Quote from: _ingsoc on January 03, 2016, 07:21:57 AM

I think it's possible and necessary to regulate the behaviour of those charged with the stewardship of the project (the people that act as custodians). A project constitution acts as this check on the behaviour of those who work on the project.

I appreciate the appreciation

The peer-to-peer aspect of cryptocurrency has some profound implications for the user group (where user = someone who knows a private key and has occasion to either interact with a web service or run a node directly).

From a practical perspective, the bottom line is that as soon as the source code is publicly released no-one is in charge of anything. The witticism herding cats doesnt even come in to it; people are completely free to do as they like: run a node, not run a node; hold coins, don't hold coins; set up a foundation, a faucet, a business, promote the coin, fud the coin, set up webwallets, offer an alternative wallet design, provide off-chain features, pay to spam the blockchain, pay to clean up the blockchain, generously contribute to a faucet, mischevously drain a faucet dry.

The fact that there is no one person in charge is significant to US financial regulators. A couple of years ago the US FinCEN made it fairly clear ...

Quote

A final type of convertible virtual currency activity involves a de-centralized convertible virtual currency (1) that has no central repository and no single administrator, and (2) that persons may obtain by their own computing or manufacturing effort.

The thing is, official this and official that are meaningless in the context of a cryptocurrency because no-one has the authority to stamp anything official. Or rather, anyone and everyone has the opportunity to stamp anything they want as official or make a claim to be official panjandrum but the claim carries no authority, only that which it can engender itself.

Regulation cannot be effective because it's simply not possible to identify any individual and in consequence, it's impossible to impose any penalty for breaking regulations.

Taking on the role of custodian is purely a voluntary commitment, anyone can do it simply by cloning the codebase and, if they can be bothered, submitting a PR to the claimed official repository, otherwise they merely advertise the location of the clone and let people decide for themselves.

It's not doom'n'gloom at all, far from it. If you check the set of attributes that pertains to a p2p networked cryptocurrency, you'll find a very close match for the set of attributes that characterises a Teal organisation (search for Teal organisation, Frédéric Laloux, Reinventing Organisations).

The main difference is that a cryptocurrency is constrained by the cryptography protocols to be an anarchy (primary definition: a state of society without government or law) whereas Teal organisations are expected to evolve from an existing organisation that currently follows the usual strong hierarchical control model. I actually think altcoins make for better Teal organisations because of this.

Cheers

Graham