dusty I’d like to see you try to make a cryptocurrency work and develop through criticism like how you’ve written. Anyone can support and promote, it takes a whole lotta skill to develop a unique/innovative idea.
And to call on them as “lying” is pretty much a little harsh (outrageous?). “Led me to believe” doesn’t seem to show any promise to anyone. There doesn’t seem to be any “lying” involved.
Thanks for taking your time expressing your post, but I do believe it belongs in a different topic - the complaints section.
I have made a simple list of questions if you guys could answer to them would be great.
Just to have my head prepared on future engagements.
My questions are:
What does the company own? only domain information gathered and device printing?
How are the rules of the protocol affected by the company? Does the motivations of a shareholder could affect alterations on things like inflation? And coin supply?
Since you have a company do you seekonly to pay development?
When selling it for partnership one would expect some professional marketing teams involved?
lynxlee Some argue it’s blackmail, some believe it’s not. Your argument is as good as others.
There is tons of companies managing an open source project. There is also many companies managing other cryptocurrencies. I don’t see any complication associated with this.
Reddcoin Nice to meet you, Jonathan. I take that comment back. It’s not just a rant, it’s a threat. Blackmail, if he knows a lot of personal details (secrets) about you guys.
Oliver has asked some important questions regarding Reddcoin Ltd, and I would like to add some of my own:
Are there any plans for Reddcoin Ltd sell a product of some kind (software, data, services)? If not, where will the funds used to pay employees come from?
Are there any other reasons that a company would be beneficial for Reddcoin? Any downsides?
What do you foresee Reddcoin Ltd’s role to be one year from now?
YouCanDoAnything I don´t agree on the notion that this is not a democracy, but guided by the devs. Reddcoin is not guided by the devs but by the majority of stakeholders. The idea that Reddcoin is somewhat under the control of the developers is scary - fortunately it is not, it is a decentralized network. The main reason why laudney and his team are in charge is because people trust them and I believe they trust with some good reason.
From my perspective we as a community do not have simply the task to “represent” Reddcoin - we need to have our own standpoints. To be mere fanboys of “the devs” really doesn´t look reflected enough to me to form a capable community to bring Reddcoin forward. Being reflected includes talking about weaknesses. Anyway, I guess we agree here so I don´t want to sound like I am opposing, just trying to make a point on cheering vs. reflecting.
lynxlee You have raised some very important issues regarding how companies base their business models on the ownership of user information. For everyone to clearly understand how Reddcoin Ltd will work, let’s first look at a few relevant case studies.
Changetip holds funds for all its users in its own central wallet. Users have no access to their private keys. According to their ToS, any damage is capped at $100. In other words, when you send Bitcoin to a Changetip account, you are converting your hard-earned money into a promise that’s delivered with best efforts by a startup and capped at $100 regardless. This major security hole exists in any online wallet such as Dogetipbot, ReddAPI and CoinLeap.
Changetip transactions happen off the blockchain, i.e. account balances are updated in their own database. Changeitp has the exclusive private copy of all transactions. It owns all the social data.
To link a social network account on Changetip, one uses single sign-on (SSO) or OATH for authentication. Remember those “login with Facebook / Twitter” banners? SSO gives Changetip access to your social network profiles including email, address and friends. Depending on the level of access, Changetip may also access your streams of posts.
In short, Changetip owns every bit of user information. Its business model is the antithesis of a decentralised digital currency.
The whole reason for Social X and the whole point for the existence of Reddcoin is to promote true decentralisation in micropayment. What makes us unique?
Security: With the Electrum browser wallet, users have exclusive ownership of their own private keys.
Transaction: All transactions occur on the public blockchain.
Social: Public proofs of social network identities are stored inside the public blockchain and can be verified by anyone cryptographically in a decentralised fashion.
We are fully aware of all your concerns and working on solving these problems. The business model of Reddcoin Ltd is not built on harvesting user information but on providing higher-level value-added services on top of the micropayment infrastructure. A lot more updates are forth-coming before the company enters full operation.
Oliver GrayPhoenix I’ll try to answer as much as I can. Although the company is not fully running yet, there are a few clear principles we would undoubtedly follow.
The infrastructure of Reddcoin is and will always be open source, which includes Reddcoin blockchain, Qt wallet, Electrum server and a whole range of developer libraries in different programming languages such as Python, Java, Javascript, PHP and Go. Please check out our github page.
For the foreseeable future, I expect Reddcoin Ltd to be the predominant (sometimes even exclusive) contributor to these open source code bases. So the company owns them in the same way that Linus Torvalds owns Linux kernel: as the main developer and gatekeeper. If one day Reddcoin Project becomes so big that new major contributors appear, it’d be very natural to set up new processes for governance. I refer you to the histories of some successful open source projects initiated by companies: Node.js and various open source projects by Google and Facebook.
Some pieces of software developed by the company will remain closed-source, either initially or permanently, due to competitive reasons.
Any proposal to modify the blockchain protocol will require thorough discussion and review with the community to reach consensus. Hard forks should be kept to absolute minimum. Remember that all hard forks technically create new crypto-currencies and users are free to choose adoption or not. So a consensus is absolutely necessary to ensure trust.
It’s too early to discuss how marketing works. Let’s get the product working first. Once a good product exists, marketing is a vital part of any business.
I don’t spend time predicting what future will be. I only focus on building the missing pieces and wait for the efforts to bear fruit.
reddibrek No matter how much people want it to be completely decentralized there will always bee the need for someone to maintain it and keep it working. Having a semi-permanent solution such as a company is better than leaving it up to complete randoms that may help or may not when things get rough. Doing it in this manner actually sugges more dedication to the coin and idea behind the coin then leaving it completely random aka decentralized where no one body is directly responsible for the direction and development.
Lets look at all the other coins outer there like mooncoin, fedoracoin, cinnicoin, and at least a dozen other coins that hardly if ever have any improvements or updates to the wallet or coin itself.
should reddcoin remain like them it would not be long before reddcoin would be no better than any other pump/dump coin on exchanges and never taken serious by anyone for any reason ever.
Thanks for the info laudney. I’m fully in support of this solution if it allows the dev team to focus on Reddcoin full-time. It’s very clear that you’re 100% committed to this project, and the creation of a registered company only serves to highlight that point.
You wrote that the business model for Reddcoin Ltd is built on “providing higher-level value-added services on top of the micropayment infrastructure”. Would you be able to give a hypothetical example of one such service so that we understand what you mean? Something like custom interfaces for websites? Shopping cart systems for digital media sites? Or is that way off?
Well planned out structure and hiring of serious developers for full time “power development” is an awesome idea to get the large scope of things rolling. I appreciate all the info. It started becoming apparent to me a couple months ago, maybe only two, that things were becoming more like a company and I’m still excited to see what is to come of it. The dev infighting shown here is unfortunate, but I believe this is bound to happen occasionally.
Outside of everything being discussed. I believe the coin is moving in the right direction. Starting a legitimate company and receiving support from big players is exactly what the coin needs. Having full time developers will make the experience more meaningful on their end and in turn result in better performance and results. I expect the awareness of the company/brand to continue to grow. It is good when not all people support you, sometimes that means you are doing something right. Continue to push forward and make moves from a business level without jeopardizing the integrity of the coin. Well done on making pivotal decisions which will provide a long term plan for the company rather than short term excitement.
I don’t understand why they thought this was something negative they could use as blackmail - I think this is the greatest possible course for RDD! Social-X is a more comprehensive plan than a lot of other VC backed ventures, let’s hope an investor can realize it’s potential as well & seriously get the ball rolling.
GrayPhoenix The main goal of Reddcoin Ltd is to invest serious resources in building the Reddcoin economy which, once having reached a critical size, opens up many unprecedented opportunities. Reddcoin Ltd cannot and will not pursue all of them. Most of them will be left to Reddheads entrepreneurs.
One service that we do plan to build after Social X is Reddcoin Broadcast which in the current form is quite rubbish. It’ll be rebuilt completely from scratch and won’t look anything like what it is now.
Back in April 2014 when I wrote the PoSV whitepaper, I actually briefly described what kind of unique Reddcoin services are possible. Please refer to the last paragraph on page 11.
DogeDump Actually many answers didn´t show up for some reasons and I only read them right now. That aside, I was also thinking about something like a regular (e.g. 2 weekly update) on what the devs are doing. Not to pressure them into work but to give the community an idea about what is currently happening and who does what. I believe that for Reddheads it´s much easier to face criticism on other forums when we can refer to more than the roadmap image.
