I did join a while ago to the IRC channel but there was no activity there at the time.
Sorry about that. The IRC channel has been inactive for a while because for the most part it's just 2 people living in the same timezone. After going a few weeks with no messages, we stopped checking. If this starts gaining momentum however we'll bring it back.
I hope you learn from the lessons of the encumbered maidsafe IPO for issuance of Siastock. I think a decentralised fundraising on a platform such as CounterParty, where users can directly send BTC, and later trade shares with no requirement for proprietary MSC style tokens would be a good fit.
Looking at the maidsafe results, what we might end up doing is selling 'tokens' for 0.001btc each. We'd sell for a week or so, and then at the end we'd divide X% among all the tokens that got sold. Or maybe we'd set up a dynamic price, so each token is worth 0.0Y%, but the cost of a token changes as people buy them up or do not buy them up. We'd want something that would end up being fair, such that everybody interested got siastock and had at least 2 weeks to get in. I'm really not sure what the best approach would be. For those curious, we'd be wanting on the order of 200 bitcoins. We'd be happy to accept more of course, but less wouldn't give us enough money to work on Sia full time. If somehow things exploded and we ended up with 500 or 2000 bitcoins, we'd probably hire a few extra developers to help us out in the spirit of trying to release quicker. We would also put some money aside for security audits of the beta.
Now what if I upload, say, child porn?
(better to ask that question now than to wait until it happens)
That's a good question. We are legally required to do everything in our power to take CP and other illegal files and DMCA'd content off of the network. But just like the creators of bittorrent, Sia is a protocol so I don't know how responsible we'd be for what happened. In the worst case, the NSA forces us to back-door the protocol such that we can censor any file. I don't think this is a realistic outcome.
The US Government has been playing nice with bitcoin. Coinbase, Bitstamp, Bitcoin Foundation, etc. have not so far been held responsible for the way that people use bitcoin. I'm under the belief that Sia would work the same way. If child porn ended up on Sia, the burden falls upon the uploader and the people linking to the uploaded file. For many reasons, I think it would be very bad to enable built-in censorship of files on Sia. If we were pressured to, we might even be able to get some human rights groups to fight for us in court. I have no idea.
Another example is Tor, a technology that has enable child porn in particular for a long time. Tor is a legally protected application. It's not the Tor devs or the relay nodes that are child pornographers, and they don't host Tor to enable child pornography. People who upload illegal content to Tor are not protected, but the ecosystem is protected, and they do have powerful legal groups ready to fight for them.
Censorship is always a difficult thing to talk about, because nobody wants to enable activity like child pornography, least of all us. At the same time, we don't want to enable the government to censor things like criticisms of the people in power. As far as Sia is concerned, if you enable one you enable the other, and you are left trusting that the person in charge of censoring child porn will choose not to censor other actions like criticism of the government.
We very much want to be viewed as "good guys" in the eyes of our government (which happens to be the US government). I have no idea what this will entail or what court decisions might be made. I do think that Maidsafe, Cryptosphere, Datacoin, and other such projects are going to run into the same exact problems.
If I recall, wasn't child porn stored in the Bitcoin blockchain? Didn't someone find some way to encode an illicit photo into a set of transactions? I know other things (like Bitcoin's whitepaper) have been encoded into the blockchain. What is the legal response in Bitcoin's case?
