How can developers make a decent return for their work in crypto currency

[neuromancer56]

I'm a software developer with many years of experience, and I have been kicking around all sorts of ideas, but I find it hard to come up with a scenario where I would make any decent return writing crypto coin code.   Heck from what I understand Gavin wasn't getting fully paid for a long time.  If he isn't getting paid enough, how could any other developer expect anything? 

One area is the alt coin arena.   How do the developers get paid unless they pre-mine and they get raked over the coals for doing so.   From the way I see it, it would be better if a percentage of the mined coins continually went to the developers, so no pre-mine would be necessary, and the coin would keep improving.

Is there any area to get into that makes sense?

[AgentME]

I don't think it's much of a decentralized cryptocurrency if it involves continual payments to some specific hardcoded user. I think you'd be hard-pressed to see a cryptocurrency like that take off. Bitcoin received a lot of popularity for being completely decentralized.

Running a useful service for a cryptocurrency like an exchange, mining pool, etc, which takes a small known fee is probably the best bet for getting paid for cryptocurrency-related development.

[mustyoshi]

Developers of coins shouldn't hold any coins hostage or give themselves an unfair advantage in the coin.

If their coin is truely great they will get donations from the users for their hard work.

Otherwise we reduce all these altcoins to ponzi schemes.

[iGotSpots]

If you develop something good, you will get donations.

And you could always mine like the rest of us, VLAD

[neuromancer56]

If there are any crypto coin developers here making a decent wage of $40/hour using any means please let us know how you do this (pre-mine, donations, something else).  If there are any crypto coin developers making more than $8/hour on donations alone please let us know this is possible.

[AgentME]

If you haven't figured it out yet, making open source decentralized P2P software is not the correct field to go into if you want to guarantee yourself a good income from the work.

[barwizi]

i am starting to believe in the hard coded thing. I have been considering methdos of reserving then taking addresses.

Example, i create a new coin. I have hardcoded 10 addresses to each receive 0.3 %

the first one is mine, the next two will be for the two best pools over a period of 1 month. The next two are for The first two exchanges to take the coin.
One will be for a faucet, another for manual bounties and another for giveaway. the last two will be reserves in case the dev team needs a hot wallet.

[AgentME]

i am starting to believe in the hard coded thing. I have been considering methdos of reserving then taking addresses.

Example, i create a new coin. I have hardcoded 10 addresses to each receive 0.3 %

the first one is mine, the next two will be for the two best pools over a period of 1 month. The next two are for The first two exchanges to take the coin.
One will be for a faucet, another for manual bounties and another for giveaway. the last two will be reserves in case the dev team needs a hot wallet.

Is this a hypothetical, or a feature you omitted from mentioning in the description of your Noirbits currency?

From the description of the Noirbits currency:

Centralized management has caused the downfall of too many coins.

...

There will be no premine.

All bounties will be from the community.

Also, to be honest, what development work is there on Noirbits besides changing some Litecoin parameters? I feel like I'm the only one not drinking the clonecoin kool-aid around here.

[solracx]

i am starting to believe in the hard coded thing. I have been considering methdos of reserving then taking addresses.

Example, i create a new coin. I have hardcoded 10 addresses to each receive 0.3 %

the first one is mine, the next two will be for the two best pools over a period of 1 month. The next two are for The first two exchanges to take the coin.
One will be for a faucet, another for manual bounties and another for giveaway. the last two will be reserves in case the dev team needs a hot wallet.

The miners really have  a different perspective.

But honestly, over time it will change.  It is just not sustainable an environment and there seems to be little reward for innovation.

Imagine if every startup had to sell all its shares to the public and the stakeholders had to buy it back.

Anyway, that's why I built ZenithCoin,  to test out the theory.

[solracx]

Also, to be honest, what development work is there on Noirbits besides changing some Litecoin parameters? I feel like I'm the only one not drinking the clonecoin kool-aid around here.

True.  Same as most every other coin out there.

It will however ultimately boil down to which coin adds more utility (i.e. services).  

Bitcoin clearly has superior services, however new devs should consider that Bitcoin has its own constraints that give new coins an opportunity to exploit.

Litecoin for example exploited the first problem,  the lack of decentralization of miners.

Other coins, will eventually exploit other flaws and have a chance to grow.

It is only the miners who care about 'pre-mine', 'insta-mine' B.S.   Actual users don't care.

In fact, the russian coins... NVC and CopperLark  have held on to high prices because they control the mining.

[AgentME]

It is only the miners who care about 'pre-mine', 'insta-mine' B.S.   Actual users don't care.

That doesn't sound like a good thing (the idea that users don't care).

[barwizi]

i am starting to believe in the hard coded thing. I have been considering methdos of reserving then taking addresses.

Example, i create a new coin. I have hardcoded 10 addresses to each receive 0.3 %

the first one is mine, the next two will be for the two best pools over a period of 1 month. The next two are for The first two exchanges to take the coin.
One will be for a faucet, another for manual bounties and another for giveaway. the last two will be reserves in case the dev team needs a hot wallet.

Is this a hypothetical, or a feature you omitted from mentioning in the description of your Noirbits currency?

From the description of the Noirbits currency:

Centralized management has caused the downfall of too many coins.

...

There will be no premine.

All bounties will be from the community.

Also, to be honest, what development work is there on Noirbits besides changing some Litecoin parameters? I feel like I'm the only one not drinking the clonecoin kool-aid around here.

First you Develop a coin, get it to a market to give it a starting value. Then you begin to roll out services, and goods that can be bought with a currency that has measurable value determined by market forces. your judgmental tone begs you read the OP. Devs want profitability, i did not hold onto any coin before releasing it and since i get no donations, there is hardly any incentive to further develop. I have many ideas and most of them garner the interest but no traction since people want devs to do it for free. A total clone of LTC could do better than LTC if it has active devs who are well incentivised. The open community idea is great but does not pay bills. Getting a stipend for my work is not centralizing anything, it is simply getting paid for my work. 

If you did understand anything about development you'd know that any form of idea needs developing, testing , refinement then release. even when released it does not mean people will like it. Have you done any coding before? If so please highlight how easy it is to code something useful. We live in a time where governments either frown on cryptos or don't understand them at all. i spent a very long phone call explaining to some officials what cryptos are, how they work and how they benefit society. after they expressed confusion i sent them simplified explanatory emails. They have agreed to conference again but they asked me one question, since it is not fiat, how do i expect to deal with the regs of founding such an enterprise? in which tax domain does it fall? Have you ever read any countries banking laws? i have read through quite a few and none has even an idea of how to truly classify what we are doing here in proper context.

So to be honest, you have no idea what you are talking about until you try what the "kool-aid" drinkers and makers are doing. Don't be a hack that just talks, if you don't like altcoins, or just Noirbits, at least be an informed person, right now your honesty just seems like jaded opinion.

[rbdrbd]

It is only the miners who care about 'pre-mine', 'insta-mine' B.S.   Actual users don't care.

That doesn't sound like a good thing (the idea that users don't care).

I think it sounds like a good thing. Miners bitch and moan about a dev actually getting paid for doing work, and devs have to take their shit. It's good that users don't do that.

Except that most often, miners are the coins earliest (and most influential) users.

[Redcoin]

They dont make money from the coin, and just do it as a hobby

[usahero]

Expecting people to donate to developers is not very smart thing to expect..

Just design the coin in the way that it gives enough benefit for users and yourself. If you design it in unfavorable way, there is pretty big chance your coin will "die". If you create a totally "fair" coin, you might not want to continue development, because of no benefit for you, and the coin dies. So what you have to do is to balance premine/tax/whatever strategy in a way that is favorable for everyone.

[thekidcoin]

I'm a software developer with many years of experience, and I have been kicking around all sorts of ideas, but I find it hard to come up with a scenario where I would make any decent return writing crypto coin code.   Heck from what I understand Gavin wasn't getting fully paid for a long time.  If he isn't getting paid enough, how could any other developer expect anything? 

One area is the alt coin arena.   How do the developers get paid unless they pre-mine and they get raked over the coals for doing so.   From the way I see it, it would be better if a percentage of the mined coins continually went to the developers, so no pre-mine would be necessary, and the coin would keep improving.

Is there any area to get into that makes sense?

pre-mine .5 - 1% of the coins.  Tough luck if anyone whines.

[neuromancer56]

Right now the rewards are just slanted way too much to the miners and not enough to the developers.  And pre-mine is just way too much guesswork.  You could pre-mine way too much, or not nearly enough.  I'm thinking though what we really want is a long term, if not perpetual commitment to development of the currency.  That means giving a perpetual reasonable small % of the rewards to the developers.    The developers can then give bounties to pools, exchanges, etc.  I don't think you can just hard code 10 addresses though for the developers.  You would need to change those addresses over time to protect the private keys.  Maybe we can come up with some other mechanism for making this happen, but something needs to happen, otherwise we are just going to be left with a bunch of worthless abandoned coins.  That does not benefit the miners or anyone else.  If I'm mining a coin, I do not want the developer to view it as some kind of hobby that gives them no reward.  The developer is bound to move on.  I want the developer to be more interested than me the miner in seeing the coin succeed.  Otherwise miners are all going to be interested in is pump and dump, which is what we are seeing now. As a miner I want coins I can rally behind and stick with for the long term.

[markm]

Isn't it pretty much like any other business?

Since you are it seems looking for a job, what you basically need is a business, company, corp or whatever that will hire you.

So it boils down to how do such entities afford to hire people.

That in turn can vary over time and in response to market forces.

For example when bitcoins are going up and up and up on average month to month, maybe a company holding lots of bitcoin can afford to hire someone by selling a few bitcoins, hopefully selling few enough that the value of their unspent bitcoins is still growing despite the fact they are spending money on an employee.

But when bitcoins are going down in value on average month to month, maybe such companies will have to lay-off their workers.

So maybe a company could also mine bitcoins? First off it would be nice to mine enough to keep the total value of their hoard of coins from falling even while the individual value per coin is falling.

Then maybe some companies might consider diversifying. Maybe hold and mine bitcoins and litecoins. Of course when I say mine bitcoins I mean mine all the merged mined coins, or at least as many of them as is technically feasible without the overhead of servicing lots of blockchains causing overall loss. (Some folks have claimed for example that because GeistGeld's blocks are so rapid they lose too many nanoseconds processing GeistGeld work, degrading the processing of other chains by more than the GeistGeld coins are worth to them in their system of assigning or evaluating worth.)

Do you have the skills to develop pool software that tracks all the merged mined chains and rewards all the miners with the correct amount of each of the merged coins?

If so maybe you could start a merged mining pool business, which if it is successful might be able to afford to compensate you for your coding and maintenance time writing and maintaining and updating and bugfixing such pool software?

For me since bounties have not resulted in anyone producing such software I am now moving on to the idea of a merged mining business, that would be the only user of a merged mining pool so that the problem of divvying up the mined coins would not exist. The company would own the pool and all the coins mined, presto no need for coders to code software for divvying up the coins. So I guess maybe coders put themselves out of a job by being so slow to respond to a coding need that the market moved on to look for ways to do business without needing new code.

There is of course a lot of overhead in running a merged mining pool, even for just one user (the company); already a third dedicated server is being set up because the two already in use just aren't enough to do the job well. There is also a lot of delay in obtaining decent ASIC gear to mine with, so that right now is not a great time to try to raise capital to obtain such equipment because right now the prices of equipment that can actually be deployed within a few business days of ordering it are exorbitant.

I was a programmer for most of my career, so have had decades to wonder how is it that so many programmers end up being hired by managers/businesses instead of being the ones who hire business managers to run their business office for them so that they are free to spend their time programming instead of dealing with whatever it is that business managers deal with.

It seems that maybe managing a business well enough for the business to be able to afford to employ anyone might not be a trivial task. Could it be that it is even harder than actually programming is? Could it be that programmers wanting to hire a business manager to set up a business capable of employing the programmer would realistically find they need to pay the manager more than they the programmer gets paid if they are to succeed in finding and keeping a manager who can actually do the business-managing job?

Personally I no longer have time to code, merely trying to create and run enterprises that would like to be able to afford one or more coders (or even one or more hours of my own time spent coding instead of trying to raise money to pay for coding) takes more time than a normal full time worker puts in working.

-MarkM-

[Praxis]

They can have the button ready on ./cgminer ... so they can mine from the very start
that is bound to be profitable

[markm]

Right now the rewards are just slanted way too much to the miners and not enough to the developers.  And pre-mine is just way too much guesswork.  You could pre-mine way too much, or not nearly enough.  I'm thinking though what we really want is a long term, if not perpetual commitment to development of the currency.  That means giving a perpetual reasonable small % of the rewards to the developers.    The developers can then give bounties to pools, exchanges, etc.  I don't think you can just hard code 10 addresses though for the developers.  You would need to change those addresses over time to protect the private keys.  Maybe we can come up with some other mechanism for making this happen, but something needs to happen, otherwise we are just going to be left with a bunch of worthless abandoned coins.  That does not benefit the miners or anyone else.  If I'm mining a coin, I do not want the developer to view it as some kind of hobby that gives them no reward.  The developer is bound to move on.  I want the developer to be more interested than me the miner in seeing the coin succeed.  Otherwise miners are all going to be interested in is pump and dump, which is what we are seeing now. As a miner I want coins I can rally behind and stick with for the long term.

You are free to pay the developers of any coin you choose to mine to do whatever updates/improvements/bugfixes you would like some/any coin you mine to have coded/developed...

-MarkM-