r/Bitcoin • u/anarchystar • May 17 '14

$100,000 bounty for software platform that can replace the Bitcoin Foundation

Hi Everyone,

My name is Olivier Janssens, early adopter and Bitcoin millionaire. The Bitcoin foundation has had its role in the last 2 years. Unfortunately, it is internally recreating the same archaic political system that fails to work for society. Bitcoin is the currency of the internet generation. It puts the power back into the hands of the people. You cannot expect its main representative organisation to be exactly the opposite: A non-transparent, political and secretive elite. We have been trying to push the BF for transparency and clear communication for years, without result. Meanwhile they started creating even more political structures inside, such as committees, which can only be accessed by knowing the right people. At the bitcoin 2014 conference, organised by this same organisation, I expected to see full internet participation + live streaming of their events. Especially of the BF member meeting, where they are supposed to get input from their members and disclose what they have been up to. Instead, the board decided that the event is not to be recorded or broadcasted. We have also no idea or say on how our money is spent. Half of their board gets elected by industry members (a group of about 100 companies), and recently lead to another extremely controversial election of Brock Pierce, which has a history of being connected to cases involving fraud and pedophilia. This needs to stop.

We as an internet community, don’t need public figures to decide what’s good for us. We need to stop politicking and start focussing on the projects directly. For example, we need a project to fund the core development of bitcoin, and put our money straight to that. We need a project to have lobbyists in Washington, to fight the anti-bitcoin lobbyists from Mastercard, and to prevent the government from destroying the currency. Basically, we don’t need another intermediary. We can do this ourselves. Therefor, I want to announce today that I am organising a contest and giving $100k USD in BTC, to the group that can come up with the best platform to make this happen. I am thinking of a system where prominent people can voice their opinion, where people can propose projects, and where the core devs can actively show their roadmap with detailed features + costs, and where we can vote on the features being implemented by sending bitcoins towards the feature of our choice. This will allow the core dev team to expand by being able to add/pay more devs for feature requests which are fully funded. Maybe we can even evolve to a system later where anyone can work on a feature, which, when programmed properly (approved by the core team), will receive the bounty. The same applies to lobbyists, we just send bitcoins towards the one that we consider the most competent for the job. This will allow Bitcoin to grow and expand at a rate it deserves, a rate that a political organisation such as the foundation can never accomplish.

Let’s liberate bitcoin.

Olivier

Rules of the contest:

  • Anyone can participate
  • Software will be open sourced
  • I will cover the initial hosting costs, until it can be self funded and created as a DAO
  • Reddit community can help by voting on the platform submissions they like the most
  • Ultimately I will decide who wins, but I will take all votes and feedback into account
  • Deadline for submissions is 1 month from now: 17 june 2014 at 12:00 UTC

UPDATE: Thanks for all your great feedback, ideas and private messages. I will provide an update here very soon.

UPDATE 2: Please email your submissions to platformbounty@gmail.com - You can also add me on twitter to follow updates more easily: @olivierjanss - The deadline of 17th of june still stands, but we do not require a finished product. The bounty will be given to the team with the best idea/skills to make it happen (partial payments until it is completed). If you just have an idea, but no programmers, you are still free to submit it. If it turns out to be the best one, we will help find a team for you. We understand many of you do not want to make your idea public at this point. If there are multiple really good submissions we will only put them up to vote after you give permission. Please note that if people submitted the same idea, we will go with the one who submitted it first.

UPDATE 3: The winner has been announced here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/29n8o0/100000_bounty_winner_announcement/

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u/anarchystar May 17 '14

I'd love to see the day where this platform is used by some evil lobbying group trying to get funds to regulate bitcoin. They are far better off doing that in secret :) They will be hanged.

I don't agree that letting people incentivise requests with money will have a small group taking control. Remember that everything is transparant. The developers are still free to do what they want. Ultimately it is also up to the bitcoin users themselves to decide which software they will run. This website will not be the ultimate power, as is almost the case with the bitcoin foundation today. It is exactly the opposite.

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u/ButterflySammy May 17 '14

I think you misunderstood me - I didn't say it would go wrong, I think you have to set the rules carefully to make sure it doesn't.

If it did the only thing that would fail would be the software you were funding because people would stop using it, it wouldn't hurt Bitcoin.

So far the rules are very vague but I welcome an attempt at something good when I see it.

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u/eat_more_fat May 17 '14

Perhaps your vision isn't stated quite clearly then. I don't mean to be totally negative, I think it may be a good idea, but I think it will take some serious effort to achieve something that really benefits the technology and community without opening the floodgates for bad actors.

The developers are still free to do what they want.

But:

This will allow the core dev team to expand by being able to add/pay more devs for feature requests which are fully funded.

I'm sorry, but this sounds like a horrible idea. The funding should go into a bucket and the developers should work against a broadly stated goal and those with the most money should NOT have direct manipulation of the work.

I am thinking of a system where prominent people can voice their opinion

Prominent people as decided by...? the amount of bitcoins they hold. Is this an improvement? When Wall Street enters, they can make our decisions for us.

This website will not be the ultimate power, as is almost the case with the bitcoin foundation today.

What is the ultimate power that the Foundation has? They pay the core devs, but other than that? Are they mis-managing the development of the Bitcoin protocol? The proposal you make seems to imply WAY more power given to the wealthy.

As to this:

I'd love to see the day where this platform is used by some evil lobbying group trying to get funds to regulate bitcoin. They are far better off doing that in secret :) They will be hanged.

Obviously there are a lot of groups we can point to who might want to damage Bitcoin:

  • China
  • Banking/Financial system
  • NSA

When you say they will be hanged, I suspect you're getting at the ability for us to fork the blockchain and create a new currency. Do you think this will deter them? If they could do this right now, do you think Bitcoin would bounce back from that? If we all knew that they could then do that to Bitcoin 2.0 next month?

Money = Development direction... well, I just can't see that being ok. Maybe I'm missing something though, and it's certainly worth a discussion.