Good.
Hunterbunter, what do you think about that?
I think it's all great discussion, and it's encouraging to see.
This coin is far from dead, and the price is going to do what the price is going to do for the time being. I'm still happy that people are seeing this as a good buying opportunity, as I do myself. It implies that people still believe in its mission, as I do too.
I've had some rl responsibilities hinder my ability to push forward the devcoin proposal since I took over in September, so the reason it is delayed is largely my fault. On the bright side, looking through the proposal now, there's still nothing that I would change about it, so I'm still confident that it will improve things long term (this is what I'm talking about, if you don't know:
http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=devcoin_division_proposal).
There were some kinks in the change of leadership when I took over; a lot of admins just disappeared with the falling price, new devtome writers weren't being added by Unthinkingbit, and whole bunch of other stuff I don't have any control over was not being done - my role as "leader" felt very much like a namesake more than anything actually meaningful, and it really felt like I'd been handed a sinking ship just so it had someone to go down with it...without a manual. Maybe that's still the case, however this isn't like a stock where a company can go bankrupt and shut down (like penny stocks), the cryptocurrency is meritable in and of itself, and can be revamped as many times as we need to. As many have mentioned before, a lot of people here don't even earn devcoins because they need the money, they earn them because of its noble mission.
As for the proposed changes themselves, UTB is still in control of accounting, and doesn't want the account files changed (account.py), so instead we're going to have to implement the proposal via the ongoing bounty file, which I do control. The way the files run, however, means it's not going to perfectly divide all the divisions as expected. At the moment, what you see on something like
http://dvccountdown.blisteringdevelopers.com is an imperfect estimate of the final shares, and when the account files are run, things like ratings, admin bonuses, marketing and all that are calculated by UTB and stored on his github. Once they are on there, it is "official", and final. I do my own calculations daily, but the only one that matters is the final one, which sometimes varies from mine slightly, probably because of timing. He then pushes those files to the various file custodians to be spread by the client. To implement the division proposal perfectly, it would have to be done before pushing to clients, which UTB doesn't want to do, from our last conversation. Doing it in the ongoing file means I have to predict what the final values are going to be, create normalizations on these, then the account script adds these to the final account.csv when UTB runs it. While I can make a very good guess, it's not going to be perfect. If the community still supports implementing the proposal this way, then that's what I'll do. I haven't calculated the error, but I estimate it to be around 5%, against the perfect version.
There are several other issues we face, going forward.
The first, is our exchange presence. Vircurex in particular is a problem, because it's run by the same people who run crypto-stocks, and while both were quite busy for a while, I've been hearing nothing but bad things about them for the last twelve months. Vircurex was hacked some time ago, and the owners promised to pay everyone back from the profits of trading, which was slowly working for a time. Then a few months ago, another issue they had meant they had to freeze funds, causing people to basically flee the exchange, which destroyed their trading volume. It still seems to be running ok now, but the volume is ultra light, meaning that both confidence in them is at an all time low, and there is extremely little incentive for the owners to build or invest anything more into it. The risk of putting funds on there long term is too high for my tastes. We are also listed on Cryptsy, which doesn't seem to be suffering the same fate, but being on only one and a half exchanges is disconcerting. We simply need more exchanges, which we aren't going to get until we're more interesting to speculators.
The second, is that we never managed to generate a block on the live chain, so couldn't confidently say our new client worked properly. This had repercussions down the line because people think the client hasn't changed in over a year, when it has had a lot of work done. The changes work in the test-net, but we have to convince the bigger merge mining pools to try them live and confirm all is well. One thing we could do is simply declare the new client official, and assume it works. It's not good practice to do this, but we may not have any other option without investing serious capital into mining hardware. I tried to do it with blisterpool, but p2pool just didn't pay out frequently enough to keep people interested...even when I was paying a 20% bonus in devcoins! I have had other ideas to get people to lend us their hash, but haven't had the time to actually do any of it. My time will become more available after January, which is when I can more seriously attempt the division changes again.
Devtome writers haven't been added for some time. UTB is still in charge of adding them, and I believe there is a substantial amount of work that goes into vetting new writers, which he seems to not have had the time to do. He is still around and is still doing the files, so the only thing writers can do about this is hound him until he does it, unfortunately.
Lastly, I wasn't exactly given a handbook on things when Unthinkingbit handed over the reigns, and essentially admins as they were have complete control over their assigned duties. This lack of organization is extremely difficult to problem solve, so one of the things I will address soon is who is actually still here doing their jobs. As someone mentioned, accountability has been poor, and that has to change if we have any hope of recovering. On that note, we will probably go through a mass culling of administrators in the next few rounds. Anyone who is still willing to work on devcoins (and has been), irrespective of the price are of course immune to the cull, but I suspect many haven't been bothering to do their duties as promised. I know the pay exists and is supposed to have some meaning, but to draw on the movies for a moment, I would rather have 300 Spartans than 3000 potters, sculptors and blacksmiths.
