Namecoin foundation

namecoiner
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Namecoin foundation

Post by namecoiner »

Namecoin foundation
Let us make something similar with Bitcoin Foundation.
We could collect donations in BTC and NMC from people interested in the development of namecoin.
I would propose following steps:
- fundraising for development
- investing the funds in namecoin
(they should raise in value relative to BTC after bringing out some software improvement)
- after each development stage the developer should be rewarded with namecoin from that fund
Raised funds should be deposited/escrowed to a trusted place.

What do you mean ? Any other idea ?

Tuxavant
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Re: Namecoin foundation

Post by Tuxavant »

It would be awesome if the bitcoin foundation could find a way to adopt namecoin as a daughter project or something and reuse their support infrastructure and network effect.

phelix
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Re: Namecoin foundation

Post by phelix »

http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=473&p=2694 Namecoin Marketing and Development Fund :mrgreen:
nx.bit - some namecoin stats
nf.bit - shortcut to this forum

virtual_master
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Re: Namecoin foundation

Post by virtual_master »

We need a real Namecoin Foundation not only a spending address.
Some ideas:

I. Membership types:
- 1. Honored President - only once
For a contribution of 100.000 NMC for a year or 200.000 NMC lifetime.
(we could propose for example for Georg Soros)
- 2. Honored Board Member - unlimited
For a contribution of 10.000 NMC for a year or 20.000 NMC lifetime. (for celebrities free)
- 3. Honored Member - unlimited
For a contribution of 1.000 NMC a year or 2.000 NMC lifetime. (for celebrities free)
- 4. Executive board member - 3 or 5
Without fee but for active namecoiners (marketing or developing).
- 5. Members - 12
For active namecoiners which are spreading the Word about Namecoin.

II. Fond management and decisions
-1. Executive board members should be identificated with each other with their real life name.
-2. It should be adopted an N of M spending with private keys for executive board members.
3 of 5 executive board member could activate transactions
-3. Spending should be decided by all board members(inclusive honored)
-4. There should be annual decisions for all members with voting system about future developments and bigger spendings.

III. Sponsoring
1. could be made applications for sponsorship by different organizations
2. if they are fonds we could also sponsor new applications upon the namecoin system, like colored coins or anything what is consuming namecoins
3. when they are enough fonds executive board members could be payed

IV Any new ideas ?
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drllau
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Re: Namecoin foundation

Post by drllau »

@virtual_master wrote
We need a real Namecoin Foundation not only a spending address.
Whilst this is legally possible, it immediately centralises a lot of legal and fiscal activities. Conceptually what you are seeking is a trust-like structure where beneficiaries are the broader namecoin community. However, there are trusts and there is TRUST (in terms of the legal concept fudiciary). Looking at the desired objectives
  • 1) membership types - this is related to the constitution, articles of association or the trust deed (if managed by individuals)
    2) fund management - enforcement of duties is where the English law of equity comes in, which comes back to a legal point of presence
    3) sponsoring - this is an onion-ring of sources - legally there are distinct relations - settlor, giftee, retained earnings
A settlor is hard coded within the trust deed and as far as I know, cannot be anonymous (though obscured through blinding and chains of trusts). But the essence is that there is evidence of manifestation of intent (otherwise courts rule that it is null ab initio) with whatever property that is gifted (in this case I suspect the namecoin mining code variant) ultimately devolves to the beneficiaries (which is somewhat automatic with the generation of namecoins).

A gift can be totally anonymous, however, there is no way for the doner to influence the trust/foundation. So if it starts going sideways (NZ have doctrine of alter-ego) there is little the beneficiaries can do if the gift is misspent.

Now the trustees have total discretion (within the powers conferred by discretionary trust deed) so if they invest it and say create naming rights or some other valuable consideration which can be sold to entities, this creates taxable earnings which can be either reinvested or given to the beneficiaries. So you can see that once tax enters the picture, you need a fair bit of legal mojo and unless bitcoin pays for a mercenary army to take over panama, suddenly becomes subject to legal authority (and yes, tax evasion is a crime). Once you have tax which by law needs to be settled using legal tender, you get entangled with issues such as anti-money-laundering laws. If you want to forgo all the complications and remain dis-corporated, then you can try and replicate all the legal structure via contractual means but this is imperfect because you miss all the benefits of laws of equity (basically what we in NZ would consider fairness) and have no legal recourse to economic torts (ie stolen namecoins or investment scams).

Now it is possible to design a structure which attempts to address some of the weaknesses in #2 and even #3 but the governance needs to be carefully thought out ... I'd suggest looking at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdcAxGGRafc for ideas.

modrobert
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Re: Namecoin foundation

Post by modrobert »

After observing the Bitcoin foundation for a while, I think we are better off without a foundation, it will only work against the core idea. Decentralized funding on the other hand, as phelix pointed out, works in hamony with the system.

Do we really need power hungry politicians pushing their own agenda?

drllau
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Re: Namecoin foundation

Post by drllau »

@modrobert wrote
Do we really need power hungry politicians pushing their own agenda?
not sure what that reference is to but an alternative to a centralised foundation (voting for people/trustees) is a variant of social policy bonds (anonymous payouts) with kickstarter (anonymous contributions). That way different ideas can be proposed and the most popular/credible gets backed. Because an explicit goal is set (eg minimum number of unique tranactions?) then you separate the politics (vulnerable to ego-driven or constituency capture) from the policy (hopefully consensus-driven).

indolering
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Re: Namecoin foundation

Post by indolering »

We could go with the Wikileaks model, designating an existing non-profit to handle the financials and reimbursing whomever is working on the project for the costs incurred. That would lead to difficulties with cost controls, etc, but it's an option.

Iceland was supposed to be setting up a virtual llc model. I really don't like the idea of paying for access to the "board" and I would like to model whatever the IETF has done, they are still very much an engineering oriented, no BS politics organization.
DNS is much more than a key->value datastore.

biolizard89
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Re: Namecoin foundation

Post by biolizard89 »

I think there are a few different use cases here. In order from least to most controversial:

Job #1 of the Bitcoin Foundation is to pay Gavin Andreson to write code. I don't see any problem with this; Gavin is doing a fantastic job as far as I can tell, and if we can fund code development for Namecoin (phelix's NMDF is one example model), I think that would be beneficial.

Job #2 of the Bitcoin Foundation is generic PR. Namecoin is in serious need of some organized PR efforts, as we've seen both with clueless journalists calling us a cybercriminal tool as well as with average Bitcoin users not knowing anything about what we're working on. I think this is extremely beneficial as well.

Job #3 of the Bitcoin Foundation is lobbying regulators for favorable policy. This appears to be the most controversial activity. However, I personally don't see any issue with trying to educate regulators. The fact is, they will gain interest in Namecoin the moment WikiLeaks or The Pirate Bay start getting significant traffic via Namecoin. I see no problem with separating legally uncontroversial use cases from controversial ones in terms of lobbying. In other words, I'm totally fine with telling regulators "Yes, someone can in theory place illegal content in the blockchain... but we've made it uneconomical for them to do so, so the only people doing so will be occasional trolls who are willing to blow a bunch of cash; anyone who really wants to distribute illegal content will be using Freenet or something similar." This is important for them to know; otherwise we'll be dealing with the worst possible kind of regulator: a clueless regulator who's trying to look like they're doing something. In a similar sense, I have no problem with telling regulators "Yes, someone could use .bit to link to Silk Road / whatever random boogieman website is in style this week, but censoring them at the DNS level is exactly what SOPA tried to do, and it was completely rejected by the public and by Congress and the President because it was more effective to use traditional police work to bring down Silk Road and because censoring at the DNS level would have had very bad results for Internet freedom." The fact that the lobbyists are distancing themselves from Silk Road doesn't mean that they're censoring the blockchain -- by all means, Silk Road could use .bit, and if they were somehow prevented from doing so, something would probably be broken in the system. But distancing yourself from legally controversial use cases while talking to regulators is a quite reasonable thing to do IMHO. Has any of the controversial Bitcoin economy been directly harmed by Bitcoin Foundation lobbying for less regulation? Consider that 2 years ago, Chuck Schumer was going on an angry rant about how Bitcoin needed to be banned -- have you seen that kind of crap from regulators and legislators lately? No? Maybe because Bitcoin Foundation's lobbying is going well?

(Sorry for the length of the above....)
Jeremy Rand, Lead Namecoin Application Engineer
NameID: id/jeremy
DyName: Dynamic DNS update client for .bit domains.

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indolering
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Re: Namecoin foundation

Post by indolering »

Well put Jeremy, the Bitcoin foundation happens to live in my backyard, I'll see if I can't reach out to them.
DNS is much more than a key->value datastore.

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