That's because DVC is unlike every other crypto-coin, and I think most don't realize how it works, or it's potential yet, just like when bitcoins first started (there are thousand of people who rightfully belong on the bitcoin or devcoin share lists, but they just don't know about it yet). It's doing to open source what mining did to digital currency. The analogy is that of the 200M coins created per round, they're distributed based on the number of people doing work to earn them, instead of machines - with btc everyone competes for the transaction pot with hardware. With dvc, it's essentially the same thing but instead of calculating hashes, people are creating things. As time goes on, the btc hashes get more difficult as the number of miners increase, and similarly dvc payouts become harder to earn because the initial work has already been done, and more difficult work lies in improving it (as well as more people doing work). Collaboration on work is similar to how mining pools operate, and there is an opportunity for people to develop ways to make collaboration between strangers easier.
But is it for example possible that the guys from blender.org (the 3d program) apply for devcoins?
Do they fulfil all criteria?
They have a large developer base... if they were to barge into devcoin, wouldn't that "increase the difficulty" (to continue your analogy with developing=mining) ?
That would mean fewer shares for everyone, ...
so what is the goal here? To encourage NEW open source software... or to try and win over all the open source developer programs that already exist?
If all those guys worldwide learn about devcoins... wouldn't all the shares be gone in a minute?
That is a good thing, right?
Originally it was a share per project, leaving it up to the project lead to divvy the coins up among the team.
So by that method, if Blender was deemed a suitable project, the project would get one share.
Nonetheless that are probably well over 4000 projects out there, and only 4000 shares in a round.
We do have the ability to do fifths of a share though so could support up to 20,000 projects.
However the closer we get to using up all the share slots the more chunky/grainy the outcomes will be, because the clients rotate through the lines of the receivers file and if the number of lines does not divide evenly into 4000 some lines will get used more than others.
If most of the lines get used 100 times but a few get used 101 times that is only 1% difference in how much different shares are worth; but if all lines get used once and some get used twice, some are getting twice as much coin per share as others!
That is why I keep urging that the total number of shares be kept small compared to 4000; so that we go through the list lots of times per round, so that the ones that get used an extra time are not getting massively more coins, relatively, to others.
Of course another way to make them all even would be to always pad the list so it always divides evenly into 4000. That might be a good way to implement a bounties fund, for example; simply pad out the list to the next number of lines that divides evenly into 4000 by adding lines that pay out to an address used to accumulate coins to use for bounties.
Because a couple of projects - bitcoin and open transactions - are so incredibly important to our mission, an exception was made for those, allowing more than one person on each of those teams to get on the receivers list with a whole share to themself instead of the whole project getting one share to split up amongst its team as it sees fit.
Obviously the pay Devtome writers have been getting looks even more insanely huge when compared to these payscales, so it is no surprise that there has been so much backlash against the Devtome payscale.
Comparing Devtome to other projects it should count itself lucky if, like Bitcoin and Open Transactions, it gets to have more than one of its team each have one share!
-MarkM-
