Question...who controls the IPM and the Bitmark Foundation?
I like the idea of guaranteed hash power on the network, but ultimately its still centrally controlled, presumably by you.
Not to say that you will be a bad actor because Bitmark stands to gain a lot more if you are good, but who is to say somebody else in the future does not gain access to the IPM? As the community grows so should the IPM and the Bitmark foundation. Eventually I would expect control of them to expand as well to include more than just you. Especially considering 5% of funds from the IPM go to the foundation, there is constant monetary support for the foundation to grow. I think the structure of how the foundation and IPM operates, as well as who controls it should be very transparent.
More than one IPM pool could exist, for example two independent IPM pools with 17.5% maximum each. It can be distributed.
Initially I will control both the IPM Pool and the Bitmark Foundation, the Bitmark Foundation funds are considered locked until after 2015-07-13. This is to give us time to create a community and have the foundation controlled in a decentralized way, similar to a DAC. Consider me a central point of failure to the entire project at this time as I am leading it on all fronts, in the case of death I hope that enough has been published in documentation and posts so that others could continue the process.
The Bitmark Foundation is currently a concept which has a BTM address for donations. The real Bitmark Foundation will be created by everybody here over the next year.
I try to engage the community and people are already committing valuable time to the project, the IPM Pool proposal was reviewed and had input from 4 people before being published.
For the Bitmark Foundation, I envision that bugs, feature requests, and units of work will be democratically selected, bounties assigned to them, and then proposed units of work completed by anybody. Once a unit of work is marked as complete, it will be accepted by the community and the bounty released. The exact specifics of the system to do this have not been defined, but we have a year to create such a system and examples already exist. We can use githubs pull requests and issues to create the units of work and track them, then a BTM payment system which attaches a bounty to the issue or pull request.
The IPM Pool will be completely transparent, each day a report will be generated which shows the rigs hired, the price of those rigs, the bitmarks generated, the btc donations and the bitmark payouts. It will always mint blocks to the same bitmark address, and the foundation address will not change. Public block chains ensure a level of transparency.
I hope to automate the IPM pool as much as is feasible, otherwise there is a time based maintenance cost associated with it.
Discussion about ideas as to how we can ensure transparency, oversight, and move to a democratic management system are gratefully received.
Thank you Chronikka for the more useful and rational input this time, I am glad you have taken the time to get to know the project.