Charlie: I have no doubt that you're a good guy and you mean well.
My top 3 concerns/solutions:
- Lack of board representation for the privacy-focused sociopolitical viewpoint. Currently, business interests far outweigh privacy interests on the Foundation's board. Matonis is outnumbered. The addition of a nonprofit political Bitcoin advocate like Falkvinge or Björnsdóttir would address this.
- Lack of board representation for international viewpoints. Currently the whole thing seems very USA-centric. Same solution as above.
- Danger in a financial dependency relationship between dev group and foundation. A direct compensation arrangement leaves the dev group susceptible to future pressure and influence through the foundation. It would be much better if the foundation created an independent salary/donation mechanism where the community was allowed to donate to the development budget first, and the foundation donated on top of that only in case of a shortfall. Basically make the payment process as decentralized and autonomous as possible.
Anything you can do to address these would be appreciated. Thank you for listening.
Thank you for your confidence (and to the others as well). As one of the representatives of the Individual Membership Class, I take my board responsibilities very seriously. When Zimmermann resigned from Network Associates because they were trying to backdoor PGP, I took him in at Hushmail as Chief Cryptographer which is when OpenPGP was launched (2000-2002).
Regarding your 3rd concern above, how do you respond to the points that I make in this reply to theymos
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113400.msg1227798#msg1227798 ?
I recognize the potential financial dependency issue, but how does your proposal mitigate clandestine, non-transparent compensation from malicious actors and how does it address succession planning for lead developers?
Simple. A for profit organization such as what TBF would like to be, can hire Gavin and all the other devs as an independent contractors. Why is this important? Because then Gavin can't hide his actions behind anyone and carries the sole responsibility. His work would be looked at by everyone and it would keep him honest, even if he is paid by some malicious organization.
But what you have done now is provided a shield for his work. A shield he can hide behind. Should TBF ever get corrupted all it needs to do is issue as press release of a changed policy and Gavin simply writes the code. Anyone opposing the new code would now need to challenge the foundation instead of just Gavin which if the TBF is well founded is almost certainly going to result in a loss for the challenger.
You say that Gavin becoming the lead "just happened.) Although it has worked out well, no one can guarantee the longevity of Gavin in that role." but that isn't true. It didn't "just happen".. it happened because he did an awesome job, had he messed up he could have been simply replaced. How simple is it to replace him now?
Also you state there are no guarantees Gavin will keep doing good work but again you miss the self regulating aspect of a market. Gavin would have to keep doing good work and it's a guarantee he would have because if he ever stopped he would get replaced. Something you have now taken away from this community because the Bitcoin Foundation can defend him.
Up is down, left is right. That's all I hear. All check and balances that we needed, we had until 2 days ago.
Now what we have is you telling us there are checks an balances within this one organization, and all the other free market checks and balances that we had were effectively destroyed. It was no accident Bitcoin worked so well until now.