theymos.
If the money doesn't belong to theymos but he has effectively the right to freely decide how to spend it, it comes down to the same thing, right?
Yes, unless theymos does not make it the same thing. He has decided to spend most of it for the development of a new forum that will open source and thus available to everyone, including those outside the bitcoin community.
That's what I mean with governance: Is the forum a private entity (ie, theymos) or if it's somehow community-controlled, how is this done? Implicitly, if at all?
There is no clear answer to that. Theymos is in legal terms the person that would be considered the sole owner as it currently is. However he does not think of himself as such. I guess his spirit is beyond ownership in that regard.
I've decided not to create an official announcement thread today. But I will answer some questions.
Who is the owner of the forum?
I've answered this before.
The forum was created by Satoshi and Sirius. Without any explicit agreement or assignment of ownership, it came to be the case that I am now chiefly responsible for forum management. The domain is owned by Sirius. I have no way of forcing him to do anything with it. (Though I recently did gain partial access so that I can change DNS records.) I control a lot of the forum's money. Sirius cannot force me to do anything with this. Various treasurers control other forum money; they're bound by the treasury agreements.
I am not a lawyer, so I can't say for sure who the forum's owner is legally-speaking, and this is irrelevant to me unless I'm dealing with legal stuff.
Who is the owner of the BTC collected by the forum?
I've answered this many times.
I control most of the money. I consider it my responsibility to appropriately manage this money for the non-profit benefit of the forum, Bitcoin, and the world. I take this responsibility seriously. However, I retain sole control over how the money is spent. No one has any
right to influence my decisions, though I can be convinced by reasonable arguments.
The rest of the money is held by treasurers bound by the treasury agreements. Under the treasury agreements, I have a lot of decision-making power, but I can be over-ruled in some cases.
Again, talk to a lawyer if you want to know who owns the money according to governments. I don't care about this unless I have to.
Is bitcointalk a registered not for profit?
No. I avoid the term "non-profit" in official materials to avoid giving the impression that a government has assigned the forum with a non-profit label, but the term does accurately represent the philosophy of the forum. No one gets or will ever get any kind of dividend from forum revenue.
Why do you think we needed to spend so much for software when there are free or much cheaper option available?
The most popular forum software is:
- Old.
- Written in PHP, which sucks.
- Written insecurely and messily.
- Difficult to modify, especially safely.
- Not much more featureful than SMF, if at all.
There are a handful of newer forum software packages which solve some of those problems, but all of them are very sparse in features.
The goal of this software project is to create new,
open source forum software which will
compete with SMF, phpBB, etc.
What special features will the forum have?
This isn't completely defined yet. It'll have almost all features that we have now. A main goal will be improving filtering and data presentation so that users can more easily manage the flood of posts both board-wide and within threads, while simultaneously reducing the need for centralized moderation.
The $350,000 was just a down payment or the full amount owed? If it is not the full amount how much more could this end up costing us?
The total cost will probably be around $1 million. The $350,000 covers several months of work, after which I will evaluate the performance of Slickage Studios and choose whether or not to continue. In any case, the code will be open source, so no work will be lost.
When will the software be finished?
About one year from now.
Are you getting a kick back from this operation or do you hold any interest in his company?
No.
Any plans for implementing some sort of a 2FA in the new forum? (this is especially important for people conducting trades over the forum)
Yes, there will be 2FA.
What do you think about creating new boards or subdomains for altcoins for a recurring (monthly or quarterly) fee? They could even be excluded from the main forum's statistics, and have their own rules and policies (only retaining a few obvious such as no linking to SR-type onion sites or no trades of goods which are illegal in the buyer's or in the seller's country).
Maybe. I don't see any harm in that if it isn't too difficult/expensive.
Will there be a working non-javascript version of the forum?
Yes, though some advanced functionality may be unavailable without JavaScript.
Why is the forum paying people a fee to store the forum's bitcoin when storing bitcoin is free? Can't the forum find enough people that will store bitcoin for free?
Some of the treasurers do store funds for free, but extremely-trustworthy people who will do this are rare.
