Subsidies are great if you want to get applicants who qualify, It should be called a subsidiary not a reward for good reason, the problem is there are developers who feel the economics are wrong and Bitcoin needs to be fixed, I may not be able to express why but to my understanding the mechanism seems well balanced and considered in my view, the onus is on the people who have a problem with how Bitcoin works to prove its broken, and build a better mousetrap not change this one.
My position is that it would be great if we could have started Bitcoin up without a block subsidy, but since the currency has to be issued via some method, and since the only way to produce a truly optimal initial distribution would require an entity that was both omnipotent and omniscient, issuing the currency via block subsidy spread out over time is the least terrible way to do it.
Other than the wealth effect, much of the real capital (at least initially until the NWO-directed ecosystem was bootstrapped) went to the utility, hardware, and usury industry to which miners are beholden. If that was the optimum way to bootstrap an ecosystem, then it was correct.
In my view, it was the only way to build a global ecosystem amongst conflicting interests because it is
unassailable until it scales to the point where it becomes distributed but centralized, then at that point it can only be assailed by the TPTB.
One would prefer a completely decentralized process (thus in theory no politics) such that we didn't have to rely on some individuals holding the private keys for proceeds derived from the ICO. But as Monero and Bitcoin have demonstrated, a decentralized process lacks leadership and unless you are entirely done and all is on auto-pilot, then the lack of leadership leads to paralysis, fragmentation, dearth of innovation, etc.. Thus I see no other way to proceed to build an anonymous, bearer-style (a.k.a. permission-less autonomy) ecosystem other than to concentrate some investment from the ICO and then redistribute it with leadership.
The problem is who will do that leadership and the resultant vulnerabilities and pitfalls.
Ethereum made the huge mistake of having too many managers. And choosing a problem set that is arguably intractable (Turing complete on a replicated verification).
Blockstream is ostensibly much more well focused; they've delivered alpha code at breakneck speed.
Thus it is cleverly designed (seemingly with military precision of forethought) to disrupt the existing financial disorder (entropy) and converge it to one NWO controlled morass at the end game. I couldn't have designed it better for that purpose.
Whereas, if you want to create an alternative ecosystem, such as
the Knowledge Age that I argue is replacing the dying Industrial Age NWO-directed, establishment system, then the coins must be distributed to the targeted ecosystem.
I hope this post is not lost in the shuffle because it may be one of the most poignant, salient, and critically important insights I have shared.
And I 100% agree with Adrian-X's point about anyone who has a point, needs to prove it in the market.
It's in my queue of articles that need to be written.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3514Those who cant build, talkPosted on 2011-07-28 by Eric Raymond (progenitor of the term "open source")
One of the side-effects of using Google+ is that Im getting exposed to a kind of writing I usually avoid ponderous divagations on how the Internet should be and the meaning of it all written by people whove never gotten their hands dirty actually making it work. No, Im not talking about users I dont mind listening to those. Im talking about punditry about the Internet, especially the kind full of grand prescriptive visions. The more I see of this, the more it irritates the crap out of me. But Im not in the habit of writing in public about merely personal complaints; theres a broader cultural problem here that needs to be aired.
The following rant will not name names. But if you are offended by it, you are probably meant to be.
I have been using the Internet since 1976. I got involved in its engineering in 1983. Over the years, Ive influenced the design of the Domain Name System, written a widely-used SMTP transport, helped out with RFCs, and done time on IETF mailing lists. Ive never been a major name in Internet engineering the way I have been post-1997 in the open-source movement, but I was a respectable minor contributor to the former long before I became famous in the latter. I know the people and the culture that gets the work done; theyre my peers and I am theirs. Which is why Im going to switch from them to us and we now, and talk about something that really cranks us off.
Were not thrilled by people who rave endlessly about the wonder of the net. Were not impressed by brow-furrowing think-pieces about how it ought to written by people who arent doing the design and coding to make stuff work. Wed be far happier if pretty much everybody who has ever been described as digerati were dropped in a deep hole where they can blabber at each other without inflicting their pompous vacuities on us or the rest of the world.
In our experience, generally the only non-engineers whose net-related speculations are worth listening to are science-fiction writers, and by no means all of those; anybody to whom the label cyberpunk has been attached usually deserves to be dropped in that deep hole along with the so-called digerati. We do respect the likes of John Brunner, Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson, and Charles Stross, and were occasionally inspired by them but this just emphasizes what an uninspiring lot the non-fiction serious thinkers attaching themselves to the Internet usually are.
There are specific recurring kinds of errors in speculative writing about the Internet that we get exceedingly tired of seeing over and over again. One is blindness to problems of scale; another is handwaving about deployment costs; and a third is inability to notice when a proposed cooperative solution is ruined by misalignment of incentives. There are others, but these will stand as representative for why we very seldom find any value in the writings of people who talk but dont build.
We seldom complain about this in public because, really, how would it help? The world seems to be oversupplied with publishers willing to drop money on journalists, communications majors, lawyers, marketers manqué, and other glib riff-raff who have persuaded themselves that they have deep insights about the net. Beneath their verbal razzle-dazzle and coining of pointless neologisms its extremely uncommon for such people to think up anything true that hasnt been old hat to us for decades, but we cant see how to do anything to dampen the demand for their vaporous musings. So we just sigh and go back to work.
Yes, we have our own shining visions of the Internet future, and if you ask us we might well tell you about them. Its even fair to say we have a broadly shared vision of that future; design principles like end-to-end, an allergy to systems with single-point failure modes, and a tradition of open source imply that much. But, with a limited exception during crisis periods imposed by external politics, we dont normally make a lot of public noise about that vision. Because talk is cheap, and we believe we teach the vision best by making it live in what we design and deploy.
Here are some of the principles we live by: An ounce of technical specification beats a pound of manifesto. The superior man underpromises and overperforms. Mechanism outlasts policy. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a pilot deployment is worth a million. The future belongs to those who show up to build it. Shut up and show us the code.
If you can live by these principles too, roll up your sleeves and join us; theres plenty of work to be done. Otherwise, do everybody a favor and stop with the writing and the speeches. You arent special, you arent precious, and you arent helping.
