Bitcoin Forum

* I think Bitcoin should fund its-self and be self-sustaining.

I am proposing that some guaranteed percentage from total supply of Bitcoin be set aside for Developers to fund important Bitcoin stuff.
Such fund will also be used to hire independent Auditors whose job will be to Audit the Fund's usage to ensure they are used judiciously.

Six specific things Bitcoin Developers would need the funds for.

1. Bitcoin related researches - which includes new Hardware & Software Researches.

2. Project Development

3. Marketing Campaigns, Bitcoin News Media,  & general information dissemination.

4. Payment for Product acquisitions.

5. Funding for Increased Decentralization, overall Network Safety and Security.

6. Salaries & Wages.

Let the community do the job. There is plenty contributor that contribute to bitcoin ecosystem instead hiring them we can(should) donate them. Doing all the thing you said above is only make bitcoin centralized like bitcoin shit fork Bitcoin Cash.

Who decides all the allocations etc?  Who controls it?  Who, exactly, are "the bitcoin developers"?  What products would have to be acquired?

If you want to fork bitcoin to do something like this, you are certainly welcome to do so, but it won’t be bitcoin.  Bitcoin is self sustaining just like SMTP, TCP/Tp and HTTP are.

Bitcoin is already self-sustaining. In my opinion setting aside a certain amount of Bitcoin's total supply for developers would only be detrimental to Bitcoin's integrity. Most alts that do this are not even worth their premine. There's a huge financial incentive to either break Bitcoin or keep it from being broken, so I daresay it's one of the most heavily audited projects there is, all by itself. There is beauty in Bitcoin's organic way of growth, don't destroy it by trying to shoehorn a centralized entity into it.



Software research is taking place as is. Hardware research would be a waste of time, given that the market is already taking care of that.



Project management is taken care of by the devs. Project development... what sort of projects?



Waste of time, the market is already taking care of that.



What sort of products?



Increased decentralization can only be taken care of by ensuring the protocol remains in a state that enables sustainable decentralization.



As far as I remember, mostly taken care of by the Bitcoin foundation.

As far as I remember, mostly taken care of by the Bitcoin foundation.

[/quote]No, they have like $1000USD to their name these days...

Your proposal is good and worthy to be noted or even implemented but the concern here is that who are those to be responsible for such implementation. The way it is, decisions like that needs to be generally accepted by the community which is something difficult to guarantee at this time. I guess that is one of the many disadvantages of decentralization

No, they have like $1000USD to their name these days...
[/quote]

Yes, we had that and it failed. Let's rather not go back to a time where a secretary got a huge salary and the organization had no real say in Bitcoin matters. Any central authority can be corrupted or bribed or influenced by external powers, like governments and people with big pockets.

Bitcoin has been growing without any guidance or governing from a central authority and I think it should stay like that.

It will be bitcoin if anyone call it bitcoin.
Any other forks including the original one won't be bitcoin in no one call them bitcoin on public.

That is only if just about everyone (not 'anyone') bought in and called this new fork bitcoin. 

A centralizing plan like this would have extreme difficulty getting to that point.  In fact, I'd say it would be nearly impossible to get 90% let alone 50% or even 10%.  The way to find out though is to fork bitcoin and fork the block chain using the terms of this proposal and see how many people, nodes, users, businesses and miners adopt it.  If it is a great idea, then I might be wrong.

Oh, so that's what happened. I only remember there being drama surrounding the foundation, but I guess I've been out of the loop for longer than I thought. Even more reason to give kudos to the devs then for keeping up the good work.

What's the main source of development funds currently? Donations to the dev team? Donations to each individual dev? Or are they mostly working part-time now?

Bitcoin funding has always been problematic (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/who-funds-bitcoin-core-development-how-the-industry-supports-bitcoin-s-reference-client-1459967859/). In my opinion, it should be miners who fund development. Miners currently walk away with $20 million per day, that's an amazing amount of money, and they mainly spend it on hashing hardware, electricity, and whatever they buy from their profit.
To make things worse, this $20 million per day paycheck gives miners completely different interests than common Bitcoin users.

Meanwhile, premined shitcoins like ethereum, dash and ripple have billions of dollars for development. This gives them a technological advantage over Bitcoin, while they only used Bitcoin (and Bitcointalk.org) to strengthen their own position.

(Satoshi Nakamoto could easily fund Bitcoin development, but he disappeared 7 years ago)

In some respects I agree, but with bitcoin as the protocol layer and with some of the improvements allowed by segwit (like script versioning) individual people and companies can build applications on top of the protocol layer.  Kind of like you can build on top of tcp/ip which allowed http, https, smtp etc.  And then those allowed innumerable applications.  Those lower level protocol layers rarely need upgrades and in many respects that is how bitcoin should be - if you have the flexibility in the scripting language, things are built on top of the protocol that is secured by the miners.  The bitcoin block chain then gets a lot of use with the applications built atop it.

I respect what you both said and you guys are among the people I usually learn from their post. But in this kind of situation there will be no solution if we keep on saying some sector have to fund the development while we all once make some gain through the bitcoin network.  I suggest you, I and every one else should fund the bitcoin development before we run out of time.

In theory they can, but it all takes forever. Blocks are full for years now, fees only get higher, and the ones who benefit from that don't spend a dime on development.

Even if a company would build something on top of Bitcoin, they can only earn very low fees. Why spend all your own funds on developing something for little revenue, if you can get a much higher ROI by just buying some mining hardware?
I can semi proof my point by the fact that nothing has been build on top of Bitcoin yet.

Feel free to send donations to parties you believe can build something useful, but I'm not doing that. The ones investing should also be the ones to reap the benefits, and that's not me if I just donate money.