how do you know some people don't?

i don't. but it just occurred to me that we can do this. like, we can actually boost the productivity of the whole fucking game by... you know, being a little recursive. :-)

i was thinking more like a wikipedia thermometer.

"we have our fill for this month"

dude, great idea and great work.

People are being paid to develop solutions  - they just work for a collection of companies like Mt Gox, BitInstant, Paysisus, BitPay, etc.

That being said community funding of the core developers isn't a bad idea.

repentance is on the mark.

can we get gavin and the other guys in here to comment on this?

i know that gavin is a self-made man and doesn't need it for himself right now, but that maybe doesn't apply to some people he'd like to have involved, or others on the team right now.

and if there's such a thing as mob rule or voting: the first non-core thing that should happen is that a UX/UI designer is hired to improve the aesthetics of the satoshi client. :-)

The devs aren't the only people who can come up with things like ways to compress the blockchain, for instance - there's just not a whole lot of incentive for other people to do it.

I think the best way to do this is for someone to plan a specific project for a specific feature or enhancement.  Estimate the amount of money to get a specific developer or two to work on it and be able to complete it.  Then use a dominance assurance contract to try and raise the necessary funding (the project lead would get a portion of the revenue as well and would be incentivized to market the project and raise the funds).  The person leading it could solicit four or five ideas, try and figure out which one is most likely to get funding (polls, talking to devs, etc), and then focus on the top idea.

I actually think the software industry will move to this model of funding as a better, more efficient alternative to copyright and licensing.  If someone made this work for Bitcoin development (building the necessary infrastructure along the way), there's no reason it couldn't be used for building all sorts of things (and I would love to be an investor in such a company).

I've said that I think the download-and-install-software-on-your-PC is a mostly-dead way of using software, and that the vast majority of people using Bitcoin in a year or three will be using it via a web application or on their smart phone. That's half of the reason why I don't think improving the UI is a high priority right now (the other half is because I think solving wallet security and backup issues is critical).

RE: 2112 and GAAP:  "patches welcome."  I don't know nuthin about GAAP, so if you're complaining that the reference implementation doesn't adhere to them then I'm not surprised. Feel free to fix that, or write a detailed proposal on what's wrong, why it'll cause problems, and how it ought to be fixed.

RE: funding development: funding open source software projects is tricky; if done poorly you end up with a couple of paid developers and lots of disappointed unpaid former contributors who decide "I'm not gonna work if I'm not gonna get paid."

That said... stay tuned, and I'll say more when I can.