Topic: [XMR] Monero - A secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency - page 1433. (Read 4671575 times)

Hey guys, sorry if my question has been answered somewhere on previous 700 pages

This mining tax (on block rewards I gather?) you were discussing, did you mean to hardcode some wallet address in bitmonerod?

 CPU + GPU mining (about 1:1 performance for now)

Is this still real? Do you suspect it will hold up? Sorry if thats hard to answer.

Well yeah the 4-5 of us are in agreement. Let's take over the world. 

Idk about you guys but here it's quite early in the morning. Give it time.

It seems we have consensus?

Certainly reasonable.


Open to ideas from any source. The MEW is planning to make its own direct donations but the amounts seem not likely to be sufficient (short term, if the group and coin both really catch on anything is possible). Of course as you say there may be other funding ideas or initiatives from that group.

Well I trust you to give it a try in a realistic time-frame. A crowd-funding takes one month top (well it takes more if it works well but in 2 weeks you usually get a very good idea of the potential gain).

And well the MEW might come up with better ideas and methods, and funds. I don't know.

That's certainly reasonable, though I doubt we will give each approach six months. That's not realistic and contrary to the whole idea that we need more funding to move faster.

Just keep the tax idea on the side and try most other form of financing before so you can say, at the end, that you're doing it because it's the only way.

In fact it works even without trying anything else before... Um. Believe me, I'm French. I know what I'm talking about.

Yeah yeah I know. Ultros, just shut up and go buy a T-shirt. I'll do that actually. I like the black one.

I wasn't talking about that necessarily. I have no problem with your proposed structure, my only concern is with the level of participation. If the crowd funding works well, with a consistently high level of participation, then the problem is solved. If it doesn't, then we're not likely to want to beg for every line item to try to drum up participation. So we will see. 

Also, there is still a need for general funds to cover infrastructure, pay unexpected expenses, pay for certain items that can't be disclosed until after the fact for various reasons, etc. Donations haven't really even been enough to cover that. Maybe T-shirt sales will do the trick. I'm doubtful.

But it's not begging. It's just filling a row for each task. It is an anticipated bill, if you prefer. Pretend you're a contractor and give an estimate for each task. Given the problem at hand, we're only looking for loose numbers.

I don't think once a week is unreasonable. You could update the table every Missive under the dev diary or as a "finance diary". It shouldn't take more than ten minutes. You don't handle the collection of the funds either since Anon136 offered to be the escrow.

But asking for funds is totally the way to get funds. In startups and FOSS alike, until the project gets a/some large enough backer/s.

Again, we don't want PowerPoints or grant proposals or anything like that. Just more transparency and accountability on the progress of the various branches of development that take place. And all this in the simplest, fastest and most minimalist data format that maintains easy readability. I believe you can raise enough now for a buffer and that monerists are going to read the Missives and vote on branches with their cash.

Totally agree, but at the same time, I'm not 100% behind an approach that has us begging for funding on a repetitive and ongoing basis. It is not something that any useful team of devs will be good at or find interesting enough to want to continue doing again and again. People with those skills and dispositions go and join real charities and stuff.
 

University funding?
Transaction %?
Crowd funding?
Tax?
Pan handle?
Feed the Devs benefit?

Of course not.


I thought fluffypony's post was pretty modular. Not all of the items though. But let's take these two:


Are those chunk sizes you think are reasonable for crowd funding, or do you want to crowd fund daily or weekly subtasks? Because I think that is pretty crazy.

@smooth, @ultros,

Also consider that any price appreciation means we can better support you in the future. We need to get you a good chunk NOW and get the ball started. We don't need to decide on milions in the future. At least not now.

But smooth, look how absurd this discussion has become. The platform we would like IS the spreadsheet and an escrow. We have the escrow. I gave you the column headers I desire and find reasonable. I told you how many rows I would like in the spreadsheet, as a rough order-of-magnitude measure. Heck, it doesn't have to be a spreadsheet, just a forum post with tabs is enough. Is it that much of an effort to populate the fields? I can throw in 10 XMR to help grease it up. Is the project really not more modular in tasks than fluffypony's post? Surely there are more dev branches than that!

As said, just try your best to give us a basic idea. Even vague and incomplete. Even for a start. That's always better than nothing. Most crowd-funding project end up needing much more money than expected anyway.

Also consider the possibility of a virtuous cycle. In any crowdfunded project, the more you work and improve openly your product, the more people believe in it and want to pay for your work. As of now a lot of non-tech savvy people see XMR as a clone without much dedicated work behind, but as soon as you release a GUI (for example) some dudes will start to think it is something unique. What I'm saying is we're probably in the most critical phase.

The crowdfunding "platform" is among the many pie-in-the-sky development ideas that don't get done very quickly because we are fighting fires with limited resources.

I'm open to the suggestion that it can be temporarily replaced with a google docs spreadsheet or something. Perhaps you would like to create one.


At this stage of development, that's basically what it is. In the embryonic stages, this is not an economy and we are not central bankers. It is just an open source project competing with 1000+ other such projects, with developers setting direction toward some goals in whom you are vesting a level of trust as a user and project supporter. If that trust includes funding -- by whatever method -- then more will get done. If it does't then, some will still get done, but much more slowly.

That logic doesn't work. You don't "develop" a product (i.e. the code), because if that was correct then I could just merge your changes into CryptoNoteX and derive the same benefit. That is clearly not the case as the distribution of coins is at least as important as the code (otherwise anyone could clone Bitcoin1-2-3-10 and they would be fungible with the original). You develop money, and an economy. Not a product, and not a service.

In this sense you are the central bankers (with limited powers).


This is not what I meant. My point is that the vote is not credible.

Suppose miners voted against, then they would damage your reputation and Monero. Thus, even if they might not agree to the screw-turn, the alternative is worse (i.e. why don't people rebel against inflation all the time? why do people just swallow injustices? because the alternative is often worse -- boiling frogs, slippery slopes, tragedies of the common and all that).

From this argument, a positive miners' vote would not indicate miners' approval, and the validity of the vote is under question.

Alternatively, suppose miners voted for and the motion passed smoothly (no pun intended). Then, even if this was indeed optimal, there would be suspicion of collusion between devs and miners, not unlike that between the corporations and the governments of the world. Monero's reputation, as well as the devs', would be damaged again.

From this argument, a negative miners' vote would not indicate miners' disapproval, and the validity of the vote is under question.

This is what I mean by misaligned incentives. No matter the outcome, it will not convince those who "lose" that their rationalization is incorrect and that Monero has not been corrupted by (a) greedy devs (b) greedy devs and miners colluding. From a reputation/credibility point of view, it's a lose-lose scenario unless transparency can counter both options (a) and (b) above.



We don't want grant proposals, we want transparency and accountability. We don't want to continue the "voluntarist" approach, in which you place a hat and start playing the instruments. We want to participate in a crowdfunding platform, which has been promised to us. We want to be able to back tasks and to observe how and what others back. But to do this, we simply need a list of SOME tasks in just marginally finer grain and more detail than what fluffypony already posted.

1. task id/name/description
2. estimated cost interval (XMR)
3. estimated time interval (weeks?)
4. estimated urgency
5. estimated impact

It probably takes you less than half an hour to compile this. But the non-developers among us need to understand more to throw our cash. Like aminorex said, again, "telling me to <> does not inspire confidence" (paraphrasing).

We just want your best first guess. Again, just marginally finer grain and more detail than what fluffypony already posted. And if it doesn't work and no other solution seems workable, then it's time for the manual override.

Desperate is not the word I would use right now, but I would say forward looking and candid. No one has threatened to quit yet. No urgent work that needed to get done to respond to attacks for example, didn't get done. We simply gave up a lot of sleep for it, and made it happen. Realistically, and I'm not even necessarily speaking for myself here, it is likely that willingness to do that will decline if it doesn't seem the project is really going anywhere. You only get so much of a honeymoon period.

And I said we aren't necessarily opposed to continuing the volunteer approach, but with that -- if we are going to be realistic about things -- it is likely progress will continue to be slow (and get slower if, as I expect, enthusiasm for volunteering on a slow-moving underfunded project wanes). Speaking 100% as my personal opinion here, that seems like a bad idea in a fast moving competitive environment.

Even i used the word tax in sense of automatic deduction in an earlier post. If someone wants to find it and link to it they can use it to crucify me.