If Solarcoin is going to work, the developers have to get paid.
If developers do not get paid, the good ones move one to things that do pay. The biggest problem in the cryptocoin world right now is that a smart kid that understands C++ and crypto (and how to properly build addnode lists into the client) can make way more money doing a new coin-of-the week, or work for an established exchange or maybe an cryptocoin trader.
I would like to see something public from the foundation on what the long-term plans to pay some developers are, and how that is going to be a living wage, competitive with what smart people can make writing crypto code for the 'gray' market, or for new IPO-style efforts like Ethereum. Something like
https://www.ethereum.org/pdfs/Ethereum-Dev-Plan-preview.pdf might be appropriate for the solarcoin non-profit board to create.
I agree with you 100% that for a crypto project to attract and retain talent, people must be paid fairly for their work. And not just developers, but also executive management, marketing and communications personnel, etc.
Up until now, the SolarCoin project has been built almost entirely by volunteers, with occasional paid contract work to supplement the work of the volunteers. The fact that so much has been able to be done purely on a volunteer basis is a testament to the passion with which many of us believe in the idea of SolarCoin -- and shows the strength and amazing potential of this currency if we acquire funding to pay people to work on the team.
I believe the volunteer-based model will have to be adjusted as time goes on. I have had in-depth discussions with the founders of SolarCoin, Nick Gogerty and Joseph Zitoli, about organizational development plans. At this time, the thinking is to incorporate as a startup company and raise venture capital to help fund the project. Nick has some connections in the VC world. There might also be a SolarCoin 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization which could raise tax-deductible donations, pursue grant funding from charitable foundations that care about renewable energy and the environment, etc. However, nothing has yet been decided about exactly how or when to move forward with the organizational structure and raise funds. Nick and Joe will make these decisions, hopefully in the next few months. I'm sure they will be interested to hear input from the community about these issues.
Edit: I forgot to mention, there is also a SLR budget of up to 5% of SolarCoins in circulation, which comes out of the Genesis Pool held in reserve. Currently, that budget would be about §1.5 million. At the current price of SolarCoin, that would be worth about $6,000. But if the price goes up a lot, as we expect it to during/after the switch to PoS, then there will be a significant budget available for paying developers and other team members. The allocation of these SLR funds has not been determined yet.
There are serious fundamental problems with proof-of-stake and I have not seen any clear discussion (or code) of how those might be avoided.
The SolarCoin team, as well as the developers from Cannacoin whom we're working with, believe that BlackCoin's Proof-of-Stake v. 2.0 is a good system which we should implement, and that's the plan to go forward. The majority of the work to implement this solution is already done. We decided on this plan because BlackCoin is on the cutting edge of improving the PoS method for securing the network. And as for PoW vs. PoS in general, PoW doesn't make sense as a long-term methodology for SolarCoin because our currency is all about encouraging clean renewable energy to be created, not for energy to be wasted via the energy-intensive mining process.
Here's an excerpt from an article about BlackCoin PoS v. 2.0 which explains some of its advantages over the older type of PoS (emphasis added):
Among other things, the new PoS system will lead to increased security and faster transaction times by encouraging users to leave their wallets open rather than opening them only occasionally to game the staking system. It does this by eliminating the coin age factor from the staking algorithm. With the traditional proof of stake algorithm that was first introduced by Peercoin, coin age is accumulated whether a wallet is open or not. As long as coins arent moved, they accumulate coin age. In order to stake, most people just leave their wallets open a couple of times a month to basically cash in their coin age bank to get a higher staking priority to receive stake. In this way, most users do not support the network, since their wallets are almost never open. This has a negative impact on both the level of security and the transaction times. With the new proof of stake algorithm, your network weight will be based upon the number of coins that you have associated with your wallet rather than a combination of coin age and the number of coins.
Source:
http://www.dailyblackcoin.com/blackcoins-proof-stake-2-0/Thank you for sharing your thoughts and opinions!
