[ANN] Bitcoin Foundation

[jgarzik]

Gavin however has worked on Bitcoin full-time since a long time, without any other income, and at least in my opinion he does a great job. Certainly it shouldn't be this foundation's only purpose, but I see no harm in making sure he can keep working on this project.

Quoted for emphasis.

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[klaus]

Most of the developers - myself included - have an income unrelated to Bitcoin. Though few would refuse a donation for our work, I myself never expected any payment for it. I work on what I like to, and if that benefits the community, so much the better.

Gavin however has worked on Bitcoin full-time since a long time, without any other income, and at least in my opinion he does a great job. Certainly it shouldn't be this foundation's only purpose, but I see no harm in making sure he can keep working on this project.

so true !!!

[Gavin Andresen]

RE: do I have gazillions of bitcoins:

I've said before that I have "thousands of bitcoins, not tens or hundreds of thousands of bitcoins." I have mined a grand total of 250 bitcoins-- electricity here is not particularly cheap, and I'm a software kind of guy, not a hardware hacker. So it always made more sense for me to buy bitcoins rather than mining them.

I would definitely be wealthier right now if I had been working as the CTO for a company for the last two years and had never heard of Bitcoin.

RE: what work will I do:

I will continue doing what I've been doing-- trying to focus on work that benefits all of Bitcoin and not one particular company. That is the kind of work that falls through the cracks-- why would one company pay for cross-implementation compatibility tests? Sure cross-implementation compatibility is really important for the stability of the Bitcoin network, but as long as the implementation THEY'RE using works properly then why would they spend extra to make life easier for other implementations?

Or a company might fund the development of anti-denial-of-service techniques, but once they do, why would they want to share that with their competitors? Being more denial-of-service-resistant might give them a competitive advantage...

TruCoin paid me a salary for a couple of months last year to do core development work (and paid Alex Waters to start doing Q/A for core development), but TruCoin ran into funding problems of their own and stopped paying us to concentrate on their own projects.

Creating a Foundation is a proven, well-established way for projects to solve the free-rider problem of funding core development that benefits everybody. Over time, I hope to be working less on the reference implementation and more on "Chief Scientist" stuff, like organizing working groups to write best practices documents or work out agreements on changes that might be necessary to the core protocol to support more transactions, better privacy, advances in quantum computing, hiring or recruiting experts to do security reviews of proposed new stuff, etc.

RE: voting:

Great ideas! I think I'll be pushing to start with a good old-fashioned "send you a letter with a PIN number to your mailing address" as the first step to preventing voter fraud. We'll have to have a much more extensive discussion of voting procedures before it is time to vote.  I'll probably push to follow the lead of other successful organizations, and to do the Simplest Possible Thing That Will Work-- which might be hiring a disinterested high-reputation company who specializes in running elections for organizations.

[jgarzik]

RE: do I have gazillions of bitcoins:

I've said before that I have "thousands of bitcoins, not tens or hundreds of thousands of bitcoins." I have mined a grand total of 250 bitcoins-- electricity here is not particularly cheap, and I'm a software kind of guy, not a hardware hacker. So it always made more sense for me to buy bitcoins rather than mining them.

I would definitely be wealthier right now if I had been working as the CTO for a company for the last two years and had never heard of Bitcoin.

Indeed.

For the record, I do not have any mining operation nor even have thousands of bitcoins.    Not that there is anything wrong mining securing the bitcoin network.

In fact, I'm the one who gave away over 15,000 bitcoins attempting to jumpstart the bitcoin economy, and incentivize developers to join bitcoin.

[jgarzik]

If someone else appeared on the scene (let's say Luke) and asked to be lead dev would you be capable of resigning your position without a vote of the membership of TBF? Let's say you went snowboarding and were laid up after a nasty accident for a year, could a person be made lead dev after you left without the consideration of TBF? If the answer to these questions is no then one elected body has too much control of a decentralized system.

RE lead dev:

Lead dev is not an elected position governed by rules and procedures.  Satoshi chose Gavin, and the community consents to agree by their use of software.  He has been a good steward of Satoshi's vision.

It might also be fair to say that lead dev is just someone who failed to say "not it!!" fast enough   Lead dev means not only wrangling releases, but also being a big fat target for any bitcoin criticism or paranoid fear.

The whole point of open source and git is to make it easy to fork the project, and go your own way.  The second any developer does something disliked by users, the software will be forked.

Thus, open source makes it easy to "fire" any dev.  If you make it easy for leaders to come and go, make it easy to change leadership, then that creates a powerful incentive not to piss off your userbase!

Leaders are simply chosen by the free market (of ideas and engineering output, in this case).


RE absence:

If Gavin gets "hit by a bus" -- the popular jargon for losing an open source project leader -- commits and releases will happen as someone steps up and the community accepts them.

I think most of us would run away screaming, if Luke-Jr were lead dev ;p

[jgarzik]

Should all contributors to the software be paid employees or just the lead? What is the typical "open source foundation" way of doing it?

For any open source project with a foundation, only a small subset of developers contributing to the software wind up getting paid.  Usually there are only a tiny few full time positions for lead developers like Linus Torvalds (who is paid by the Linux Foundation), or Gavin in this case.

The remaining contributors tend to fall into one of two categories

• Developers paid by a vendor in the ecosystem, who has a direct economic interest.  Example: My day job is working on the Linux kernel, and Red Hat (not the Linux Foundation) pays for me to work on that open source project.
• Unpaid volunteers

And there are plenty of reasons why one remains a volunteer dev.  As an unpaid volunteer developer, I am free to disappear whenever I want, ignoring all bitcoin related emails for 6 months when the day job gets uber busy, or while I backpack on the Appalachian Trail.  

In open source projects, the long tail tells you that you will always have 100x more casual contributors, than steady contributors you can depend on for a timely response to a critical security bug.

Bitcoin is a very small ecosystem right now, as open source projects go.  (Warning: my own predictions...  I've no BF insider info at all here)  As it grows, Bitcoin Foundation will probably hire another dev or two, another sysadmin, pay for some infrastructure.

Once the bitcoin ecosystem is large enough, you will start to see devs appear who are working for third parties.  For example, (again, prediction, no insider info) MtGox hires their own developer, who contributes work based on MtGox's interests.  Similarly, chipmakers Intel and AMD hire their own Linux kernel developers to represent their interests, and submit Intel/AMD-specific code to the open source Linux kernel.

But that is a ways off.

An open source project is a rich blend of paid devs and unpaid volunteers, everybody working together on one common piece of software, to make it better for everyone.  As the saying goes, you work on an open source project to "scratch your own itch."  That is the engineering equivalent of pursuing one's own economic self-interest, the essence of the free market.

[boonies4u]

I think most of us would run away screaming, if Luke-Jr were lead dev ;p=

*hides in corner of room* jk <3

[niko]

Anyone feeling they can help one way or another can get in touch with BF and start volunteering.

[jgarzik]

Anyone feeling they can help one way or another can get in touch with BF and start volunteering.

You don't have to go through BF to volunteer

Developers may simply submit a pull request to https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/

Users may participate by helping out with testing.

[matonis]

Should all contributors to the software be paid employees or just the lead? What is the typical "open source foundation" way of doing it?

For any open source project with a foundation, only a small subset of developers contributing to the software wind up getting paid.  Usually there are only a tiny few full time positions for lead developers like Linus Torvalds (who is paid by the Linux Foundation), or Gavin in this case.

The remaining contributors tend to fall into one of two categories

• Developers paid by a vendor in the ecosystem, who has a direct economic interest.  Example: My day job is working on the Linux kernel, and Red Hat (not the Linux Foundation) pays for me to work on that open source project.
• Unpaid volunteers

And there are plenty of reasons why one remains a volunteer dev.  As an unpaid volunteer developer, I am free to disappear whenever I want, ignoring all bitcoin related emails for 6 months when the day job gets uber busy, or while I backpack on the Appalachian Trail.  

In open source projects, the long tail tells you that you will always have 100x more casual contributors, than steady contributors you can depend on for a timely response to a critical security bug.

Bitcoin is a very small ecosystem right now, as open source projects go.  (Warning: my own predictions...  I've no BF insider info at all here)  As it grows, Bitcoin Foundation will probably hire another dev or two, another sysadmin, pay for some infrastructure.

Once the bitcoin ecosystem is large enough, you will start to see devs appear who are working for third parties.  For example, (again, prediction, no insider info) MtGox hires their own developer, who contributes work based on MtGox's interests.  Similarly, chipmakers Intel and AMD hire their own Linux kernel developers to represent their interests, and submit Intel/AMD-specific code to the open source Linux kernel.

But that is a ways off.

An open source project is a rich blend of paid devs and unpaid volunteers, everybody working together on one common piece of software, to make it better for everyone.  As the saying goes, you work on an open source project to "scratch your own itch."  That is the engineering equivalent of pursuing one's own economic self-interest, the essence of the free market.

Great (and clear) summary of paid developers and unpaid volunteers in open source environment. I concur. It works best when there is a methodology and requirement for transparency of compensation.

[cypherdoc]

great to hear that Gavin will be paid and that Jeff doesn't mind.

[bg002h]

Most of the developers - myself included - have an income unrelated to Bitcoin. Though few would refuse a donation for our work, I myself never expected any payment for it. I work on what I like to, and if that benefits the community, so much the better.

Gavin however has worked on Bitcoin full-time since a long time, without any other income, and at least in my opinion he does a great job. Certainly it shouldn't be this foundation's only purpose, but I see no harm in making sure he can keep working on this project.

+1

That's the main reason I joined...

[CharlesPonzi]

I think most of us would run away screaming, if Luke-Jr were lead dev ;p=

*hides in corner of room* jk <3

http://bitcoinchurch.org  he can always produce a "catholic" version of bitcoin with built in 10% "tithing"

[Micon]

wow there is a ton going on in this thread.

I run a little podcast each Wed. I would love to have someone representing the Bitcoin Foundation on the show tomorrow.  It airs live from 7-8ish PM Vegas time, then posted for podcasting after that.

I have an email out to someone in the organization as well.

[interlagos]

In my view the voting procedure must allow members to verify two things:
a) check that your own vote is correct
b) check that other votes come from legit members
(then those members can verify that their vote is correct on their own)

So I thought that the following approach might solve the problem:
Each vote needs to include a signed message from the Bitcoin address used to pay the membership fee to a fixed known BF address. Then the whole registry of these messages with their respective addresses can be made public so that each member can (a) check that his vote is correct and (b) that other votes originate from the addresses that paid the membership fee. This will prevent BF from creating phony members just to rig the voting.

Before this is teared apart... this approach implies the changes to the procedure of paying membership fees. It needs to come from a single Bitcoin address preferably never used for anything else.
Member would need to register that address with his profile and BF would need to use a single public address for collecting fees, while identifying its members payments by the originating address they registered.

...
RE: voting:

Great ideas! I think I'll be pushing to start with a good old-fashioned "send you a letter with a PIN number to your mailing address" as the first step to preventing voter fraud. We'll have to have a much more extensive discussion of voting procedures before it is time to vote.  I'll probably push to follow the lead of other successful organizations, and to do the Simplest Possible Thing That Will Work-- which might be hiring a disinterested high-reputation company who specializes in running elections for organizations.

Thanks for looking into this!

I don't see how "sending a letter with a PIN" would help address point (b) in my quote above.
Also it might not be the best way to look into the past or at other "successful" organizations or hiring a "trusted" third party (please please don't hire Diebold) for handling voting as the best solution might not have existed before advent of Bitcoin.

As an example the online gambling industry is now moving for the first time towards 'provably-fair' gambling:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/08/31/bitzino-and-the-dawn-of-provably-fair-casino-gaming/

I believe there is a great opportunity here for Bitcoin Foundation to become a first successful organization in setting a precedent for 'provably-fair' voting and showing the rest of the world how voting should have been done in the first place. Please don't underestimate the importance of it.

I'm certain that Bitcoin won't only prove to be a base for future monetary systems but will become a potent tool for direct democracy where people vote for underlying principles of their society with their hash power and/or cryptographically signed messages. Thus 'provably-fair' voting is going to be a crucial part of that future.

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

wow there is a ton going on in this thread.

I run a little podcast each Wed. I would love to have someone representing the Bitcoin Foundation on the show tomorrow.  It airs live from 7-8ish PM Vegas time, then posted for podcasting after that.

I have an email out to someone in the organization as well.

I'll be in Las Vegas tomorrow, if you want me to speak on the show!

[Phinnaeus Gage]

wow there is a ton going on in this thread.

I run a little podcast each Wed. I would love to have someone representing the Bitcoin Foundation on the show tomorrow.  It airs live from 7-8ish PM Vegas time, then posted for podcasting after that.

I have an email out to someone in the organization as well.

I'll be in Las Vegas tomorrow, if you want me to speak on the show!

That'd be awesome! (remember to look into the camera and wear a Bitcoin tie) Seriously, I just thought of something neat to do at the end of the interview. Cut for high card, with the loser paying the winner 1 BTC, then somewhat showing the paying off of the wager via smartphones, PC, etc.

~Bruno K~

[repentance]

If the Foundation is seeking registration as some form of non-profit, then it's likely that voting procedures are outlined by law and that they can't just make them up themselves (here, votes by the membership of non-profits must be overseen by officers of the Electoral Commission who check that members were financial, that the required quorum was met, and that the required formal procedures such as notice, proposers and seconders etc were followed).

[Atlas]

If the Foundation is seeking registration as some form of non-profit, then it's likely that voting procedures are outlined by law and that they can't just make them up themselves (here, votes by the membership of non-profits must be overseen by officers of the Electoral Commission who check that members were financial, that the required quorum was met, and that the required formal procedures such as notice, proposers and seconders etc were followed).

Why they chose Washington DC as the location, the most oppressive, regulated shithole in the world, is beyond me. Oh wait, it isn't because I am sure the original intentions were to get Bitcoin regulated.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

If the Foundation is seeking registration as some form of non-profit, then it's likely that voting procedures are outlined by law and that they can't just make them up themselves (here, votes by the membership of non-profits must be overseen by officers of the Electoral Commission who check that members were financial, that the required quorum was met, and that the required formal procedures such as notice, proposers and seconders etc were followed).

Why they chose Washington DC as the location, the most oppressive, regulated shithole in the world, is beyond me. Oh wait, it isn't because I am sure the original intentions were to get Bitcoin regulated.

If you are saying that Washington DC is regulated, then you have no fucking idea what the word "regulated" means.

Come to the UE. We have laws here that specify the exact curvature a banana must have to be allowed on the market. They also tell us how much milk, cheese and sugar we can produce. That is **regulated**.