I agree. Not about beeing suspicious but that will avoid a lot of possible future misundertandings and will make everybody more confortable about getting in and invest via the IPM system.

More than one IPM pool could exist, for example two independent IPM pools with 17.5% maximum each. It can be distributed.

Initially I will control both the IPM Pool and the Bitmark Foundation, the Bitmark Foundation funds are considered locked until after 2015-07-13. This is to give us time to create a community and have the foundation controlled in a decentralized way, similar to a DAC. Consider me a central point of failure to the entire project at this time as I am leading it on all fronts, in the case of death I hope that enough has been published in documentation and posts so that others could continue the process.

The Bitmark Foundation is currently a concept which has a BTM address for donations. The real Bitmark Foundation will be created by everybody here over the next year.

I try to engage the community and people are already committing valuable time to the project, the IPM Pool proposal was reviewed and had input from 4 people before being published.

For the Bitmark Foundation, I envision that bugs, feature requests, and units of work will be democratically selected, bounties assigned to them, and then proposed units of work completed by anybody. Once a unit of work is marked as complete, it will be accepted by the community and the bounty released. The exact specifics of the system to do this have not been defined, but we have a year to create such a system and examples already exist. We can use githubs pull requests and issues to create the units of work and track them, then a BTM payment system which attaches a bounty to the issue or pull request.

The IPM Pool will be completely transparent, each day a report will be generated which shows the rigs hired, the price of those rigs, the bitmarks generated, the btc donations and the bitmark payouts.  It will always mint blocks to the same bitmark address, and the foundation address will not change. Public block chains ensure a level of transparency.

I hope to automate the IPM pool as much as is feasible, otherwise there is a time based maintenance cost associated with it.

Discussion about ideas as to how we can ensure transparency, oversight, and move to a democratic management system are gratefully received.

Thank you Chronikka for the more useful and rational input this time, I am glad you have taken the time to get to know the project.

The Bitmark Foundation is currently a concept which has a BTM address for donations. The real Bitmark Foundation will be created by everybody here over the next year. During this time I am holding the private key to that address until we have agreed what to do.

Our goal is for the created Bitmark Foundation to be a decentralized autonomous non profit corporation powered by the community, to hire resources and staff and pay for units of work with the BTM under it's control.

Over the next year I am working voluntarily in the hope that this creates an avenue of work for many people including myself.  I am not rich, I have lowered my standard of living to the minimum acceptable by my family, a little too low if I am honest. I am living on a small finely balanced income during this process.

This is a community effort, if you all want to hire people, by attaching BTC or BTM bounties to units of work over the next year you can. Or you can sponsor work, or donate to those who commit time to the project. You can also commit some of your own time and effort. You can also leave things as they are, I am already committed.

I resisted the methods other projects have adopted to do this ethically and fairly, so that value is earned.

If our work is good, our ethics are fair, and our reasoning sound, it should pay fair dividends to those involved at each stage.

Sent 50 BTM to the Bitmark Foundation, wallet just hit the 1001 BTM mark!

cheerio

Difficulty has dropped to 28.15

I feel we need to spread the Bitmark name some more and we need to get onto an exchange.

I do like the direction Bitmark is going, but we need to get a better idea where we stand in the market.  I also feel by not getting the word out Bitmark will be labeled an ninja launch and stealth instamine.  These labels can cause volatility in the coins market.

I certainly agree in terms of the 'direction Bitmark is going' but feel that this 'direction' does not require getting Bitmark onto an exchange any time soon. In fact, IMHO, the longer it is before it gets on an exchange the better...

It is quite a bit different than the average ANN page on this forum, but to me the straight up facts no nonsense approach is inspiring.

The tl;dr at the top there sums it up quite nicely I think.

I'm not against marketing or anything. I just think it's easy to come off the wrong way in the altcoin world and sometimes things can just speak for themselves.

And I can't see anyone making any sort of argument that it could be a stealth launch considering discussion has been going on here for weeks spanning multiple threads.