[LTC] Litecoin Core Development Fundraising

[CoinHoarder]

eh whatever, sticky or no sticky, we can still bump it.

BUMP.

[1714092525]

1714092525

[1714092525]

1714092525

[tacotime]

Sent a block.  Looking forward to 0.8.1+ version.

[crazy_rabbit]

eh whatever, sticky or no sticky, we can still bump it.

BUMP.

true, true. bump. :-)

[adpinbr]

bump this should def be sticky...stop being so politically correct about it. Obama got elected cause he was black, doesn't mean he can't be a good president

[efodix]

TradeFortress has a reasonable argument here.  This thread does not need to be stickied to be successful as Litecoin can win on its own merits.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AnlrnfU-U6E-dFVuUnlfZUlqek9JbzlNYjVENWp3ZlE&gid=0
Thanks to the community we are approaching 2,000 LTC in donations.

https://plus.google.com/104307324656397909502/posts
Please follow the Litecoin Project on Google+ for the latest news.  Important news about p2pool and LTC stratum pool security landed in the past day.

Yeah, great news - if you're small don't use p2pool.  And even if you're not that small, you still have to wait for weeks to use coins without paying huge fees. It's slower and more expensive than a bank transfer or paypal ffs.

[relm9]

eh whatever, sticky or no sticky, we can still bump it.

BUMP.

Another bump

Sad this was un-stickied when nothing else is being done about the other crap on this forum. So much for being neutral.

[Brunic]

2000! 

[wtogami]

eh whatever, sticky or no sticky, we can still bump it.

BUMP.

Another bump

Sad this was un-stickied when nothing else is being done about the other crap on this forum. So much for being neutral.

Please, no need for spam bumps.  Bump it when people announce their donations.

[flound1129]

I'm confused as to why there are donations needed for LTC development.  If LTC is the "one true altcoin" and you guys (the devs) have been mining since release then you should have plenty of LTC sitting around to sell off and pay yourselves with.

Or have the devs cashed out all their coins for BTC and fiat already?

It's a legitimate question; if the devs are not invested in their own coin then why should the community believe in it?  Is this why the coin has lost 30% of its value relative to BTC in the past month?

[coblee]

I'm confused as to why there are donations needed for LTC development.  If LTC is the "one true altcoin" and you guys (the devs) have been mining since release then you should have plenty of LTC sitting around to sell off and pay yourselves with.

Or have the devs cashed out all their coins for BTC and fiat already?

It's a legitimate question; if the devs are not invested in their own coin then why should the community believe in it?  Is this why the coin has lost 30% of its value relative to BTC in the past month?

Since the beginning, there has been one dev (me) with some help from a few of people like pooler and fanquake. And as you can see work has been slow because I have another job and I'm doing this on my free time. To push things forward, I'd like to get more devs involved and that requires some funding to incentivize people to work on it. For example, Warren has done a tremendous job in leading the efforts to rebase our code to Bitcoin 0.8.2. He's new to Litecoin so he's not invested in the coin. So part of the funds will be used to both pay for his work and to get him invested in the coin. And part of the funds will be used to pay for the infrastructure and maintenance costs of serving the homepage, wiki, forum, explorers, dnsseeds, etc. I personally will not be accepting anything from the fund.

All disbursements of this fund will be made public here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AnlrnfU-U6E-dFVuUnlfZUlqek9JbzlNYjVENWp3ZlE&gid=1

If people think that we are already rich and just begging for more money, no one is forcing them to donate. But it is pretty clear that a lot of users want to give back to Litecoin development and have donated already. We will put these funds to good use. Thanks.

[wtogami]

I'm confused as to why there are donations needed for LTC development.  If LTC is the "one true altcoin" and you guys (the devs) have been mining since release then you should have plenty of LTC sitting around to sell off and pay yourselves with.

Or have the devs cashed out all their coins for BTC and fiat already?

It's a legitimate question; if the devs are not invested in their own coin then why should the community believe in it?  Is this why the coin has lost 30% of its value relative to BTC in the past month?

I wrote earlier explaining this issue.

http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1f0sz4/litecoin_core_development_fundraising/

Hi. I am Warren Togami, the lead developer on Litecoin-0.8.x. I am better known as the Founder of the Fedora Project, and I have worked on other open source projects like Spamassassin, K12Linux and Cyanogenmod. I spent the last two years in grad school. I need to clarify some points here.

• coblee said he will not accept any of these donations for himself.
  
• Donations first will go toward reimbursing server hosting expenses for various infrastructure that benefit the entire Litecoin community. This includes the homepage, wiki, three explorers (for redundancy), permanent testnet nodes, dnsseeds, and automated security monitoring infrastructure.
• I discovered Litecoin very late (March 2013) when I began mining, so I currently have very little. My operating theory is that if I can build a meaningful stake and hold it for a long time, it enhances the personal incentive for me to fix the software and to further work on tools and clients to foster vendor integration. If I am successful with these goals, then LTC will grow in value due to its increased use as a medium of exchange in commerce. Thus it makes sense for me to hold on to it in the long-term.

In any case, these donations aren't going to a "rich developer".

[soma13]

small ltc donation, but it's about 15% of my current holdings.

[flound1129]

I wrote earlier explaining this issue.

http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1f0sz4/litecoin_core_development_fundraising/

Hi. I am Warren Togami, the lead developer on Litecoin-0.8.x. I am better known as the Founder of the Fedora Project, and I have worked on other open source projects like Spamassassin, K12Linux and Cyanogenmod. I spent the last two years in grad school. I need to clarify some points here.

• coblee said he will not accept any of these donations for himself.
  
• Donations first will go toward reimbursing server hosting expenses for various infrastructure that benefit the entire Litecoin community. This includes the homepage, wiki, three explorers (for redundancy), permanent testnet nodes, dnsseeds, and automated security monitoring infrastructure.
• I discovered Litecoin very late (March 2013) when I began mining, so I currently have very little. My operating theory is that if I can build a meaningful stake and hold it for a long time, it enhances the personal incentive for me to fix the software and to further work on tools and clients to foster vendor integration. If I am successful with these goals, then LTC will grow in value due to its increased use as a medium of exchange in commerce. Thus it makes sense for me to hold on to it in the long-term.

In any case, these donations aren't going to a "rich developer".

Hey Warren,

I also joined the community fairly recently.  Unfortunately, your reply doesn't really address my point (and in some ways reinforces it).  Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that there are new people who are motivated to work on Litecoin and are willing to do so for free, in their spare time.  I have donated my own resources to LTC by providing a fee-free mining pool for people to use.

My concern is that the original developers lack either the desire or motivation to work on the coin.  This suggests to me that they themselves do not have a meaningful stake anymore; If they did have a large stake and just did not have the time to work on the coin then it would be easy for them to simply to use some of their LTC to pay someone to work on the coin.  But this 'asking for donations' bit confuses me.  It seems like anyone who truly believed in LTC and mined it from the beginning should have quite a bit of it, and therefore there should not be a reason to ask the community who are already giving their resources to donate.

[disclaimer201]

bump.

[RandyMagnum]

I wrote earlier explaining this issue.

http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1f0sz4/litecoin_core_development_fundraising/

Hi. I am Warren Togami, the lead developer on Litecoin-0.8.x. I am better known as the Founder of the Fedora Project, and I have worked on other open source projects like Spamassassin, K12Linux and Cyanogenmod. I spent the last two years in grad school. I need to clarify some points here.

• coblee said he will not accept any of these donations for himself.
  
• Donations first will go toward reimbursing server hosting expenses for various infrastructure that benefit the entire Litecoin community. This includes the homepage, wiki, three explorers (for redundancy), permanent testnet nodes, dnsseeds, and automated security monitoring infrastructure.
• I discovered Litecoin very late (March 2013) when I began mining, so I currently have very little. My operating theory is that if I can build a meaningful stake and hold it for a long time, it enhances the personal incentive for me to fix the software and to further work on tools and clients to foster vendor integration. If I am successful with these goals, then LTC will grow in value due to its increased use as a medium of exchange in commerce. Thus it makes sense for me to hold on to it in the long-term.

In any case, these donations aren't going to a "rich developer".

Hey Warren,

I also joined the community fairly recently.  Unfortunately, your reply doesn't really address my point (and in some ways reinforces it).  Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that there are new people who are motivated to work on Litecoin and are willing to do so for free, in their spare time.  I have donated my own resources to LTC by providing a fee-free mining pool for people to use.

My concern is that the original developers lack either the desire or motivation to work on the coin.  This suggests to me that they themselves do not have a meaningful stake anymore; If they did have a large stake and just did not have the time to work on the coin then it would be easy for them to simply to use some of their LTC to pay someone to work on the coin.  But this 'asking for donations' bit confuses me.  It seems like anyone who truly believed in LTC and mined it from the beginning should have quite a bit of it, and therefore there should not be a reason to ask the community who are already giving their resources to donate.

Not that anyone must adhere to past procedure, of course, but I'm curious how BTC development carried on after its leader bugged out?  My understanding is that some of the BTC crew were also relatively early and gathered a nice stockpile; whereas this is just one original dev that is somewhat handsoff, passing the work onto a newly inspired dev who isn't vested in LTC, yet.  Satoshi left his baby in the hands of others.  Did he pay them out of pocket to keep the torch lit?  I don't know, just asking.

I feel like many of us are all part of this project and I have no qualms of raising funds to support it, rather than ask the founder to put up on his own.

[wtogami]

Hey Warren,

I also joined the community fairly recently.  Unfortunately, your reply doesn't really address my point (and in some ways reinforces it).  Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that there are new people who are motivated to work on Litecoin and are willing to do so for free, in their spare time.  I have donated my own resources to LTC by providing a fee-free mining pool for people to use.

My concern is that the original developers lack either the desire or motivation to work on the coin.  This suggests to me that they themselves do not have a meaningful stake anymore; If they did have a large stake and just did not have the time to work on the coin then it would be easy for them to simply to use some of their LTC to pay someone to work on the coin.  But this 'asking for donations' bit confuses me.  It seems like anyone who truly believed in LTC and mined it from the beginning should have quite a bit of it, and therefore there should not be a reason to ask the community who are already giving their resources to donate.

The original developers are severely lacking time due to their day jobs.  They are contributing their expertise to development when I need help, often in cases to understand why things were done a particular way a year ago.  Probably because they already have stake and they don't have time to lead the current effort they have largely* refused to accept the current donations.

LTC needs to be well maintained and with many supporting vendor integration tools if is to have any chance of long-term growth in its fundamental value.  People need to use it as an actual medium of exchange for commerce instead of the manic-depressive speculation vehicle it currently is.  In support of this goal, it seems logical for large holders of LTC to donate a small portion to a long-term development effort if they want the rest of their holdings to have a better chance of growing in value.  More important than the holders of LTC are the exchanges of LTC.  They are the ones currently making profits from LTC trade.  They have an interest in the network being better maintained and the client more stable, because if chain accidents happen they can potentially be defrauded of a significant amount of money by double-spending theft.

Warren

* Largely but not entirely refused.  pooler said he "won't refuse" a small portion, and in my opinion he deserves it, especially after things like spending hours of his time to figure out how many competing pools were being cheated.  Your comments to the contrary in #litecoin suggesting that the pool was stealing from its miners was offensive, especially when you are a competing pool operator that would gain from spreading FUD.  Yes, a single CPU miner could fake a 35MH/s GPU farm when the pool was failing to check the difficulty correctly and you have a modified mining client.  (I'm guessing it didn't even need to do scrypt.  I didn't look at those details myself.)

[flound1129]

* Largely but not entirely refused.  pooler said he "won't refuse" a small portion, and in my opinion he deserves it, especially after things like spending hours of his time to figure out how many competing pools were being cheated.  Your comments to the contrary in #litecoin suggesting that the pool was stealing from its miners was offensive, especially when you are a competing pool operator that would gain from spreading FUD.  Yes, a single CPU miner could fake a 35MH/s GPU farm when the pool was failing to check the difficulty correctly and you have a modified mining client.  (I'm guessing it didn't even need to do scrypt.  I didn't look at those details myself.)

Yes, I agree with you now that I've analyzed the code myself, and I apologize for the accusatory tone I took when I started talking in the channel.  However, if instead of calling me an idiot and ridiculing me, you had given me the two sentence explanation that I came to myself (and of which you were obviously aware), the conversation likely would have gone quite differently.

What didn't really agree with me was the use of the word 'fake' in the original 'announcement' (which wasn't really an announcement, and was lacking necessary transparency).  The vulnerability does not, in fact (to my understanding), allow submission of fake shares, only valid shares with an artificially low difficulty.

If this is incorrect please feel free to add details in the thread I started for the vulnerability.

[flound1129]

LTC needs to be well maintained and with many supporting vendor integration tools if is to have any chance of long-term growth in its fundamental value.  People need to use it as an actual medium of exchange for commerce instead of the manic-depressive speculation vehicle it currently is.  In support of this goal, it seems logical for large holders of LTC to donate a small portion to a long-term development effort if they want the rest of their holdings to have a better chance of growing in value.  More important than the holders of LTC are the exchanges of LTC.  They are the ones currently making profits from LTC trade.  They have an interest in the network being better maintained and the client more stable, because if chain accidents happen they can potentially be defrauded of a significant amount of money by double-spending theft.

And yeah, I totally agree with this.  However, if the people who actually have a large stake in LTC don't care about the coin anymore, then I don't see why anyone should.

I'll tell you right now, if someone else made a new clone coin by porting scrypt to the 8.1 client, I'd wager it would immediately take off due to LTC's stagnation.

[peacefulmind]

LTC has been spread around a lot more evenly - remember BTC founder is gone as well.

Also this thread should be stickied - but I would not expect it in a BTC biased forum.  

I donated, and will donate again.

[wtogami]

LTC needs to be well maintained and with many supporting vendor integration tools if is to have any chance of long-term growth in its fundamental value.  People need to use it as an actual medium of exchange for commerce instead of the manic-depressive speculation vehicle it currently is.  In support of this goal, it seems logical for large holders of LTC to donate a small portion to a long-term development effort if they want the rest of their holdings to have a better chance of growing in value.  More important than the holders of LTC are the exchanges of LTC.  They are the ones currently making profits from LTC trade.  They have an interest in the network being better maintained and the client more stable, because if chain accidents happen they can potentially be defrauded of a significant amount of money by double-spending theft.

And yeah, I totally agree with this.  However, if the people who actually have a large stake in LTC don't care about the coin anymore, then I don't see why anyone should.

I'll tell you right now, if someone else made a new clone coin by porting scrypt to the 8.1 client, I'd wager it would immediately take off due to LTC's stagnation.

http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/period-charts.php?period=alltime&resolution=day&pair=ftc-btc&market=btc-e
Here's one of the typical pump-and-dump scam clone coins that steal money from people dumb enough to buy it during the initial mining bubble.  You will notice in this chart that the early miners made thousands of BTC with this pump-and-dump scheme, which triggered a massive increase in hashrate as more idiots piled on.  As soon as the difficulty was too high and the price had plummeted, the coin fully collapsed with not enough miners to sustain confirmations. The leadership of this scam then tried to lure back miners with the promise of BTC bounties, which helped them to push it along slowly toward a smaller difficulty drop introduced in a mandatory hardfork client update.  Even after the adjusted client they are again now stuck with falling hashrate, the scam now having fully run its course.

The miners don't care about the long-term safety of the network.  So it would make no difference for the scam coin to be based on 0.6.x or 0.8.x.