Quote from: smooth on October 23, 2015, 09:32:56 PM

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on October 23, 2015, 09:17:04 PM

A crowdfund can be configured to allow every potentially interested buyer to remove his offer to buy at any time.

Okay that is a somewhat unconventional definition. If no one commits to anything then I agree you are likely outside the definition.

But this is getting quite contrived in my view:

1. No commitment for funding.

2. No efforts post-sale by the developer to fix the damn thing if it breaks

3. No efforts by the developer to refine post sale (at least none that are important to success)

Maybe you can avoid problems with securities law, but in practical terms the project seems like a mess of other problems.

Actually there is a crowdfunding platform that has refunding at any time before the milestone is funded.

You pretty much know if you have commitments to funding. You talk to people. You gauge market sentiment and the competitive landscape.

I specifically wrote refutations to #2 and #3 up thread.

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on October 23, 2015, 08:44:53 PM

The developer can pledge to be available for ongoing work for donations as desired by any investors that wish to donate to him. He would not violate the Howe test.

A developer can make a proposal to do some work. Users can vote by making donations on that specification and other proposals if there are any from any others contractors that wish to do some work. Not all the users have to agree. If the contractor has enough donations to meet his desired remuneration, then he proceeds. The users later decide whether to adopt that work in the common enterprise which only they manage.

A developer can also volunteer work, as he might be a holder of the coin too who wants to exert some of his control over his investment.

Quote from: smooth on October 23, 2015, 09:08:20 PM

Quote

You are correctly pointing out that making a coin that is not yet mostly finished

I guess this is yet another gray area but I'm not really sure what "mostly finished" means here.

If it has all features appears to be "done" but it turns out to crash such that no one other than the original developer can or will fix it then everyone is going to lose all their money. So the developer's efforts or lack thereof may still be critical. I guess that is a market value question too. If the developer says "I won't fix it if it breaks" then what will the ICO price be vs. the case where the developer will fix it? I think very, very different, which argues for the importance of the developer's efforts even after launch, but who knows I might be wrong.

Mostly finished means you don't need to hard fork the protocol, because it is very difficult to coordinate hard forks from optional code patches done by volunteers who are not in control in the eyes of the users.

If it crashes, I think the users will most likely accept any patch by anyone that makes it run again. The developer is not the only person who can fix open source. I find it very amusing that you argue with me for over a year (and intensely for a couple of days recently in private) about how great Monero is because of volunteerism and open source, and now when your point-of-view favors my argument you suddenly argue that open source is impotent and only the one dev can fix or improve anything. Makes it seem all the more suspicious that you are not sincere and have an agenda. Maybe you just don't like to ever lose any public debate.

Quote from: smooth on October 23, 2015, 09:08:20 PM

Quote

remove things from the protocol that force users to rely on the managerial control of the core devs, such as that forced hard fork every 6 months

There is nothing in the protocol for that. If no further updates are released (or if users don't install the updates), nothing will happen after six months. It will just keep going forever (assuming people continue to use it and it doesn't crash). The idea of the six month window is to continue to add them on a rolling basis with updates, so no one is surprised. (Off topic for this thread though, if you want to discuss it you know where the Monero thread is.)

Othe was the one that wrote (in another thread) that hard forks are forced every 6 months. I was basing on his statement. Then you told me recently in private that users could opt out by editing the source code. Now you tell me the clients will continue on working if there is no hard fork. I can only go based on what you Monero folks tell me. I don't hang out in Monero threads.