BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS

> Aren't you paid by Google to work on Dart?

I am, this is a great question!

> How is that different?

What it means is that working on Dart is my job. It's a great job, and I love it. Like other good jobs, I get lots of both extrinsic and intrinsic reward from it. (In fact, a curious facet of being at Google is that the intrinsic rewards of being at the company feel like they overshadow the extrinsic ones. I'm constantly in this "and you pay me too?!" fugue of astonishment.)

But it also means that working on Dart is work. I do some extra-curricular activities related to it: I've spoken at a couple of conferences. But even then, I'm getting time off from work for free to go there, so in some sense I'm still being compensated.

I spend time answering questions about Dart online outside of work hours, but that's because, through some Hermione-like mental affliction, I will spend time answering questions about anything I know (and several things I don't).

But, aside from that, I actually don't do much of anything Dart-related when I get off work. Dart is what I do 40 hours a week. It's a happy 40 hours, but when I go home, I stop working on it and stop thinking about it.

Would I hack on it until the wee hours if I wasn't getting paid to do it while the sun was up? I don't know.

I think this could work as long as you have very detailed contributor and style guides.

Perhaps this would create an incentive for contributors to better explain the significance of their changes in their commit messages. Whether or not this would be a positive effect is up for debate.

I've got kind of a complicated picture to paint, so please bear with me...

1) Services can be bought with Bitcoin.

2) Github is awesome, but currently it's a totalitarian regime. Anyone with power can accept a Pull Request. There is no other form of government possible.

The thought occurred to me that for some kinds of projects, it might make sense to encode a form of government into the Source Code Repository / Source Code Review / Account system, itself. And possibly to have the entire thing - government, source code, data, and the running project itself - be self-hosting on a cloud server.

Self-hosting is the critical, and very interesting part to me. You pay your membership dues with BitCoin, and the service pays for its own hosting with BitCoin. And perhaps that's it - no one else has the keys to the BitCoin account, no possibility to profit off the service, it just pays for itself as long as it can, and then shuts down.

You could imagine a direct democracy, of everyone who pays their monthly membership fee. Or perhaps you gain voting privileges once you've been a paying member for 3 months in a row. All kinds of parameters could exist, and a single Community could possibly even modify their own laws, through something like a Constitutional law process. Maybe if the community is really successful, the governing body can start paying people with BitCoin to fix bugs, add features, create new art assets, etc.

There could be separate partitions of government. Like, picture an MMO RPG. Member for 3 months can vote on engine. Member for 12 months can vote on the content of the game itself, like where cities go, how much manna a spell costs, etc. Or maybe you get the right to vote, once you've completed an in-game quest!

As the code is modified, the service waits for all of the unit tests to pass before accepting a code change, waits for the government to approve of the changes, and then does something like restart the server at midnight.

And depending on the licensing, it may be possible for someone else to throw some BitCoin at a new server, and fork the whole Community, picking slightly different Constitutional and legal parameters. Over time, people end up with accounts on systems that have content and laws they like.

I've got a lot more thoughts about such a system, and I hope it comes to exist some day.

I had the same idea, it's great to know I'm not alone :-) I was imagining an 'enforced' democratic website ie the website runs the live code that any user can submit patches and/or vote on, and no-one has root.

At some point this sort of thing becomes a co-operative business... kind of big for a side project :-/

Anyway I started a python prototype (see my profile), and would love to bounce ideas off you!