The problem I see with this is that there's no incentive for new programmers to join the project after you launch it. Perhaps you should include a way to create bounties for the programming work that needs to happen after the launch. This way a new programmer would have incentive to contribute to this project.

Well... there is the same incentive that there is for any open source project, plus the incentive to want the program to behave better, because you may have shares.
Take for example Bitcoin, nobody pays the programmers, but I'm pretty sure they have a bunch of bitcoins in their pockets, so they are interested on improving it.
The more valuable Bitcoin is, the more you are interested. The same will happen with WeTube for sure.

UPDATE

We are separating Wetube from Bitcloud, which is the protocol.

The economic model is here:

https://github.com/wetube/bitcloud/blob/master/economic-model.org

The protocol is here:

https://github.com/wetube/bitcloud/blob/master/bitcloud.org#introduction

Our forum is here:

http://talk.bitcloudproject.org/




Programmers - the great initial winners

In you have read something about economics of Bitcoins, DACs and the approach of Invictus Innovations, all of them are based in the concept of mining. This has some advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages of mining:

• You attract a lot of investors and other people interested in your idea. You only have to see the impressive success of Protoshares and how thousands of people got involved into it the first week.

• People worry about your project and encourage the adoption of it.

However, it has also serious disadvantages:

• Real workers are not motivated to do any programming, so you must centralize this task and put money of your own to overcome it in the form of bounties. This is ironic, as you pursue decentralization but you obtain the contrary: centralization of human resources, at great cost.

• Many criminals mine virtually for free, using botnets, a form of virus that steal computer power from infected computers of innocents. They obtain at least 1000 more shares this way than an individual. And solutions to end up this are not clear nor efficient.

It is my opinion that a DAC of this characteristics should not be driven by the greed of eventual hackers. It is also my opinion that the persons who do most of the efforts should be the initial shareholders of this company, just like it happens in the real world. Do you imagine Steve Jobs doing what he did knowing that he had only 0.0001% of the company he just created? No, he had a good share because he took the risks and has the ideas (it is irrelevant if after some years he sold them).

So I propose something that would not like very much to speculators, but certainly will motivate programmers and serious investors to do serious work here.

My proposition is to centralize the capital in a group of programmers EXACTLY ONLY for the INITIAL phase of the project until we have the first alpha released to the world. I mean: the initial shares of the company are equally distributed to the programmers, only in function of the amount of code/art/documentation they write manually. We can debate how amounts are measured. And, after the release of the software, the company becomes COMPLETELY, without exception, DECENTRALIZED. This is the equivalent of the actual way in which most companies start: first it comes the idea, then comes the partners who do the initial work, and then, if the company has succeed, it goes to the stock market.

This way, the programmers will obtain their part with justice, their work will be rapidly rewarded once the system if fully functional, in the form of dividends. And because they obtain a good part of it, this project should become very primordial in their minds. They should be very motivated to maintain the source code in the future because they have a proper share that they don't want to drop in value.

Compare this with a programmer who has been paid a simple bounty. S/he would have no further motivation to maintain it.

My proposition is to form a democratic virtual cooperative of programmers in which everybody who contributes can share her/his ideas, with the compromise to obtain their shares one day before the launch and then become investors. After that moment, WeTube DAC will be maintained by its workers (artists, moderators, clients and servers), but the programmers will still have the important role and motivation of maintaining the software itself.

Because I know that there are people who want to invest but don't have any skills to contribute, we can also create a ProtoMediaShares, similar to what Protoshares is, that could be converted to WeTube DAC's shares at the launch, at some proportion. We are open to this proposition if we still give programmers something like 3/4 of the total initial shares. But some shares could be given to miners-only with a moral condition: please promote WeTube!

Our intention to develop this initial political system is precisely to encourage the initial decentralization of human resources, which are the most valuable of them all, and without them we can only fail and give power to people who don't really want to get involved but just get rich without having to do nothing. Think about this question: would you give shares of your company to someone who steals money from someone else? He will steal from you when he find the proper moment, too.

After the initial share partition upon programmers (and probably some miners that act as promoters), people can invest in the usual ways for WeTube: by serving, by uploading content, by moderating, or just by buying shares in the Bitshares market.

How do we know when to do the partition for the programmers and become fully decentralized? Very simple: when we start to operate and receive the first clients, so we are forced to become a BitAsset and operate on Bitshares market. This comes exactly at the same time that the first alpha release happens, the same time at which the original block of our block-chain is released. From there on, WeTube DAC is fully decentralized an it is on its own.

And what part of the stock do we reserve for programmers and miners? I propose 10% for programmers and 2.5% for miners. The 87.5% left is reserved for workers to be earn slowly once the system starts running. 10% is really a lot if we consider that this DAC could become the next YouTube. Imagine you do about 10% of the programming, that would give you 1% of the total shares that WeTube will ever have, which would convert you in a millionaire in some years.

So please consider yourself all this matter. This is a serious business we have here, and a real opportunity.

UPDATE FROM HERE

Managers / marketers / modelers

A project of this size/repercussion, cannot go far without thinkers. Every single area of this DAC needs delicate analysis and modeling.

In the traditional structure of a company, you normally have departments and directors. Directors mandate a way of working and ensure that everybody is working in the correct direction. This imposes a hierarchy. And we don't want that. We want freedom, voluntarism, and a way to compensate everybody only in function of their work. We would like this DAC to be flat and auto managed.

But, let me be very clear on this: while we want full freedom, we also need proper analysis and direction. So, how to achieve both?

I have this idea, that I hope everybody can agree with. I call it distributed management, where everybody can become a manager, and where real experts can obtain their proper retribution with their thinking. They will not receive more or less money than programmers, instead they will work together to model the necessary political details. Many times, but not all the times, one will be both a manager and a programmer, which is fantastic!

Every manager has the important task to model the details of the protocols and characteristics of the system. Some examples of different areas that require management:

• p2p protocol modelers, to ensure privacy and performance. This is the core of WeTube, and the most important task.

• Marketing, or how to encourage adoption of the system, while maintaining the delicate balance between profit and user enthusiasm. This department is mainly about the business model.

• Economists and currency experts in charge of MediaCoin, working together with marketing guys.

• Legal advisers. Their analysis are vital to avoid legal issues.

• Social thinkers, whose task is to think about the interface behavior and net-inter-relations between users and/or moderators.

• Programmer's coordinators. Very important to ensure communication and the application of ideas.

• Spokesmen, doing conferences/videos to promote the system.

• Moderators, to avoid abuses (for example, someone tries to write very redundantly or write code in an unnatural way to augment the number of lines).

• And general coordination, in charge of the original idea, trying to put everything together. I will assume this task, but will obtain the shares in the same proportion and conditions as the rest.

Every area may require several managers/thinkers.

So I propose that managers can get their shares in the system by writing papers, and their retribution will be in proportion on how much they need to write. Every manager should write one or more papers with a detailed analysis of the needs, and a suggested model to achieve the objectives. Then, this paper is passed to programmers and they implement the ideas. At the same time, a programmer can work with the manager to propose changes, or the programmer him/herself can become a manager if that area is empty or the actual manager is not competent/open minded enough. In case of severe conflict, a meeting will take place with the rest of the team, and we'll decide together by consensus.

Shares will be paid in the moment of the launch, so rejected writings of previous modifications will not count. I suggest that everybody will obtain their shares in proportion to the number of lines s/he wrote, the same that happens with programmers. In case of graphics/drawings, we could agree that they cost something like 20 lines each. More if they are logos.

The three pillars of WeTube: freedom, privacy, voluntary moderation

Imagine a web page where you can upload any video, music, image or document, and it will be inmediatly avaiable to everybody without restrictions, without anybody knowing who you are (if you want), without anybody censoring you.

Imagine a web page where you can access any media you want without anybody having to know what are you doing, not being imposed to authenticate with your real ID, IP, or associated credit card number, not being observed by the big brother, and at the same time the content you access is of high quality and helpful for your evolution and relationships.

Imagine you are a publisher, a periodist or an editor, and there is a place where you can safetly publish your discoverings, but without any censorship at all, while at the same time you are able to get rid of the junk and noise around you, providing only good quality researches and associations with you audence.

Imagine you are an artist that lives for and from your art, and you have a free place where you can express your ideas and concepts, participate in comunity with your followers and other artists, and even earn the money you deserve for your hard work, without imposing others and not having to pay big comissions to any private editor or distributor, nor having to support their greed and censorships.

Imagine a media where you can get rid of the junk so easy as doing a click. Imagine being your own moderator, where you can select what is good and bad for yourself and your family, without having to surrender yourself to what other has decided, specially when that other is trying to impose you a vision you don't agree with.

Imagine a place where you can choose multiple moderators, including yourself or no moderators at all, being them people and organizations you really trust, and the posibility to add or remove them without restriction. Imagine how good a free moderator could be if their motivation is to serve only what people want while removing what they don't, not what a big guy on top of him/her decides. Moderators with big impositions and bad appliance of filters would be rapidly abandoned by the comunity, and their reputation disminished.

Imagine that the media you see is temporaly stored on your computer so you can see it multiple times without having to reload it. Imagine that the content you like most is permanently stored on your computer so if you lost your internet connection you can still access it. Imagine a safeguard of all the important media you have in case of media server shutdowns, human crisis, war, or goverment censorship. You don't have that in today's standard media providers, as they prohibit you to store the content. Even companies like Google prohibits the publishing of browsers add-ons that use a trick to record the media, making YouTube videos very difficult to get stored locally with the Chrome browser.

Imagine that you are a legit enterpreneur and have a useful and good business that you need to promote. The audence of this new media provider will be large and a real oportunity for you to come in. Every single area of business you can think of is covered, and you'll be able to perfectly select the categories you want to be in. Even better is the fact that advertisers can select to what moderation they want to be attached, so you can perfectly choose moderators who provide legal only content in your country.

Imagine that you are a programmer and/or a system administrator and you want your deserved reward for your hard work while being useful to humanity. You can host a server and earn bitcoins proportional to the amount of bandwith, space and maintence you serve. At the same time, the protocol is specially designed to protect you against the arbitrarian laws, as you can select which moderators you're going to serve, and therefore, the content your server helps the user to download. But not even that, most of the contents are actually not stored in your servers, but interchanged between users alone, making this protocol a really distributed anonymous one. We even optionally protect your IP with a technology similar to hidden Tor services if you want to serve delicate searches, at only the cost of some added latency. You are a crucial part of this revolution.

Is this another moderated system?

Yes and no. It is moderated in the sense that oneself can be the moderator, or relay the task to a trusted moderator or a group of moderators. The magic of this system is that it allows full freedom, while maintaing the convenience of good-quality results and potential legality, as explained bellow.

First things first. In WeTube, there is a root moderator called “unmoderator” which acepts everything and cannot be violated in any form. This moderator resides in no place and all its content is purely in the cloud of users. Not a single part of this moderator content and searches resides in any server, except if the server administrator decides so, which s/he must explicitly configure to. This moderator fullfils freedom and zero discrimination, which unfortunately includes low quality results and potentially some illegal content in some countries.

You can compare this unmoderator with raw eMule, Tor hidden services, Gnutella, Kademlia, and other p2p protocols offering searches and/or magnet links. One who has used those programs knows that the results are more often than not of very low quality, when not ilegit or honeypots. But yet, people use those programs because of censorships and copyright issues in their countries, so they accept the junk in favor to obtain some valuable content.

That drives us to a problem: because no moderation is taken place, both the quality and legality of the content is disminished, and most people don't use them because of that.

So, what to do? We dont want to be illegal, and at the same time we want full access to quality content which is censored in central mainstream medias. We also want privacy, one thing wich we don't have today unless we use very complicated technology.

The point here is: you can't have legallity and good quality content in an unmoderated system. After a while, the system will be full of junk and legally dungerous staff.

So we introduce moderators. But let the thing be WELL done. We choose to be OUR OWN moderators. Certainly not a good thing for opressive business and goverments, who want to be the only one moderators (we should call them opressive censorers, or just fascists), but still a good thing for goverments and enterpreneus who embrace freedom and really take care of their citicens/clients.

When a user enters in the WeTube network, s/he is ussually attached to a moderator which only censors things which are not relevant to the theme s/he is attached to. For example, one moderator can specialize only on providing news, throwing out the rest. Another moderator could provide a good collection of music of a specific style. There could be also more general moderators which only accepts everything which is legal in his/her country. And there could be another interesting type of moderator which accept content which is censored in his/her country, but that content is globally considered good in the rest of the world, making him/herself an activist pro human rights against dictatorships.

A user of WeTube allways can choose whose moderators s/he wants. He is presented with a default, which is usually a group of moderators which keeps things legal. But s/he can allways choose to exit that moderation, or combine with others. Yes, multiple moderators are allowed, but interesting enough, the system allows also to be attached only to “unmoderated” (moderators themselves enter in this mode to pick good staff througout filtering).

Anyone can be a moderator and no personal information is required. Just register a nick and go to the moderation area, and there you got it.

Now it is time to introduce the concept of WeTube entry points:

The entrance to the world of WeTube

The p2p programs are a problem in themselves. They require the user to install an application in their computers and configure things. The learning curve is also ussually high, and passing links to another person is complicate because requires both sides to have the program installed and configured. Another important problem is that those programs are not really real-time, so the user must wait for the entire media to download in order to start watching it, which is extremely slow and inconvenient.

So we propose a very nice solution: WeTube can run in your browser and in your mobile device, so you can pass links around, use a nice interface, embed videos in your blogs, send by email, and do with the content all the things you can actually do with with any page.

But, because WeTube is in fact a p2p protocol, with thousands of servers and users connected to it and making it run, the web is only one of the possible interfaces. As a protocol, it can run on webpages, but also in the form of applications which uses the WeTube libraries to present themselves in other convinient forms. Desktop applications and mobile applications are perfectly posible.

The average user will use a simple web interface as his/her entry point. Many WeTube servers will also provide an entry point that will download the JavaScript program that runs in the browser, which is in fact the interface for WeTube. Optionaly, every entry point to WeTube can choose their default moderators, and even disallow the users to select moderators which provide illegal material, just to avoid legal issues. Of course, in this case, the user can change the entry point for another less restricted that allows more moderators, or simply download a full-featured browser extension with unlimited access.

The matter of allowing entry points to be fully moderated has many advantages:

- The site itself can avoid legal issues.
- A site that is meant to provide content for just one specific area, for example, news or scientifics, can filter the rest out.
-A site with content only allowed for childs, could be considered safe and can provide only useful and educative content for them, filtering out violence or sex, and also boring things.

Those sites are also a way to promote WeTube itself.

Quote from: liberman on November 26, 2013, 08:07:19 pm

UPDATE: please join us on #wetube on freenode and read the paper put here:
https://github.com/wetube/wetube-web

We are planning to use the original bytemaster code and get ideas from there.
We are already a team of 4 individuals, but we still need programmers with profound knowledge on internet protocols, or at least with enough time to learn.

You can help in any means you want/can.
In fact, there are many areas we need to cover, and we need a good contribution base.
For example: legal advisors, thinkers, translators, programmers, designers, anything!


This is a very good idea, I wish I had the time to learn more on internet protocols so I could help you. I wish you the best of luck in this project.

I am really interested on this.
Our project WeTube needs exactly this and more.

Please, can you contact me by PM or on IRC? You can find us in #wetube on freenode.
Also, I'm writting a paper here, please download it, I hope it is of your interest:

https://github.com/wetube/wetube-web

I think we can join our efforts and mix ideas.

Interesting, bytemaster.
But I think the problem with your original idea is about the people donating to the network.
This is different, as we are a truly substitute for Youtube. Free for users, but paid by advertisers.

Ok, that makes more sense. Do you think this should use its own cryptocurrency, or would it be better for it just to use some currently existing cryptocurrency? Or, perhaps several media DACs could all honor a single coin, thus greatly increasing its value and usefulness.

Not exactly, it would be a stock. Just like Apple and Google are stocks and they operate on regular markets, this would be another stock  operating on the Bitshares market.
Dividends could be perfectly paid in any other currency (like Bitcoins or Bitshares).

Instead of mining, the shares of this stock are obtained by serving bandwidth and space. The more you serve, the more shares you obtain, and therefore the more dividends you win.
You can also sell or buy stocks.

UPDATE

We are separating Wetube from Bitcloud, which is the protocol.

The protocol is here:

https://github.com/wetube/bitcloud/blob/master/bitcloud.org#introduction

Our forum is here:

http://talk.bitcloudproject.org/


Another great idea.
Imagine a decentralized site which holds media content uploaded by users, and serves video in real time to other users. Pretty much like a decentralized YouTube.

Ideas:

• Engine based on BitTorrent, slightly modified so order of media parts is important. First parts of the media are served first.
• Transparency of video downloads. The user doesn't have to do nothing, and use the site like he uses youtube.
• A user can select how much he/she want to share for every video or part of video he downloaded. Ussually it should be 1:1 and infinity for the videos he added to favorite. He stops to share when he abandon the page or turn off the program, or after a predefined time chosen.
• Optimized cache for users: view one time and see many times without having to download it again. Favored videos are stored permanently, while others are automatically deleted when the cache is full. User can choose how much cache does he/she wants.
• Video uploaders retain their content permanently or until many users hold the video in their cache.
• Interface similar to youtube. A javascript version for browsers, but also an application with more advanced features.
• The main servers of the interface are the shareholders of the DAC, and the more you contribute, the more shares you obtain.
• Integration with AdWords DAC, so revenew obtained from ads are returned in the form of dividends to the shareholders.
• Integration with Keyhotee IDs.
• Decentralized search engine based on Gnutella, adapted to serve faster (using cache on servers), reputations, views, related, categories, etc.
• Pay per priority: your video can get in the front page and give extra bandwidth by servers if you pay a fee..

These are only some of the ideas. We could start to program immediately after the first alpha of bitshares is released, and meanwhile put the ideas on paper. The opportunities are big!