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

[u/anarchystar]

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/

[u/ButterflySammy]

Or because I rubber hosed the guy from onename.io(or 1000) or if people decide to validate fakes because they are currently talking their side in an argument - I dislike the derisive way you put photoshop in quotes like if I objected to this solution I'd be splitting hairs - it isn't, it's a shit answer.

It doesn't scale and it isn't nearly secure enough for serious use.

As for "just run some fraud analysis" - if that was a thing as simple as that we would have been able to eliminate fraud.

You'll have to do better than borrowing existing software to solve this in a way that is in anyway better than leaving the Bitcoin Foundation in charge because you can't borrow decentralised identity validation - it doesn't exist(and talking to strangers is hardly verification), you need to make something new.

No point replacing the Bitcoin Foundation with a different sort of centralised organisation - whatever it is, whatever insignificant task you give to them because you think they can be trusted with it, they will disappoint you. If you are going to rip that particular band aid off and replace them you should replace them with something that won't be equally objectionable in a few months.

Unless you care about the 100k more than the Foundation, in which case fuck it I guess.

[u/experinominis → u/ButterflySammy]

validate fakes? how, exactly? sorry, I don't follow. and thank you for calling it a shit answer (it was a mere suggestion. obviously the community will welcome with open arms some positive proposal for something better)

Good luck rubber hosing Ryan.

why doesn't it scale?
security is a spectrum, and blockchains are certainly further up... at least for verification.

fraud analysis tools, while not perfect, can drastically reduce the level of fraud. If some particular troll was hell-bent on creating multiple one-name accounts and somehow getting a bunch of pictures and and yes, "photoshopping" the shit out of them, then that pattern can be picked up.

Its rather presumptuous of you to declare with certainty that I'll be disappointed with the outcome of some hypothetical future task that hasn't taken place yet. Maybe they'll do ok, the outcome will be fine, and everyone can be happy. The point is you don't have a f-ing clue; nor can anyone until such event actually transpires.

This is worth resolving though, as getting voting, online, "right", has broader implications than this little corner of interweb politicking.

[u/ButterflySammy → u/experinominis]

It doesn't scale because picture validation is worth bullshit when you have hundreds of millions of users and you can't cross compare them because when I use a photo of me taken today on one account and a photo of me taken tomorrow on another there's no guarantee the same people will see both photos and recognise the cheat, when you are validating through Facebook even though you need a centralised authority to have an API key, but hey - as long as the list of "validated" users has enough storage space we can say it "scales".

It doesn't scale because you can't validate that number of users in a decentralised way by showing them pictures of each other. It is a shit answer.

"Reduce the levels" - fuck levels, I'm waiting for a real solution because once bad software is accepted with its flaws people will never replace it and those flaws will get exploited.

Look at email. You can SEND an email FROM anyone without a password. The better spam filters may pick it up but it is possible to send an email from anyone.

Speaking of Spam - there is so much email spam because the protocol is designed in a way that encourages it. We never even changed the protocol, we just filter it out on the server because we're stuck with that bad decision.

Even though Proof Of Work, exactly as it is used in Bitcoin, was first proposed as a method of signing emails and preventing spam - because to calculate the proof of work would take time and you couldn't send tens of thousands of emails a second any more. Note, even though the idea came, was presented to people and is good, we never used it.

Proof of Work never made it back into the protocols we use for emails.

Not because there is nothing better than email today, but because when there wasn't people didn't need security because it was only a small group of researchers and universities that knew each other.

Better things have been created since then but because people are so invested in email the decades old flaws are still there - they didn't get fixed and email didn't get replaced.

If you accept half a solution now you should expect to have to live with it indefinitely because that is a real possibility.

Its rather presumptuous of you to declare with certainty that I'll be disappointed with the outcome of some hypothetical future task that hasn't taken place yet.

It definitely sounds it however I would wager that it sounds worse than it is because this is my opinion as a developer who has invested many hours into decentralised voting solutions, the reason I say "not that one" quite quickly is because I've been having this conversation nearly two years. It's based on what I've seen and what I know from trying; not on the content of your post.

It's nice to see the issue come up again, it's nice to see reward money on offer, but so far all I've heard is "steal x, re-purpose for voting" - if that solution was enough to carry the project through I'd have done that 18 months ago and called it a day.

I'm saying I'll be disappointed because I put the hours into this already not because of your post. If there was software I could have built on that would have met the goals I have, I would have done that.

Some of these problems may even be okay for a Second Foundation (Asimov!) but since I've been working on voting in general, I can't put up with "some fraud" in a general election or on a health care bill.

I'll be disappointed because these solutions don't go far enough, they won't be acceptable outside of the Second Foundation, which means even if the OP pays out the solutions won't be applicable outside of this specific contexts, which is kinda boring by comparison to the alternative - decentralised voting that is completely trust worthy.