Thank you for your confidence (and to the others as well). As one of the representatives of the Individual Membership Class, I take my board responsibilities very seriously. When Zimmermann resigned from Network Associates because they were trying to backdoor PGP, I took him in at Hushmail as Chief Cryptographer which is when OpenPGP was launched (2000-2002).
Regarding your 3rd concern above, how do you respond to the points that I make in this reply to theymos
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1227798 ?
I recognize the potential financial dependency issue, but how does your proposal mitigate clandestine, non-transparent compensation from malicious actors and how does it address succession planning for lead developers?
Jon I think anyone who has been following you over the past couple of years (as I do on Twitter & Forbes) is likely to agree that you are a principled individual, not only very knowledgeable about socioeconomic topics, but also well-aligned ideologically with the original spirit of Bitcoin.
You make valid points in your other post, and I agree that the Foundation could do a lot of good as a sanity check, sounding board, buffering mechanism, and supervisory entity versus the development team. And undoubtedly, in the long term, an enlightened oligarchy is less risky than a hereditary Gavinistic monarchy. My main fear in going from a known state where the developers control the priorities (currently) to an unknown state where possibly the Foundation dominates, is related to the first bullet point: essentially, I don't think that the announced board composition fairly represents my own perception wrt. Bitcoin's ideological and cultural makeup. I think it needs one extra seat assigned to someone who loves Bitcoin purely for ideology, has lived outside the USA, and has a track record of defending freedom and privacy under political pressure. Hence the two names I proposed.
Thus, the third bullet, trying to get the development schedule crowdfunded, was simply an attempt at a safety valve in case the Foundation gets dissolved or goes astray, a possibility that seems nonzero given my misgivings regarding the board composition. I can follow your thesis that a Foundation structure should be more stable and less risky than unsupervised developer control, but that thesis has, as an assumption, a Foundation board which is trustworthy. At this point, the devil I know (the current dev team) has a very good multiyear track record of self-governance and respect for Bitcoin's privacy features; whereas wrt. the Foundation, yourself and Gavin (a minority) are the only people that I would trust to shepherd Bitcoin not just as a public transactional medium, but also, just as importantly, as a
private store of value and
private means of payment.
So basically my position is that I'd accept (or at least be willing to try out) the governance premises in your post, and support the Foundation more unequivocally, if the board composition was adjusted to guarantee a stronger ideological commitment to monetary freedom and privacy.
Jon sent me by here and asked for my comments.
I don't know if I fit your ideological requirements personally, but my first reaction is that I think you'll get what you want -- the individual member seats seem pretty well situated for trustworthy (from your perspective) representation right now, with Gavin and Jon. In other words from your own description, we have your two favorite people representing you at the Foundation. That said, I anticipate that members might want someone different in those seats at some point; it's why we settled on a term limit and elections.
I think if there's agreement that Corporations should also participate in this opt-in process of protecting, promoting and standardizing Bitcoin (and I understand that many here do not believe that should be the case) then they should also have some say in choosing who they wish to represent them.
Anyway, I drill down what you're saying to be that individuals as a membership class should have more influence than Corporations over the Foundation. I'm not sure I agree with that, partly because of the time and capital investment these businesses make as compared to most of the individual members, and partly because I can't think of strong arguments for it that couldn't be turned around to argue for more corporate influence instead, and partly because I think it's less important to tweak any initial representation than it is to just forge ahead and try and get something done with the members we've got, and let the community at large decide if they want to join, denigrate or hamper us.
Anyway, if our members come forward and say that the board structure is broken, I'm sure we'll want to discuss that. I don't think we've given it nearly enough time though, it's been two days! What I've learned so far is the initial board members are passionate, generally kind rational debaters who are willing to put in yeoman's effort talking about this. A good indication for the future, but not as great as getting our list of To-Do's done. :-)
