[ANN] ORA :: NXT 'monetary system' currency

[kora2]

How is the coin's progress now?

Progress is slow but steady! We're still in brainstorming mode on many issues, and all feedback and suggestions are most welcome. What features would you like ORA to have? How would those features solve real world problems? What do people use ORA for? Everyone is most welcome to have their say still.

Remember, at this stage ORA is mainly trying to build a strong viable community, then start a discussion, and then we build the tech. Our lead dev nio is still considering options, so this is still a very 'open' process. ORA has no leader as such, so things will inevitably be slow at the start, maybe too slow for some. My hope is we'll reach a tipping point soon and things will start happening a lot faster, but for now I have to admit that momentum is slowing, but that's  OK IMO.

If ORA is going to 'work' we need to empower people into positive self directed actions, to overcome the bystander effect where we often expect someone else has everything under control. In a starfish organisation that assumption, that other people are 'taking care of business', probably is a little dangerous. With ORA it's more about 'ask not what ORA can do for you, but what YOU can do for ORA'.

Posting a question or a comment in this thread is very useful at this time, to let people know the IDEA of ORA is still strong, so thanks for 'doing something' for ORA today, every little action creates an effect :-)

so after 5 months still we don't know what Ora might be? i mean still NIO thinking what to clone? Slow? i would call it a turtle race..

Turtle pace is a fair assessment, but total crypto user numbers would be max two million people, probably much less, and growth rate of adoption has stagnated too this year IMO, so turtle pace now does not mean ORA won't be successful, and a lot of cool tech is being released at the moment, and if we're patient ORA can take advantage of some of this stuff. I'm thinking in particular of things like CIYAM's AT which is cutting edge and opensource.

Being methodical now does not mean we get left behind, the crypto race hasn't started yet.

Turtle pace is more a reflection that ORA is not a full time pursuit for anybody (yet), and until it is for our dev team we need to be patient. The pace is slow, but our initial distribution was FREE, and the experimental aspect of ORA has always been pointed out to people, so I expect all those who have purchased ORA on the NXT AE understand the risk involved.

If we had raised funds in an ICO it would be a different story, but we didn't, and so far the only person seriously out of pocket is probably me, and I'm a true believer! I can promise nothing other than that I will do everything I can to make ORA successful, but I have no ability to make anybody do anything now, which is the nature of decentralized starfish organisation. Starfish has benefits but also weaknesses too, and in the end it will only work if enough people care enough to do things.

+ 1

I got it for free and all I can say its to be grateful. Just keep the hard work on

Thank you, your support is very much appreciated :-)

[Este Nuno]

What happened to the discussions that were going on about being the first Bitshares fork? That would be pretty incredible I think. There's a lot of potential there. And the DPoS thing is quite interesting. Even Vitalik wanted to use that system for Ethereum. But he apparently has to convince a ton of people who are anti-PoS in general.

[Mac Red]

so after 5 months still we don't know what Ora might be? i mean still NIO thinking what to clone? Slow? i would call it a turtle race..

Nice one.

[kora2]

Here's part 3 of my extended article on ORA!

PART 3


Nio contacts me
During the registration period for the 'phase 1' FREE giveaway nio contacted me, and we started discussing the possibility of him joining ORA as our lead dev. This was obviously a major milestone for the project! ORA now had an experienced and talented dev who was capable of cloning Qora at the very least, but just as important for me, nio was already familiar with the ideas around leaderless 'starfish' communities, and he was instantly very supportive of my desire to make ORA a leaderless Starfish community from the outset.

Nio was also capable of modifying Qora, (or any other coin) into something unique, and he also has his own goals and vision for what a ‘new’ crypto coin could/should be, so having him join ORA so early in the community building stage was really exciting. I honestly thought attracting a lead dev would take a lot longer, so nio making contact and starting a discussion DURING the registration period gave me a well needed boost of confidence!

After nio joined ORA I was able to split the community building side off from the dev related efforts which was a BIG relief. I am very interested in crypto tech, but I have a layperson’s understanding of the nitty gritty details only. Obviously everyone in the community can, and should, have an opinion on everything to do with the project, but if ORA was to become truly leaderless, then someone had to assume the role of lead dev, and given the importance of the role of lead dev to the success of the project, and the risk of wasted effort should ORA fail, I was more than happy to pay nio a 2 bitcoin personal bounty in recognition of his time and skill.  Paying the two key developers a personal bitcoin bounty was always part of my plan, and this was outlined in my original announcement post on BTT.

Funding, what works in crypto?
Another lesson from crypto coin history is quality people need to be compensated in some way for their efforts. A person’s time is valuable, and if your project timeline is many months, and the likelihood of future success uncertain, then a dev share in the coin itself probably won’t be enough to attract quality people, especially in this instant when the role of the ORA lead dev included almost complete autonomy and decision making authority over the tech direction. Good people often work on projects for the love of their craft, especially in the open source software movement, but we all have bills to pay too. Paying a bounty is also a way of saying 'thank you'!

Getting the right mix of performance based compensation that still covers the dev in case the project fails is something that many crypto projects have suffered from in the past. In a way it’s like paying police very low wages, and then being surprised if they don’t work very hard, or they end up being corrupt in order to ‘earn’ enough to survive. I think many coin projects suffer because a few key people spend many hours working for very little, so the temptation to do something dodgy like a P & D with a premine can become too great, especially if the community isn’t helping much.

IMO 2 bitcoins plus 5% of ORA was a balanced and reasonable compensation package to attract an experienced lead developer like nio who has a skill set capable of taking existing code from different sources and modifying and extending them into something unique. If ORA is successful 5% might be a tidy sum for nio one day, but if ORA failed, 2 bitcoins would cover *some* of his wasted time. Finding a good balance that was fair to both parties was my goal, and I hope I found it!

I honestly don’t know what the best method for compensating developers and community activists working on community based decentralised crypto projects is, but I know it is critically important to reward people for effort, even if it’s only a token payment to show the community values their effort and skills, and I think the best option probably involves a combination of incentive based payment from holding the coin being developed, plus some ‘real’ immediate funding in fiat or bitcoin for those who commit time when the outcome is most uncertain (i.e. the start of the project). Whale donations can be very important too, but any coin that relies solely on whales as a funding source exclusively to pay people long term is taking a big risk IMO.

For PoW coins the dev is probably an early miner and can grab a big holding relatively cheaply, or maybe there is an ‘acceptable’ premine, so compensating PoW developers is probably more straight forward compared to PoS coins. BUT, the ‘easier’ method of PoW compensation comes at a HUGE cost in the form of wasted electricity and wasted computing resources involved.

With PoS coins the distribution happens all at once, so that does offer the chance to ‘reserve’ a good proportion of coins for dedicated purposes, including paying developers and community activists. This is one of the key ideas I want to pursue for ORA. If ORA could establish itself as a credible and ‘honest’ community, and we were able to setup one or more community treasurers independent of Mac Red, nio and myself, then it *might* be possible to keep a large proportion of coins undistributed for a long period of time. If it was then ORA would potentially become one of the first decentralised crypto coin projects with a MASSIVE amount of community funding available to spend on performance based compensation, and we wouldn't need to get involved with an ICO. If things go well the value of ORA in our community coffers will grow, and so offering it as payment becomes a more realistic proposition. On day 1 ORA had no value, but now it DOES, just very small! The future ... that depends

ORA community could pay many people to work to advance the project, and it's all incentive based. ORA is worth peanuts now, but what about in the future? We have enough community funds to create many merit based dolphins, and a good number of merit whales too! The possibilities open to ORA from having such a large pool of community funds are very exciting, but the challenge is huge too.

We need to stay decentralised, open, transparent and accountable, and we need to come up with community processes to handle decision making, and spending decisions. Those tasks are difficult for traditional hierarchical organisations with pyramid management structures, but what about a decentralised leaderless organisation, can it decide how to spend all these funds wisely, and ‘fairly’, in a way that promotes community harmony? I honestly don’t know the answer yet, but I do know that the people who joined ORA to become our community treasurers, Darkhorse and fragORA, are both exceptional people, and their willingness to take on multiple roles for ORA has been outstanding, and much appreciated.

Neither of them has received any bitcoin bounties from myself (although Mac Red and I did give them both personal ORA bounties from our own holdings), but an ORA bounty probably doesn’t feel the same as bitcoins at this stage. Despite having little personal gain, both Darkhorse and fragORA have both pro-actively organised things for ORA off of their own backs. Darkhorse organised with cr7yp to develop the first NXT based asset faucet! That’s something I’m ecstatic about! Not just because it’s cool to have an ORA asset faucet, but because having other people do things independent of myself shows that the ORA Starfish is working. People ARE doing things for ORA that didn’t start from me. ORA has multiple centers of activity, there isn’t a leader calling the shots.

I had an idea to start a crypto short film festival to promote crypto currencies generally, and as a way to distribute more stakes, but fragORA took that basic idea and made CryptoFest a reality by making the CryptoFest site and refining the processes for how CryptoFest will work. Again, this makes me very happy because frag did it because he wanted to, so it’s pure Starfish at work. The fact that other people have wanted to organise things for ORA gives me confidence that my original idea for ORA CAN become a reality! But it is proving quite difficult too.

We needed a logo, and Pentamon took over the organising of that, and as a result we ended up with a really great logo! Again, this was very important as it wasn’t a traditional top-down process of organising things, and Pentamon was autonomous in organising how the logo process worked.

So the ORA 'Starfish' has developed a life of its own in many regards, and that's been a highlight of this project for me so far!

[kora2]

What happened to the discussions that were going on about being the first Bitshares fork? That would be pretty incredible I think. There's a lot of potential there. And the DPoS thing is quite interesting. Even Vitalik wanted to use that system for Ethereum. But he apparently has to convince a ton of people who are anti-PoS in general.

I agree Este Nuno, a Bitshares fork would be quite something! If nio decided to take ORA down that track I think a lot of people would be excited!

nio is still researching options, and Bitshares is still one of them!

[th4o]

I want to discuss something that came to my mind yesterday night 

NXT will get a feature called Monetary System. How about issuing ORA as a coin inside the NXT ecosystem? ORA would be one of the first coins inside NXT (probably the first). We´re already living inside the NXT ecosystem as an asset, so why not issuing a coin there and swapping the Assets for it?

[DarkhorseofNxt]

I want to discuss something that came to my mind yesterday night 

NXT will get a feature called Monetary System. How about issuing ORA as a coin inside the NXT ecosystem? ORA would be one of the first coins inside NXT (probably the first). We´re already living inside the NXT ecosystem as an asset, so why not issuing a coin there and swapping the Assets for it?

We have discussed this. This could be one of the option.

[geyu]

Time is money

[th4o]

I want to discuss something that came to my mind yesterday night 

NXT will get a feature called Monetary System. How about issuing ORA as a coin inside the NXT ecosystem? ORA would be one of the first coins inside NXT (probably the first). We´re already living inside the NXT ecosystem as an asset, so why not issuing a coin there and swapping the Assets for it?

We have discussed this. This could be one of the option.

What's your cons on this?

I think it's a great opportunity. NXT has it's initial distribution problem, which someone always talks about. Besides this there is a great community and NXT contains many features. ORA has a good initial distribution (if not the best so far).
Together it could be awesome In my opinion it could perform much better than a simple clone of another coin.

[Sebastien256]

I want to discuss something that came to my mind yesterday night  

NXT will get a feature called Monetary System. How about issuing ORA as a coin inside the NXT ecosystem? ORA would be one of the first coins inside NXT (probably the first). We´re already living inside the NXT ecosystem as an asset, so why not issuing a coin there and swapping the Assets for it?

We have discussed this. This could be one of the option.

What's your cons on this?

I think it's a great opportunity. NXT has it's initial distribution problem, which someone always talks about. Besides this there is a great community and NXT contains many features. ORA has a good initial distribution (if not the best so far).
Together it could be awesome In my opinion it could perform much better than a simple clone of another coin.

I proposed this option two times earlier this year in this thread, but AFAIK Ora devs or Kora never came back to give their opinion on this matter.

[DarkhorseofNxt]

I want to discuss something that came to my mind yesterday night  

NXT will get a feature called Monetary System. How about issuing ORA as a coin inside the NXT ecosystem? ORA would be one of the first coins inside NXT (probably the first). We´re already living inside the NXT ecosystem as an asset, so why not issuing a coin there and swapping the Assets for it?

We have discussed this. This could be one of the option.

What's your cons on this?

I think it's a great opportunity. NXT has it's initial distribution problem, which someone always talks about. Besides this there is a great community and NXT contains many features. ORA has a good initial distribution (if not the best so far).
Together it could be awesome In my opinion it could perform much better than a simple clone of another coin.

I proposed this option two times earlier this year in this thread, but AFAIK Ora devs or Kora never came back to give their opinion on this matter.

Well dont get this wrong, but we still have not seen the ms system yet. The documentations are there, i am also actively stdying the MS but yeah we cant decide without seeing anything.

The pros - we can use all the Nxt features.
The cons - totally dependant on Nxt platform and Ora does not have its own platform or its own features.

Like i said earlier, we are considering Ora being A Currency exist in Nxt Monetary System. But we need to see what it is all about before deciding. Do you feel this approach is wrong?

[Sebastien256]

I want to discuss something that came to my mind yesterday night  

NXT will get a feature called Monetary System. How about issuing ORA as a coin inside the NXT ecosystem? ORA would be one of the first coins inside NXT (probably the first). We´re already living inside the NXT ecosystem as an asset, so why not issuing a coin there and swapping the Assets for it?

We have discussed this. This could be one of the option.

What's your cons on this?

I think it's a great opportunity. NXT has it's initial distribution problem, which someone always talks about. Besides this there is a great community and NXT contains many features. ORA has a good initial distribution (if not the best so far).
Together it could be awesome In my opinion it could perform much better than a simple clone of another coin.

I proposed this option two times earlier this year in this thread, but AFAIK Ora devs or Kora never came back to give their opinion on this matter.

Well dont get this wrong, but we still have not seen the ms system yet. The documentations are there, i am also actively stdying the MS but yeah we cant decide without seeing anything.

The pros - we can use all the Nxt features.
The cons - totally dependant on Nxt platform and Ora does not have its own platform or its own features.

Like i said earlier, we are considering Ora being A Currency exist in Nxt Monetary System. But we need to see what it is all about before deciding. Do you feel this approach is wrong?

it all right

[DarkhorseofNxt]

I want to discuss something that came to my mind yesterday night  

NXT will get a feature called Monetary System. How about issuing ORA as a coin inside the NXT ecosystem? ORA would be one of the first coins inside NXT (probably the first). We´re already living inside the NXT ecosystem as an asset, so why not issuing a coin there and swapping the Assets for it?

We have discussed this. This could be one of the option.

What's your cons on this?

I think it's a great opportunity. NXT has it's initial distribution problem, which someone always talks about. Besides this there is a great community and NXT contains many features. ORA has a good initial distribution (if not the best so far).
Together it could be awesome In my opinion it could perform much better than a simple clone of another coin.

I proposed this option two times earlier this year in this thread, but AFAIK Ora devs or Kora never came back to give their opinion on this matter.

Well dont get this wrong, but we still have not seen the ms system yet. The documentations are there, i am also actively stdying the MS but yeah we cant decide without seeing anything.

The pros - we can use all the Nxt features.
The cons - totally dependant on Nxt platform and Ora does not have its own platform or its own features.

Like i said earlier, we are considering Ora being A Currency exist in Nxt Monetary System. But we need to see what it is all about before deciding. Do you feel this approach is wrong?

it all right

Yes, cheers man. Lets wait for the Monetary System. I am pretty excited about it. It should be in 1.4 i believe.

[th4o]

It's planned to be on testnet in mid November

[DarkhorseofNxt]

Btw, what is everyone's opinion about Ora on Nxt  Monetary System

[Sebastien256]

Btw, what is everyone's opinion about Ora on Nxt  Monetary System

In my opinion, ORA could then concentrate on making NXT monetary system better instead of starting from scratch. In a sense, also, all NXT devs will somehow be working for Ora too. Then ORA could more concentrate on getting adoption and marketing their very nice initial distribution. There is no need to reinvent the wheel here, imho.

EDIT: Plus ORA will get coin shuffling from Nxt MS, which is a very nice feature.

[DarkhorseofNxt]

Btw, what is everyone's opinion about Ora on Nxt  Monetary System

In my opinion, ORA could then concentrate on making NXT monetary system better instead of starting from scratch. In a sense, also, all NXT devs will somehow be working for Ora too. Then ORA could more concentrate on getting adaption and marketing their very nice initial distribution. There is no need to reinvent the wheel here, imho.

This is the pro of this move that i meant. But current system of MS, user of ORA also needs NXT to perform a task. So basically the Nxt users will or can use Ora. How about people outside the Nxt circle?

[Sebastien256]

Btw, what is everyone's opinion about Ora on Nxt  Monetary System

In my opinion, ORA could then concentrate on making NXT monetary system better instead of starting from scratch. In a sense, also, all NXT devs will somehow be working for Ora too. Then ORA could more concentrate on getting adaption and marketing their very nice initial distribution. There is no need to reinvent the wheel here, imho.

This is the pro of this move that i meant. But current system of MS, user of ORA also needs NXT to perform a task. So basically the Nxt users will or can use Ora. How about people outside the Nxt circle?

Promote coin shuffling and distribution, for example.

EDIT: ORA will get the first mover advantge on this matter. This is to be considerate.
EDIT2: MS will create a synergy between Nxt and ORA coin on top of it. That is the meaning of it.

[DarkhorseofNxt]

Btw, what is everyone's opinion about Ora on Nxt  Monetary System

In my opinion, ORA could then concentrate on making NXT monetary system better instead of starting from scratch. In a sense, also, all NXT devs will somehow be working for Ora too. Then ORA could more concentrate on getting adaption and marketing their very nice initial distribution. There is no need to reinvent the wheel here, imho.

This is the pro of this move that i meant. But current system of MS, user of ORA also needs NXT to perform a task. So basically the Nxt users will or can use Ora. How about people outside the Nxt circle?

Promote coin shuffling and distribution, for example.

EDIT: ORA will get the first mover advantge on this matter. This is to be considerate.
EDIT2: MS will create a synergy between Nxt and coin on top of it. That is the meaning of it.

To be honest, eventhough i am a Nxt fanboy, i was against this idea in the beginning for one reason only, development. But now i am 50/50, but still there is no concrete plan on use cases of coins issued on MS except coin shuffling. Let's wait for a little longer to see the development of MS. That is important in my opinion. You need the coin to do something or the coin dies.

[Sebastien256]

You need the coin to do something or the coin dies.

That is a redundant issue, to be on MS or not. Unless I miss something.