they'll be beholden to the company for pay so they can eat etc. Screw that they walked away from more money doing alt-coin crap - ie they already demonstrated willingness to walk away from things they think are unethical.
sure but that's all subject to interpretation. Greg has said that you guys have been granted stock options. clearly there is an incentive to make those go up and that means making a profit. why didn't you guys consider forming a non-profit at reasonable salaries. that way no one could accuse you of any of this in the first place.
I quit a job paying plenty more than I am paid now. I think everyone took a pay cut relative to US listed company rates of pay. I wouldnt say we are poorly paid for a seed startup, but software development is expensive, and there are limits to how far below market rates you can expect people with living costs to go.
What you are saying is sort of analogous to me suggesting you donate your bitcoins to charity so no one can accuse you of bias?
I dont think a kickstarter or donations would've raised enough money to do it. Mark Friendenbach has first hand experience of trying to work for a year on bitcoin donations, that didnt work out very well. We could probably have implemented the core part in our spare time, but we figured that isnt enough for people to actually use it. You need mining software, wallets that understand sidechains, you need a sample sidechain or two, a sidechain explorer, tools to issue assets (if thats in the sidechain feature set), etc etc. Thats a ton of work and in our estimation if you drop a library or patch over the wall it lands with a thunk and sits there unused. You have to minimally demonstrate a useable system.
You should view blockstream as a sort of hybrid. We are developing FOSS open IP much as a not-for-profit would. But we are also aiming to make a profit by selling services, doing partnerships, advising integrators etc this is all complicated stuff and people need help to make it work. Like was said its kind of like Mozilla.
We also had opinions about the correct uses, and maintaining bitcoin ethos. If you drop a patch you dont have any strategic input into maintaining bitcoin ethos in the deployment.
We're also individuals with a community voice independent from the company. I dont think you see most companies nor individuals working for companies in the bitcoin space giving the kind of detailed rationale or insight into plans.
Not to OpenTransactions, not conformal/btcd, not bitfury, not 21e6 etc. I understand we're the only company to propose actually extending the core so there's a higher standard - but really btcd is kind of opaque which to my mind is a bit of a concern given that its proposed as a full node and creates risk of network fork as it has a reimplementation of consensus critical code.
Adam