CROWN DEVELOPMENT TEAM MEETING NOTES
12/5/2016 London Blackfriars
9:30 AM - 3:30 PM
In Attendance: Chaositec, Defunctec, Crowncoin_Knight, Stonehedge, Urban_Idler
Purpose/Goals:
1. Have a chance for people to meet face to face.
2. Define and discuss each individuals goals and reasons for involvement in the project, as well as their level of commitment.
3. Discuss design principles and the elements of the Crown Revolution project.
4. Begin to break out specific tasks, responsibilities and requirements for executing the project.
SUMMARY
The meeting served several the purposes listed above, and was the only way that the team could both digest the ideas which Chaositec and Stonehedge have articulated as the Crown Revolution and a face to face meeting was also the best way for team members to connect and commit to the goals of the project.
Everyone in attendance is committed to building, or attempting to build, a durable cryptographically secured application platform of lasting value. This commitment and long-term orientation will be essential for the projects success if we are to avoid pursuing an attractive local maxima or in more colloquial terms, we arent going to run up to the top of the nearest hill and say weve won. We have our sites set on a mountain or constructing a system which solves problems which have developed for Bitcoin.
Chaositec articulated design principles which included the need for focus and simplicity despite the fact that he himself can jump from idea to idea at different times. The purpose of this note isnt to get into any technical details, so this portion is truncated. The key takeaway from the technical discussion was that everyone on the team at least conceptually understands the goals of the Crown Revolution project. The course of work is leaving the conceptual phase and everyone on the team is onboard.
Stonehedge and Urban_Idler will begin work on the detailed documentation of the project, which is expected to result in a series of short white papers, and/or functional specifications describing what we will be attempting to build and why the high level logic suggests it should work and where the challenges may be as we drill down into the specific details. The devil is always in the details.
Stonehedge and Urban_Idler discussed the importance of constructing the platform in a way that takes into account the different business models of the people running businesses on the platform. Simplicity of the core platform is both a security consideration, but also a business consideration. We want the platform to be stable and secure and rarely updated once it is completed so that economically successful communities of node operators and application developers can rely on and build their businesses on the Crown Network.
Part of the value of the Crown Platform will be that Crown will not be in the application business Crown will be focused on the new blockchain and providing a stable framework for compute capacity and a process for integrating and operating applications on the platform.
There are skills which the existing team lacks which will be needed to complete the project and we discussed how we would fill those skill gaps. The team was in agreement that the way to do this would not be to raise capital from corporations.
Despite the significant interest corporations have in blockchain at this point, the team believes that it is critical for the core Crown platform to stay clear of outside capital so that the project remains open source. The world doesnt need another technology platform controlled by corporations, arguably it needs more good ones that arent.
As the team thinks about the appropriate governance structure to both embed in Crown revolution (throne voting implementation details), Crowncoin_Knight and Urban_Idler agreed that it will be critical for the core platform to be organized such that we do our best to embed our values in a way analogous to what Crowncoin_Knight did with the Knights Code, but formalized more as a sort of social contract or terms of service. These elements of a social contract or terms of service should be constructed in collaboration with the community. Crowncoin_Knight and Urban_Idler are idealistic about this, but it is not clear that these ideals can be implemented at the end of the day. The only value of these statements may be as a signal to others who might be interested or deterred by them.
If the development process is successful, we hope to legally organize the project such that the intellectual property is held by a community benefit organization to prevent the platform from being captured by corporate interests, as one might argue has happened with Bitcoin. This would require more legal research, and may never happen.
Defunctec updated the team on discussions with Bittrex. The team has confidence and expressed support for whatever agreement he may be able to reach with Bittrex. The address committed to covering Bittexs listing expenses currently has a balance of about 2.2 BTC.
We quickly covered the current update to the latest Bitcoin/Dash core code for Crown which Infernoman has been working on and is on pace to complete before the end of the year, and the progress which Crowncoin_Knight is making on the website update -- texts were recently updated but the site is a little dated at this point.
And I think thats about all thats fit to print
except one last important detail... I am someone who is sort of a long-time listener, first time caller in the crypto community. My greatest personal concern coming into the meeting was that something from someone on the team would set off my radar or it just wouldnt feel right or add up. In other words, I would get the vibe that someone was running a scam or that somebody just felt shifty or not genuine. What I found was an eccentric, idiosyncratic group of very bright guys, all of whom are interested building something and whom I think I can learn from and also have fun working with.
There are no guarantees that the team will reach its goals. This is still a project, and not anyones full time job. But if it fails to happen it wont be due to a lack of effort from the team the biggest issue is really that we know we dont know everything we need to know to do this
which is an awkward sentence and an even more awkward feeling.
Our commitment to the community is just to communicate about our progress as we proceed.
Thank you for the summary urban_idler
I think there are some important points you have outlined:
1. The team met face to face, a rare thing in crypto, we saw our strengths and weaknesses, I think the personal meeting was a positive surprise for all.
2. We are starting to draft the white paper on our Crown revolution goals. Looking forward to that!
3. Governance structure - its essential for Crown to remain an open source with no funding from Corporations.
Great to meet you guys and looking forward!
