Why we need to have this discussion
This week the Community Council prepared their funding for 4 months for David T.s work on Grin++ (API and client so Grin++ can run as client on Raspberry Pi’s), funding for 4 months for two fine groundskeepers full of new ideas. Since the start of the Community Council, we made sure those who needed funding had access to them, we are funding the CoinSwap implementation, bounties for Grin Telegram chat bot, we bought a lot of community miners and the ground-keepers made sure information news and accounting went fine. So everything is the Community Council working as intended then?..well yes partly… and in other parts not completely the way I hoped it would. I will explain below.
Grin is a distributed project
In general since the Community Council was started, the aim was to encourage more voluntary contributions to the project, work in subteams and have more contribution on a voluntary basis. This is happening to some extend, people make great contributions to discussions, marketing material, their own websites on Grin and many people use their free time and energy to contribute, not to forget, the Community Council (CC) members and Original Council (OC) members work on a voluntary basis.
However, if I look at the spending of the Community Council, I cannot help but feel we should be even more minimal and more strategic in our spending especially in a bear market like the one we are having. Find below an overview of the Community Council’s BTC wallet:
https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/bc1qmdhmgmhd6j89225hzdh7dxqgmen3y2q0g4vgpez0tw9tkp4ae39qsqvuyl
Financial status and long term health of the Community Council funds
As can be seen, we the Community Council started with a fund of 33 BTC and now has some 25 BTC left. As also can be seen in the transaction this month, a simple 4 months payment to David and our Groundkeepers takes a significant amount of our remaining funds. If the current low BTC price would hold (unlikely), no new donations come in (possible) the Community Council would spend all its funding in 3.7 years.
Now as I said, those 3.7 years assume a worse case scenario, however we need to discuss as community if we should not be more minimal and saving since these 33 BTC granted to use by OC, community and its generous donors were meant to fund Grin for the long run, and not only for the next 3.7 years. Every Bitcoin we spend in the bear market, could be used to fund 10x as much work in a bull market. To be clear, what I state here is my own pondering and concerns. I did not have any discussion with other CC members on this topic before posting (@mcm-mike, @davidtavarez, @Neo, @Mokhtar, @hendi), nor is there any existential crisis. The OC still has plenty of funding left, as does the CC at this moment. I just want to address this topic now while all funds are healthy since we need to have this discussion if we want to be responsible and true to the long term goals of the project and the long term financially health of the CC funds.
Why I timed this discussion now
I on purpose timed this discussion while having our ground-keepers and @davidtavarez funded for the coming 4 months, so we have time for this discussion and there will be no direct threat to the continuity of their work or personal dis-convenience
We need your input since these are your funds
Let me know what you think, should we become more minimal and strategic in our spending?, should we minimize our spending in a bear market? What should be our short term and long term strategy? If we should be more saving, where should we spend and where should we save on spending? What about certainty and continuity for long term contributors?