Charlie: I have no doubt that you're a good guy and you mean well. My top 3 concerns/solutions: - Lack of board representation for the privacy-focused sociopolitical viewpoint. Currently, business interests far outweigh privacy interests on the Foundation's board. Matonis is outnumbered. The addition of a nonprofit political Bitcoin advocate like Falkvinge or Björnsdóttir would address this.
- Lack of board representation for international viewpoints. Currently the whole thing seems very USA-centric. Same solution as above.
- Danger in a financial dependency relationship between dev group and foundation. A direct compensation arrangement leaves the dev group susceptible to future pressure and influence through the foundation. It would be much better if the foundation created an independent salary/donation mechanism where the community was allowed to donate to the development budget first, and the foundation donated on top of that only in case of a shortfall. Basically make the payment process as decentralized and autonomous as possible.
Anything you can do to address these would be appreciated. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your confidence (and to the others as well). As one of the representatives of the Individual Membership Class, I take my board responsibilities very seriously. When Zimmermann resigned from Network Associates because they were trying to backdoor PGP, I took him in at Hushmail as Chief Cryptographer which is when OpenPGP was launched (2000-2002). Regarding your 3rd concern above, how do you respond to the points that I make in this reply to theymos https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113400.msg1227798#msg1227798 ? I recognize the potential financial dependency issue, but how does your proposal mitigate clandestine, non-transparent compensation from malicious actors and how does it address succession planning for lead developers? |
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Maybe you haven't been paying attention to the wonderful stats that dooglus and others have been posting, but we need some serious engineering to avoid incentivizing users away from the P2P clients and towards centralized, privacy killing websites: - One single gambling application has doubled the size of the blockchain in the past 4-6 months
- The reference client, the "full nodes" keeping the network alive, is feeling the strain
- A punishing blockchain download may incentivize users away from P2P clients, towards easy-to-use websites
- Resultant P2P node counts decline, reducing decentralization factor
We are racing to implement ultraprune and other changes to address some of the scaling issues. But the most important part of Satoshi's design, the part that keeps the network scaling further -- SPV mode -- was only lightly sketched by Satoshi. SPV mode enables anyone to be a fully decentralized P2P client, even on your mobile phone. It is a race to fully implement the decentralized design, otherwise users will simply not bother with apps at all and go straight to mtgox.com or instawallet.org or blockchain.info. And even that is a race, to "seed" bitcoin across the world, making sure it is sufficiently entrenched before the inevitable legal and governmental and central banker push-back. So frankly I do not think many critics in this thread even comprehend the Clear And Present challenges looming, just to keep bitcoin alive and decentralized. +1 good clarification. Thanks for post here, Jeff. |
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It's good that the Foundation will be funding development and representing Bitcoin legally, but it's important that the ownership of Bitcoin-related assets doesn't become too centralized. In particular, the Foundation should not:
- Control bitcoin.org
- Control any DNS seeds, etc.
- Own copyright on the Bitcoin source code
- Own any patents
- Own the Bitcoin trademark (unless someone has to own it)
I've answered this on reddit and similar sentiments in the comment section of my recent article, but I also want to post here. [No comment from me on copyrights and patents, because I don't believe in them and I don't support their infrastructure.] theymos, thank you. I considered those issues as well prior to accepting the offer to join the board (and the specific direction is still being debated in multiple venues such as this forum). The success and organization of the Tor Project had a lot to do with my decision. As a libertarian and non-Statist on the Foundation board, I think that other libertarians and non-Statists would mostly agree that a transparent organization is preferable to a 'single anointed individual' that can select the next 'single anointed individual' in a non-transparent fashion (the community never voiced their opinion on Gavin taking over lead role for Satoshi — it just happened). Although it has worked out well, no one can guarantee the longevity of Gavin in that role. Open source software is actually more vulnerable to discreet State pressures and random bribery when only one, or a few, steer core protocol development without any community input on succession planning. A centralized individual is more corruptible than a group and the foundation is actually a step towards de-centralization in that regard. Additionally, I would think that bitcoin users in general would welcome a check-and-balance on the core development group that may or may not have been involved in receiving clandestine compensation on the side. Of course, nothing prevents that from occurring now or in the future but I believe that an accountable, nonprofit foundation would decrease its likelihood. |
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you know, with all my kidding about that, i knew i should've gone out and grabbed that domain!  Had thought about it before but not quite so sure you would be as professionally courteous as he is with Matonis (themonetaryfuture.com). +1 sunnankar (thanks!) |
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There is very little legal oversight of the Bitcoin exchanges because frankly there are no laws that regulate digital made-up money, reports ARS Technica. I love that line in the article. Yes, "Laws that regulate made-up money" could also be used to eventually regulate air guitars. The author gets it correct at the end when he states that using money as identity tracking mechanism is no longer that useful. |
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It was this post by Ben Laurie that led me to read up on distributed systems. I suspect he’s wrong. At the very least, it’s possible to rearrange the problem statement in such a way that Bitcoin solves it. Anyone who has followed the development of this field over several decades will acknowledge that there is no single correct set of model assumptions for every application. Subtle variations have led to unexpected outcomes, for both possibility and impossibility. It surprises me that as of yet, no one from distributed systems has said anything about the underlying consensus mechanism of Bitcoin. (Although Bitcoin and Red Balloons comes close, they focused on a red herring related to the gossip layer rather than the core.) I hope this changes soon, as distributed systems researchers and the Bitcoin community should have a lot to learn from each other. Like many areas of computer science, distributed systems theory was developed long before actual networks and internet were widespread. Many of the theoretical contributions have been dismissed in practice. I recently came across this paper (and I'd be glad to hear your comments on their conclusion): Can We Afford Integrity by Proof-of-Work? Scenarios Inspired by the Bitcoin Currency http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2041492I also disagree with Ben Laurie but that is because I don't believe efficiency needs to be the goal of a decentralized, non-political currency. Methodical, authoritative, and coercively-selective breeding will also lead to better and stronger humans, but that's not the world we want. |
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This is actually really big. That show has average viewership of over 500 000 which is around 10% of the Finnish population. We got major visibility there. Finland is already the biggest Bitcoin country (per capita), now it's going to another level.
I will try to get that Youtube vid subtitled asap so you guys can understand.
How do you know that about Finland being the biggest bitcoin country per capita? Are you measuring nodes? |
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What is interesting is why Bitcoin gets the attention it does here. The other topics discussed in this video were PayPal being accepted wherever Discover card is accepted by physical merchants and how Dunkin Donuts copied Starbucks by creating a mobile app for loading and spending from a stored value account.
Bitcoin got as much press time here as these developments by absolutely huge players in the payments space. The editor's responsibility it is to make sure the readers (and viewers, in this instance) are aware of developments that could or will be changing the landscape in the banking and payments industries. He gives little ole bitcoin, which sees just tens of thousands of transactions a day, top tier attention.
That to me is something fairly peculiar and interesting.
Not sure what you mean here. Are you implying that bitcoin does not have uniquely-different potential for changing the landscape that banks can prepare for and take advantage of...or, are you suggesting that editor may have other, external motives for discussing bitcoin? |
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By the way, there's also a story circulating that MasterCard has denied that it will issue these cards.
Frankly, I can't see the major credit cards validating bitcoin because it's probably the biggest threat to their hegemony on payment since they were invented.
Joe, it would be considered a success for BTC if Mastercard and VISA adopted it as a currency unit among their portfolio of 158+ other national currencies (although that is not what the BitInstant card does). Yes, bitcoin is a long-term threat at the P2P payment level and so is paper cash; however, in bitcoin's role as independent nonpolitical monetary unit, BTC is just another 3-letter currency symbol out there in the world. See my related comments here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102494.msg1125924#msg1125924 |
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WHY? It looks to me like it's how Bitinstant is ultimately going to destroy Western Union. As long as MasterCard is accepted in the recipient country, and the cards can be used internationaly, it makes it very cheap to transfer purchasing power from people in developed countries to their relatives back home. Yup, that's one of three main reasons. With a card that can be loaded using bitcoins, you can add funds to my card. Or, as competition for remittances, a person can send bitcoins to load funds to the Paycard that he sent to his family. A second reason this is important. This becomes an easy to use point-of-sale terminal for a merchant. BitPay.com offers a very similar service already, but they work with your bank account (e.g., ACH transfer). This lets the merchant spend the funds wherever Mastercard is accepted and by withdrawing at an ATM. Faster access to the cash is important to many merchants. [Use as a point-of-sale terminal assumes that there is some notification to the merchant, such as an SMS text message, each time a payment is received.] The third reason this is important. It makes it easier to get by without a bank account. I can store my wealth in bitcoins, but spend in dollars when that is more convenient or less expensive. Sure, long term it would be nice to not even do any payment card transactions, and pay for everything using bitcoins but we are a long way from that. This is like a bridge that helps get from here to there. +1 |
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This still needs to be sorted out because Mastercard wouldn't necessarily have knowledge of partner bank's affiliate negotiations.
That is probably true, but the problem is that now that they know about it, they could revoke that bank's authorization to issue debit cards. The fact that MasterCard is coming out and saying they don't have knowledge of this does not bode well for the product launch. That was my initial thought too, because something that was relatively innocuous is now on CNN, etc. However, in reality, the affiliate card programs generate transaction/fee volume for MC; they don't care if it's a Planned Parenthood card or an ACLU card or an NRA card. I doubt that this has put bitcoin on any 'special radar' (it's no different than selling bitcoin on your own and putting the value on your Wal*Mart debit card.) I believe that the BitInstant card will receive approval. The thought that Mastercard is intimidated by bitcoin is funny, because they could co-opt BTC momentum at any time by just adding it to the list of 158 other currencies that they authorize and clear in. Bitcoin is another currency to Mastercard and the chargeback and consumer protections provided by that network are value-adds for certain transactions. |
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This still needs to be sorted out because Mastercard wouldn't necessarily have knowledge of partner bank's affiliate negotiations.
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So now it is time to bring it on?
If it's accommodating $22 million in annual sales revenue on Silk Road, I think it can handle little ol' Wikileaks. |
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Matonis!  Mind doing a Q&A session sometime? Would love to see an IAMA with you over at reddit. Oh, and thanks for your always passionate, intelligent and interesting write-ups! Cheers, -elux elux, I answered you on PM. |
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