What's wrong with the Google Docs? If you can make a spec for what's needed for the website I can ask around with some developer friends if they are interested. I would do it myself but I already have a todo list that only increases in size...
Google Docs are fine for limited scale.
We're accelerating.
I don't have time to make a proper spec.
The idea: Manage higher scale, more expenditures, nicer UI, tracking, admin section to allow us to officially enter expenditures (which then become public), tags, ...
FYI this is not just for us.
Read about
DACs, and soon David's whitepaper about AAs (it's not published yet).
Let's use the term AA here.
We are in fact an AA with the purpose of building AAs. We are not just a financial system.
We will grow out of this and share our infrastructure with anyone wanting to build AAs.
This budget component in itself will eventually serve many, many AAs. It's a huge project.
(Everything we're doing is a huge project).
That last part sounds good and I understand your reasons for the first part. I was just thinking, given that we aren't there yet, and with Willett's note that someone attempted to clickbait him a few days ago, it would be a shame to lose a big chunk of a big chunk of money. Something where a quick sane standard (i.e. for anyone holding foundation money must either use armory offline wallet, or keep it as a totally cold/paper wallet) would go a long way. You could be open about the general technique(s) you were using at that kind of a high level to secure the funds among the foundation members (or whoever) to give confidence to the community, without having to go into details about who, what, where, etc.
Just seen too many stories of people losing tons of BTC to thieves in the last few months... would hate to see that happen here. That's all.
A standard is good, however it can't enforce armory.
Some people that will be holding funds haven't used armory, and don't have to learn / buy a machine strong enough to run it.
Please know that we'll all be using cold wallets for this purpose, just every one has his own implementation of cold wallet.
A standard is good to develop anyway. It's just that it might take a while until we adhere to the standard.
A few questions regarding the Mastercoin funds:
1) Has any thought been given to selling a small % of BTC for USD to lock in some of the gains we've made in the development funds and hedge against the risk BTC crashes? For example, let's say we have a huge run up next week and 1 BTC = $500. Or if BTC reaches $1000 in the next several months? In the latter example, would it make sense to sell 1000 BTC and put $1 million USD in the Mastercoin Foundations' bank account. I don't believe the board should engage in trading the funds on a regular basis at all, but a "one off" sale of some small % of BTC for fiat as a hedge might be something worthy of discussion.
Excellent questions!
I would NOT support selling any BTC right now, or perhaps ever.
1. We don't have a decentralized way of representing or storing USD, and I won't support risking our funds on a centralized entity like bank or exchange.
2. I'm uber bullish about BTC and think we'll be at $1000 a pop within a few month.
This will bring us to around 4-5 million dollars in the fund.
I won't risk missing out on that.
2) Similarly, has any thought been given to paying bounties denominated in anything other than BTC or in some sort of hybrid that hedges the payment such as a combination of BTC/MSC/USD? Or is that too confusing? It seems to make sense to reward the developers with some MCS, to increase their incentive to work.
Payouts are paid in whatever currency is required (or perhaps we just pay BTC and let the receiver convert, Willett remind me?
3) If the funds are being distributed amongst board members what precautions/considerations are being made for/against (i) a rogue board member misappropriating funds, (ii) death or incapacity of a board member and (iii) security of funds? In the case of (i) is it possible to require two or more board members to access fund in storage? In the case of (ii) it is important that more than one person has access to the private keys (private keys should be in safety deposit boxes or some other secure place accessible by the board in case a board member dies).
i. Rouge - nothing. Will go to multisig and eventually direct community control, and then we won't have any definition of "rouge".
ii. Death - each board member holding funds will have his own mechanism for dealing with death. I'm not sure we'll specify more details as this is quite personal.
iii. Security - we discussed this above.
The direction is multisig we just don't have time to implement it ...
We won't do Shamir Secret Sharing in the meantime, I'd rather just speed up to multisig which is what you're describing.
4) In the case of BTC, will all of the public addresses holding the funds be published so that MSC holders can periodically view the balance of funds?
Yeah, addresses be published. This will also be a part of the Budget site above - now it's easy to track as there's only one or a few number of addresses. This will change and become very complicated soon. One feature suggestion - "subscribe to expenditures" that will email you whenever we make an expenditure.
5) Has any thought been given to appointing a Treasurer of the Mastercoin Foundation funds, to oversee all of the above, and report to the board and MSC holders? This person should be separate from both JR and RG imo.
We won't trust anyone external at this point.
Maybe an Auditor
But instead of appointing an auditor, let someone build the Budget/Funds site so you can all audit.
(FYI we're also looking for a
security auditor).
From what I can tell, technically this is not "on" slashdot yet (i.e. still awaiting editorial approval).
Please, everyone go to that link and (once logged in with your slashdot account) click on the plus icon to the left of the title to vote it up. Hopefully they will pick it up and publish it!
Ron, you may want to note that in your reddit post about this as well, let's mod it up and turn the topic 'red' and hopefully it will have the best chance to actually run.
More info on the firehose submission process here:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/07/08/02/1719238/introducing-the-slashdot-firehoseHmm, I didn't know this is how things happen, but it sure explains the lack of comments on the thread
Where are all you guys and why aren't you commenting?
Please post whatever on my reddit and get people to do it, I have a million things to do.
I think I'll sadly need to start spending less and less time on this thread
I might need a secretary soon lol.
