I would very much like to see some amount of Grin’s supply go to the Grin General Fund, in order to fund development over the long term.
Since an ICO or founder’s reward is out of the question, I wanted to propose that an option be added to grin-miner that would mine some percentage of the time into a wallet that the core team controls.
I think that Grin will appreciate over the long term, so it may wind up being a substantial amount of money. Especially if people donate a lot (in Grin terms) early on, when the coin is less valuable and less established.
For the actual implementation, I would add a dev-donation-share option to the grin-miner configuration file that could be set between 0.0 to 1.0, to mine to a dev wallet between 0% of the time and 100% of the time. Instead of making it opt in and opt out, it might be good to make the miner to refuse to mine unless the setting is manually set, with an explanation in the default configuration file, and a suggestion of, say, 0.05, or whatever people think would be reasonable.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but if no fees are collected by the default miner, the license above only applies to people using third party miners that charge a fee. If a lot of people are using the default miner, then it seems like a missed potential source of donations.
Correct. We do expect third party miners to appear before long, within a month or two, and fear that grin-miner may not be able to stay competitive for long.
Adding configurable donations to grin-miner is a non-trivial undertaking though, considering the need for interaction with the recipient wallet, and grin developer time is a scarce resource. The first step is to provide a Grin alternative to the current BTC/ETH donation addresses.
Yeah, that’s problematic For third-party miners, a clear incentive exists to improve them, whereas with grin-miner there is no such incentive, which is unfortunate.
One way to make this work would be for the project to maintain an account on a pool, and to have the miner mine to that account whenever it’s in donation mode. There are privacy implications, though, since donating miners would leak information about their existence to the pool.
I suspect that these bounties won’t be enough to be enticing. From personal experience, GPU programmers who can optimize PoW solvers are incredibly valuable, and the salaries they would get working for private parties is much more than the bounties offered. Especially once the network goes live, and miners will be looking for an edge.
political correct miner developers will have a problem competing with those who just don’t care. this places a burden/dilemma on them in my opinion. In case I launch a service with a fee I will follow that license, but I believe it should be voluntary by definition. I would feel much better following it voluntary than to obey the political correctness. I think you don’t need to try to force the people who have the appropirate morale and everyone else won’t follow anyway, no matter what.
“Political correctness” is the wrong way of thinking about this. This can be a very loaded term with implied negative connotations. I would think of this more in terms of an issue of ethics.
You are free to go build a clean-room implementation of a solver. You are also free to voluntarily donate to the dev fund. But if you leverage the existing reference implementation then there is an ethical obligation to adhere to the license.
What is your point exactly? I’ve been asked for FAIR MINING license free miner code before. Certainly people in the western world respect the license, GPL is enforceable form of contract, so can be this. You can sell a miner for a fixed cost if you don’t like it, you can just start from zero with your own implementation or publish it under GPL. Or just do something else entirely.
Also the idea that the 50% will make the dev non-competitive is absurd. The variance in solver speed is so large (orders of magnitude higher than the fee now) and winner takes it all, so your argument makes no sense.
Not to mention that two other miners already joined, this is unprecedented show of respect to what Grin stands for and how it is funded.
everyone running a node for profit has an ethical obligation then
In the context of your original question around the fair mining license, then no, you cannot draw this conclusion. Only in the case where a solver is based substantially on the reference implementation, falling under the fair mining license.
I’m not actually sure what your point is here - that “code is law” and therefore since it is crypto no license can or should apply?
crypto never worked on the basis of ethics
That’s a pretty extreme subjective view that I don’t think is necessarily universally held by everyone here.
tho I suggest to make it voluntary I am fine with it. Only one question remains for me: in case I use the solver for a coin differend from grin that is not traded, how you would like to be compensated?
For third-party miners, a clear incentive exists to improve them, whereas with