Welcome to the SF Decred Devs Meetup

SF Decred Devs is a monthly meetup designed to foster a community of developers, researchers, and investors dedicated to growing the Decred network. All information about the meetup including how to sign up for future events can be found here: https://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Decred-Meetup

We’ll use this website to provide people with readings and resources for each meetup, ensuring each discussion is lively and participatory. This site will also serve as an easy way to stay up to date with development im the Decred ecosystem.

April 18, 2018 — Coordinating Open Source: Today and Tomorrow

An open area of research for cryptocurrency projects is how to best fund their development and coordinate the various parties that help build the network. Like other open source projects, cryptocurrencies don’t extract revenue from their users. To date, it has been difficult to incentivize core protocol development without a clear profit motive. This has led to many tragedy of the commons situations. We recently saw this play out in the Grin ecosystem as a core developer couldn’t raise enough money to fund his work.

To date, cryptocurrency funding can be broken up into three distinct groups:

1. Ad Hoc — holders or independent parties fund special projects on a case by case basis
2. Centralized Organization — some central entity, can be non-profit or for-profit, develops software for the blockchain. Examples include Ethereum Foundation, Block One, and Zcash Electric Coin Company
3. Decentralized Autonomous Organization — Funding comes from some block reward and disbursement of funds happens through token holder voting

Decred is special in that it’s one of the only cryptocurrency projects to employ the DAO funding model. In Decred, contributors can submit proposals for work such as the addition of new features, marketing expenditure, or a new policy, on Politeia, which are then voted on by holders of DCR. Approved proposals are funded through a project treasury which collects 10% of each block reward. Right now, the treasury is controlled by a centralized group of actors, but in the future, it will be controlled through a DAO. Through this mechanism, Decred is a cryptocurrency that’s able to fund itself, while giving its contributors autonomy over their work and identity.

To better prepare for the seminar we’ve put together a reading list to help meetup attendees familiarize themselves with different cryptocurrency funding models.

Reading List

Decentralized Treasury Spending — Politeia Proposal https://proposals.decred.org/proposals/c96290a2478d0a1916284438ea2c59a1215fe768a87648d04d45f6b7ecb82c3f

Funding Cryptonetworks — Joel Monegro https://www.placeholder.vc/blog/2019/1/10/funding-cryptonetworks

Decentralized autonomous funding of blockchain projects, scroll down to ‘Funding fit for commons-based peer production https://medium.com/@richardred/decentralized-autonomous-funding-of-blockchain-projects-3c0c233ae4ad

Funding, Incentives, and Governance — Zooko Wilcox https://z.cash/blog/funding/

Zcash & the founder incentive trilemma — Arjun Balaji https://medium.com/@arjunblj/zcash-the-founder-incentive-trilemma-fe7689fc8293

Working for the DAE — Richard Red (long but worth it) https://medium.com/@richardred/working-for-the-decred-dae-a9cfb17686fa

Inside Moloch: A new DAO aims to fix Ethereum https://decryptmedia.com/5206/fixing-ethereum

The Internet Was Built on the Free Labor of Open Source Developers. Is That Sustainable? https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43zak3/the-internet-was-built-on-the-free-labor-of-open-source-developers-is-that-sustainable

Who Funds Bitcoin Core Development? How the Industry Supports Bitcoin’s ‘Reference Client’ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/who-funds-bitcoin-core-development-how-the-industry-supports-bitcoin-s-reference-client-1459967859/

Discussion Questions

1. What is the role of the early development team? How should they be fairly compensated for their work?
2. How might the incentives between private, venture-backed companies be misaligned with those of users and developers?
3. What are the tradeoffs between having a centralized vs decentralized team? Does it make sense for a cryptocurrency to use both methods at different points in its lifecycle?
4. At what stage in a cryptocurrency’s life does a DAO make sense? Can a DAO exist if the entity its governing isn’t valuable? 5. How are disputes between contractors resolved in a DAO?
5. What roles does grant funding play in furthering open source software? Who should have the ultimate say over grant funding?
6. How would you describe Bitcoin’s funding situation? Is this the most optimal?
7. Is it important to have multiple teams working on the same reference implementation?
8. What are different ways in which private, venture funded companies could build something that both captures value and benefits the greater whole of the network?
9. For private, venture funded companies that do participate in the network, what are the most impactful ways they could help grow a network? is it through directly funding development, educational marketing, community development? maybe something else?