Hi everybody.
It has been one week since the mainnet project got the funding and I have an important update to make.
A little bit about the progress: I've found a wonderful developer, who is helping with the library, so it is starting to take some shape. I'm ironing out our REST API, got some useful feedback, continuing to do so. About 0.17% of the total funding spent so far.
The important update though is that I have decided to take the development and spending private, instead of public. Before I explain what that means and why, I understand that it might upset some donors. So, if you have pledged any amount and disagree with my change for any reason - please contact me (DM, or hello@read.cash) and I'll refund your pledge completely, no questions asked.
(Please sign any message using the address that you used to prove that you sent the funds, see the list of donors here to find your pledge and the link the the funding donation to find which address you sent from).
If more than 50% of pledges ask for money back, I'll just return everything to everybody in full and we'll consider the project cancelled. At that point anyone willing to take on the project (via a new Flipstarter or something), I'll donate the domain to them. Everything that is done so far is MIT licensed, so anyone is free to take it at any moment.
Let the market decide!
I've got to tell you that I'm a bit disappointed with our progress so far. I expected a lot of people willing to earn some money, but I've got only 4 relevant developers, 3 of them passed a very simple test, only one is actually doing anything.
This was not expected by me, when I had promised to work publicly and with BCH developers.
Another problem is that I have a certain vision that I described in the project description. In addition to that vision there is also a lot of experience talking to read.cash users. A lot of them are in countries with very bad Internet (2G, few kilobytes per second), using very old Android phones (10+ years, the size of an iPhone 4 and the speed half of that of iPhone 4).. And I also really hope that someday we will have 100MB blocks, 1GB, 1TB blocks. But now I'm tied in arguments with BCH developers who argue that many current solutions are good enough already and we don't need to change them - just build on top of a few convoluted and complex protocols, just download a block when needed (again, Africa, 2G, 100MB blocks), just download 640,000 block headers, listen to the whole mempool (with 1TB block we'll have 1TB mempool) - it's fine, blocks are tiny... Just send a few queries (now)... Just download a mempool fully.
(To those of you that know what this is about, please don't name names, I'm not here to play the blame game, everybody is entitled to their own opinions. It's fine.)
If your wallet becomes too big - create a new one. It's fine.
Sidenote: my read.cash wallet that gets the fees takes a few hours to open now, and it's barely 9 months old! I find current solutions unacceptable, I want my wallet to open up immediately and handle 100MB blocks as well as 60KB blocks.
I don't want to develop for tiny blocks or tiny wallets that need to be changed every few months.. I want huge blocks! I don't want mainnet to be as brittle as to break at the first sight of success.
A few of these discussions got me really tired and I have no leverage on these guys. They have money now, they have their vision, I have mine, described on the site, they don't want to do it my way. I didn't collect the funds to do it their way.
Yet I have made a commitment to work with them.
This is very tiresome. I feel like I've got myself into a trap - I have to work with these people, they don't want to work on my stuff.
This is just stupid.
One more thing is that now that I have Slack - I'm caught in endless private discussions of people trying to sell me their vision of how stuff should be done or questions about me or read.cash... I didn't sign up for that, I barely have any time to do the work, I don't have time for this, sorry.
Change #1: Private development
Having said that, I'm moving the project to private development.
Frankly, all I care about is to get this project done. I added an additional burden on myself to be do the public development. And it's tiresome.
The plan would be to hire some outside developers, using regular contracts, so that they don't have THEIR ideas on how to do the project and they'll just do what I described.
I think everybody cares about the end result - library working, document being written, etc...
Change #2: Private spending
Hired developers also means salaries. When people (in the real world) know salaries of other people, it leads to conflicts. I went through this experiment (public salaries) once in my life, I won't go through that again. Even people knowing your budget become a problem, since they start to bargain with you. (Again, we're talking about outside developers, they are not interested in BCH success, they are interested in getting as much money as possible)
By private spending I mean that I'll post periodically how much is done and how much funds is approximately left, but no details on who got what for what. Right now there's 99.83% funds left.
Some of you might see it as a money grab or something else - I can't blame you, but I'd rather see this project cancelled by market forces than drown in endless fights about why we should do exactly nothing or their idea, hope for small blocks and use what we have no matter how convoluted or hard it is, or why somebody's hourly rate should be bigger than that guy's.
Will this lead to everyone cancelling their donations? It sure could! It's voluntary funding after all, I can't force anyone to love what I do or how I do it.
If you donated and want a refund to your original address - just ping me.
When this post is 48 hours old, if more than 50% pledges remain, the project will move on as described above. If 50%+ cancels - everybody gets refunds to their original addresses.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/ibrujs/mainnet_project_an_important_change_if_you_are_a/
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