Authors should be a kind of developer, they develop free open source writings.

So, like other developers, whether they are developing free open source hardware or free open source software or whatever else, they should be getting similar pay, one would imagine.

Pay for developers of free open source software is one share per month for ten hours per week of work, or, if they are specifically working on tasks directly wanted by the devcoin project, they can get away with ten hours per month.

So for example it might be reasonable to say that a devtome developer who spends ten hours per month making categoriy pages listing all the other pages that fall into each category could get one share per month for that. Developers (aka authors) who develop random pages of whatever they happen to want to write about should be able to get one share a month if they are spending forty hours a month (ten hours a week) authoring such pages. That would put authors of wiki pages/articles on the same payscale as authors of blockchain-based currency clients, authors of Open Transactions and so on and so on.

Normally the idea is to find the people who already do those things naturally for free just because those are things they are going to do anyway. So for example if it was discovered that there existed a contributor to devtome who puts in forty hours a month developing a history of the world on devtome, and having a history of the world on devtome seemed like a great idea, so that a person who all on their own without any pay or reward was putting that much work into doing it was an admirable kind of person spending their time freely developing such a useful thing, then that person might be nominated to go onto the devcoin recipients list, so that they receive a share of devcoins every month as long as they continue putting in that much work on projects that awesome.

That is for example why FellowTraveller, developer of Open Transactions, receives a share of devcoins every month. He works like crazy on Open Transactions, probably more than forty hours a month, it is crazy-useful awesome software, so he was placed in the list of people who receive a share of devcoins.

So it seems reasonable the same should apply to the wiki: if it turns out that some contributors to the wiki spend lots of hours month after month working on awesome stuff for the wiki, they too, like FellowTraveller, maybe deserve to receive a share of devcoins each month that they continue to do so...

-MarkM-

Starting from about page seventeen or so the thread about writing for devtome has started to get into shares ideas/concerns that affect more than just devtome; should probably have been posted in this thread instead of that one maybe in fact...

-MarkM-

Not quite.

Typically, in the past, a really important thing the project needed would be awarded a twelve share bounty.

Arguably, devtome might be a really important thing the project needs, so maybe a twelve share bounty would be justified to have a devtome exist.

Going out on a limb, we could even imagine devtome is so insanely important that each and every month it deserves a bounty, provided it does, uh, something. Brings in so many new authors and/or so many words of new writing, maybe? Something.

Then just like other projects like pools or clients or whatever that are awarded bounties, the project leader of the team that wins the bounty is expected to divvy up the bounty coins among the team, the theory being the person the team chose as leader knows better than generic devcoin-admins how much each member of the team contributed to the project.

So it'd be like maybe the free open source spaceship project gets a twelve share bounty to develop whatever the next step of the spaceship is and the devtome project gets a twelve share bounty to do whatever is needed next for devtome and so on for whatever projects there are that are so important they warrant such a huge bounty.

However, your suggestion actually sounds a lot like the projects that have not been announced yet, the ones that would need appropriate domains, which we didn't want domain squatters to go out and get and try to hold to ransom, so partly we have been waiting until we have secured all the important domain names before talking about those projects.

Apparently it is not just the domain names that are a problem but also the amount we can afford to pay people to work on them. We are paying so much to authors who just piss away the coins lowering their value that offering even a huge - twelve whole shares - bounty for development of any one of the planned projects would be such a pathetic, laughable bounty that we could not reasonably expect anyone to do them for so little pay.

Paying authors even more than that just for any more-than-12 kilowords just adds insult to injury, not only offering people pathetic pay to do a huge project launch but also paying way the heck more than that to "authors" for the short stories they wrote in gradeschool or whatever the heck else they feel like posting.

Open Transactions is considered important - and thus gets paid something like maybe four or more shares every round - partly because it is to be used for these planned projects.

Blockchain based currencies are insecure, it is hard just getting enough miners mining devcoin, making more blockchains is crazy, thus, the plan is that all the other projects, the entire fields that devcoin wants to support, can get their however many shares of devcoin paid into their project's Open Transactions server, from which the project can share out the coins among the people working on that project without all the vulnerability and cost-to-pay-miners and so on that would be involved if we tried to launch a new blockchain based currency for each field of endeavour. (Think fields like maths, physics, biology, etc, though not those exact fields.)

So, Open Transactions is mission-critical: many entire fields of endeavour depend on it being working and useable. Yet it gets maybe four or more shares of devcoins per month. All fields other than coding and wiki-ariticle-writing are on hold until Open Transactions is ready for use AND devcoins are worth enough that people in those other fields will consider the amount of devcoins they are offered to be worth actually doing stuff for.

-MarkM-

It won't matter so much whether they are appreciated or not if they are only diluting the amount of money each person working on the devtome project gets, instead of diluting every damn project all at once.

It presumably is going to be like, okay, someone won the twelve shares bounty for 3d-printer files for the first stage booster rocket for the devspacemobile, so now we are announcing a new huge bounty, yes, another twelve share bounty, folks, for the second stage! And since the spacemobile project is obviously thoroughly started now, the first stage having been tested and debugged and proven, we will also have a twelve share bounty for the crew module, so it can be developed in parallel!

Oh but, someone wrote 80k words, so they of course get way more money than either of the space-agencies working on those two spacemobile bounties...

It just doesn't make sense.

-MarkM-

I think it should not be how many shares of actual receivers file per round, it should be the whole of devtome gets twelve shares bounty then each round devtome can add up how many words each of its authors contributed and divide up the coins the twelve shares worked out to among its authors, like any other project was expected to divide up its bounty among those who worked on the project.


If we have devcoin clients / the devcoin network, we can pay for any books we want. But if we don't have any clients and we don't have the network, we cannot pay any devcoins to anyone for anything no matter how many books people write or how many we would like to pay for.

So having devcoins exist, that is, having client software that lets devcoins be sent and received and minted and so on, is more mission-critical than spending those coins, since the coins need to exist and be spendable before they can be spent at all.

-MarkM-

Mission critical infrastructure includes such things as up to date client source code. Less critical would be things like compiled clients for various operating-systems.

Devtome seems to be insanely more than mission-critical, its authors probably make more per hour than do people who build devcoin clients.

One share is supposed to mean you do ten hours of skilled work, such as programming, each week. That is what programmers get paid... or if they are working on specifically asked for things directly useful to the devcoin project, then they can get away with ten hours per month to get their one share.

-MarkM-

We could do it by paying based on clickthroughs, on the principle that if the video fails to convince the viewer to actually follow through by going to the site the video is promoting then the video failed to "convert" that viewer...

-MarkM-

We can't, because the largest bounty given to the most massive and essential infrastructure projects is twelve shares. Once. Not twelve shares per round.

Yet authors can get more than that, every round, just by doling out 13k or more words per round.

We aren't likely to get any infrastructure built when it is 80/12 as lucrative to dump old crap you wrote in high school than it is to work on mission-critical infrastructure projects.

Maybe the solution is to claim that devtome IS a mission-critical infrastructure project, and be extra super insanely generous to that project by awarding it - the entire devtome project - a max-sized bounty every single round, that is, twelve shares a round to devtome for devtome to share out as it pleases to its authors.

Then we can get on with finding other critical projects to promote, though so far those usually only seem to get 12 shares once, not twelve every damn round...

EDIT: Bear in mind that the less shares there are in total in a round, the more each share is worth. So if there were only five projects, each getting twelve shares, that would only add up to 60 shares but there would not be dozens of authors getting 80 shares each diluting the value of those shares, instead all authors added together would divide up the twelve shares that go to devtome.

-MarkM-

Well the 80 shares was probably a massive mistake, letting someone get that many shares, especially in one round, totally devalues everyone else's shares like crazy.

The incentive to write at all simply evaporated, heck it nearly wiped out admins and programmers and so on too from devtome authors suddenly getting 90+% or some such of all the shares, Unthinkingbit had to put in minimum percentage quotas for the admin category just to try to ensure people admin-ing websites for the project could maybe cover their hosting and bandwidth bills, maybe they still don't actually make anything once those bills are paid I am not sure.

I basically gave up writing, figuring if a whole bunch of people are going to dump 80k words on the devtome each round there really isn't much point bothering to write less words than that and since I don't figure I am likely to be able to write that many words I don't bother.

It would have made more sense probably to limit it like bounties, the biggest bounties usually seem to have been twelve shares, that is for entire programming projects specifically commissioned by the project. No author of random stuff should be able to make more than one massive bounty per round, surely? So 12 shares seems like a reasonable limit, some might say unreasonable since even that amounts to getting the largest bounty the project gives to the most-essential pieces of infrastructure yet authors get it for just having dumped 12k of some old story they wrote in high school?

The twelve shares for a bounty also tended to assume you might have a team doing the work, the team leader then shares it among the workers.

Heck entire software projects were only getting one share originally, with the team lead intended to share out those coins appropriately among all the programmers working on the project!

Open transactions doesn't even get twelve shares a round I don't think, and it gets shitloads compared to most projects because it has like maybe as many as four programmers, maybe even more, who each get one share, and they work tons and tons of hours on that stuff all the damn time! I think they get one for FellowTraveller, and one for a guy who codes and debugs and packages it all for Windows, and one for a guy who does the whole autotools auto-build mess and maybe one for some other guy too.

Maybe it should not be per thousand words but, rather, per "mean number of words per author per round", so that if typical/mean words authors contribute is 50K words then 50k words is what it takes to get a share...

-MarkM-

Not if their first submission is awesome quality and on a featured topic so it gets bonus for quality and bonus for featured article of the month and bonus for being on a specific topic that is being specially rewarded that month due to its direct relevance to other projects that are also going on and such, maybe also best new author or second best new author or whatever.

So far we seem to be spending so much on random writings that we aren't really getting a lot of other projects done that could in turn be written about, for example.

There could also be bonus for increasing the relevance of existing articles by spinning them together into some larger picture, so the whole thing hangs together more instead of being a bunch of unrelated pages without much in the way of relevant links drawing readers deeper and deeper in as they follow the links to learn more and more about all the various pieces of the puzzle...

-MarkM-

I wasn't thinking of making authors pay up front to get to be authors.

More like start them with a one share per month maximum and have ways to move up from there.

So someone could join up, dump 80k of old crap they have no use for and could not sell anywhere, and then either sit back getting a share per cycle for 80 cycles or do something to raise their max shares per cycle rating.

Like maybe retaining some of the coins to become a "stakeholder" in the coin, or maybe fixing up all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors and typing errors, maybe even tightening up the plotline and dialog and such, to improve the quality of their submission. Or maybe even have a couple of raises just on sheer seniority, one share the first cycle, two the second, three per cycle thereafter. So they'd have six shares worth of payout three cycles in and could maybe consider holding some of it as stake to speed up the rate at which their initial big dump of text actually pays off...

Maybe even set it up so they'd be better off posting their 80k words in batches, 1k the first month, 2k the second, 3k the third etc, so as to gain a step up in max shares per month each month for posting more than they did the month before...

-MarkM-

Yeah but if someone did just mass produce chips and mass produce mining rigs to put them in all those companies that wasted time and effort and money building mining farms could maybe all have been royally screwed because if someone seriously churned out mining rigs really really fast they could have turned over a small markup over and over and over again while driving up difficulty so fast that only home miners heating their houses in winter and heating their linen closets year round and such, with no employees and no extra space rented specially to house rigs, could hope to profit...

Basically if you seriously churn out rigs, mining as a commercial entrprise would be a sucker's game and the company that saw that ahead of time and went full out just "selling shovels" without getting into the "sucker's game" themselves could maybe have really "cleaned up".

-MarkM-

Hopefully the mining-ASIC manufacturers will eventually realise that mining is a sucker's game, that their huge farms are obsolete, and realise how much money they missed out on by not pouring out ASICs to suckers in vast, vast quantities much much faster, driving all the conflict-of-interest manufacturers who wasted time and money setting up mining farms of their own into obsolescence...

TL;DR there is reason to sell the damn things quick instead of mining with them, because if someone does mining with them is going to be a white elephant...

(Whereas for mine-at-home folks heating their bathroom floors and heating their houses in the winter and not needing employees and not having to rent datacentre space and so on and so on, all the overheads of a commercial mining operation, mining might still actually make sense.)

Basically the normal return on investments is only maybe 5%, 10% if you are really lucky, so if you can sell the darn things at 10% profit and buy more wafers you could make 10% over and over again adding up to much more than 10% per year by the time you've churned out product for a year...

-MarkM-

Sure. Or you can point your miners at http://dvcstable01.dvcnode.org:10332 which is a zero fee p2pool.

Plus if someone manages to figure out some kind of script or something for finding out from somewhere in the p2pool data directories how much bitcoin it paid each miner it would be possible to pay miners extra besides by selling merged mined coins and divvying up the proceeds. So far though despite bounties offered no one has come up with any tools for doing such divvying.

-MarkM-

Maybe use p2pool?

-MarkM-

A lot of altcoins claimed that really fast blocks was a major important thing to have, if they were right then maybe GeistGeld will turn out to be the best fit for that niche since you get it "free" alongside your bitcoins and it has very fast blocks.

-MarkM-

But why is that surprising?

If they were able to develop something worthwhile they would have made a bundle accepting bitcoin for it.

Instead they made yet another scamcoin and accepted bitcoin for that.

Pretty much the standard everyday scam we see all the time around here.

-MarkM-

I see you are evading the actual thread about the coin, that presumably shows how much it was pre-mined and insta-mined, instead shifting focus to a bribery attempt, do such bribes actually serve to distract people from whatever dirty laundry might be hidden away in the actual launch thread of the coin?

Besides, value isn't attractive, it seems. If it were we'd see people running Open Transactions clients so they could get in on all the coins that skyrocketed far above bitcoin in value.

-MarkM-

An interesting one to do would be this one: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=297147.0

Maybe you could offer on that thread to create that coin, maybe giving some indication of what kind of level of "donations" you would be looking for to do so...

-MarkM-

All the merged mined coins except I0Coin need new code to deal with the fact that merged mining eats more RAM, faster, than non-merged mining.

The faster a coin spits out blocks, the faster it runs into the problem of it using huge amounts of RAM.

GRouPcoin is a relatively sedate coin, with ten minutes block timing target if I recall correctly, so it is less urgent to update GRouPcoin than it is to update those merged mined coins that have faster average time between blocks target.

Presumably GRouPcoin will get done eventually, it is just not the one in most-urgent need right now.

Also, once it gets onto exchanges then maybe developers will be more interested in bounties denominated in GRouPcoin thus more responsive to the needs of GRouPcoin users who desire work done on the coin and have coins to reward developers for doing the work.

-MarkM-