31–40 of 67 posts
This seems really strange, to me. Isn't it basically working around an arbitrary, self-imposed restriction to give code away? As a developer, if I want to make money from one of my projects, I'll charge people to use it or to buy a copy. If I can't sell enough copies to fund development, I don't see how I would ever be able to fund development with "tips." As a user, I don't mind paying for software, and I don't thin…
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I'm 99% sure that everyone receiving tips has a job. Many of these people probably also love what they're doing. I also know that a lot of them are very self motivated and build things on their own time in order to solve common problems in an elegant way. But isn't that what they're also trying to do at a "job"? I've been building products based on open source technology for the past 10 years. However, I've seen a HU…
We have a ticket for providing invoices, with the use case of making Gittip more friendly to companies wanting to give. https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/83
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The biggest problem I have with bitcoin is that the fixed bitcoin supply and decreased rate at which coins can be mined rewards hoarding behaviors. If you know that the bitcoins you have in your account today will be worth more in the future, you have a powerful disincentive to spend.
If you know that the bitcoins you have in your account today will be worth more in the future, you have a powerful disincentive to spend. That's only if you're a scrooge and don't like spending anything. Since bitcoin started, I spent bitcoin on hosting and domain, t-shirt, musics, development bounties, writers, and other things that I forgot to mention. I never spent a bitcent on mining hardware, though. You have to…
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If you know that the bitcoins you have in your account today will be worth more in the future, you have a powerful disincentive to spend. That's only if you're a scrooge and don't like spending anything. Since bitcoin started, I spent bitcoin on hosting and domain, t-shirt, musics, development bounties, writers, and other things that I forgot to mention. I never spent a bitcent on mining hardware, though. You have to…
"We don't exists to horde money, but to spend it doing things that we like." Deflation increases the incentive to hoard cash. People respond to incentives. Economies based on deflationary currencies end up suffering from problems caused by this. You may not agree, but pretty much every economist does.
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If you know that the bitcoins you have in your account today will be worth more in the future, you have a powerful disincentive to spend. That's only if you're a scrooge and don't like spending anything. Since bitcoin started, I spent bitcoin on hosting and domain, t-shirt, musics, development bounties, writers, and other things that I forgot to mention. I never spent a bitcent on mining hardware, though. You have to…
You're making a subjective and emotional argument ("a scrooge") when it's well-established across societies that deflationary currencies have this effect (of discouraging spending and investment). Bitcoin, with its very tight supply, is inherently deflationary-- so long as it continues to gain traction.
I also happens to disagree with the idea of deflation being necessarily bad for society or actually discouraging spending and investment. I contend it that it only shift the timeframe longer into the future, and saving enabling people to buy higher quality lasting goods.
With inflation, it encourages short term thinking and shorter term investment.
Here's a question: What verifiable documented successes exist in the world?
The one that always comes to my mind is Dwarf Fortress. It's not open source, but Tarn Adams has gone with the donation-ware model since January of 2007. I've been tracking those numbers since, and recently have attempted to start getting data on community size where that's also verifiable: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhPaW9RBi5v4dGF...
>Instead we should expect a few people to tip a lot, and a long tail of people to tip a little.
Based on anecdotes, this doesn't surprise me, but I'd certainly be curious to have a look at hard data. I know in the case of Dwarf Fortress about 1% of Bay 12's income is from one person: me. Additionally, I'm aware of other big tippers as well.
However to get back to my original question, if folks could provide links or other sources to other successful donation-funded endeavors that aren't humanitarian efforts or fitting the typical charity mold, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
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Mind saying more or linking? I keep hearing strong opinions against bitcoin but haven't heard details.
The most clear-cut argument against Bitcoin is that it is a ridiculous waste of energy. The nature of mining in the protocol implies that if Bitcoin takes off on any significant scale, there is a dichotomy going on: either there are so few miners that single large actors can dominate the total hashing power of the network, making it vulnerable; or, a significant fraction of the total world computing power goes toward…
> which means that the electricity used up by the Bitcoin network would be much larger on any reasonable measure than what you need to maintain other currencies
This is only true if the other currencies are fiat money. For a non-fiat currency, it is necessary that either (i) it is hard to make (or people will just make enormous amounts and its value will go away), or (ii) it has intrinsic value.
> Is personal funding viable? Here's a question: What verifiable documented successes exist in the world? The one that always comes to my mind is Dwarf Fortress. It's not open source, but Tarn Adams has gone with the donation-ware model since January of 2007. I've been tracking those numbers since, and recently have attempted to start getting data on community size where that's also verifiable: https://docs.google.co…
I want to see a culture of people funding each other. I want Tarn Adams to have been ahead of the curve.