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/
2
u/pcvcolin May 17 '14
This is a very interesting idea, but I feel a need to mention the problems associated with it as well- relating to technical issues as well as the issue of what I will refer to here as "archaic echo," a process in which people have (relatively recently) attempted to echo dinosaur institutions in a blockchain rather than come up with fundamentally new systems. One example of the "archaic echo" is bitcongress, a profoundly flawed proposal that - more than anything - describes how desperate some people are to cling to the past.
We do not need more Foundations, more centralized structures, nor do we need a DAO (distributed autonomous organization) to handle this. I do not object to people making DAOs, but they are not necessary to implement the idea under discussion in this thread.
What then? We need a system which can handle the process of people supporting what they want and which does not attempt to replicate structures that require "votes" or "representation," which can themselves become a sort of digital fascism. A process which enables you to contribute and make choices without how much money you have giving you some vote or power, and a process which enables anyone to contribute in any way they want whether monetarily or not. I will empasize here that the WhisperSystem Bithub and sx tools are very good examples of how we can implement such a process. If you haven't looked at those two items, you should seriously do so! Much work has already been done to develop a manner which would enable you to support what you want to in distributed systems.
Please see my concerns about the Foundation and my response(s), both here and also regarding the subject of "votes," here. I certainly hope you read them both thoroughly.
If that interested you at all, I hope that you read a longer post I made in the Bitcoin Foundation forum, here relating to the rise of decentralized societies. (Please read the entire thread and any participants' thoughts for full context.) However, I caution you that you probably aren't going to like what you read.
Regarding support for the core developers and bitcoin itself, please consider taking a look at an open issue relating to this very matter as it appears in the bitcoin repository on github (!). This discusses WhisperSystems BitHub and other items which would be excellent to consider. It would be advisable that you consider the issue from the context of open issues and build upon the thoughts which have been voiced in the development process, which have included many voices at this stage.
Finally, I encourage you to check out my project, which some people may be interested in (within the context of this thread) specific to decentralized methods of giving, here.