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One thing I realized today, after talking with someone close to Parker in the lab today, is that a lot of Bitcoin activity in Austin seems to be supported by nonprofit structures or funding. Just an observation.
It reminds me how rare it is to try to build a Bitcoin business the long, difficult way. Me, @k00b, and a few others at @PlebLab are still committed to that path.
I'm not sure it's the right solution, but I've heard it suggested that folks build a redhat-like bitcoin implementation. It adds incentive diversity in addition to implementation diversity.
To be clear, I'm not against nonprofits generically, but with all the qualified ideological folks getting grants, who is left to build for-profit bitcoin-involved ventures? Shitcoiners and masochists afaict.
Why do you think a bounty system never really materialized? Bitcoin is internet money, it seems like such an obvious way to do things. But all the bounty systems I remember never got much attention.
Bounties work best when the work is well scoped and easy to verify. A lot of work, like code review, isn't well scoped nor easy to verify. Also The Nature of the Firm.
I didn't spend more than a day cooking SN's repo bounty system, but I spent long enough to conclude it's at least very non-trivial to create a system that produces results comparable to a tenured team.
the non profits may be dumb but bitcoin holders aren't dumb.
eapecially with consensus, if nonprofits steer bitcoin in a direction that fails to maximize value, forks ensue and the shitfork dies a shameful deah to become a pitiful altcoin.
under the hood it's pure economic darwinism, no matter how the developers are paid.
I'm glad Atack is getting out there more. The circumstances are a bummer.
If we are committed to devs being funded by nonprofits, which it seems like no one is yet willing to question, we need to figure out how to fight the tradeoffs that nonprofits introduce.
For example: I suspect BIP 110 has gained more steam than it deserves because Luke, even if his aim is wrong, is running a business and his incentives are obvious and relatable to everyone. Luke ultimately butters his bread by doing things many people want.[1] What are the incentives of folks surviving off of grants? By all appearances, and best case, they butter their bread by doing things some tiny federation wants. With near-zero respectable bitcoin companies entering the ring to fight Luke that aren't themselves in some way tied up in a nonprofit, it looks like the aristocrats against the people. The optics are terrible even if the reality is not (and the reality might be terrible too idk).
Bitcoin protocol developers deserve to get paid for what they do and the market would fail to pay them without nonprofits, but: money is dumb by itself, dumb money is poisonous, and there's a lot of money flowing through bitcoin nonprofits lately. If we add that nonprofits, absent saints managing them, tend toward politicization, corruption, and status games - and that nonprofits are generally weapons of influence - we might be curing one disease with a variety of poison.
Most people respond to this with well achtually he has VC money. I wish it were easy to communicate how this differs from a grant (or how it differs from having a job or how a grant even differs from having a job). The best I can do: (1) running a business is one of the hardest possible things for people to do (if you disagree with that, why aren't you doing it?). (2) If Luke fails to do what many people want, he's taken years off his life only to pay an enormous opportunity cost, and he will have failed to reciprocate the generosity of customers/VCs and stand in a kind of social/moral debt for the rest of his life. ↩