Whole idea that a company can be managed by a crowd of shareholders is utopia, because shareholders don't understand a shit about how a company works. In real world, companies are ran by experts. Voting exists to collect input from shareholders, and based on this input, experts make their educated decisions. Bitshares proved that crowd can't manage nothing.
We have proxies for that .. call them managers if you like
You can call them managers or whatever, but they don't seem to manage anything. You still need approval from a crowd for every little development step, through proxy or directly no matter. This is wrong.
Proxies are the solution to this problem, I think. They have a responsibility to step up and be active voters and managers. In theory, the best proxies will receive the most support due to their good management and reputation.
Take a look at our proxy list here:
http://cryptofresh.com/ballots. Interestingly, Bytemaster and Angel are in 9th and 11th place, controlling the vote of nearly 30M BTS between them, even though they haven't placed any vote in over 270 days! Their dormancy has gradually caused them to lose support, but they still have significant power. This may be a weakness of the system, but it is not fatal, since we are still able to vote workers in and out without their participation.
A bounty system may be able to be set up without the need for any hard fork. It could work something like this:
- The community proposes a bounty to create (example: a bug fix or new feature)
- Anyone can create a worker with zero pay to measure support of the bounty
- While this zero-pay worker is voted in, it is an announcement of the available bounty
- Someone does the work, i.e. creates a pull request with the new code, earning the bounty
- After the work is done, the committee creates a worker to generate the pay, which is then given to the recipient
This could even be denominated in BitUSD, if the committee made the conversion from BTS to BitUSD by purchasing it on the DEX in step 5.
So, I don't think we need to hard-fork or overhaul the system, because there is a lot we can do with the current system. Xeroc gave another creative example with his idea for a worker payable in BitUSD.
Do we lack volunteers? I'm not sure, and it's hard to measure. I think the worker system probably does reduce volunteerism. But it also brings new productivity, such as through
my own worker, so the tradeoff may be worth it. It's hard to know.