Top developers should temporarily be allowed more than one delegate

[luckybit]

I want to make clear that by using terms such as "superstar devs" for current outside talent, I'm not actually grading them in a professional manner. I'm not trying to imply, e.g., that they are better than the current team. With the amount of cheerleading I've done for BM and BTS' technical superiority in general, it should be clear that I deeply respect the current team.

I'm talking purely in marketing terms, and in terms of longterm stakeholder confidence. The bitcoin community considers amir a superstar, and many will take it very, VERY seriously if he joins us.

The eventual coalescation of the entire crypto industry into a giant collaboration on improving BTS will basically be a developer reorganization into the framework that the current team has already built. The current team will most likely become the new industry-wide superstar, and enjoy the reverence people like Gavin and Gmaxwell currently receive.

The Bitcoin community is also very small because of that. Sure you'd get the hardcore crypto-anarchists and they make up some of the best coders currently involved. The problem is that in a few years they wont be the best coders in the industry anymore.

So you have to not focus on politics so much and focus only on the numbers. If you're going by the numbers then it doesn't matter at all how famous a developer is. What matters is the beauty of the code they wrote, their level of innovation, etc.

Bytemaster is pretty innovative, if we are lucky we'll find another person like that. Innovative developers would be developers who invented something entirely new. This would mean SunnyKing, the developer who invented NXT, Satoshi Nakamoto, Bytemaster, Dacoinminster.

[julian1]

I hate the uncertainty inherent in the inflationary model that's been chosen to fund development via giving delegates the power to create new bts.

Money creation/quantitative easing etc remains the outstanding problem of fiat currencies especially in less developed countries and this seems like a backwards step to me.

It would be better to carve out an initial fixed stake up-front, and then distribute in some manner (maybe delegates) and let Bitshares live or flounder on that basis of work achievable with those funds.

Also, many Open-Source projects attract developer talent  on the basis of their inherent perceived value of the project - consider Linux,BSD,XOrg,firefox,GNU,apache etc as obvious and high-profile examples.

It's certainly true there's a lot of marketing value in head-hunting sought-after candidates.

[Rune]

I want to make clear that by using terms such as "superstar devs" for current outside talent, I'm not actually grading them in a professional manner. I'm not trying to imply, e.g., that they are better than the current team. With the amount of cheerleading I've done for BM and BTS' technical superiority in general, it should be clear that I deeply respect the current team.

I'm talking purely in marketing terms, and in terms of longterm stakeholder confidence. The bitcoin community considers amir a superstar, and many will take it very, VERY seriously if he joins us.

The eventual coalescence of the entire crypto industry into a giant collaboration on improving BTS will basically be a developer reorganization into the framework that the current team has already built. The current team will most likely become the new industry-wide superstar, and enjoy the reverence people like Gavin and Gmaxwell currently receive.

[luckybit]

but a new developer with no community trust or experience should not be given more pay than anyone else with no community trust or experience.

Agreed.  I doubt that anyone the community didnt trust would be elected, especially to multiple paid delegates. 

Delegates will have to earn our votes.

This is why I support the idea of algorithmic hiring. I think a lot of developers might be able to manipulate people's emotions to become a delegate. Anyone can win votes from the masses who are untrained on how to properly spend their votes.

If the masses can go into Bitshares, select a template policy for a smart contract or write their own, and then let the algorithm delegate their vote to whomever or whatever has the required attributes then everything could be made to work.

Imagine if it were an election where you simply set it up so that your algorithm will automatically vote for whichever politician has a history of doing what you want? No need to listen to their bs because they cannot fool the algorithm. Imagine if voters all voted algorithmically? If the algorithms were really good then those algorithms could optimize to produce really good results.

The algorithm doesn't care who takes the job because it's just an algorithm. The algorithm just looks at the numbers and if those numbers surpass a certain threshold then the votes go to the that delegate. You'd all be free to choose any policy you want or even follow the policy of someone you look up to (like Bytemaster) if you want.

By the way, while I respect Amir Taaki a lot as a human being why would you want to target the most controversial developer in the entire industry?

Amir Taaki is a superstar, and will attract LOADS of attention. In addition to that then, as you say, he is an extremely capable developer and that's enough to make me not give a damn about his personal opinions. The way I see it dark wallet is basically a non-profit attempt at turning bitcoin into bitshares anyway, so he's already got the vision.

Developers don't need attention attracted to them. Developers aren't the people best at marketing or managing that attention. LOADS of attention on our developers could put our developers at increased risk over time from governments. It could also mean developers get stalked by TMZ as they go out for coffee each morning.

It's fair to say we disagree on the strategic benefit of that particular example but what is your opinion on algorithmic hiring? In algorithmic hiring if you set your policy to attract the intellectual capital with the most Google searches then yes you could use Google searches as an attribute in the smart contract. Only developers with a certain amount of Google searches would meet the attributes to receive your vote and if enough people adopted that policy we'd have very famous developers.

[Rune]

By the way, while I respect Amir Taaki a lot as a human being why would you want to target the most controversial developer in the entire industry?

Amir Taaki is a superstar, and will attract LOADS of attention. In addition to that then, as you say, he is an extremely capable developer and that's enough to make me not give a damn about his personal opinions. The way I see it dark wallet is basically a non-profit attempt at turning bitcoin into bitshares anyway, so he's already got the vision.

[Rune]

Pay them to do WHAT?  Just cause they are a "top developer".  Do you have a project plan?  Work breakdown structure?, milestones?, roadmap?  You seem to just want to "hire" people and give money to people without clearly identified objectives or measures.

In the beginning the only thing we need top developers to do is simply to be attached to our project, and to spend their time going through the code looking for bugs, thus lending their professional credentials as an endorsement to our blockchain. The explosion in market cap this, and the ensuing publicity, will far outweight whatever salary we pay them.

Once we've gotten them on board and they're familiar with the code, they will most likely be able to organize autonomously due to open source experience. If not then we can have an entity such as I3 step up and try to create a development framework. Or perhaps one of the top developers from bitcoin with experience working together with as many contributors as bitcoin, will be able to come up with a system.

If it turns out there are developers on board that are simply not worth their money we can reduce their salary or fire them entirely if they are truly useless. The absolute transparency of our system allows us to autonomously scale any number of developers in a decentralized manner, like a self organizing microsoft where the middle managers are replaced by activist-stakeholders with transparent access to all information.

And if you don't think the community will be good enough at stakeholder activism, just look at the recent examples of bitcoin action such as the robocoin scandal, the moolah hunt, etc. The community has proven many times that it will actively seek out and call out anyone it feels is acting dishonestly, and our system allows it to work at full efficiency due to the forced full transparency that delegates give.

[luckybit]

By the way, while I respect Amir Taaki a lot as a human being why would you want to target the most controversial developer in the entire industry?

In my opinion when you bring in delegates it should be based on some criteria you define.

If you're talking about intellectual capabilities then we all can agree Amir Taaki is a capable developer but he comes with some downsides too. He's in the media a lot, he takes on very partisan stances, he is involved with projects which are very questionable, so while he might help the development side he could hurt the marketing side.

Having said all of this I think with algorithmic hiring it would be the algorithm which hires or fires based on policy, attributes, trust and reputation. Amir Taaki has a reputation in Bitcoin but not much of a Bitshares community reputation so he would have to earn a reputation and trust to improve his stance if the policy were set to measure that.

In my opinion, I prefer the sort of policies which start out treating everyone as equal blank slates. Then over time as they develop some kind of reputation this is when perhaps the policy could be set up to pay trusted developers more than untrusted. So someone like Bytemaster, Toast, Xeroc, and the other developers currently involved would definitely be more trusted than Amir Taaki based on evidence from our community.

[arhag]

A recent topic of discussion around the office is that usually when people leave good jobs and take lower pay and higher risk, they are compensated with leveraged rewards (equity).

What advantage does a developer have working for lower pay on BitShares (getting paid in BTS) versus working for higher pay elsewhere and using a part of their income to buy the BTS? It is an open market.

There is no advantage. That's the point. One better materialize soon.

I don't know what you guys are planning, but I don't see how you could create an advantage. The BitShares ecosystem has the freedom to create any financial instrument open to anyone, not just a select few. Even if you create BTS options, we could have an open market selling those options as well (meaning you could work for USD at some other job, move the USD into BitUSD, and use the BitUSD to buy the options at the market price in the internal market). At the end all that matters is what is the current dollar value of the compensation provided to the employee since they then have the freedom to change that into whatever form of value they wish.

[Troglodactyl]

Allowed?  Anyone can run as many delegates as they want, and shareholders can vote however they want.  Delegates can operate as many signing nodes as they can get approved, and can allocate delegate pay to themselves or to any developer, team, or other effort they like.

This cannot be prevented.  Embrace it.

The stakeholders will certainly factor decentralization into their priorities, but not because of some unenforceable rule telling them they have to, or that they're currently allowed to approve multiple delegates for the same person.

[Rune]

A recent topic of discussion around the office is that usually when people leave good jobs and take lower pay and higher risk, they are compensated with leveraged rewards (equity).

What advantage does a developer have working for lower pay on BitShares (getting paid in BTS) versus working for higher pay elsewhere and using a part of their income to buy the BTS? It is an open market.

There is no advantage. That's the point. One better materialize soon.

We can always pay a higher salary at fair market rate. No matter who the developers current employer is, unless they're currently fleecing the employer they will get higher pay with us because we will make more from their contributions.

Currently developers are either begging for their salary (and thus can't work full time), or they're paid by a third party to monetise an inefficiency in the blockchain (instead of fixing that inefficiency). Because a developer is most valuable when he is working directly on improving the blockchain, we will always be able to gain more value than those other methods, and will thus always be willing to pay a higher salary, resulting in us eventually getting all developers.

As the industry starts to realize this undeniable truth, the entire market cap should collapse into ours.

[hpenvy]

Pay them to do WHAT?  Just cause they are a "top developer".  Do you have a project plan?  Work breakdown structure?, milestones?, roadmap?  You seem to just want to "hire" people and give money to people without clearly identified objectives or measures.

 

[Rune]

I agree that we should avoid centralisation, however in this case it is for a VERY good reason = getting the top talent, which is the most important thing for a company in the tech industry.

This is one of the few reasons why I strongly support a separation between delegates that run the consensus engine and workers who get paid to further the interests of the DAC. Mixing the two leads to many problems. The only problem is that implementing the separate workers concept requires more code to be written (also it requires stakeholders to come to a consensus on the BitUSD salary of each worker as a collective).

This will be a temporary measure though. As soon as we get even one "superstar dev" our market cap will explode beyond anything that will ever require multiple delegates in order to pay a fair market rate anyway.

[toast]

A recent topic of discussion around the office is that usually when people leave good jobs and take lower pay and higher risk, they are compensated with leveraged rewards (equity).

What advantage does a developer have working for lower pay on BitShares (getting paid in BTS) versus working for higher pay elsewhere and using a part of their income to buy the BTS? It is an open market.

There is no advantage. That's the point. One better materialize soon.

[roadscape]

"waiting a few months" for the market cap to go up so we can hire people with a single delegate is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. The thing that will most likely cause our market cap to explode in the first place will be that we're getting the top talent. If we can't starting getting the top talent instantly, we can't grow our market cap exponentially within a few months.

Bringing in talent would definitely pump the price. But we'd also have to be careful to not have too many cooks in the kitchen. They would all have to be trained, as well..

[arhag]

A recent topic of discussion around the office is that usually when people leave good jobs and take lower pay and higher risk, they are compensated with leveraged rewards (equity).

What advantage does a developer have working for lower pay on BitShares (getting paid in BTS) versus working for higher pay elsewhere and using a part of their income to buy the BTS? It is an open market.