Please, can someone post that picture of the huge lump of gold again?

Thank you Doctor

How did it work with HTTP dev? I'm not familiar. (Actually, was how that was developed even relevant to us?)

1) I'm not saying that salaried devs will be hard to find that will utilize political and managerial duties, it's just that I feel that many of the current devs we have prefer to stay out of politics if they can avoid it. in my "additional thoughts" quote one post above, I said that if a manager would actually turn out to be useful, I would hope they would offer their managerial talents to the devs and they can figure it out from there. Sort of like how a band and band manager works, they know best what is fair within a team. This would work under the current bounty system, especially when it is presented that there is a huge prize available.

2) I think that is up for the person who has to make the choice of deciding between longer-term commitment and the possible awesome rewards at this end of the rainbow. You posit we scare away developers because we don't offer salaries. How do we even justify giving a newcomer a salary if they have had nothing to show for it before? Again, for the third fourth time, unearned windfall. It's a risk that is made irrelevant when we have bounties for clear-cut criteria, which is true for developing the spec implementation.


This is  an excerpt from one private email, as a response to JR when he asked the devs what it would take to have them on as full hires:

It echoes what I have been thinking with even more specificity. Salaries add unnecessary complexity and questions to be answered that you do not have with bounties.

There has been and will be cooperation. Why do we need to pay individuals salaries and hope they "cooperate" as if they weren't already? If there's already the incentive to work together, distribute strengths as necessary, and efficiently organize roles in order to solve the problem at hand and secure the prize? The detriment of the salary is that when you have an official salaried "development team," it presents the idea that we already have the developers we need and we just need to wait and let them do work now that they are paid a salary. This is not conducive towards attracting new and possibly better talent!


 
additional thoughts:

quote from board emails:

quotes from earlier:

No...embarrassingly enough I am not on that list. I just requested Aric to add me, hopefully I can see the previous messages.

My apologies zathras, thank you for your valuable input, you have no idea know how much it is needed with these conversations! I guess I didn't consider that others did not see Bitcoin as a savings account like I do (I pull money from my coins as necessary for expenses and spending and don't worry about the price. Doing this has served me very well, and I do recommend it, though of course, I'm not a professional financial advisor. I believe this will be the majority tendency in the future).

 To you, as a veteran of the process thus far, does upping the bounty size work better or worse than having a preconfirmed salary in terms of motivation and results? Not only to the person with the salary but to those without as well, the whole system.

What would you like to see

Different topic.

For those interested, reminding everyone that there is an ongoing 100 BTC bounty for testing the code our developers have been hammering away at and making sure they work well. This is the best way any person can help the developers and the Mastercoin project as a whole.

I do not think that the size of the bounties were disproportionate to the work they did.  They definitely earned it and this sort of consequence only serves to increase developer incentive.

"I would only point out that whether you're right or not doesn't in-itself mean that salaries are either good or bad."
I can agree. I want what is best for Mastercoin as well guys. I just think bounties are more effective than salaries in the case of core dev with clear criteria.

Yeah, I think it's a pretty appealing case for the devs right now to spend their time on Mastercoin, salary or not.

Again, if I was a contestant, if after I had already earned 500 MSC and whatever the BTCs that first $30000 contest is worth now, if I was faced with the decision to leave my job or dedicate more of my time towards earning more of these high value coins that have already shown to have value, (options/equity in the startup basically), I'd probably leave after getting a taste of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. To each their own, that's the point. If I could earn 50-100 BTC in a few weeks-months of working on code that I am confident I could get done, I definitely would!  Especially after earning serious wealth. If you were already awarded BTCBTCBTC and made more in a month's creativity than your job paid in a year+, and had the chance to do that again, you have a choice to make.

Yes, cryptocurrency has convicted me strongly of competition. Competition creates some crazy crazy innovations and brings the best people together. Already confirmed rewards (salaries) kind of go against that. Did the DARPA Grand Challenge reward anyone before the contest? Once the contestants have proven themselves, they receive the bounty which enables them to spend more TIME on such projects. The best way to encourage further dev is by providing further incentive for development of objectives with very clear criteria, ie bounties.




requoting for the second time for further emphasis:

During my one comp sci class, I think I learned that the majority of work (at least cost of time wise) involved testing. I'd like to encourage this somehow to have more help on the testing front. Bug bounties a la google et al to preserve a rigorous spec.

Posting from my phone, real quickly all, I'd like to point out the current devs have already earned a substantial amount of money...likely enough to live off for at least a few months/years/decades... They do not need the extra advantage, and it is up to them how much time they wish to allocate between the rest of their lives and Mastercoin considering the future reward. I do not support an ongoing salary for them until some sort of objectives are laid out for such a salary that cannot be better accomplished via bounties.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Edit: board members include
Antony Vo (me)
JR
Ron Gross
David Johnston
Brock Pierce
Sam Yilmaz
Jonathan Yantis

Is there anything I can help with in the meantime while Bitcoin-QT is syncing?

I pose this conundrum to you David: Considering that even if we thought Candidate A deserved x% of the amount of new MSCs released in l time period, the award process involved (waiting for a contest to end, judging, etc) will not lead to a linear or any sort of regular distribution rate.

Have any of your companies ever had a constant new stream of shares to give out, or did you know how exactly many you have and how many you would be willing to give out?

I really don't know. I'm split on this issue, honestly, as you can tell from my posts. I have favored full-time employees before because I know the talent is excellent and I know they will get the job done, but at the same time, I now realize this subtle difference in mechanism of motivation could mean a lot down the road, on a systems level. It also forces those developers to become an authority and would probably burden them with managerial responsibilities than they normally have to. I know at least one developer that does not want to deal with that kind of stuff. I asked for their input in the Dev Thread to come in here in order to voice their side, but I like to think these guys simply wish to stay out of the politics and just do what they do best by solving problems when presented clear cut objectives with a very clear cut reward. But I don't know, I wish they spoke more on this topic.



I do not. The quieter board members like Brock Pierce and Jonathan Yantis I do believe so. I will let the others who have accounts here speak for themselves. Anyway, looking into it some more, I found this interesting article that involves both Brock and Jonathan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGE

Ron did have a proposal that for those who seek security, they can be paid a salary and either they'd be entirely unincluded from bounties or their salary amount would be deducted before the award (which makes more sense)

At the same time, these are my reservations:

1. It is favoritism. Every should have the same chance at the same prizes, disregard any previous history or expertise.
2. This favoritism places later contestants at a greater disadvantage than they already are. Aside from having to play catch up already, they now have to compete against those that don't have to work their day jobs through Mastercoin salaries, for a smaller portion of the pot that has already had slices allocated away for such salaries.
3. What do you think is more effective? Paying someone(s) a salary so they may forget their other financial obligations and focus full time, or placing a large enough bounty with good enough directions so that anyone can begin developing as they see fit, work together as they see fit, and quitting their jobs as they see fit? I lean towards the latter.



Ideally, I would like to see:
1. Open contestation for bounties, to put contestants on a level field. Regarding how to design them, honestly I would like to see JR more visible on this front as the first contest was designed and handled very well imho by him (his decision of course, because Mastercoin is his baby and of course he'll do what he has to to make Mastercoin succeed. We all will). Though bounties should be more of a volunteer's job ie the board's, we may see fit to contract bounty creation and management out to the community. Taariq Lewis, our top candidate for heading development of the smart property milestone, I could see as a top competitor for bounty creation if he can design the best incentives and directions to guide such development (right now there is some discussion on how to best utilize Taariq's talents, still ongoing with the board. Personally I think objective-based bounties are best suited for this). Obviously anyone can contribute proposals, collude, and/or critique each other. If the proposed bounty, open to the community, is approved, a bounty would be paid out to the creator(s). A further or "second half" bounty could be made for bounty designers or anyone to make sure the bounty is managed and executed well. Bounties and bounties for bounties would be developed during the time the developers are working on the as of current milestone, so that upon completion, we already have the next bounties ready to go.

2. Use nice fixed BTC/MSC prizes for the major milestones, the market can decide what that is worth monetarily, and the contestants can decide whether or not it is worth it to them as well.
a. The fixed BTC/MSC prizes will tend to increase in value. High value will increase profitability for those that spend their skills and efforts on development, and the incentive for efficient work will increase.
b. I think this is where we'll see self-organizing coalitions as it almost always more competitive to team up than it is to be a lone wolf going against teams. Encourage strategization by increasing the stakes at hand.

3. More open discussion and exchange of ideas! Keep this going gentlemen, it is refreshing to have each other to bounce ideas off of.

Well, that's what happens when you create profit incentives. Efficient allocation of resources tends towards efforts that yield the highest return.

My reservation is that with bounties, we never know how long it will take to finish. How do you decide for what length of time someone deserves x percentage of the newly released MSC??

 I voted no for that reason, but I reserve in some use cases that it could be more useful to pay out a percentage of the newly released MSCs in l time, but still, it's incredibly difficult deciding what that percentage is even worth, especially before the fact. I voted no because we can exercise more financial latitude over what is spent and for how much. From a distributed voting perspective, an actual amount for l time vs x% of the new coins between l time is easier to evaluate, IMHO.

As soon as my damned laptop will sync the blockchain 100% I will join in on testing!! Wish I could help more on this front in the mean time guys.  Also, can our devs please check the last few posts on the main thread, around the same time as this time stamp? I'd like you to weigh in your thoughts about things very relevant to you.

For open-ended ongoing tasks like this, I believe what David proposed could be effective, to have x percentage of the new coins released in some length of time. To keep on receiving the flow of funds one must do a satisfactory enough job to the community to justify keeping someone on. Open communication in this case will be vital.
Edit2: I have rethought my position. See my post in the poll, I do not believe this is a good way of evaluating worth of work without clear objectives, and even harder to evaluate the worth of x PERCENTAGE of MSC in l time interval.

Edit: at the same time, do we need a project manager? I'd like to ask the current developers their thoughts. Do self-organizing teams need/benefit from a top-down type of manager to get clear-cut objectives completed? I like to think that we just need the element of competition for truly grand prizes  to speed things up fastest.  If a manager indeed would help development, I would imagine a good manager would offer up their talents to a dev talent pool and put together a team. Bounties split as they're earned and as the team likes.

Again, thoughts?