to do the job well. There is also a lot of delay in obtaining decent ASIC gear to mine with, so that right now is not a great time to try to raise capital to obtain such equipment because right now the prices of equipment that can actually be deployed within a few business days of ordering it are exorbitant.

I was a programmer for most of my career, so have had decades to wonder how is it that so many programmers end up being hired by managers/businesses instead of being the ones who hire business managers to run their business office for them so that they are free to spend their time programming instead of dealing with whatever it is that business managers deal with.

It seems that maybe managing a business well enough for the business to be able to afford to employ anyone might not be a trivial task. Could it be that it is even harder than actually programming is? Could it be that programmers wanting to hire a business manager to set up a business capable of employing the programmer would realistically find they need to pay the manager more than they the programmer gets paid if they are to succeed in finding and keeping a manager who can actually do the business-managing job?

Personally I no longer have time to code, merely trying to create and run enterprises that would like to be able to afford one or more coders (or even one or more hours of my own time spent coding instead of trying to raise money to pay for coding) takes more time than a normal full time worker puts in working.

-MarkM-

Right now the rewards are just slanted way too much to the miners and not enough to the developers.  And pre-mine is just way too much guesswork.  You could pre-mine way too much, or not nearly enough.  I'm thinking though what we really want is a long term, if not perpetual commitment to development of the currency.  That means giving a perpetual reasonable small % of the rewards to the developers.    The developers can then give bounties to pools, exchanges, etc.  I don't think you can just hard code 10 addresses though for the developers.  You would need to change those addresses over time to protect the private keys.  Maybe we can come up with some other mechanism for making this happen, but something needs to happen, otherwise we are just going to be left with a bunch of worthless abandoned coins.  That does not benefit the miners or anyone else.  If I'm mining a coin, I do not want the developer to view it as some kind of hobby that gives them no reward.  The developer is bound to move on.  I want the developer to be more interested than me the miner in seeing the coin succeed.  Otherwise miners are all going to be interested in is pump and dump, which is what we are seeing now. As a miner I want coins I can rally behind and stick with for the long term.

pre-mine .5 - 1% of the coins.  Tough luck if anyone whines.

Expecting people to donate to developers is not very smart thing to expect..

Just design the coin in the way that it gives enough benefit for users and yourself. If you design it in unfavorable way, there is pretty big chance your coin will "die". If you create a totally "fair" coin, you might not want to continue development, because of no benefit for you, and the coin dies. So what you have to do is to balance premine/tax/whatever strategy in a way that is favorable for everyone.

But they're not the only users, and while devs have to take their shit at the start, after a while, no one cares about a premine.

They dont make money from the coin, and just do it as a hobby

Except that most often, miners are the coins earliest (and most influential) users.

First you Develop a coin, get it to a market to give it a starting value. Then you begin to roll out services, and goods that can be bought with a currency that has measurable value determined by market forces. your judgmental tone begs you read the OP. Devs want profitability, i did not hold onto any coin before releasing it and since i get no donations, there is hardly any incentive to further develop. I have many ideas and most of them garner the interest but no traction since people want devs to do it for free. A total clone of LTC could do better than LTC if it has active devs who are well incentivised. The open community idea is great but does not pay bills. Getting a stipend for my work is not centralizing anything, it is simply getting paid for my work. 

If you did understand anything about development you'd know that any form of idea needs developing, testing , refinement then release. even when released it does not mean people will like it. Have you done any coding before? If so please highlight how easy it is to code something useful. We live in a time where governments either frown on cryptos or don't understand them at all. i spent a very long phone call explaining to some officials what cryptos are, how they work and how they benefit society. after they expressed confusion i sent them simplified explanatory emails. They have agreed to conference again but they asked me one question, since it is not fiat, how do i expect to deal with the regs of founding such an enterprise? in which tax domain does it fall? Have you ever read any countries banking laws? i have read through quite a few and none has even an idea of how to truly classify what we are doing here in proper context.

So to be honest, you have no idea what you are talking about until you try what the "kool-aid" drinkers and makers are doing. Don't be a hack that just talks, if you don't like altcoins, or just Noirbits, at least be an informed person, right now your honesty just seems like jaded opinion.

I think it sounds like a good thing. Miners bitch and moan about a dev actually getting paid for doing work, and devs have to take their shit. It's good that users don't do that.

That doesn't sound like a good thing (the idea that users don't care).

True.  Same as most every other coin out there.

It will however ultimately boil down to which coin adds more utility (i.e. services).  

Bitcoin clearly has superior services, however new devs should consider that Bitcoin has its own constraints that give new coins an opportunity to exploit.

Litecoin for example exploited the first problem,  the lack of decentralization of miners.

Other coins, will eventually exploit other flaws and have a chance to grow.

It is only the miners who care about 'pre-mine', 'insta-mine' B.S.   Actual users don't care.

In fact, the russian coins... NVC and CopperLark  have held on to high prices because they control the mining.

The miners really have  a different perspective.

But honestly, over time it will change.  It is just not sustainable an environment and there seems to be little reward for innovation.

Imagine if every startup had to sell all its shares to the public and the stakeholders had to buy it back.

Anyway, that's why I built ZenithCoin,  to test out the theory.

Is this a hypothetical, or a feature you omitted from mentioning in the description of your Noirbits currency?

From the description of the Noirbits currency:

Also, to be honest, what development work is there on Noirbits besides changing some Litecoin parameters? I feel like I'm the only one not drinking the clonecoin kool-aid around here.