**First and foremost---I am speaking only for myself here and if you want @ccedk @kuro112 @emailtooaj @Freebieservers to give their opinions, they will have to speak up themselves because it is unfair to them for me to put words in their mouths so-to-speak.1) Will this project be closed source, or open source and licensed? If it is closed source, will there be a transparent way to audit that everything is working properly?
This is up for grabs but currently it is closed source. It could be opened up, but I would prefer not at this moment. Licensing, however, would be something for which I would press.
2) Do you plan to ever dilute the Sharebit UIA to more than 250k in the future? Who will be the official trustees?
It is possible. If the community feels that a feature being added would be worth another Crowd Donation for, say, 20k more ShareBits to receive the money to add a feature in. Of course, it might also be possible for us to add functionality and charge for it to be added. My honest thoughts though are that after 1 year this ShareBot and its ShareBits will be so big that this ShareBot will become huge, will earn us more than enough to pay for the basic updates, maintenance, additions...etc. Because of this value other services will likely want to pay to have their services integrated (and part of these payments could actually be given as a "bonus" dividend payment/token buyback).
3) Do you have any built in mechanism for funding future development of the bot? For example, do you plan to allocate a percentage of the referral income towards ongoing development? In your breakdown I saw $1200/year for maintenance fees, but I don't remember any mention of an ongoing development fund.
The idea is largely to use the tx fees received to help pay for that maintenance. The “ongoing” development fund would likely be more of a pool of money that we hold and use as needed because as much as you want to plan for something…in the coding world it often doesn’t matter what is “planned”. Far better to save funds and use them for emergencies. I am also pretty certain that CCEDK and myself would be interested in helping pitch in if it was completely necessary ( for instance if the community for some odd reason doesn’t want to fix it or add what we may truly believe to be a killer feature). But then again, we are giving a very large portion of this bot to the community so I would be stunned to see them not support a little worker proposal funding here or their to make sure it functions and grows as they want it to.
4) I'm very interested to hear about how do you plan to implement dividend payments to UIA holders (high level, of course 
)
Payouts on a regular schedule. This might be daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly….etc.
5) Last - out of curiosity, If you end up sharedropping ShareBits UIA onto BTS and Brownies holders, how much is that going to cost? Aren't there like 60,000 addresses? That's a lot of transaction fees!
This is a question that I am very glad you brought up. Let’s ask
@kuro112 and
@hybridd what they have to say. From my perspective, though, it is more important to give everyone in the BitShares community a valuable stake in ShareBits because it embodies everything they need to successfully earn referrals from across the most heavy traffic social media and other sites. This means that the cost is worth it...and it will at the very least be substantially lower since the account sending them will be a lifetime member account
Edit: One final question I have - how will the project be governed? Will ShareBits UIA holders have a say in any decision making processes going forward, or will it be "centrally" governed by Beyond Bitcoin and CCEDK? My personal (unsolicited) opinion is that it would have a much higher chance of success if you did not try to formally involve the token holders in much (if any) of the decision making processes. I know this isn't even possible yet (until hopefully FMV releases their UIA voting software), but nevertheless I am wondering about how you envision the tipbot to be "governed", i.e. who is pulling the trigger on major and minor decisions?
Governance of the project shouldn’t be too much of an issue as the only real decisions needing made would tend to be neutral decisions that would benefit all users via maintenance or upgrades. Here are a few things I can think of that would need a few individuals to make a final decision:
A) To ensure ease of use improves
B) When to upgrade/update
C) If a feature is needing added (for instance…making the ShareBot work with, say, joomla), a community member could pay out of pocket or ask for a worker proposal to pay for it to be added.
D) Whether fee distribution needs to change in some way due to a number of factors. Personally I feel it is partially my job to try to get these things covered and as such I am going to be working to ensure it goes as smoothly as possible.
However, after a year of this bot being used, it will likely be bringing plenty to help pay for these fees. In addition, since this bot is specifically being used by bts community and will be sharedropping so heavily onto them, I am also not against a worker proposal helping pay for some of the most vital or community-backed changes/maintenance/upgrades if they are required and the bot is unable to make it 1 year without needing those updated.
I say this because beyond bitcoin has run very very lean for the past nearly 2 years---having a delegate pay us approximately $500-700/mo for somewhere in the realm of 6-9 months and has arguably brought some of the
greatest value and uniqueness to the BitShares ecosystem (I mean everyone just ask yourselves if BitShares would be the same without Beyond Bitcoin and I am pretty sure most would say it wouldn't be). We have shown time and time again that we use less money than we should and bring lots of value to the table for it.
In my mind, at least, the community who gets sharedropped on will likely be willing to look at situations and make decisions on whether or not to help fund it. But it is definitely in their best interest to do so…because they basically have a better version of some other crypto-talk competitors that bitcoin has
just waiting for them to support and build it up. BitShares having something equivalent to LTB that is born and NATIVE to the bitshares environment (which no other crypto-talk shows do) is priceless.
If we can expand and have our own community’s project managers/reps holding hangouts and various other initiatives, you will see beyond bitcoin become what it was truly meant to be.
Topic: [ANN]Now Open: ShareBits CrowdDonations (Read 15719 times)
