Funding open-source development

Real-time transcript.

Summary

No funding: pros, easy; anyone can be the highest-paid dev!

Grant funding: $3M to [I3C]

Funding from companies: Fidelity to DCI

For profit company: lends itself to centralized development. If you want to change it, you’re not in that company.

premine/ICOs. innitial distribution… often different transferable token representing potential coins before they’re transferable.
Raises lots of money, but inefficient use of capital; not much connection to interesting deliverables.

Mining reward. helps w/ front-loading, same issues w centralization as ICOs: limited on ramp; why work on a fully funded coin? Still ineficient.

nonprofit/foundation attached to one of the above. (where does it get its funds? is that really decentralized or independent?) Ex: Bitcoin Foundation, didn’t go that well.

[It was hard not to talk about all of the hilarious fun stories I have about people and groups. No clear answer. ]

Reflections overall

Development doesn’t currently scale w/ level of support.
Bitcoin has O(log(n)) development. # of people working on it has grown by ~2x as price has gone up 100x. High welfare, seems suboptimal

Similarly: there’s maybe 1 person working on GPG; OpenSSL; others. Maintenance is difficult.

Worst case: enclosure, theft. reverse correlation b/t reward and system utility.

Best case: optimum reward gets skilled people cooperating. stability/advancement. reward sublinear in system utility!