Quote from: BkkCoins on September 28, 2012, 03:04:45 AM

- 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?

If you don't like the decisions Gavin has made, you should start contributing to the Bitcoin source code. Gavin has clout purely because he has a long history as a level-headed contributing member of the Bitcoin community and codebase. He's a rockstar developer, and the more rockstar developers we have working on Bitcoin, the less power any one dev will have (plus, everyone holding Bitcoins benefits from a more rapid dev cycle). If you write better code than him, you'll become the new lead core dev. Please do try, we'll all be better off for it.

Gavin isn't Bitcoin. The Foundation isn't Bitcoin. No single entity is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the sum of all the parts. If you're worried about there being too much power in one place, don't weaken what's working well, add new power somewhere else.

I'm quite shocked that so many people are against Gavin being compensated now, after he's put so much time into this project for free.

Quote

- It was formed in a country that believes it's own laws to be enforceable world wide. What is the foundations view on laws that the USA holds but other countries do not? Are they going to align Bitcoin, through alterations to the client, to the full extent of US law only? For example, tax evasion is not an offense in Switzerland (at least to my last reckoning) but is the most egregious offense in the USA. If someone doesn't report their Bitcoin holdings or income how will the foundation respond to government pressure to install tracking in the client? Will they fight it briefly, not at all, or disband entirely?

Most organizations would rather bend under authority than risk their own demise , or just close their doors. If you think having control over the devs doesn't mean they can manipulate the client then you're wrong. There are devious, tricky ways of pushing forward what they want to happen to Bitcoin. They might take US congress as an example and push multiple changes into a release where some are desirable enough that many users would ignore the undesirables changes. They might make a release no longer work with some older releases such that a gradual fading of freedoms encroaches upon users.

If you think the USA isn't a good place for a foundation, start your own one in Switzerland. The cool thing about decentralized peer-to-peer project is there will never be an "official" Foundation. Every organization that helps advance Bitcoin can be judged on merit, and people can choose which ones they want to support. This foundation is kind of a big deal because the biggest companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem are throwing their weight behind it, but it doesn't mean a different foundation couldn't grow even larger than this one someday.

If you're worried about the direction of BF, become a member and make your voice heard. The Foundation wants you to be a part of their decision making process.