Quote from: _ingsoc on December 17, 2015, 11:38:46 AM

Quote from: peonminer on December 17, 2015, 05:44:34 AM

Gleb, I need to photoshop you an award that says World Record Holding Inspector Gadget Of The Interwebz Tongue

Quote from: Gleb Gamow on December 17, 2015, 05:50:55 AM

I'll settle for the Pakled We-Look-For-Things Mother Ship.

Wow, Gleb! I second this. You have dumped a ton of information here. I just woke up to all of this, and am trying to catch up on all the activity.

I want to give you my perspective on this as a community member, an individual working on the project, and as a matter of public record. I've been involved in the project since 2013 when I got to know tacotime. It was purely theoretical at that point - his work on hybridising PoW/PoS. There was an obvious desire to turn this into something practical, but things were absolutely crazy. Tons of ICOs everywhere. We considered at that point to do something similar - before things even got that crazy - but when lots of projects started taking people's money without deliverables, we got really concerned about the ethics of the matter, since there was always a possibility the project could fail and we'd let all those people down. This was especially worrisome as tacotime would be the only dev. We decided against this and would rather not have his work come to fruition than take the risk to mess people up like that.

So in late 2013 I learned about c0 (Conformal Systems at the time) and got to know Jacob through their open-source work. Obviously btcsuite represented, even at that time, a monumental contribution to Bitcoin development given all the devs employed to work on it. Bear in mind not all btcsuite devs (btcd and btcwallet primarily at the time) were employed, and we should all know these other people for their work and contributions to the ecosystem. Having said that, btcsuite is primarily the funded open-source contribution of c0. You can look at their Github account for that.

I wanted to find a way to bring the talent and effort I saw in their Bitcoin development and contributions to alternative cryptocurrencies - because why not? That's where we can try new things and experiment with new ideas. If you forget about the negative connotations some people hold against "alts", you can bring the same quality and progress seen in packages likes those in btcsuite elsewhere. That was my motivation in approaching c0 on behalf of myself as an individual and tacotime. It turned out c0 shared a lot of our philosophies of collaborative governance and pushing for alternative systems - not at the expense of Bitcoin, but as an extension of technology. It's healthy for the overall ecosystem, and we'll fight for this.

So then development began in early 2014 and here we are. The project didn't take anyone's money and it never will. The project isn't even ours - "we" are custodians trying to boost it so it can become collaborative. If we screw up, someone should call us out and take that position from us. That is healthy and proper governance. I want to get out of the mindset that it's "our" project. It's your project. As soon as it's public after testing, you can come and work on the code and become respected and established in the community based on your merit, not based on anything else. To me that's a fair system - none of us are anything else than people interested in this technology. We fill our positions on that basis - we get done what needs doing to get it up and running. Yeah, sure, we've put years of effort into it - but that's that, we do it as individuals because we love it. Anyone can come work on this. That's the system the project wants, and we'll all stand by that personally too. We'll also defend that philosophy as I am trying to do for you now.

(I'm going to split my response to you so I don't write essays in one post, so give me a sec so I can write it - I'm doing this in real-time and there's a lot to address here!)

Everyone should read this post for sure.