ChrisJ for the Bitcoin Foundation?
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LOL +1 Tuck
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Nice one Chris, Shameless plugs for Feathercoin at every opportunity. Lol
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Great news indeed :)
Congratz Chris!
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That would be great. Representation from the Feathercoin community there is long overdue.
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Hey guys,
I did not expect Mad to put in that much work and get this much support. If I do decide to run for the Foundation it will be as a protest to the organisation itself.
I am still here but have been made busy recently with more and more people competing for my time. I also sensed that I was getting in the way at Feathercoin a bit and felt that if I stepped back a bit that maybe some other people would step forward. It looks like that is starting to happen.
Leadership is local. Anyone who wants power shouldn’t be allowed it. I am proud to wear the Feathercoin logo and tell people about what we have built here. I will be giving a talk at Hull City Council on Friday having just done one at Warwick University the other day https://twitter.com/MrChrisEllis/status/439107520804945920
I think the best way I can contribute to Feathercoin right now is by contributing to the whole crypto community and to showcase what we are doing here.
Over the next few months I would like to focus on doing talks and video interviews on Youtube. Will you support me in this?
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It’s a shame you would only consider it on protest grounds as your input would be incredibly valid. :)
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You have my support chrisj I think the work and promotion of crypto as a whole that you are undertaking is the best use of your time right now.
We need champions like you who know their stuff and are willing to get the message out there and educate people.
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All you need now is a snazzy feathercoin T-Shirt…
…walks off whistling.
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Good luck Chris, you make this community rock :)
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I changed my mind. I now think this would be a bad decision for Chris personally. Why board a sinking ship?
This could affect Chris’s reputation just by being associated with teh Foundation … when the ship goes down.
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It was a fair thought and might’ve been good to have some fresh blood unaffiliated with the early money that represents the Foundation at the moment.
Now, though? Everything’s up in the air. It’s an excitedly nauseating time.
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Yeah, I agree, I’ve changed my stance on this. Whilst I believe people like Chris would be exactly what the foundation needs, I think in it’s current format it’s beyond repair by a single individual. Haven’t they just appointed two government suits or something?
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Hey guys,
I’m running for the Industry Seat at the Bitcoin Foundation. I recognize that most of you probably can’t vote in these elections (if anyone here can). That’s partially why I especially value your opinions - you would have no stake in the whole enterprise and simply want to see to the long-term benefits for crypto-currencies in general. Here are a couple of high level links about what I want to be a proponent of at the foundation:
http://www.mohammadmufti.com/btcfoundation-en.html
I don’t believe a protest seat is useful because (a) it doesn’t stand a chance of winning and (b) it wouldn’t actuate any change within the foundation. That said, I do believe the foundation is repairable - and I know how people outside of the foundation feel about the foundation (it’s definitely in need of some re-alignment). I have a tech background, I’m fairly active on Facebook btc communities and unlike most of the industry candidates, I don’t have a bitcoin business or large capital backing me. My ultimate goal in running is to make sure that the foundation has a better ability to react to situations like Mt Gox, which resulted in a catastrophic loss of value and ultimately promotes negative material such as this. The foundation’s role should be to facilitate the adoption of bitcoin, the current perception pretty much everywhere outside of the foundation is that it’s either in bed with parties that could care less or it’s completely incapable of reacting to emerging situations (by it’s extremely late action in distancing itself from Mt Gox while issues of solvency were being noted much much earlier on).
Anyways, I approached one of the members on this thread who suggested I publicly post the specifics here. I haven’t posted my specific action-items (for the changes I’d like to see) on the foundation forum, but here they are below:
Bitcoin Foundation â€" A Plan of Action
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Modification of the by-laws. The very idea of having a class of members with the added rights for being “founding board member(s)" is antidemocratic. Removing this antidemocratic class concept will allow The Bitcoin Foundation board to quickly form a quorum and take action as needed in case of a MtGox-esque debacle in the future. Current rights exclusive to “Founding Board members†include a prohibition on removing them without pre-established cause (3.5 b of the by laws) while a Board member elected by the stake-holders can be removed without cause. Ignoring the obviously anti-democratic nature of these clauses â€" any board member should be removable without cause â€" allowing the foundation to (re-)act in a more timely fashion to issues as they arise.
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Modification of the by-laws. Founding members should be moved to the industry class and an increase made in the by-laws of the number of industry seats available to accommodate for this. A simultaneous increase should be made in Individual seats to compensate.
(The ideal situation would be to completely remove all board member classes and simply have functional board member roles allowing individuals to run for each position relevant to their skill-set and not differentiating between the voting power of a $1000 contributor or a $25 member, of course suggesting something like that can be construed as “anti-industry†and would ensure I get 0 votes in the election).
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Modification of the by-laws. The by-laws need to have an introduction of clauses which specify the voting platform to be used, modified as needed with an ultimate goal to move towards as trustless a platform as possible.
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Modification of the by-laws. Every board member should have a complete listing published of every bitcoin foundation member business they have a stake in, even if the stake is nominal.
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Modification of the by-laws. The by-laws should enforce transparency in voting: votes should be public and tied to the name of the member voting. In the case that a vote is being placed by an industry member, the name of the company and any relationship it has through stakes in other voting companies or members should be fully disclosed. Voting anonymously should not be an option. [This does not contradict the second bullet point. It’s fine to have classes with certain benefits - these benefits simply should not carry over into voting rights]. Ideally, votes should be limited where one business owns a stake in another member business (as alluded to in 3.10 b of the by-laws which reduces voting rights in the event of acquisitions and mergers). One business / one individual with a singular interest should not possess multiple votes.
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Transparency. Complete publishing of all past meetings minutes and a policy of publishing minutes on a continual basis going forward. Though these may be legally available by asking â€" the foundation should set an example by facilitating access to Foundation records to everyone rather than forcing people to look up Washington DC laws associated with non-profits and then following through with requests to the appropriate parties. This will help a lot with the severe image problem the foundation has outside of the foundation forums.
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Transparency. Complete publishing of the foundation’s running balance sheets with live updates showing expenses as they occur and are authorized by the board. Balance sheet should also reflect whether an asset is held in fiat or btc, and whether an expense was expensed in fiat or btc.
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Transparency. In the same vein, a list of individuals responsible and liable for each particular asset should be publicly published. While the treasurer may be responsible for some assets held, various assets can be in the care and/or custody of other members (such as physical property, domain names, etc.)
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Increase Activity. On the grounds of these changes being made, and the foundation being made more democratic with a move towards transparency, the foundation can fund efforts to generate additional members. This can be done through direct business-to-business interactions by a foundation appointed “sales” rep. The foundation will ultimately become more representative.
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Split up the foundation. As activity is increased, particularly through an increase in international membership and communication with international foundations - divide the current foundation into a Bitcoin Foundation (dedicated to the US) and an overarching international foundation. Begin elections.
[Alternative: Is an international bitcoin foundation actually necessary? Clarify publicly that TBF is simply an American Bitcoin Foundation and encourage the development of foundations internationally to represent regional interests.]
More detailed proposed changes to the by-laws here. I guess my main goal in posting here is possibly getting help in polishing this - is it even a good idea to post this particular message? What your perceptions of the foundation are - what improvements you think can be made? I’m not an active participant in the ftc community, but I followed it before you guys had this updated forum and it seemed to be made up of a pretty socially-conscious lot of people. When I saw this thread (after listening to the discussion on the Mad BTC soundcloud), it seems that this hasn’t changed so I figured this would be a good place to get some feedback.
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Thanks for posting this here for everyone. You points seem very well thought out. Transparency is something that I think the whole crypto scene needs to embrace to push forward the trust issue.
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I voice my support for Chris and will try to imitate his actions.
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Lol, Gavin’s not setting anything on fire - he’s just opened up that he’s distancing himself from Core development not the foundation position which he’s keeping. Wladimer was being paid a salary by the foundation alongside Gavin for a pretty long while now.
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Muftimoh, I’ll be honest, I’ve little idea how the election process works for the foundation. Could you please tell us more about the process?
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Sure, so they’ve divided up votes into two classes (individual members and industry members). The only real difference is individual members paid $25/$250 for their membership while industry members paid $1000 or more. In exchange for paying more, industry elected board members receive equal representation on the board of directors to more popularly elected individual members. The industry class elections run across about 100 industry members (max) of which likely 40-60 will actually vote. Of these ~80 are audit-able industry members (we can independently verify their memberships on the current members page) while there is also a sub-class of “silent members” about whom we don’t necessarily know anything - right now, we don’t even know how many silent members there are (so we don’t know the influence of silent membership on the vote). This is the sort of class that wouldn’t really exist in an 501©… org that has a physical vote (voting members can’t be invisible).
Currently, there’s two seats up for grabs - and they’re both industry seats so individual members can not vote during this election. The two seats opened since Mark Karpeles had to depart in a crap storm and the other founding/industry member, Charlie Shrem was arrested for money laundering and also stepped down. These open seats however aren’t functional seats - so whoever wins ultimately decides what they’ll actually be contributing, and there is no real requirement for hours board members need to put in (aside from 1 meeting per month which you might have to attend and the occasional conference - it’s up to the board member how involved they get).
The board sets up a committee (of volunteers) to run the election, and from my understanding, they say they do so with little direction from the board (which is positive). Dr. Brian Goss, who volunteered last time is volunteering again to chair the committee. The elections themselves will be conducted using Helios - which is a definite step in the right direction from electionbuddy (which was used last time). With Helios, one aspect of the trust issue is addressed in that the voting industry members can actually verify that their votes were actually counted.
Overall, there’s plenty of room for improvement (imo) - but out of other 501(3)© and 501(3)(6) orgs that I’ve personally seen, this is definitely an example of a decent process for an online vote.
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Lol, Gavin’s not setting anything on fire
That does not change the fact that he (or anyone else) should set fire (metaphorically speaking) to Teh Foundation. lulz
Andreas view on Teh Foundation …
http://youtu.be/mhOtXVJf7X0?t=50m41s
“The Foundation is the Mt. Gox of professional associations in Bitcoin”.
“complete failure of leadership”
“conflict of interest”
"I would not be surprised at all if the foundation implodes in a giant embezzlement problem somewhere down the line or funds get stolen"
and on and on.
