IMO I see a couple major problems with the foundation. Maybe this will be clarified when bylaws are published.
- The control of what gets coded by devs into the client (the defacto protocol) needs to be decoupled 100% from the foundation board and monetary/political interests. I see this being pretty hard to achieve when the foundation pays the salaries. What's the famous quote about someone always seeing things in alignment with who pays their salary?
(bits copied from other thread)
I think you are missing how bitcoin software development works right now. All source code is open, and widely reviewed. We make it
easy to fork the code, and find a better way than our own. The moment Gavin or anyone else introduces code the community dislikes, the code will get forked and the community ignores the changes.
Nothing in bitcoin happens without the consent of the majority of users,
and that is by design.
The bitcoin design is used and trusted because it is open and available for deep study. Nobody needed to know who Satoshi was -- they only needed full access to the software, for review.
For the technically minded, there are further processes in place to guard against hackers, or evil CIA-funded developers, adding backdoors to bitcoin:
- Other bitcoin client implementations exist, besides the "reference client" originally written by Satoshi
- For the source code, we use git. Just like the bitcoin block chain, git is a chain of hashes. Each and every change is protected by a hash. Anyone following git in a decentralized fashion may see and verify all changes. Any "back door" is quite public.
- For the binaries, we use gitian, so that outside parties may independently verify dev team binaries precisely match their locally-built binaries. Bitcoin binaries from the dev team are not published until multiple sig matches appear.