Quote from: maaku on January 04, 2013, 09:22:42 AM

Maybe when bitcoin started it was democratic (before GPU mining, before ASICs), but it certainly isn't anymore.

You're lucky that the person trying to create a hard fork was incompetent this time around. I suspect you'll continue to get competing demurrage altcoins until your foundation begins the actual process of bootstrapping that is supposed to be separate from (and more effective than) the bootstrapping that comes from mining.

It's worth noting that Satoshi would have preferred the "democratic" non-GPU mining to get a healthier spread of the coins initially-- that is, a functional "Generate Coins" button lasting, say, a year longer than it actually did would have created a more vibrant economy than the smaller number of specialized GPU miners getting the bulk of the initial coins. But you have the opposite problem-- where he had a concrete, built-in bootstrapping mechanism that worked from day one but ended too early, you have an abstract, out-of-band bootstrapping mechanism that has yet to be implemented, for which none of the who/what/when/where/how questions have been answered. Even worse for you, Bitcoin has already created plenty of sophisticated mining rigs that can work for nearly any altcoin, so your technical options for bootstrapping (or I guess the options of any potential grant recipient) are severely limited since any bootstrapping design targeting non-technical users cannot be based off proof-of-work. (Otherwise it'd just get dominated by the "elite" miners and you would have been better off without the foundation.)

Furthermore, you're going to be subject to endless accusations of social engineering, since the Foundation ostensibly has more goals than just getting coins in the hands of the public. My only advice is to make the actions of the Foundation specific to bootstrapping the currency and only that, as well as limiting it only to projects that subvert its own authority. The fewer coins you have sitting in its coffers, the quicker all these problems go away. But of course you have to spend them in a way that obviously creates a more vibrant economy than just giving it to miners (or at least as effective). You've set up quite a challenge for this coin, and I doubt you or anyone else associated with the coin have the same level of experience and expertise as you do coding up a complex p2p protocol, since I don't see any concrete details about how any of this would work. I see no easy way out of these problems, and unfortunately the longer you put them off the worse they will get.

Btw-- when I say bootstrapping, I'm talking about getting the coins out to the general public, as opposed to a more insular circle of users who are a priori interested in topics like cryptography, p2p networks, economics, etc.