I get it, everyone is unemployed or underemployed. I’m in that category too.
But the community council money is not a way to solve that problem.
What happened to hacking on Grin just for the love of the game? It feels like nobody wants to do that anymore. Because we have this money, nobody wants to lift a finger unless they get paid.
I am starting to agree with @syntaxjak. Having the money feels like a curse. It sort of stops people from working on Grin instead of attracting them.
Save the money for audits, bug bounties, and core work (I would argue that alternative implementations and SDKs like the Python one etc count for that). But for everything else, consider changing the policy.
Work that would normally be a resume builder, learning experience, and just plain fun (hacking on grin), has gotten incentive misalignment and wrapped up in money.
I would not say it us curse or even feel in any way negative about having these funds as community. Lately we did a lot of post funding, so donations to people who did great work for the project in one way or another. Since work was already delivered, there was also no risk for the community and neither did we pay very high prices in most cases.
It is however true that there always has been the problem that if one gets paid, other might think, why should I be the one to do it for free? Still, many have done so, myself included. In the end having funding creates more opportunity and freedom. So in short, no, the funds are no curse in my opinion, neither have they been a fix it all, but for sure they have served their purpose and they will remain doing so for a long time if manage them a bit wisely
Is your claim that if the community didn’t have any funds, more would get done? I think that’s a fantasy, and the reality is that sentiment around the project has been in decline for the past seven years. Even with funding on offer, we haven’t had many proposals made. In my opinion, I think that Grin should make use of the funds to get things done that it wants to be done and not be passive in waiting for others to do things for them (for free based on your thinking). Otherwise, we may still be having these conversations in 20 years.
Because we have money available, nobody does anything until they get paid. If they don’t get paid, they just stop the little project or don’t start it. Let’s call this Group A.
In the past couple years, nearly the only things that have been built on Grin have been from random hackers that just show up and share things. This is usually from people that aren’t active on the forum and don’t even know about any money. Let’s call this Group B.
My claim is that if we didn’t have money to give, more of Group A would fall into Group B.
If you look at crypto projects overall, most will be complaining about not having enough funding for development. Lets give it all the funds away so we can join them in complaining about not having enough money .
Maybe some more people would indeed just contribute. On the other hand, if there are payments done to contributors who make free contributions, does that not inspire more people from Group A to join group B, because although they contribute freely, there is an incentive and the potentail they will get rewarded?
I used to have same idea, but now i didn’t bother anymore. Let’s try to keep simple rule, finished product which is useful to grin community = paid, no matter what he’s in CC or not.
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