This is an issue that is being addressed in MemoryCoin. A percentage of newly mined coins are set aside for salaries and coin owners get to vote on who receives the salaries. Everything is controlled in the blockchain so it's fully decentralised.

That's great. Now how do I pay rent and put food on the table for my family in the mean time? Yes, I have a handful of bitcoins tucked away in a never-spend paper wallet just in case. But sometimes I question the sanity of that as its current value is less than my credit card balance.

How do you expect core developers to actually work on bitcoin today, without being paid enough to live on?

Maybe it should come out of those miner's fees.

I'm not saying all you get is 20 BTC and nothing more. That's crazy. I'm just offering something WE the members of this forum who happen to be reading this thread could do to help. I'm sure we could collectively cough up 20 btc or so, but I don't think the dozen of us could afford some dude's salary in perpetuity.

If I were the CEO of an exchange, I'd pay y'all's salary. However, I doubt Karpeles is gonna turn on the faucets any time soon....

Or put a "donation" button for the developers at the top of the forum's main page, kinda like how wikkipedia does it.

Or charge for tech support (use of this forum) kinda like how Ubuntu does it.

Directing money to some particular set of pre-ordaned developers (or developer choosing people, or pre-miners) as part of the system is a point of centralization of the sort that Bitcoin seeks to eliminate.  People choosing personally, individually, and autonomously to fund work, contributors, or funding schemes they consider valuable is— I believe— the only method which is in accordance with the implicit principles of the system, though it may not work very well.  Sure, paying people with everyone elses funds is more attractive, but that isn't what infrastructure like Bitcoin is about.

I don't believe this notion of developers having oodles of coin and being somehow selfishly motivated to contribute to preserve their value makes any sense. For one— it has the freeloading problem, assuming someone has oodles of coin they can just sit back and let someone else do the work, or they can contribute and feel that a lot of other people with a lot more coin are unfairly benefiting from their efforts. For another, I don't believe that many _any_ of us actually have the aforementioned oodles: Being around "early" by no means guaranteed ever having a large amount, nor did it grant magical foresight to not sell most of it at $7, and it makes it much easier to have given away thousands and thousands of it in bounties (which some of us are known to have done), or to have lost it in scams/heists.

Beyond that, I'm not sure that directly profiting by Bitcoin's future value is the best motivational structure in any case: It favors bubble forming activity (why make a profit only on the up when you can take risky actions which create volatility and make money both up and down, over and over again?)

My own motivations are essentially political: I favor a world where people have the option to choose to use trustless systems, and geeky: cryptographic protocols and high-risk embedded software development are exceptionally enjoyable mental puzzles. I'm certain I could get paid to work full time on Bitcoin, but such arrangements unavoidably come with strings attached— even if they're silk strings— which may not be very compatible with my motivations. Things like the foundation may help cut through that, but I think that unless we have multiple such organizations we risk creating dangerous points of centralization.

Another reason that self-investment doesn't make sense as a development funding argument is that it currently appears to be a losing strategy when compared to some of these high profile altcoin efforts. Right now it appears that you can take a poorly substantiated bill of goods and sell the promise of future development to the market and receive thousands of Bitcoins and perhaps never create anything successful at all. The ideas don't even need to be technically sound, the applications don't need to be well defined, the whole thing can even be more or less completely redundant with Bitcoin...

In general I think we should do all the things: We should have developers on company payrolls, community and institution funded developers, freelance agents, academic researchers on grants, bounties for specific functionality, independently wealthy tinkerers, etc.  Though I doubt we'll have any self-investors: They'll chase altcoins and business schemes that have more near-term upside. Any one mechanism has its limitations, hopefully we can support many approaches and gain the advantages of all of them.

Bitcoin should be a collaborative work with people contributing code, writing documentation, etc.

Who would pay the salaries? Associating private companies with Bitcoin development could be a recipe for disaster.

Maybe you should email Bitcoin Jesus https://www.facebook.com/rogerkver . I'm not being facetious. There really is such a guy and he's reputed to be really helpful to guys like you.

The context of the conversation is "Bitcoin Core Developers Should Be Paid" as such, anything you say should be construed by all readers of your text as for, against, or about that subject unless you say otherwise.   

You said: "I'm sure they have got enough money" in the context of the conversation any reasonably intelligent individual should logically conclude that you are implying that they don't need to be paid for what they do because they "got enough money".   The contrary conclusion is illogical.

who is paying them in bitcoin?
wihat is their bitcoin salary

Clearly the rant of a slave driver-sweatshop owner mentality.




 

I wouldn't call the core dev team centralized in any way.