Hey AbelsFire, these are good questions, ones I'd like to discuss. I think that the fundamental concept we are working with is that individuals (who have invested some money and time) and corporations (who have often invested MAJOR money and time) and the core development team should work together, share the load and financial burden better while aiming at protecting and promoting and standardizing Bitcoin. The bylaws, to be published soon on Github, talk a little bit about how we're aiming to do this. I have anticipated that member classes who are unhappy with their representation would advocate for different representation.

Thanks! I'm super psyched about it, actually. Gavin and I were discussing how awesome actual cryptographically secured payment controls would be for business owners and bookkeepers, there's also a whole set of businesses that I can imagine which need to be built out -- like payroll companies for Bitcoin, payables companies for Bitcoin.. It's really exciting to think about, and it's one reason we decided to repeg the bitcoin-USD rate only every so often, we're trying to go totally Bitcoin.

We are trying to go bank-account-less and do all incoming and outgoing payments with BTC, including payroll. Dogfooding Bitcoin as currency-of-a-corporation is one of my favorite things about the Foundation, actually.

Hi all,

Thanks for the vigorous discussion and debate! I'm enjoying reading most of it.  :-) If you check my logs, you'll see I don't spend a ton of time on the forums, but I wanted to say a quick 'hello' and throw out a few thoughts / next steps.

• Confirmation of Payments: We need this, bad. Confirmations are easy to do, but we were so sick of waiting to launch we figured we'd do it after launch. Sorry! I would anticipate tomorrow we'll get notifications out.
• Speaking of which, WOW! We've had people from over 25 countries sign up already! Thanks!! It's super exciting to see.
• The general response has been overwhelmingly positive, and I appreciate that. We're all throwing in time and money to see this go forward, and I think it will be a great thing for Bitcoin. That said, I know some of you are worried. Tomorrow I'll do a reddit AMA, (well AMAA) and I'll look forward to discussing questions, comments and concerns in a slightly easier-to-manage q&a format. So, look for the link.
• I'm looking forward to digging in with thoughts on theymos' opinions -- some I disagree with, but all seem worth talking over
• Graeme's worries about miners -- I HEART miners, and I have some thoughts about where they/we fit. I'll look forward to discussing that as well.
• Bylaws -- Patrick is doing something super cool and publishing the bylaws on github. (tonight maybe?) The next board meeting is mid-October, and I would LOVE to look over pull requests on the bylaws at that meeting. Our intention is that members pester their board seats with thoughts, improvements, ideas, etc. to help steer the organization.

Finally, I can confirm that Satoshi is a Founding Member. That is all.

Hey iCEBREAKER, thanks for these thoughts. I'm sold; we'll work with our team to launch a 100% PPS pool as well. It's possible we're just thinking farther ahead than most, but I would be stunned to find that $/GH don't drop by a factor of up to 10x in the next year, so I think we're offering real value to miners right now with this offer.

That said, it's complicated, I grant. I love simple. We'll work on it.

I'm not clear how we can just assess the blockchain to determine imputed fee structures as things stand, which I think is where Gavin was headed.

I suppose we could count up blocks that have only transactions < x btc fee, or x btc fee / kilobyte, and bucket them. That would give a sort of cumulative distribution function for how quickly you're likely to get a transaction out.

As things stand, BTC issuance matters most to miners, but I think we'll see fees go up when BTC issuance drops to 25 BTC. If I ran a mining pool, I would be considering posting speed 'guarantees', deterministic 'waiting times' for trannsactions... That is, 0tx fees will be processed on the bulk timeline -- daily. 1 BTC / kilobyte would get put through right away.

One comment here about miners and marginal value -- actually, transactions do cost mining pool operators a bit; they create new getwork responses, and those have to get pushed down to clients, and this adds latency, network and compute cost to the cluster. Mining pool customers talk a lot about stales, these are real costs to the network. A mining pool operator is probably currently incented to ignore nearly all transactions, honestly. I would guess that large pool operators are still largely motivated by maintaining the integrity of the blockchain, (although you might not think so if you read the complaints their customers have, yeesh!)

I've been thinking about mining pools, the future for miners as Bitcoin block rewards drop, and transaction fees.

My hypothesis is that fees are currently quite low, supported by the 50 BTC reward for successfully finding a valid block.

I wonder if it would be useful for miners to publish their transaction rules somewhere? This could happen in the blockchain if we were to keep the messaging very short, or coinlab would be happy to host an API that let miners publish what sort of fees they require.

Thoughts welcome.

 

Gavin,

Thanks for this work.

Is the intent with BIP 16 to maintain the irrevocability of sending, that is, to ensure that once 'sent' coins will always leave an address, whether or not the script hash is ever proffered?

I agree that's a problem if there was a fixed exchange rate, (although, see China). I was more imagining a one-time move-over to a situation in which there is no more fijibucks after the "E-Day" (for exchange day).

I'm not clear in that case that there would be exchange pressure. I bet someone who knows what hard currency issues are like in Zimbabwe right now would be able to tell us a bit about this.

Tawsix,

The only real ways to reward your shareholders are with dividends, and by increasing both the value of the corporation and the market value of the company.

In this case, they would go together nicely; dividends would increase the market value.

What are your plans for dividending? I would recommend a schedule; this will create some market gyrations around dividend time, but it will also provide the kind of information current shareholders, the ones who funded the business, eagerly desire.

As a pre-emptive response inre: generating more capital, I think you'll generate far more capital by engaging politely and following through on my suggestions than just holding the generated BTC.

What Nefario said is right on.

Tawsix, I mentioned these dynamics early on; the "IPO" floated out about 2000 shares. That's pretty frickin' awesome, actually, so congrats. There wasn't sufficient market demand for all your shares at the IPO price. In the 'real' world, this problem is solved basically by testing the market with knowledgeable insiders who make some calls and commitments, and agree to float shares at an opening price. They buy the shares directly and privately from the corp, then sell what they want on the markets opening day.

Sometimes IPOs fail, that is, there's not uptake of all the shares, or the price drops precipitously in the first few days of trading. In that case, the corporation has had its bite for a little while -- the market has spoken, and it doesn't want all the shares. The corporation needs to make some progress before the market will be interested in dumping more capital into the corporation.

This is the situation you're in.

I urge you to cancel the rest of the 3500 shares on offer. Nobody will buy them until you demonstrate both that you are willing and able to dividend to shareholders from the mining earnings, and that you are continuing to bring more miners onboard. At the least you will be able to provide your existing shareholders with the chance to make a market for your shares; as it is, the massive 3500 on offer hangs over your order book, and it's alienating the people who currently are invested in you (like me!)

If you want to recapitalize the corporation later, you're going to need to work with existing shareholders and find a price everyone is happy about.

On the upside, you have some really simple methods to make people happy:

a) dividend
b) cancel share offering
c) update daily with timeline for new miners
d) bring them online
e) possibly set a dividend schedule so that people know when they should buy/sell.

This is dead simple given where you're at, and will make people much happier.

The BTC are rolling in, well, not really, but they are coming in about as expected. Tawsix, what are your dividend plans?

Ok, now we need a small island willing to try out BTC as a seconday ad-hoc currency to test your assumption. Anyone?

I sent you email, but I think I had a weird clearing / crossing problem. I'm not sure if it resolved. Logs in my email. Thanks for the work!

I voted no for a couple of reasons (I voted yes the first vote).

In very brief, I have two thoughts.

The first is that you need to let the market settle the price out and get a secondary-offering plan sorted with Nefario. Right now, increasing the BTC price per share artificially just lets shareholders come in below you; no extra capital for the business.

The second is that you haven't made enough progress to double the value of the company yet. You're close, it sounds like, so that's good. Sometimes good investor relations can cover for execution gaps. You haven't (if I may be so bold) managed q and a with investors (or possibly just naysayers) here very well, but you're well spoken and made a good initial presentation, so I'd give you a 50-50 right now on the investor relations / execution side of things.

To me, this doesn't add up right this second to a major block of shares pricing higher. It seems a bit premature.

 I think you should probably pull all the extra shares for a week or so and watch where the market settles as you provide proof (BTC generated, pictures of the rigs), then work out an offering plan on the boards and with Nefario to expand using a second-tranche capital raise.

Right now what you're doing is providing a sort of artificial price ceiling by capping the share value; I'm not sure there's any real benefit to anyone in doing that.

My 2 millibits!

Yes, the important point to note here is that using a deflationary but infinitely (well highly) divisible currency throughout an economy, including for production of basic goods might be interesting. It would likely fluctuate vis-a-vis USD some due to trade imbalances, and more due to currency speculators, but could well be useful and stable in a community as is.

As I read through the responses, I think that it raises some interesting questions; using mobile phones, and scratch-and-reveal type cards is likely necessary in a scenario like this, unless the government issues BTC-notes.

Actually, the whole thing would be quite easy if the government kept a BTC wallet and didn't allow fractional reserve banking; you could verify the money supply easily, 1 bill = 1 BTC. The issue then has to do with divisibility though.

We are facing this issue in the Bitcoin community in general right now; decimals are hard to think in. Nefario's 1 satoshi = the actual unit is not a great solution either right now, it's also hard to think in 8 zeros. This is a psychological issue, and one that doesn't seem to be well thought out or solved right now. It would be a factor in this thought experiment as well.

Out of curiosity, what is dox?

I vote for some patience, although I too would love an update.

Interesting conversation with a friend last night; over beers we discussed the possibility of a small country, maybe one that currently pegs to the USD, pegging to BTC for their currency.

I'm curious as to people's reactions to this. How would we do such a thing?

My friend suggested the block chain could, for a period of time, allow extra BTC to be generated in exchange for destruction of the existing national currency; separate to his above suggestion, but also intriguing. That is, imagine you're a resident of fijilandia. You'd put in your 50 Fijibucks somewhere, they'd get destroyed, and the next block would include 50 fijibucks worth of BTC for you.

Anyway, fascinating to me. I think it would jumpstart an economy, especially one that produced and exported goods to be based on BTC. I'm trying to figure out how this could be done in a small scale to test viability; maybe some permaculture farmers want to try selling just for BTC?

They'd need to provide BTC purchase access to many of their customers of course; anyway two intriguing ideas.

Any updates?

Now we're on the same page. : )

I await comments from the businessman himself here in this thread.