Author Topic: Dan is doing the right thing .. again!  (Read 24225 times)

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Offline CLains

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The bear and suffering has made us stronger than ever..  8)

Offline sschechter

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We were told developers sold BTS to pay for taxes.  Now its developers sold BTS to pay for personal expenses?  What a shift in tone.  Especially when it was given that they would use Bitusd for all transactions.  Just another pipedream.....

What shift? Personal taxes are personal expenses. The IRS is not to be trifled with or you get to see just how personal it is  :-X .

Who let the devs eat???  You can't code on a full stomach
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Offline Riverhead

We were told developers sold BTS to pay for taxes.  Now its developers sold BTS to pay for personal expenses?  What a shift in tone.  Especially when it was given that they would use Bitusd for all transactions.  Just another pipedream.....

What shift? Personal taxes are personal expenses. The IRS is not to be trifled with or you get to see just how personal it is  :-X .

Offline JoeyD

First up I applaud you for your efforts to keep the ship afloat even with funds drying up, compared to the threats I've seen on the ethereum reddit of simply abandoning development if they are not paid those wages.

Maybe I should have split up my post to clearly differentiate between my gripes with what's going on with ethereum from my concerns for the move to bitshares2.0. Or maybe you are reacting more to newmines post.

Like I said I don't refute the fact that the developers are adding value to the community and I do hope you don't think everybody believes that you should not reap any benefits of the sweat equity you've put in.  Bytemaster remarks about the crypto-community not realizing how much value developers add sounds a little bitter and over generalizing.  Then again you might very well have a better grasp on this than I do, but is unwillingless really all there is to it?

I'm still not convinced using going rates is entirely applicable in the crypto-currency crowd-source scene in it's current state and I don't think it is solely because of unwillingness to pay developers. I think cryptocurrencies are a little different from your average startup especially in the funding aspect. Not only are the current cryptocurrencies not targeting the same audiences on the same scale as something like twitter, their funding has to come mostly internally from their own marketcaps instead of coming from the outside, almost like mini economies. Cryptocurrencies are still a long way from reaching adoption like the current internet, and the internet itself took quite a while to reach it's current level of adoption. I think comparisons with similar niche crowd-sourced projects would be more fair and set more realistic expectations.  If there was new outside VC money coming in or big corporations support then those "industry standard" wages would be more easily achievable, but the crypto scene is not that big and with bitcoin as the only onramp this limits the amount of people and money that can be reached even more. If blockchains would be in the realm of google/facebook levels of succes then I'd expect the going rates or higher would be a non issue.

Honestly the bitcoin bearmarket following the mtGox bubble might be a bigger culprit than community unwillingness, although Ethereum dumping 30k btc in a bearmarket probably didn't help much either.

EDIT
Oops sorry Method-X, seems I'm a slow typer and the discussion already moved way beyond where I started my reply.
« Last Edit: June 29, 2015, 10:50:09 pm by JoeyD »

Offline Ander

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I think the root cause of the angst in the BTS (and every other crypto community) is the bear market we've been in for over a year. If the bottom didn't fall out of crypto nobody would even be having these discussions.

Very much this.

Fortunately, it has already begun to turn around.  Bitcoin's been stable for 6 months now.  All the alts bottomed two months ago and have been taking turns rallying.  Bull markets tend to start slow and then pick up steam later.  Then next more will be bigger than the first one.


People worry about the price for profit motive, but they also worry about the price because it is an indicator of the success of the project.  Its important that Bitshares is still one of the top crypto projects.  The price is an indicator of the ability to get funding, and a barometer of the chance that the project will succeed or fail.  Its important for many reasons.
« Last Edit: June 29, 2015, 09:48:03 pm by Ander »
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Offline Method-X

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Since most here seem to like the term incentive over interests, I'm very concerned over potential problems with the conflict of incentives in the move to cryptonomex/bitshares2.0.

Wow, +5% to that entire post. I too have noticed that in this community, it's always been more about profit and comparing salaries to Google employees then freedom and building a fair financial system. Recently, I've been seriously questioning whether cryptocurrency will change anything when it's human nature that's fucked up. Even if we pay lip service to "liberty", our God is money.

Financial INCENTIVES must be aligned to produce freedom.   It is crazy to think that we can build a platform that secures life, liberty, and property while depending upon individuals doing something against their best interest.   Profit must exist for any system to be sustainable.  Above market profit must exist for any system to grow.

Yes, I agree. I think you guys have been doing a great job and it's easy for anyone to criticize from their Internet armchairs with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. I'm speaking more about the crypto community in general as I've come to see it recently and how flawed human nature is. I don't doubt your commitment to genuinely doing something great for humanity. It's obvious you deeply want that above all else.

I think the root cause of the angst in the BTS (and every other crypto community) is the bear market we've been in for over a year. If the bottom didn't fall out of crypto nobody would even be having these discussions.
« Last Edit: June 29, 2015, 09:40:00 pm by Method-X »

Offline topcandle

Since most here seem to like the term incentive over interests, I'm very concerned over potential problems with the conflict of incentives in the move to cryptonomex/bitshares2.0.

Wow, +5% to that entire post. I too have noticed that in this community, it's always been more about profit and comparing salaries to Google employees then freedom and building a fair financial system. Recently, I've been seriously questioning whether cryptocurrency will change anything when it's human nature that's fucked up. Even if we pay lip service to "liberty", our God is money.

Profit must exist for any system to be sustainable.  Above market profit must exist for any system to grow.

This. It's amazing to me how many critics expect professional-grade development to be implemented yesterday for free.  ::)

We were told developers sold BTS to pay for taxes.  Now its developers sold BTS to pay for personal expenses?  What a shift in tone.  Especially when it was given that they would use Bitusd for all transactions.  Just another pipedream.....

btw think your doing good work.  posting m grievances just because...
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Offline yellowecho

Since most here seem to like the term incentive over interests, I'm very concerned over potential problems with the conflict of incentives in the move to cryptonomex/bitshares2.0.

Wow, +5% to that entire post. I too have noticed that in this community, it's always been more about profit and comparing salaries to Google employees then freedom and building a fair financial system. Recently, I've been seriously questioning whether cryptocurrency will change anything when it's human nature that's fucked up. Even if we pay lip service to "liberty", our God is money.

Profit must exist for any system to be sustainable.  Above market profit must exist for any system to grow.

This. It's amazing to me how many critics expect professional-grade development to be implemented yesterday for free.  ::)
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Offline bytemaster

Since most here seem to like the term incentive over interests, I'm very concerned over potential problems with the conflict of incentives in the move to cryptonomex/bitshares2.0.

Wow, +5% to that entire post. I too have noticed that in this community, it's always been more about profit and comparing salaries to Google employees then freedom and building a fair financial system. Recently, I've been seriously questioning whether cryptocurrency will change anything when it's human nature that's fucked up. Even if we pay lip service to "liberty", our God is money.

Financial INCENTIVES must be aligned to produce freedom.   It is crazy to think that we can build a platform that secures life, liberty, and property while depending upon individuals doing something against their best interest.   Profit must exist for any system to be sustainable.  Above market profit must exist for any system to grow.
For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.

Offline Method-X

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Since most here seem to like the term incentive over interests, I'm very concerned over potential problems with the conflict of incentives in the move to cryptonomex/bitshares2.0.

Wow, +5% to that entire post. I too have noticed that in this community, it's always been more about profit and comparing salaries to Google employees then freedom and building a fair financial system. Recently, I've been seriously questioning whether cryptocurrency will change anything when it's human nature that's fucked up. Even if we pay lip service to "liberty", our God is money.
« Last Edit: June 29, 2015, 09:24:16 pm by Method-X »

Offline Ander

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Sounds like the Ethereum community is going through similar growing pains as BitShares experienced.

Yep.

Ethereum not releasing in March-April is like Bitshares 1.0 not releasing in November-January.  Now they are months past the expected release date, low on money, and the community is impatient and worried about the future of the project.

Sounds like Bitshares prior to the 2.0 announcement. 



How are the ethereum devs going to secure more funding so the project can continue? 
If only the ethereum devs couldve formed a company and called themselves something like, I dont know, 'Cryptonomex' or something, and get additional funding from private investors while they continued to give all the code they developed to the Ethereum platform.   Maybe they would then have a way to make some money by providing consulting services or licensing while also building Ethereum and using everything they create for anyone else to also built Ethereum and help it gain features.  Maybe that would get them through the crypto bear market, so that they didnt have to rely on trying to get more money out of the Ethereum community who have already lost a ton of money over the past 18 months.

But oh wait, if they did that, people would accuse them of being scammers and trying to steal the value of everyone's stake in Ether.   So I guess they gotta dilute Ether and dump a bunch to keep paying their devs.
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Offline yellowecho

I am going to come right out and say that experienced software developers doing cryptography and advanced c++ work in major cities like NY or CA can easily justify a $150 to $200K salary.   Those *ARE* market rates.    That said, web developers do not earn those rates and typically make much less than a c++ developer.  So not all developers are equal in the market.   

In order for me to hire people at $100K I had to look for "inexperienced" yet highly motivated individuals straight out of school and be located in Blacksburg, a relatively low cost of living.    Overall I am very happy with the skill level of this team and am certain they could all earn over $100K at other companies. 

That said, this same amazing team has been earning just $36K plus delegate pay for all of 2015.   

The BTS in the angle fund are gone because we sold them off over the past 6 months at ridiculous prices just to pay the developers $36K/year each.

As far as newmine's claim that "our stake from mining PTS" of over 100M should be enough to motivate us to complete it completely ignores the following facts:

1. Mining PTS was not free, we had to PAY to buy that stake.
2. We would have to sell the stake to pay for development leaving 0 stake at the end.

Our team is highly motivated by principles and goals.  We work for the love of the job and so far have asked for relatively little compensation.

 +5% Thanks again for everything you and the team are doing and have sacrificed! 
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Offline Stan

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For the record:

To date this year I have personally not received one cent worth of funding outside my single delegate position which amounts to about $29 per day at today's price.  I still own every single one of those shares.  Unfortunately, many of our other developers have needed to use that delegate pay to buy food.

All of the BTS earned from AGS/PTS have been carefully budgeted by I3 to cover office costs, taxes, legal and accounting support with enough left over to give the core developers a small subsistence stipend each month averaging about 25% of what they could make elsewhere.  That I3 stipend ends this month.

Cryptonomex has not accepted one penny of AGS/PTS funding and its expenses are covered by contributed sweat equity and the personal cash resources of its founders. 

The cost to develop Graphene from scratch was less than the total sweat equity contributed by the team during this period.  That means the net value flow for 2015 has been from the developers to the BitShares community, not the other way around.

By developing a product that they can sell to make a living, the developers bring new money into the ecosystem instead of relying on BitShares to bear all of the costs itself.  BitShares gets free unrestricted use of these products without incurring most of the costs.  This maximizes how many people we can have working to grow the ecosystem before the competition realizes what just hit them.

:)


« Last Edit: June 29, 2015, 08:33:29 pm by Stan »
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Offline bytemaster


That said: startups normally have developers working for equity and not cash *if* they are being bootstrapped.   Once a VC comes in they generally would prefer to pay salaries than equity. 

Only a crypto-currency community would think that a developer does not contribute an order of magnitude of their market salary to the value of the company.
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Offline yellowecho

Sounds like the Ethereum community is going through similar growing pains as BitShares experienced.
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