Good to hear. Of course, you realize that the positions I have with Mastercoin, Dark Wallet, Coinkite, and others are advisory positions as well; as Chief Scientist/Chief Naysayer I am not involved in the day to day operations of any of these organizations.
Yes, I think you made that clear.
don't indicate any accusations of personal bias where I might be pushing ideas solely for the benefit of those paying me. So I'd appreciate it if you let Jeff know - I already did but some reinforcement of civility might be appreciated by all.
I think Jeff would be happy if you just noted those positions when advocating for things that those projects need/want/have asked for. Sort of like how people sometimes disclose share ownership in articles where they comment about companies and the like. Having interests is not itself a problem as long as things are transparent. I don't think it's a big deal, just best to be explicit.
In your case, you've advocated for things that only projects like Mastercoin really care about (or care about much). Whereas if Circle need anything from the wider Bitcoin community, they haven't told me about it. In fact we don't interact much. I've spent about a day with them in total since they first approached me, and most of that was review of their architecture and general discussion.
Along those lines, I've been working to diversify my income and clients sufficiently that would, say, Mastercoin fail I'd have no cause for concern. Similarly I've made a point of not taking significant investment positions in any of these currencies; currently the only non-Bitcoin crypto-assets I own in any significant quantity are about
~$3.5k worth of Litecoins, and
~$2.5k worth of Mastercoins, the latter only due to a misunderstanding about what compensation my contract with Mastercoin included. I'm strongly considering just selling off the latter entirely to maintain my independence, and either changing my contract or simply selling off future MSC as I earn them.
I think that's all good and useful to hear.
It's only reasonable to ask the same question of you: How is Circle compensating you exactly? Is implementing redlists/blacklists/tying transactions to real-world-identities in their plans? Are you going to financially benefit either directly or indirectly if technologies like that become a success?
A very small amount of equity (0.1%). It's not enough to have any influence on my decision making, in fact it's rather hard to estimate its value at all, given that I know little about their plans and am not in the loop except when they want my advice, which is rare.
What's more, they know that I am generally not in favour of "bitbanks" and other centralised Bitcoin financial institutions. They understand that my personal politics around decentralisation does not align much with their business plans, and we're both OK with that. I do not have to agree with a companies politics to answer questions for them.
If they have any positions on coin tracing then they haven't told me about it. I have been exploring those topics for a long time, since before Circle even existed, so you can rest assured that's all me :p.
The question on my mind is, to what extent is Bitcoin's chances of mainstream success harmed vs helped by a security strategy based entirely on defence? What we see today is a lot of thefts and hacks. Last time I wrote about coin tracing I was worried about extortion, that CryptoLocker might take off and become really big. That didn't happen thank god, but what we are seeing is lots of thefts and hacks. Although there's usually a plan for how to block such attacks, implementing them is slow work. Like, the "zomg chrome extension regexd my address" attack that came up a few days ago was predicted years ago, the TREZOR and payment protocol are all designed to stop it, but the effort required to defend against that is enormous compared to the effort required to do the attack. It's going to be a long time before the defence side really catches up to that but the malware is like 50 lines of code.
In the "offline world" a blended strategy is almost always used. Lots of defence, but then offence to target the attackers who get through. The Bitcoin world only uses defence. Hackers can try their luck against a hundred users and eventually succeed; there is zero risk involved. We've created a paradise for thieves; they can only win. Most people I know would consider that some kind of hell ... a world where they can work hard every day and then some pimply faced hacker the other side of the world just swipes their wages from them, and get away with it every single time. Especially when the victim blaming begins. They would consider the banking system far more just regardless of its failings, because people who try to steal get chased and a lot of them get caught (see how the Zeus guys ended up).
One can believe that a 100% defence based every-man-for-himself strategy is the correct and best solution, but don't be surprised or appalled when other people explore this topic and think about alternatives. Just argue that they're unnecessary instead.
