Proposal for Standardizing the Distribution Rate of Dev MSC via the MSC Protocol

[bitexch]

Secondly, if a dev wants to reduce his exposure to crypto he can immediately sell his MSC for fiat, in the very moment he got paid. What's the problem?

The problem is that you're assuming MSC is more liquid than it is. If you want to sell your MSC, you need to find a buyer, which isn't always easy, and even if you do find a buyer, he may not want as many Mastercoins as you are selling, in which case you may have to lower your ask price.

Reversing your remark would be better: If a dev wants to increase his exposure to mastercoin he can sell his fiat for MSC. This is surely much easier than selling MSC for fiat.

I don't know how many times it needs to be proven that we're going "all in". If the goal is to attract good developers, irrespective of whether *they* are "all in" or not, they should be paid in fiat, or at least BTC.

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[zbx]

I don't know how many times it needs to be proven that we're going "all in". If the goal is to attract good developers, irrespective of whether *they* are "all in" or not, they should be paid in fiat, or at least BTC.

They should at least be *offered* fiat (or bitcoins).

[Rampion]

1) the most important thing IMO is that JR commits 100% of his time to MSC, he is the founder, brain and soul of this project. Half measures are counterproductive.

2) Devs should be offer only MSC, and maybe fiat. No worries about the liquidity of MSC, the foundation would be providing that in the solution proposed by JR.

3) "reducing the exposure to MSC" is not an option. It would look like that the board wants to sit on  a pile of BTC "in case MSC fails". That's bad because create many negative incentives.

[bitexch]

2) Devs should be offer only MSC, and maybe fiat. No worries about the liquidity of MSC, the foundation would be providing that in the solution proposed by JR.

3) "reducing the exposure to MSC" is not an option. It would look like that the board wants to sit on  a pile of BTC "in case MSC fails". That's bad because create many negative incentives.

Regarding (2): JR's solution is the following: "Use the remainder of our BTC to purchase MSC over the next few months on the distributed exchange". This is too vague to determine whether it will be successful. Unless it is specified at what prices the board is buying MSC, we're not even sure how many MSC we will have to pay developers! At least with Bitcoin, we know how many we can have and what we can offer. It is true that there ought to be a more cohesive list of future bounties, that way we can intelligently partition our Bitcoins, but if we convert BTC to MSC over the course of months we won't even be able to determine the number and size of the bounties.

Regarding (3): Not everything is about projecting an image. It's possible that MSC will hit a technical wall and the demand for it will go down, and we'll need to hire developers . It will be difficult to pay developers in a currency which is of little value at the time they receive it.

[Luckybit]

Secondly, if a dev wants to reduce his exposure to crypto he can immediately sell his MSC for fiat, in the very moment he got paid. What's the problem?

The problem is that you're assuming MSC is more liquid than it is. If you want to sell your MSC, you need to find a buyer, which isn't always easy, and even if you do find a buyer, he may not want as many Mastercoins as you are selling, in which case you may have to lower your ask price.

Reversing your remark would be better: If a dev wants to increase his exposure to mastercoin he can sell his fiat for MSC. This is surely much easier than selling MSC for fiat.

I don't know how many times it needs to be proven that we're going "all in". If the goal is to attract good developers, irrespective of whether *they* are "all in" or not, they should be paid in fiat, or at least BTC.

I think its better to pay developers in MSC and to have the foundation hold MSC. It's a lot easier to trust a foundation or company which uses it's own product than the foundation or company which uses some other product internally.

Ideally you want developers who really believe in what Mastercoin can become rather than speculators who just want a quick buck. I think it should be MSC or fiat for developers but not BTC, not LTC, or PTS.  Imagine how awkward it is if the Bitcoin foundation paid people in Litecoins.

[rbdrbd]

Wow, there are a lot of varying opinions here (as far as the foundation buying up MSC, how to pay devs, JR working full-time, etc). I think any unilateral action on something this big by the mastercoin foundation could risk alienating the community.

For any big issue that requires voting, how about we do this:

* Open a voting period of 1-2 weeks. A thread is started where 3 or 4 voting options are given (along with a 2 paragraph "best justification" for each).
* Each voting option has a corresponding bitcoin address
* To vote, the top 50 or 100 Mastercoin holders will send some small fraction of a mastercoin or bitcoin from their MSC holding address to one of the voting addresses. Some one then tallies up the votes, after removing any duplicate votes, verifying MSC balance, etc.

This way, voting is semi-anonymous, and one can easily verify voter eligibility (as well as perform recounts, if desired, for verification). It also gives the community a voice in this matter.

[rbdrbd]

I think perhaps it is time to convert more of our BTC to MSC. I'd rather have MSC in a rainy day fund than BTC anyway. As you say, giving away BTC attacts people more interested in BTC, and I'd rather the foundation hold MSC than BTC.

Here's my crazy proposal:

1) Keep only the 1000 BTC we've already moved into offline wallets
2) Use the remainder of our BTC to purchase MSC over the next few months on the distributed exchange
3) Pay all future bounties exclusively in MSC
4) Keep half of our MSC money for a rainy day and/or future distributed bounty system
5) If our rainy day fund becomes excessive, we can always vote to lower the ratio later

I realize that this would potentially make all of our existing investors absurdly wealthy, but, well, the stated purpose of the Mastercoin Foundation is to serve the holders of Mastercoins, and I'm having a hard time seeing this course of action as anything but a huge positive for them, as long as we do it transparently and over a long enough period of time that nobody who wants to sell to us is left out.

Also, MSC prices would probably go up to the point where I'd sell 1% and quit my job to work on MSC, which I hope would also be in the best interests of our investors.

I do like the "eating your own dogfood" type ethos of this idea, but I share some of Kyune's well-stated concerns as well. This may make sense IF devs are willing to work for MSC (which I doubt, at least at this point, since it's so new and unstable, even compared to BTC).

This, right here. I wouldn't even feel comfortable getting paid in BTC let alone a currency that's just a few months old.

I have a feeling that we sometimes forget how fragile MSC still is. There are so many things that will or could happen that will have a great influence on the perceived value of the coin itself. It would be seriously irresponsible to use most of the Bitcoins from Exodus to buy more Mastercoin.

J.R., if you want to leave your job, do you really need to sell Mastercoins to do this? I'm sure a part of the 3000 BTC currently sitting in Exodus could be exchanged for non-internet money so your family has the security that for the foreseeable future they don't have to worry about anything while you work on Mastercoin. Having you on board as a developer would solve a lot of problems and speed up the process. I'm currently often waiting on votes on the way how the spec should be interpreted before continuing on. Having you in the trenches would surely speed this up.    

If I may ask, regarding wealth generation, what's your personal goal.... i.e., pay your bills, and then beyond that, stock up on an asset that is risky, but has a huge upside, or, pay your basic bills, and save a much more moderate amount in something that's much more of a "sure thing"? If the latter...what interested you in Bitcoin??

If you were given enough in fiat every month to pay your bills, and then MSC/BTC beyond that at a good level...would that help?

Personally, I'm used to spending my time on risky things, after putting up with insane risk for years...i.e. losing 6 figures in a blown up business, scraping by by a few K in the bank with a company that burns 70K/month and having to have my parents buy my groceries for a few months because I couldn't afford it, etc .... but I am a weird duck I guess...in my case it paid off, but, yes, those hard times lasted years and it took me awhile to adjust to that. Doesn't mean I like that much risk....just saying that because compared to crap like that, to me, this seems pretty safe, hahaha! 

If I didn't have this business that was growing so quick and taking 90% of my time, I'd be here coding for you guys in a heartbeat.

[milkyman]

I like the idea of having the remaining asset partly in msc. But I would rather aim a msc ratio of 50% instead of 80%.
Also, if the foundation buys msc over the next months and then abruptly stops, the msc value will then suddenly drop, because of a sudden drop in demand. That's why I propose a 'smooth' way to get msc into the foundation wallet - to reach the desired ratio asymptotically over a long time. I worked out a formula that could be used for that purpose:

http://imageshack.com/a/img543/7554/xry2.png

m_buy(t): number of mastercoins to be bought on that day from the distributed exchange, by selling bitcoins.
m(t): number of owned mastercoins on that day
b(t): number of owned bitcoins on that day
x(t): price of one mastercoin in bitcoins on that day
c(t): average number of mastercoins spent per day (bounties, etc.)
T: Time in days, when the desired ratio should be reached (1/e)
r: Desired mastercoin ratio of the total value.

I this way, the desired ratio will be reached exponentially.

To get a feeling of how many msc would have to be bought per day: If we choose m(today) = 0, b(today) = 5000, x(today) = 0.15, c(today) = 50, T = 365 days, r = 0.5,

m_buy(today) = 95.7

So, the foundation would have to buy back about 96 mastercoins from the distributed exchange today. Of course this number will change, as soon as the msc asset goes up, or if the prices change significantly. Everything would be transparent, and bounties etc. could be paid in mastercoins.

What do you think?

[rbdrbd]

I like the idea of having the remaining asset partly in msc. But I would rather aim a msc ratio of 50% instead of 80%.
Also, if the foundation buys msc over the next months and then abruptly stops, the msc value will then suddenly drop, because of a sudden drop in demand. That's why I propose a 'smooth' way to get msc into the foundation wallet - to reach the desired ratio asymptotically over a long time. I worked out a formula that could be used for that purpose:



m_buy(t): number of mastercoins to be bought on that day from the distributed exchange, by selling bitcoins.
m(t): number of owned mastercoins on that day
b(t): number of owned bitcoins on that day
x(t): price of one mastercoin in bitcoins on that day
c(t): average number of mastercoins spent per day (bounties, etc.)
T: Time in days, when the desired ratio should be reached (1/e)
r: Desired mastercoin ratio of the total value.

I this way, the desired ratio will be reached exponentially.

To get a feeling of how many msc would have to be bought per day: If we choose m(today) = 0, b(today) = 5000, x(today) = 0.15, c(today) = 50, T = 365 days, r = 0.5,

m_buy(today) = 95.7

So, the foundation would have to buy back about 96 mastercoins from the distributed exchange today. Of course this number will change, as soon as the msc asset goes up, or if the prices change significantly. Everything would be transparent, and bounties etc. could be paid in mastercoins.

What do you think?

Hmm...to better help folks understand how this may look, would it be possible for you to plot a few graphs of this formula for 3 of so different scenarios over the next 12-24 months, e.g.:
* Linear MSC price rise, Bounty amount in USD stays about the same
* Exponential MSC price rise, Bounty amount in USD increases linearly
* Whatever else may make sense?

I know there are a number of variables expressed here...if you don't think it would be useful due to this, that's fine.

[ripper234]

Trying to catch up to the discussion. I propose that David and/or J.R. get it into a Google Doc so people can comment on specific parts of the proposal more easily. This discussion is really hard to follow and participate in.


My goal is to build the Mastercoin protocol as quickly and efficiently as I can, while maintain a high quality standard.
This is what I perceive would bring the most benefit to MSC holders.
I would like to accelerate the development and ecosystem and work at ever increasing speed.
I would also like us to burn away our customary budget for the Mastercoin Foundation as quickly as possible, and move that to community control ASAP, in order to remove ourselves as a point of failure.

This is the context in which you should read my reply.

About David's proposal

Now, in light of this, and given the project is super early stage and evolving rapidly, I would hate to see us "shackle ourselves" and commit to any specific long term budget. The Dev MSCs are generated at a predictable rate as set in Mastercoin's original 1.0 whitepaper. However, I do not feel there is a dire need to compel us to a specific burn rate. of our funds

We can do a slower burn rate when applicable.

However, if we believe at some point that we want to spend more cash because we have a great opportunity to increase our development momentum, we should be able to do that. The mechanism I suggested for this is Lending. I want us to be able to ask the market for loans, while keeping future unvested Dev MSC as collatoral for these loans. This is a way to get more funds ready right now, if that is what we all believe will speed up development and ultimately increase MSC value (this should move to a public Proof of Stake vote between MSC holders rather than a board vote ASAP).

Therefore I am against setting this spend limit in stone right now. Also, we need to formalize our decision processes before this anyway. What if we do decide, as David suggests, to "formalize the distribution of "Dev MSC", to mirror the amount of Dev MSC generated each month" ... but a month later decide via a majority or super-majority vote to change this? I don't see a value in shackling our future selves here.

Having a plan is ok, but I would rather see this as a tentative plan always up for changes, rather than a commitment.

I see the "Dev MSCs" as just another part of our pool of funds, totally equivalent to BTC or MSC that we bought. Their rate of generation is arbitrary, and I do not think we should use that as any factor in the formula deciding how to compensate developers, but rather come up with an alternative formula depending on taking market compensation and subtracting some amount (because we assume developers are / will be MSC holders, and thus benefit anyway from MSC increase over time).


What I propose is this:

• We need to pay developers using some predictable formula, especially if we want to bribe them to quit their jobs. The choice of currency that they get paid here doesn't matter, as everything is interchangeable in the Mastercoin universe. Each developer chooses how to divide his bounties / salary among BTC and MSC.
  
• We can commit / preallocate a certain amount of BTC or MSC (or USD for that matter) for developers who want  predictability, for a certain period of time. This is always contingent on their continued performance. We as the nonprofit Mastercoin Foundation do not yet have experience with retaining full time employees, we need to define the process of how such positions are hired, evaluated, and for how long (David might want to lead this definition himself).

FYI one project that I would like to use a huge chunk of BTC/MSC for, is what I call "Mastercoin Ventures".
I would like us to find a trusted person, seasoned with investing, to smartly invest a big chunk of our money.
I consider this money well spent if it contributes to the Mastercoin ecosystem and thus increases MSC valuation.

This distributes some of the funds from our centralized decision-making process, and lets that 3rd party (whom we need to trust) have the proper incentive and time to find interesting unexpected initiatives that we as board of directors won't even see, because of our narrow vision.

We are managing too much money right now, the quicker we get it decentralized (in a smart way), the better. In the Mastercoin Ventures proposal, I don't mean we just send a huge chunk of money to a complete stranger to manage - but rather that pending on finding someone suitable (e.g. a seasoned VC) we allocate a chunk of money to them, but only send it when reaching specificic milestones (e.g. when they secure an investment in a 3rd party company that contributes to the Mastercoin economy). We would still approve any such investments, but the VC would take the role of finding the ventures to invest it and doing due diligence.


About J.R's proposal
The type of money we award isn't relevant, any person chooses what currency composition they prefer, we can always convert on the spot.

The trick to choosing our ratio of holding between BTC and MSC is risk management and portfolio diversification. J.R. I believe you are still 100% MSC in your personal portfolio, and I think this is not a sound decision from a risk perspective. For the foundation, I think we need to pick some monetary policy and consult with a professional CFO on how to pick this number. I have no personal experience with proper risk analysis, but I think somewhere along the lines of 50-75% MSC and 25-50% BTC might be appropriate. This is just a hunch, and I would really not like us doing any decision before very very carefuly analysis by experienced personnel. Note again that the type of currency our developers prefer to be paid in is simply not relevant to this discussion as we can always convert on the spot.

About quitting your day job - is there a specific market or other condition you are waiting for here? What MSC price would be suitable for you to liquidate 1% and quit your job? I suspect that without any deliberate action from us, MSC prices would reach 1 BTC in the next few weeks and months. I hope that would be a suitable price point for you, if not before, because you would then hold over 100,000 BTC worth ... these are your own personal financial choices, I just think we need to draw a firm line separating what works for J.R (or J.R's wife) from what works for the Foundation and MSC holders. And I just don't see us buying a huge amount of MSC as a sound move right now, certainly not unless we get a proper risk analysis by a seasoned CFO. In fact we need this analysis anyway ... not buying may also be the wrong and risky decision here. I am simply not qualified to make these kinds of decisions myself.

I don't understand why we even need to purchase more MSC. The Foundation owns about 9% of all MSCs. Isn't this a reasonable number for an ESOP? How much is usually reserved for ESOP? How much would be our target ... how much of all MSC do you believe the Foundation should own in order to operate efficiently?

[ripper234]

I'll quote this message I just posted to the main thread, about hiring a few developers:

ripper234 will this be a no brainer if at least 10 people echo this? I hope to everything we believe in Tachikoma does not think otherwise.

We do have such plans ourselves. David is forming a more detailed plan, and J.R is reaching out to all the developers to determine their availability and focus.

I fully agree that we should be able to fund development in a more orderly fashion.

I personally think this should be higher on our priorities than standardizing the way Dev MSCs are spent.
The former is a specific task - hire a few developers.
The latter is a higher order problem, and I would take some convincing before I'm satisfied with a solution there.

David & J.R - to your attention.

[milkyman]

I like the idea of having the remaining asset partly in msc. But I would rather aim a msc ratio of 50% instead of 80%.
Also, if the foundation buys msc over the next months and then abruptly stops, the msc value will then suddenly drop, because of a sudden drop in demand. That's why I propose a 'smooth' way to get msc into the foundation wallet - to reach the desired ratio asymptotically over a long time. I worked out a formula that could be used for that purpose:

http://imageshack.com/a/img543/7554/xry2.png

m_buy(t): number of mastercoins to be bought on that day from the distributed exchange, by selling bitcoins.
m(t): number of owned mastercoins on that day
b(t): number of owned bitcoins on that day
x(t): price of one mastercoin in bitcoins on that day
c(t): average number of mastercoins spent per day (bounties, etc.)
T: Time in days, when the desired ratio should be reached (1/e)
r: Desired mastercoin ratio of the total value.

I this way, the desired ratio will be reached exponentially.

To get a feeling of how many msc would have to be bought per day: If we choose m(today) = 0, b(today) = 5000, x(today) = 0.15, c(today) = 50, T = 365 days, r = 0.5,

m_buy(today) = 95.7

So, the foundation would have to buy back about 96 mastercoins from the distributed exchange today. Of course this number will change, as soon as the msc asset goes up, or if the prices change significantly. Everything would be transparent, and bounties etc. could be paid in mastercoins.

What do you think?

Hmm...to better help folks understand how this may look, would it be possible for you to plot a few graphs of this formula for 3 of so different scenarios over the next 12-24 months, e.g.:
* Linear MSC price rise, Bounty amount in USD stays about the same
* Exponential MSC price rise, Bounty amount in USD increases linearly
* Whatever else may make sense?

I know there are a number of variables expressed here...if you don't think it would be useful due to this, that's fine.

Sure, makes totally sense
Here are some plots:

no change in msc price:
http://imageshack.us/a/img706/4323/qpcj.jpg

linear increase of msc price:
http://imageshack.us/a/img17/1430/ucbq.jpg

exponential increase of msc price:
http://imageshack.us/a/img593/158/2t1u.jpg

exponential decrease of msc price:
http://imageshack.us/a/img42/4566/q6ix.jpg

In each case, I used the values
T = 182.5 days (1/2 year)
c = 7.5 BTC/day (daily expenses, chosen to be constant in BTC, but paid in MSC according to daily price)
r = 0.5

Each plot displays the dependence over the next 500 days (x-axis).

[ofer]

I think perhaps it is time to convert more of our BTC to MSC. I'd rather have MSC in a rainy day fund than BTC anyway. As you say, giving away BTC attacts people more interested in BTC, and I'd rather the foundation hold MSC than BTC.

Here's my crazy proposal:

1) Keep only the 1000 BTC we've already moved into offline wallets
2) Use the remainder of our BTC to purchase MSC over the next few months on the distributed exchange
3) Pay all future bounties exclusively in MSC
4) Keep half of our MSC money for a rainy day and/or future distributed bounty system
5) If our rainy day fund becomes excessive, we can always vote to lower the ratio later

I realize that this would potentially make all of our existing investors absurdly wealthy, but, well, the stated purpose of the Mastercoin Foundation is to serve the holders of Mastercoins, and I'm having a hard time seeing this course of action as anything but a huge positive for them, as long as we do it transparently and over a long enough period of time that nobody who wants to sell to us is left out.

Also, MSC prices would probably go up to the point where I'd sell 1% and quit my job to work on MSC, which I hope would also be in the best interests of our investors.

JR,
As an investor of Mastercoin and as someone who cares about this project I just don't agree to this approach.
Let's be honest with ourselves: the reason that MSC currently worth money is mainly (or practically only) because of the BTC invested in it. The intellectual property of MSC is still very low. We have nice ideas which are not yet implemented and there are only few experimental websites and few experimental wallets and that's it. The number of developers that are currently working on the project is still very low.
The echo system of MSC is very close to zero.
This is why I think that selling the foundation BTC will kill the project.

BTC has value that attracts people. It can be converted to any fiat currency, it's price is rising. Investors are looking at this and understand that the foundation has the ability to make this ambitious project happen - this is the reason that MSC worth money at the moment IMHO.

Like everyone else in the world - I love easy money, but this idea just confuses me.
This idea reminds me of USD - printing money out of air.

If the foundation is going to be left without BTC - why we even raised it just few months ago?


B.T.W
I think that we need to have at least 1 million USD as fiat money, to reduce BTC risk

[Corgidad]

Hi there everyone! 

I don't have much to contribute to the discussion; I will be quite happy with whatever the board ends up deciding.  I have confidence you guys will steer us in the right direction

That being said, I highly support anything that gets more people (especially the big names!) working on this project full time.  I've been so busy this last week that I've barely had any time to develop my own little local chapter.  I've often wished to myself over the last few days that I had more time to work on things...

If buying back a bunch of MSC will allow others to do just that, I'm all for it.  Keep up the good work!  Can't wait for the distributed exchange...

[superfluouso]

Hi there everyone! 

I don't have much to contribute to the discussion; I will be quite happy with whatever the board ends up deciding.  I have confidence you guys will steer us in the right direction

That being said, I highly support anything that gets more people (especially the big names!) working on this project full time.  I've been so busy this last week that I've barely had any time to develop my own little local chapter.  I've often wished to myself over the last few days that I had more time to work on things...

If buying back a bunch of MSC will allow others to do just that, I'm all for it.  Keep up the good work!  Can't wait for the distributed exchange...

+1..I feel the same.  And though we'd all love dedicated devs on the project yesterday, thanks to the existing devs for everything they have done to get us this far.  I can empathize with the need to prioritize your families etc first and don't fault you at all if dropping everything else to focus solely on this project is not feasible at this stage.  Anything you CAN do to keep the progress moving forward is hugely appreciated and I am optimistic that whatever mixture of MSC/BTC/USD is decided will be one that will further accelerate things.

[djohnston]

Thank you everyone for your thoughts on this topic. I'm just getting caught up after spending the weekend working with a team of developers on one of the first Applications that will operate on top of the Mastercoin user currency / smart property feature. That is APIEngine.co / APIcoin. This was part of the Global Startup Battle / Startup Weekend 72 hour hackathon and I'm happy to report our model went over well enough with the judges that we won 1st place for Austin, Texas : )

More on that fun later. Lets get back into the discussion.

Lots of different thoughts on lots of different topics seem to have led the conversation here into multiple directions. There is the original proposal regarding Dev MSC, discussion of if its wise to convert some or all BTC into MSC, how to hire developers full time, and so forth.

I think the wisest suggestion put forth was to poll the Mastercoin / Bitcointalk.org community on at least the original proposal and see where the numbers land. I'd like to focus back on the original proposal only and set aside these other discussions for the future.

I'd propose to put forward the poll question this way:

Poll Question:
Do think that the Dev MSC "Distribution Rate" should be fixed by the MSC protocol, in order to mirror the Dev MSC "Generation Rate"?

A. Yes, full speed ahead! Lets distribute 100% of Dev MSC generated each month, proportionately to each developer's contributions. That's what they are for! When the Distributed bounty system is launched it should be set at this same predictable Distribution Rate.

B. Yes, however things are early and we should be conservative. Lets distribute 50% of Dev MSC generated each month, proportionately to each developer's contributions. Save up the other 50% of Dev MSC for the hand over to the distributed bounty system when its launched in the future.

C. No, the Dev MSC are just part of the Mastercoin open source project development funding budget, along with the BTC from the Exodus address. And we should not tie the funding budget to any set rate, but should instead alter it daily, weekly, monthly based on project needs.

I think these three options to answering the question roughly capture the three proposals in this thread.

We can word smith these a bit, but I'd like to post this fairly soon and leave it up for a week or two and see where we are before the Christmas holiday kicks in and folks disappear for a while until mid January. I believe this is a very important decision.

[TKeenan]

If we want stability, it should be USD in our bank account, not BTC.

That's right.  If they want stability, they should get a job at IBM and buy that stock.  MSC project is only for high risk - high reward personalities.

It's all or nothing - baby.  Never, ever 'maybe'.  Gotta be all in. 

[Tachikoma]

Poll Question:
Do think that the Dev MSC "Distribution Rate" should be fixed by the MSC protocol, in order to mirror the Dev MSC "Generation Rate"?

A. Yes, full speed ahead! Lets distribute 100% of Dev MSC generated each month, proportionately to each developer's contributions. That's what they are for! When the Distributed bounty system is launched it should be set at this same predictable Distribution Rate.

B. Yes, however things are early and we should be conservative. Lets distribute 50% of Dev MSC generated each month, proportionately to each developer's contributions. Save up the other 50% of Dev MSC for the hand over to the distributed bounty system when its launched in the future.

C. No, the Dev MSC are just part of the Mastercoin open source project development funding budget, along with the BTC from the Exodus address. And we should not tie the funding budget to any set rate, but should instead alter it daily, weekly, monthly based on project needs.

I think these three options to answering the question roughly capture the three proposals in this thread.

We can word smith these a bit, but I'd like to post this fairly soon and leave it up for a week or two and see where we are before the Christmas holiday kicks in and folks disappear for a while until mid January. I believe this is a very important decision.

Yeah. I think a poll would be a good idea. We have discussed the options enough and if more discussion is needed we can do it in the topic that includes the voting.

[dacoinminster]

Poll Question:
Do think that the Dev MSC "Distribution Rate" should be fixed by the MSC protocol, in order to mirror the Dev MSC "Generation Rate"?

A. Yes, full speed ahead! Lets distribute 100% of Dev MSC generated each month, proportionately to each developer's contributions. That's what they are for! When the Distributed bounty system is launched it should be set at this same predictable Distribution Rate.

B. Yes, however things are early and we should be conservative. Lets distribute 50% of Dev MSC generated each month, proportionately to each developer's contributions. Save up the other 50% of Dev MSC for the hand over to the distributed bounty system when its launched in the future.

C. No, the Dev MSC are just part of the Mastercoin open source project development funding budget, along with the BTC from the Exodus address. And we should not tie the funding budget to any set rate, but should instead alter it daily, weekly, monthly based on project needs.

I think these three options to answering the question roughly capture the three proposals in this thread.

We can word smith these a bit, but I'd like to post this fairly soon and leave it up for a week or two and see where we are before the Christmas holiday kicks in and folks disappear for a while until mid January. I believe this is a very important decision.

The poll is a great idea. I like the options presented here, but I'd also like some way for people to vote on whether (and how much) we should convert our BTC to MSC.

If somebody wants to create that poll, I'd be grateful, otherwise it will have to wait until one of us gets to it

Yeah. I think a poll would be a good idea. We have discussed the options enough and if more discussion is needed we can do it in the topic that includes the voting.

[ripper234]

David,

One question before the poll - how do you propose the MSC protocol can be modified to code what you proposed?
Or do you assume Proof of Staking voting as the means to directly control these MSC at the protocol level?

If this is your proposal ("instead of Exodus controlling Dev MSC, let 100% of them be controlled by Proof of Stake voting"), then I fully agree (but we need a spec for Voting before this change can be codified).

I would like 100% of Dev MSC (and Exodus BTC for that matter) to be controlled by the Proof of Stake voting ASAP.

I doubt there would even be a need for a poll for this proposal - it makes sense so much (but you can put the poll up nonetheless).