Possible use for forum funds?

[tysat]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313.msg7430095#msg7430095

I think using some of the forum's money to help fund p2pool development would be a great idea.  It would be awesome if it could be made better so usage would increase.

[theymos]

I tend to think that getblocktemplate will be better than P2Pool in the long-run. There's not really a need for pooling to be 100% decentralized instead of just distributed, and some centralization offers advantages here. So I'd be more inclined to donate toward GBT development. In particular, I'm not sure whether there is any mining software which can actually verify block templates to make sure that they follow the network rules. (Ideally, you should be able to just add a flag to your mining software, and the software would act as a full Bitcoin node without any required additional software or configuration.)

[Maged]

Why not both? Hire forrestv full-time to work on P2Pool and spin up another group (maybe headed by Luke-jr?) to improve GBT. Bitcointalk is making about $5k in profits per week (based on some back-of-my-hand estimates on undisclosed expenses such as the sysadmin that was hired along with the known expenses such as mods), which gives plenty of room to work with without even touching what has been stored up. Bitcointalk could currently sustain two full-time devs at $120k/year.

[theymos]

Why not both? Hire forrestv full-time to work on P2Pool and spin up another group (maybe headed by Luke-jr?) to improve GBT. Bitcointalk is making about $5k in profits per week (based on some back-of-my-hand estimates on undisclosed expenses such as the sysadmin that was hired along with the known expenses such as mods), which gives plenty of room to work with without even touching what has been stored up. Bitcointalk could currently sustain two full-time devs at $120k/year.

I'm not sure that this issue is important enough to warrant two full-time devs.

Also, I don't want to eat into the reserves too much, especially with the forum software project unfinished. (The forum currently operates at a monthly deficit of ~90 BTC due to the software project.) I think that one full-time dev and some occasional bounties could be safely supported now, but not more.

As for which projects to support... I'd like to see more discussion (especially from Bitcoin experts and core devs) on where additional resources would be most useful.

[Maged]

Why not both? Hire forrestv full-time to work on P2Pool and spin up another group (maybe headed by Luke-jr?) to improve GBT. Bitcointalk is making about $5k in profits per week (based on some back-of-my-hand estimates on undisclosed expenses such as the sysadmin that was hired along with the known expenses such as mods), which gives plenty of room to work with without even touching what has been stored up. Bitcointalk could currently sustain two full-time devs at $120k/year.

I don't want to eat into the reserves too much, especially with the forum software project unfinished. (The forum currently runs at a monthly deficit of ~90 BTC due to the software project.)

What else do you plan on using the reserves for after the new forum is done? If you plan to keep Slickage working for bitcointalk indefinitely, I'm totally fine with that as an answer to that question, since those guys do some pretty good work. Otherwise, it's kinda silly for a forum to have several million dollars in reserve.

[theymos]

What else do you plan on using the reserves for after the new forum is done? If you plan to keep Slickage working for bitcointalk indefinitely, I'm totally fine with that as an answer to that question, since those guys do some pretty good work. Otherwise, it's kinda silly for a forum to have several million dollars in reserve.

I don't intend to indefinitely spend this much on software development. The reserves should be used for Bitcoin development and other things that benefit the Bitcoin community. In a year or two, I'd like to see the forum organization (maybe renamed to something more appropriate then...) hiring a few developers to work on Bitcoin full-time (focusing especially on the technology) and creating frequent bounties for smaller projects, but still maintaining a large reserve to handle emergencies which affect the forum itself or the Bitcoin network/ecosystem.

(I do have a natural tendency to maintain a constant surplus and save as much as possible, even when this is maybe not correct, so someone should complain to me if we reach a situation where the forum has a surplus and still has a reserve of 5000+ BTC. But right now I think that the spending level is about high enough.)

[Maged]

Fair enough. It would be useful for an organization like the forum to have a large amount of emergency funds for the purpose of protocol emergencies. If a single mining pool asserts total control over the blockchain and starts rejecting non-pool blocks, the forum could guarantee payment of about 200 blocks for competing miners. That's probably smart.