how should coin developers be remunerated?

[smalltimer]

a dev has to mine his coin from the first day till the last day. He must be the first to start and the last to stop mining. So if he creates a wothwhile coin he will earn money from it. Other than that: donations and income from creating services for the coin.

Main income for the dev will be the priceappreciation of the coins he holds until they mature.
We are talking about multimilliondollar coinmarketcaps. If you can create a coin that is traded for multimilliondollars later you will be suited. If you can't do that you shouldn't get a large income. Show results first. People get payed after they worked not beforehand.

Your problem seems to be that you want to make a quick buck but can't produce a coin that can compete in the market.

[1714011023]

1714011023

[coinsolidation]

Thank you for not reading anything.

[smalltimer]

either you doing it because you love it or you are doing it because you have a groundbreaking idea that is a gamechanger. If none of that applies you shouldn't release a coin.

sorry for being direct. Investor here. (one of the last survivors probably)

[Kiloday]

The community appears to have moved towards screaming scam every time they see the potential for a coin developer to make some money on a coin they created, released, and supported.

So as a community, what method of remuneration would you be happy with?

I would think that a coin developer who believes that his coin will succeed would probably already own significant amounts of the coin that he is developing. Just like the case with Satoshi and Bitcoin. By simply contributing to his own project and helping to push the coin forward, he would be enriching the value of his own coins.

[smalltimer]

The community appears to have moved towards screaming scam every time they see the potential for a coin developer to make some money on a coin they created, released, and supported.

So as a community, what method of remuneration would you be happy with?

I would think that a coin developer who believes that his coin will succeed would probably already own significant amounts of the coin that he is developing. Just like the case with Satoshi and Bitcoin. By simply contributing to his own project and helping to push the coin forward, he would be enriching the value of his own coins.

exactly that

that guy asks maybe for constant payout to dump on the market. I'll take that back when prooven wrong of course. No offence.

[coinsolidation]

then we are agreed, that is exactly what I am doing here

[smalltimer]

then we are agreed, that is exactly what I am doing here

watching. Having it on exchange though helps investors to obtain it if they want. If you can't exchange it and speculate on future success what sense does it make?

edit: it's the art to find a balance between reward for miners and protecting interests of investors. Supply and demand makes the price. Keeping it off exchange initially can make sense but later it should get on exchange when you want to open it for investing.

further edit: it'll be about keeping miners interested for the long term to mine it. That's the first thing towards a successful coin.

[Este Nuno]

either you doing it because you love it or you are doing it because you have a groundbreaking idea that is a gamechanger. If none of that applies you shouldn't release a coin.

sorry for being direct. Investor here. (one of the last survivors probably)

So do you think it's a benefit to Bitcoin that Gavin et al get paid? Or do you think that they should be doing it for free?

Remember, developers are a limited resource. With completing incentives(ie they can get paid for other work quite easily). As someone who owns a currency and wishes to to see it succeed(which almost always with one exception involves significant development over time), wouldn't you like to provide the maximum amount of economic incentive to the developers of any coin that you hold? It seems to me that it's a case where interests align, but it seems some people don't see it that way.

I can understand people not wanting all the developers remuneration to be front-loaded like it would be in an IPO. It makes sense that you might want something that incentivises continued development and progress.

Ideally, donations alone would be more than enough since like I said, holders and developers interests are aligned. But there is risk that donations fall short. As is often seen in the Bitcoin world. Which is why maybe a voluntary automatic system that takes a fixed amount out of (something) over time is good. But it's still hard to come up with a good system.

Say you had a coin with a 300 million dollar market cap and you owned a large chunk of your net worth in that coin. Would you not want there to be a team of developers working full time on that project? As there is in Bitcoin?

[smalltimer]

either you doing it because you love it or you are doing it because you have a groundbreaking idea that is a gamechanger. If none of that applies you shouldn't release a coin.

sorry for being direct. Investor here. (one of the last survivors probably)

So do you think it's a benefit to Bitcoin that Gavin et al get paid? Or do you think that they should be doing it for free?

Remember, developers are a limited resource. With completing incentives(ie they can get paid for other work quite easily). As someone who owns a currency and wishes to to see it succeed(which almost always with one exception involves significant development over time), wouldn't you like to provide the maximum amount of economic incentive to the developers of any coin that you hold? It seems to me that it's a case where interests align, but it seems some people don't see it that way.

I can understand people not wanting all the developers remuneration to be front-loaded like it would be in an IPO. It makes sense that you might want something that incentivises continued development and progress.

Ideally, donations alone would be more than enough since like I said, holders and developers interests are aligned. But there is risk that donations fall short. As is often seen in the Bitcoin world. Which is why maybe a voluntary automatic system that takes a fixed amount out of (something) over time is good. But it's still hard to come up with a good system.

Say you had a coin with a 300 million dollar market cap and you owned a large chunk of your net worth in that coin. Would you not want there to be a team of developers working full time on that project? As there is in Bitcoin?

i personally think Gavin is a multimillionaire who owns a lot of BTC from early investing and mining and has more highclass joboffers than he can count. Every day more.  Gavin is suited. Developing a successful coin means also to build a reputation which itself is worth a lot of money.

[coinsolidation]

then we are agreed, that is exactly what I am doing here

watching. Having it on exchange though helps investors to obtain it if they want. If you can't exchange it and speculate on future success what sense does it make?

edit: it's the art to find a balance between reward for miners and protecting interests of investors. Supply and demand makes the price. Keeping it off exchange initially can make sense but later it should get on exchange when you want to open it for investing.

You make a good point.

We have tried to counter this in two ways.
1. people may invest if they like, any "investment" will be spent on mining rigs to support the network at say 35% of the hashing speed, the btm minted will be split 5% to the foundation and 95% to the investor*
2. we aren't explicitly keeping bitmark off exchanges, we just aren't actively pushing for it to be on exchanges. If an exchange wants to add it at some point that is fine.

* I prefer the term donor, this methods keeps it fair, ensures the network is healthy, and doesn't preassign any would be value to bitmark other than base hashing power cost. Overall network speed and health entirely determines how many bitmarks are returned for any donation. Bitmark distribution is then fairly distributed between those with cash and those with mining rigs. No markets/ipo/premine/price-specification needed.

[smalltimer]

2. we aren't explicitly keeping bitmark off exchanges, we just aren't actively pushing for it to be on exchanges. If an exchange wants to add it at some point that is fine.

i think that is a good approach. worked for pesetacoin. probably the best approach you can make tbh.

[coinsolidation]

2. we aren't explicitly keeping bitmark off exchanges, we just aren't actively pushing for it to be on exchanges. If an exchange wants to add it at some point that is fine.

i think that is a good approach. worked for pesetacoin. probably the best approach you can make tbh.

thank you for the feedback, it is good to know somebody else thinks this is a good approach.

[smalltimer]

when it comes to built in regular payout for the devs i would say such a thing would make it less attractive since the dev would be expected to sell those coins which puts downward-pressure on the price. If you need that you should keep it to a minimum. Attracting money from outside via investors and have the coin apprechiate in value is probably the better way to raise money.

Better to have a scarce coin with low sellpressure (from devs and miners) which is interesting for investors exactly because of that and have the coin apprechiate in value than having that constant payout maybe?
The higher you pay yourself the less attractive it is for the serious investor. Ideally you don't have any of those payouts and only mine your coins like everybody else and don't sell them but hold them while you continue to increase appeal of the coin and try to cover your livingexpenses otherwise.

To put it short: the more sellpressure you put on the coin for covering your own costs the the less attractive it will be for investors. The investor is where the money comes in.
The perfect coin would have a dev that covers his livingexpenses otherwise and not plain selling his coin. You can earn money from trading (buy low sell high) aswell.
You can implement a stabilizationfund which can produce overhead for example.
Reduce sellpressure as far as possible to get a better price. (supply) while raising demand in one of the many possible ways and you'll have a winner-coin.

I see the problem here. It's the balance miners, devs, investors. Each is important in their own way and can't be left out. There is potentially a lot of math to do (what is electricitycost, how much money do you need to come in to sustain a price x to keep the network running, etc)
Finetuning

maybe pos/pow hybrid is a little cheaper to run? I don't know. Needs to be secure too. (very small pos-reward if pos). Scarcity is important. Scarce coin + high demand makes good price in theory if both demand and low supply are sustainable in time.  

edit: scarce doesn't mean low number of coins, it means low sellpressure/ low inflation - number of total coins doesn't matter.

Hope i was of any help

[coinsolidation]

when it comes to built in regular payout for the devs i would say such a thing would make it less attractive since the dev would be expected to sell those coins which puts downward-pressure on the price. If you need that you should keep it to a minimum. Attracting money from outside via investors and have the coin apprechiate in value is probably the better way to raise money.

Better to have a scarce coin with low sellpressure (from devs and miners) which is interesting for investors exactly because of that and have the coin apprechiate in value than having that constant payout maybe?
The higher you pay yourself the less attractive it is for the serious investor. Ideally you don't have any of those payouts and only mine your coins like everybody else and don't sell them but hold them while you continue to increase appeal of the coin and try to cover your livingexpenses otherwise.

To put it short: the more sellpressure you put on the coin for covering your own costs the the less attractive it will be for investors. The investor is where the money comes in.
The perfect coin would have a dev that covers his livingexpenses otherwise and not plain selling his coin. You can earn money from trading (buy low sell high) aswell.
You can implement a stabilizationfund which can produce overhead for example.
Reduce sellpressure as far as possible to get a better price. (supply) while raising demand in one of the many possible ways and you'll have a winner-coin.

I see the problem here. It's the balance miners, devs, investors. Each is important in their own way and can't be left out. There is potentially a lot of math to do (what is electricitycost, how much money do you need to come in to sustain a price x to keep the network running, etc)
Finetuning

maybe pos/pow hybrid is a little cheaper to run? I don't know. Needs to be secure too. (very small pos-reward if pos). Scarcity is important. Scarce coin + high demand makes good price in theory if both demand and low supply are sustainable in time. 

You have described the problem perfectly.

Long term funding should cover itself, the rationale is simple, if the foundation holds a small percentage of total currency, and that currency has a high value, then expenses are covered and downward pressure is not created when a small portion is sold. This is why the bitmark foundation won't touch any funds until at least 1 year in to the project, longer if possible.

There are multiple things which need balanced as you mention.

I think the problem reduces to developer living expenses. If everything is balanced fairly then I can only see two possibilities:

1. The developer(s) prepare and fund themselves for a period of development time
2. An investor takes a gamble on the developer(s)

Or a mix of both.

A variation is for an investor to acquire an amount of the currency being developed, and then sponsor the development team.

As you say, the main problems are ensuring development incentive and commitment, combined with limiting or alleviating downward pressure.

[smalltimer]

yes, people are not so generous with donations, i know that.
If devs would announce to not sell large amounts or be very transparent about it that would help. Never sell more than 0.025% of total supply in a week. Possibly even less.

Unobtanium would be maybe a coin to look at since that one struck a fairly good balance in my opinion. They had some minor problems lately including lots of stolen coins being dumped. Without those problems price should be probably a lot higher. We'll see how that plays out, but the parameters could be something to look at and maybe stretch that a bit in time since it was going pretty fast. Dev was mining from the start and still is. Takes donations. Works out fine so far. Will be interesting to watch. No premine or instamine. Fair but relatively rapid distribution. Very nice coin that struck a very healthy balance. Ideally miners are also not dumping because they believe in the coin (like it is with btc, ltc or Uno)
You want to get rid of the miners that dump straight away. You want to attract miners that believe in the coin and hold it.

If developers can fund themselves through other channels than selling at least for a year that would make a good picture for the coin given there is no premine or regular payout. If you then can create demand, have miners that hold and are holding yourself the coin surely goes to the roof.

needs to be fair, rare, well distributed and something that either fills existing demand or can create that demand - all for the long term. People need to believe in the longterm success of the coin to hold it.
Distribution is also quite important since the wider it is distributed the less power over the price a single individual has. Coins that are concentrated in fewer hands tend to have more problems than coins that are wider distributed.

enough coinwisdom now. That's something to chew

edit: maybe make a second disconnected coin to capitalize on and leave your main project pure to help it succeed.

[coinsolidation]

Transparent ... Never sell more than 0.025% of total supply in a week.

Unobtanium would be maybe a coin to look at

You want to attract miners that believe in the coin and hold it.

If developers can fund themselves through other channels than selling at least for a year

Your first suggestion sounds reasonable, I will propose this as a rule for Bitmark.

I will take a look at Unobtanium.

Attracting the "right" miners until the coin has a strong hashrate is very important, it is my main concern. We will see what happens.

Funding through other channels is ideal, but it also can detract from the project development as you said earlier.

Distributed risk seems to work to some extent. For example I needed to raise 0.6 BTC to get resources for bitmark. A few donations of 0.1 average came in, no single donor spent more than they could reasonably afford to lose, and they did not need to take a big risk of trust and belief. Some IPOs seem to work the same, with many buying a small amount.

Speaking for myself, we never know what will happen in life. So it is possible that at some time I will require money to live due to something unexpected. At such a time the issue would be whether to put it to the community transparently, or whether to commit to taking a break to work on something funded. The problem with taking a break is that it can lose momentum and create negativity, forcing prices down, and making it harder to return or pick back up. The problem with the community reliance is just that, there are very few people who are happy to donate cash on the hope that it will increase or maintain the value of an asset they hold (the currency in this case. It is ideal to have emergency funds or reserve for an event like this, but after working unfunded on something for a long time most people would not have an emergency fund left.

I can see you have put a lot of thought in to this, thank you.

edit:

edit: maybe make a second disconnected coin to capitalize on and leave your main project pure to help it succeed.

I will think on this more. I considered it and have forked the project to create "Pfennig" a clone-able version, but I felt that creating a coin with no intention of creating long term value or support felt ethically wrong, it would be unfair to those buying the disconnected coin.

[Este Nuno]

either you doing it because you love it or you are doing it because you have a groundbreaking idea that is a gamechanger. If none of that applies you shouldn't release a coin.

sorry for being direct. Investor here. (one of the last survivors probably)

So do you think it's a benefit to Bitcoin that Gavin et al get paid? Or do you think that they should be doing it for free?

Remember, developers are a limited resource. With completing incentives(ie they can get paid for other work quite easily). As someone who owns a currency and wishes to to see it succeed(which almost always with one exception involves significant development over time), wouldn't you like to provide the maximum amount of economic incentive to the developers of any coin that you hold? It seems to me that it's a case where interests align, but it seems some people don't see it that way.

I can understand people not wanting all the developers remuneration to be front-loaded like it would be in an IPO. It makes sense that you might want something that incentivises continued development and progress.

Ideally, donations alone would be more than enough since like I said, holders and developers interests are aligned. But there is risk that donations fall short. As is often seen in the Bitcoin world. Which is why maybe a voluntary automatic system that takes a fixed amount out of (something) over time is good. But it's still hard to come up with a good system.

Say you had a coin with a 300 million dollar market cap and you owned a large chunk of your net worth in that coin. Would you not want there to be a team of developers working full time on that project? As there is in Bitcoin?

i personally think Gavin is a multimillionaire who owns a lot of BTC from early investing and mining and has more highclass joboffers than he can count. Every day more.  Gavin is suited. Developing a successful coin means also to build a reputation which itself is worth a lot of money.

I can't comment on Gavin's financial status from jobs before his full time status as lead developer. But he's said that he doesn't own a very large amount of bitcoin. Almost all of his early bitcoin from when mining was easy had been sold off long ago from what he has said.

He felt that it was important for him and his family that he was able to earn a steady income from Bitcoin development which was the main reason the foundation was created.

[coinsolidation]

For those following this thread, we have discovered an additional benefit to the IPM proposal.

[Gavin] felt that it was important for him and his family that he was able to earn a steady income from Bitcoin development which was the main reason the foundation was created.

I also feel the same about the Bitmark foundation, both for myself and others who join the project.

[YarkoL]

What do you guys think of this idea

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=700125

I think it's wonderfully simple and AFAICS would work well.

[coinsolidation]

What do you guys think of this idea

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=700125

I think it's wonderfully simple and AFAICS would work well.

The two "fair" block chain approaches are:
1. Block or Transaction Fee Taxation
2. What you suggest, a premine which is locked.

The problem with 1 is that it breaks backwards compatibility with existing infrastructures such as mining pool servers and more. If BC isn't a problem then you can use this.
The problem with 2 is that nLocktime doesn't particularly work, it would require the transactions to release the premine to be floated around the network until each lock time is hit, which would be transaction spam/ddos and if the network was busy they wouldn't be held in the transaction pool.

After studying all the technical approaches, we came to the following conclusion for Bitmark, to use Investor Public Mining (IPM) Pool, coupled with a donation based foundation

I am currently testing the process and it seems to work well, it also has a wide range of benefits for miners, investors, network health, attack mitigation, and continued incentivised developer support.