Quote from: smooth on December 31, 2014, 08:16:00 PM

Quote from: cypherdoc on December 31, 2014, 08:07:03 PM

Quote from: smooth on December 31, 2014, 06:19:41 PM

Quote from: cypherdoc on December 31, 2014, 05:53:32 PM

Adam, how can you possibly say you're not "for-profit" when in fact that is precisely what Blockstream is? do you seriously expect us to believe that Reid Hoffman, et al invested $21M while not expecting at least a 10x return on their investment?

I read somewhere that they invested personally instead of via organized venture funds specifically because they are bitcoin supporters and the investment didn't really meet the usual criteria for the funds (roughly described by you as a 10x return). I can't vouch for any of this being actually true or relevant, but I did read it.

That doesn't jive with this from their blog:

The round was led by Reid Hoffman, Khosla Ventures and Real Ventures, with investments from Nicolas Berggruen, Crypto Currency Partners, Future\Perfect Ventures, Danny Hillis, Eric Schmidts Innovation Endeavors, Max Levchin, Mosaic Ventures, Ray Ozzie, Ribbit Capital, Jerry Yangs AME Cloud Ventures and several others.

http://www.blockstream.com/2014/11/17/blockstream-closes-21m-seed-round/

Well maybe it isn't true then.

I agree with you that a for profit entity should be assumed to be in business to generate profits, and unless they can convincingly tell us how they plan to do that, ulterior (though not necessarily nefarious) motives should be assumed. That is just common sense.

The quote didnt say not to make a profit it said to have a dual objective and compared the approach to Mozilla. Mozilla made plenty of profit (and is a hybrid incorporating both a for profit and a not-for-profit) and also did a good job of making the firefox browser a leading source of user ethos focussed innovation and features.

Greg Maxwell (nullc on reddit) wrote some about how blockstream plans to make profit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2k3u97/we_are_bitcoin_sidechain_paper_authors_adam_back/clhoo7d

I dont think making a profit is a bad thing - to hire developers & QA and UX designers and maintain software and design protocols and figure out how to use smart-contracts and find business partnerships to make those available to users all takes money. As those are good outcomes, and require more money, you have to have a profit to fuel it, you cant rely on investors to keep putting in more rounds!

Its quite feasible to make money without being controlling, proprietary, centralising or evil. We certainly aim to try.

Adam