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djohnston
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November 30, 2013, 08:22:14 AM |
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Bitexch, You may be interested to know that Ron explicitly called JR a bottleneck, and not in disapproving terms: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=265488.msg3759797#msg3759797. I saw Ron's post. We all want more J.R. time. I know he is doing what he can to make that happen very soon. Though I still don't think a Board member has to be online 24/7. We shouldn't be structuring things in a way that Board members have to be online 24/7. I say this as I'm up at 3:21 a.m. eastern time answering questions on Bitcointalk.org because everyone else is asleep. |
“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” ― Frédéric Bastiat
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djohnston
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November 30, 2013, 08:23:52 AM |
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I love you guys and I hope I answered some questions in a helpful way. But its way too late and I've got to get up in the morning. Good night my friends.
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“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” ― Frédéric Bastiat
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bitexch
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November 30, 2013, 08:25:30 AM |
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Though I still don't think a Board member has to be online 24/7. We shouldn't be structuring things in a way that Board members have to be online 24/7.
Who said anything about 24/7? I asked a very specific question which neither you nor vokain has answered: Do you think it is OK for a board member to be completely inactive 2 out of every 7 days of the week. More importantly: What does the community think? Is everyone satisfied with JR's level of commitment to the project? |
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bitexch
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November 30, 2013, 08:36:49 AM |
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I've been distracted fighting FUD all day on the Bitcoin Sub Reddit.
You guys spent $18,000 on a PR firm. Shouldn't they be handling fighting FUD. I would think that for $18,000 they should be willing to do this...
Not so much. The flame wars (which I hope are over, I talked with Alex about ways to cooperate instead of lob grenades at each) are pretty much up to those in a position to speak to the technical issues to answer. Ron, me, JR, Taariq, and so forth.
The "PR" firm, read Michael Terpin of BitAngels is helping the Foundation line up Conference speaking spots, talk with major non-Bitcoin media, assemble press kits, and write thought leadership stuff. Its not so much post things on social media, its more how do we get this story into Forbes. Michael is a really experienced guy and knows Bitcoin well having co-founded BitAngels and works with lots of Bitcoin startups. I'm confident he is the right Media Director for Mastercoin.
In my opinion, if $18,000 doesn't buy us someone with technical knowledge, this just means the board made a bad decision about which PR firm it hired. I would be interested to hear what everyone else thinks. Quote from: djohnston on Today at 07:36:10 AM
2. Folks are asking for a road map and plan. My understanding is that the Spec is our development road map. Starting with the Decentralized Exchange the idea is to offer a bounty for each of the features one by one (obviously some can be done in parallel) until all the features are built. I know the developers have estimated its going to take another 3 or 4 weeks to knock out the kinks in the current implementation.
Presumably it will take less time if we hire full-time developers!?!?!?!
I completely agree brother. Lets get these awesome guys full time. I've seen the email back and forth. Its easier to say though than to extract yourself from a job you have been at for 5 years, 30 notice is normally a minimum.
You and the rest of the board seem to have a most singular tunnel-vision: Are our current developers the only possible developers for MSC? If I am not mistaken, none of them wants to work full time, why twist their arm about it? We should be branching out into the rest of the Bitcoin community to look for developers. |
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TaaviK
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November 30, 2013, 08:44:29 AM |
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Who said anything about 24/7? I asked a very specific question which neither you nor vokain has answered: Do you think it is OK for a board member to be completely inactive 2 out of every 7 days of the week.
More importantly: What does the community think? Is everyone satisfied with JR's level of commitment to the project?
I think we need to give it a rest. This has been under heavy dicussion these last weeks. Lets give it some time for the solution to come forward. If we only ever force speed on everything we'll tire ourselves out pretty fast. And however much I want MSC to move forward, I'd rather not see JR or others involved sell their souls for MSC. On another note, I want to thank the foundation and the developers for all their work. I think you have been great and I especially like how you all conduct yourselves even in high-pressure situations. It gives me much faith in you guys. I know I put my money in the right place when I sent my coins to exodus. Im sending you all my good thoughts, espcially to the board members since you are constantly fighting the rough PR battles. |
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zbx
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November 30, 2013, 08:48:27 AM |
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Who said anything about 24/7? I asked a very specific question which neither you nor vokain has answered: Do you think it is OK for a board member to be completely inactive 2 out of every 7 days of the week.
More importantly: What does the community think? Is everyone satisfied with JR's level of commitment to the project?
I think we need to give it a rest. This has been under heavy dicussion these last weeks. Lets give it some time for the solution to come forward. If we only ever force speed on everything we'll tire ourselves out pretty fast. And however much I want MSC to move forward, I'd rather not see JR or others involved sell their souls for MSC. For the record, according to this post, JR is "completely off the internet evenings, weekends, and vacations". This is a fast-moving, global project, and those involved in it need to be able to keep themselves reasonably up-to-date, at least. |
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Faraday
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November 30, 2013, 08:48:45 AM |
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Im sending you all my good thoughts, espcially to the board members since you are constantly fighting the rough PR battles.
One question: Has the PR firm that we paid a large sum of money to actually done anything yet? I think it has already been said but why are the board members 'fighting PR battles' in the first place? |
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djohnston
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November 30, 2013, 08:53:49 AM |
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Who said anything about 24/7? I asked a very specific question which neither you nor vokain has answered: Do you think it is OK for a board member to be completely inactive 2 out of every 7 days of the week.
More importantly: What does the community think? Is everyone satisfied with JR's level of commitment to the project?
I'll answer you directly. YES. I think it is OK for a Board Member to be completely inactive 2 out of every 7 days of the week.
I think we are having a difference of opinion over the "role" of a board member. At a typical company (which Mastercoin is not) "Board Members" typically show up to 6 meetings per year and vote on a few critical decisions, which new CEO to hire, the size of employee vesting, auditing of financials, projections and so forth. In contrast the Mastercoin Board gets emails and takes votes every day of the week. It just takes a majority to approve something, so we aren't even inactive over the weekend, even if J.R. or someone is away.
No one on the board signed up to work on Mastercoin 7 days per week (almost everyone is running a company of their own), everyone is a volunteer who participated in the Exodus Address and wants to see Mastercoin succeed and wanted to provide balance and transparency so that this wasn't the "J.R. project", but took in lots of community input.
Now when it comes to someone that has singed up to spend his full time effort on Mastercoin such as Ron he has been working 16 hour days from the time he wakes up to the time he falls asleep in front of his computer 7 days per week since taking on the Executive Director of the Foundation role. Now Ron is getting more help and bandwidth from others and thats a good thing. Volunteers are great, but you need people's full time efforts to get things done.
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“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” ― Frédéric Bastiat
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zbx
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November 30, 2013, 08:54:45 AM |
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5. Someone pointed out that the Board is getting old. As in its just a temporary structure left over from the formation. I COMPLETELY AGREE. Its time we had our first board election.
+1 |
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djohnston
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November 30, 2013, 08:58:28 AM |
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One question: Has the PR firm that we paid a large sum of money to actually done anything yet? I think it has already been said but why are the board members 'fighting PR battles' in the first place?
Yes, they have done a lot of good work, and when the first article lands I'll be sure to post it here. Reporters are slow on holidays and weekends. The best time to get an article is early in the week when people aren't off doing things offline.
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“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” ― Frédéric Bastiat
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bitexch
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November 30, 2013, 09:14:07 AM |
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The "PR" firm, read Michael Terpin of BitAngels is helping the Foundation line up Conference speaking spots, talk with major non-Bitcoin media, assemble press kits, and write thought leadership stuff. Its not so much post things on social media, its more how do we get this story into Forbes. Michael is a really experienced guy and knows Bitcoin well having co-founded BitAngels and works with lots of Bitcoin startups. I'm confident he is the right Media Director for Mastercoin.
You shouldn't be trying to get a *Forbes article* written about Mastercoin when people don't have well-defined Mastercoin balances in their wallets! The fact that the board *unanimously* thought that hiring a PR firm at this point in the project was a good idea speaks volumes about their ability to direct the project; and is indicative of a gross misunderstanding of priorities. |
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bitexch
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November 30, 2013, 09:16:21 AM |
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I think it has already been said but why are the board members 'fighting PR battles' in the first place?
+1 |
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bitwhizz
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November 30, 2013, 09:30:41 AM |
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Guys, here’s my pie in the sky proposal. I wanted to throw it out there as a starting point in how to get this project back on the tracks and moving forward. I invested time into this proposal, as well as discussing it with my business partner, so I would highly appreciate if someone from the board would take 10 minutes and speak to me directly about it, even if the answer is a "no".
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I think we can pretty much all agree that the 900lb problem with things at the current point is that there is no dedicated dev team, and there is a lack of process control/procedure. The current devs we have have done a great job getting us to this point, but they are only working part time (due to their perfectly understandable need to sustain themselves and pay their bills). We sorely need a dedicated team that can work on the core part of Mastercoin, and serve as a lynchpin over which the community ecosystem can form.
YES +1 |
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djohnston
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November 30, 2013, 10:21:09 AM |
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5. Someone pointed out that the Board is getting old. As in its just a temporary structure left over from the formation. I COMPLETELY AGREE. Its time we had our first board election.
+1Ok, so we need a way to count votes based on ownership of MSC (someone let me know if others have already figured this out). I propose the following to implement a simple version of our Proof of Stake system. 1. A yes or no question is posted. 2. All those with MSC make a small BTC transaction from their address to prove they own a certain number of MSC. 3. If the MSC holder posts a transaction for 0.0001 BTC than they are answering Yes. 4. If the MSC holder posts a transaction for 0.0002 BTC than they are answering No. 5. In the case of multiple choice questions each choice is given a number, a vote for the corresponding number is counted as a vote in favor of that choice. This is a fairly limited system, which only supports one vote during a specified time period. This said it would get the job done and I believe we have all the tools to code this up as a simple script. For example: A. Use which ever of the Mastercoin Explorers / Client implementations in order to look up the Mastercoin Addresses. B. Check recent transactions at the public address of all those holders of Mastercoins. C. If a recent transaction meets the voting definition, then count the answer and add the # of Yes' or No's based on the the number of MSC held by the public address. D. Add up all the answers for Yes or No from all the Mastercoin Addresses and determine the majority decision. This sounds fairly simple to implement. Anyone want to come up with a simple script to test this out? There are a couple edge cases we need to think about when it comes to dust rules and the rest, but this is important and would facilitate a lot of community input and is much more accurate than a poll who anyone on Bitcointalk.org can participate in. The first thing we can use it for is holding the first Board elections. While we are on the subject here is the Mastercoin Legal Repo is any wants to help improve it. We just started with a fork of the Bitcoin Foundation by laws. https://github.com/DavidJohnstonCEO/Mastercoin-Foundation-Legal-Repo
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“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” ― Frédéric Bastiat
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bitexch
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November 30, 2013, 10:24:03 AM
Last edit: November 30, 2013, 10:38:40 AM by bitexch |
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I think we are having a difference of opinion over the "role" of a board member.
Our difference of opinion regarding the role of a board member should be separate from the actual duties that someone agrees to undertake when becoming a board member. The fact that there isn't a list of expectations means that in every case they can construe their behavior as in line with their position. This is not to say that the duties shouldn't be fluid and dynamic, it's only to say that they should be there! I don't know the personal MSC holdings of the board members, but in any case there is at least $50 million of other non-board-member's money invested in MSC, it's not reasonable to be so wishy-washy about what is required of our board! There ought to be a discussion among the community regarding what we expect of our board members. |
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bitexch
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November 30, 2013, 10:26:39 AM |
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I'll answer you directly. YES. I think it is OK for a Board Member to be completely inactive 2 out of every 7 days of the week.
Thank you for answering me directly. Now, let me ask you a further question: do you think it is OK for a board member to be completely inactive 2 out of every 7 days of the week, AND not active during the night AND have a full-time job - so that he is basically forced to deal with urgent Mastercoin decisions when he has free time at work? |
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DGulari
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November 30, 2013, 11:39:50 AM |
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Not EVERY week, but this week is a big family week in the US.
Hasn't JR said that he can't be involved with Mastercoin on the weekends? That's 2 out of 7 days... JR's wife is ruining this project. $100 million down the drain because some woman can't live without her hubby mowing the lawn on Sunday. What a drag. |
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littleblue
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November 30, 2013, 12:50:57 PM |
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Not EVERY week, but this week is a big family week in the US.
Hasn't JR said that he can't be involved with Mastercoin on the weekends? That's 2 out of 7 days... JR's wife is ruining this project. $100 million down the drain because some woman can't live without her hubby mowing the lawn on Sunday. What a drag.   |
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Nagan
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November 30, 2013, 01:42:30 PM |
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2. Folks are asking for a road map and plan. My understanding is that the Spec is our development road map. Starting with the Decentralized Exchange the idea is to offer a bounty for each of the features one by one (obviously some can be done in parallel) until all the features are built. I know the developers have estimated its going to take another 3 or 4 weeks to knock out the kinks in the current implementation.
3. Centralization. I'm highly in favor of DECENTRALIZATION. This is an open source project. The Mastercoin Foundation doesn't control this project and you are free to suggest anything you want to the developers and seek to develop consensus. You are free to build your own implementations, websites, suggest bounties on the Trello, in fact I encourage you too! Bitcoin is strong because it is decentralized, I'm seeking to build the same thing here. The less that requires the Foundation to do the better. If you have ways to hand off tasks your input is very welcome.
Exactly. I think decentralized exchange is the most important thing at the moment. Once it's out there, it's something tangible, and also market itself will control price of mastercoins, following board decisions etc. Could be a good thing. Up for decentralization. People shouldn't express requirements to get something from the Mastercoin Foundation before starting their development. At this stage I favour the bounty system JR started. Once feature is coded and it works - you get a reward. There's plenty of funds available - not many open source projects are happy to have that incentive. A proposal like mastercoin daemon is a great idea, just if we can't it get running without some overcommitment from the Foundation, maybe it's not time for it yet. Call me naïf, but if someone would show up with some excellent implementation ready, wouldn't he be rewarded even without an upfront bounty? I would vote for him for sure. Heck I would even reward him with my own funds. My belief is that greatest solutions come from late night hacking, not externally hired people with 9-5 jobs, even if it's slower/less professional that way. The least thing I would like to see in Mastercoin is it being tied with some company that has it's momentum on architecture. In my opinion, if $18,000 doesn't buy us someone with technical knowledge, this just means the board made a bad decision about which PR firm it hired. I would be interested to hear what everyone else thinks.
I think it's a good decision, it's not a huge sum for PR. And saying that I'm in no way connected to the BitAngels. |
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Nagan
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November 30, 2013, 01:47:25 PM |
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I propose the following to implement a simple version of our Proof of Stake system.
1. A yes or no question is posted.
2. All those with MSC make a small BTC transaction from their address to prove they own a certain number of MSC.
3. If the MSC holder posts a transaction for 0.0001 BTC than they are answering Yes.
4. If the MSC holder posts a transaction for 0.0002 BTC than they are answering No.
5. In the case of multiple choice questions each choice is given a number, a vote for the corresponding number is counted as a vote in favor of that choice.
One up. This system would fit me perfectly as a stakeholder. |
Bitcoin is physical.
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