Quote from: AnonyMint on July 18, 2014, 01:38:54 AM

It would be much preferrable to have a small premine (say 1% of 10 year coin supply) used to fund development of the coin than to have say 50% of the 10 year coin supply allocated to what is effectively a premine for the early miners at the expense of the funding and adoption of the coin for the latter years.

Much better to get a smaller premine into the hands of the core developers, than using a scattershot approach to get those coins into their hands as Monero does. The problem with donations is they are subject to politics and design by mob consensus, i.e. leaderless and unfocused.

I can tell from the present publicly viewable donations and whatever else hasn't yet been accounted for, there is not less than .5% of the current supply that has been donated for bounties and development (this includes 3.685 BTC I've priced at .00477 - which would be much more if priced by their actual day of contribution).

This would be a good number to track (roughly of course), and initiatives like the community HoF can help bring to light an approximation of what has been donated.

There are donations that are privately given as well, which I've no way to attest to exact amount (save to say that it would bring that number closer to the 1% ideal mark we seem to agree on). Disclosure has been requested for the funds in the donation address.

The flaw you point out (scattershot approach), while potentially true, hasn't necessarily been fatal as of yet.

To date, I've not seen much in the way of politics emerge with respect to organization. It would be misleading to say political movements are not budding; however, the pull is not strong yet. For a comparison, take a look at the politically motivated attacks Moolah is under with regards to Dogecoin: http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/7/5877131/moolah-currency-exchange-tearing-dogecoin-apart-report

Towards the mob consensus -- I would propose that even with a leader/BDFL, the consensus is governed by a mob (albeit possibly to a lesser extent). If such a leadership were to come about in this situation, it would inevitably be an emergent leadership. Though this 'mob' has already rejected one assigned leader in its recent past -- as such I would say that it will take time for one to replace that, if it were going to happen. Who would jump on top of a horse that just bucked it's last rider? You would want to give it time to cool down -- though the horse is in no way deemed unworthy of being ridden in the future.

Of course, there's no guarantee that this will happen -- but it would be illogical to say it will never happen. My conclusion in this is that the community would likely follow an emergent leader over an assigned one, due to the way in which Monero was introduced to the world (though I have to admit this is just my personal stance - someone please make a comment if you actively want no leadership at all). Logically, I cannot see any other scenarios in which this could have played out.

In this case, you say that it's unfocused. I'd make the comment here that there's really no way to be unfocused right now .. even without an assigned leader. There are quite a few large thorns that tend to stand out amongst the rest of the needed advancements. Considering if one (leader) were in place right now, I would think that the top priorities are already being addressed. Number one priority to me seems to be tackling the database, so the software continues to run on computers that people already use. Apart from that, there are factions that branched out and started looking for GPU miners, gambling sites, and other initiatives like raising awareness. The results of which are brought to the main community, and are accepted or dropped.

Do you have a time-frame in which you see this project becoming unfocused? Do you also have a target date in the future when the 'scattershot' approach will lose all benefit it has so far provided? I recognize this seems far from ideal to you, but I'm trying to see how far from ideal you think it is. Personally, I think it's kept on track pretty well .. but that's only a viewpoint encompassing the last 9 months.