mimblewimble team mailing list archive

[Ignotus Peverell <igno.peverell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Couple questions: what's governence and outreach entail from a high level?
> And, I know this one came up in the past, but should grin get a foundation
> type thing going to take donations, or are there benefits to keeping it casual?
> anybody with non-profit experience that has any insight?

Great questions. At a high level governance and outreach entail something along the lines of a foundation. The advantage of keeping it casual for now is making it easy to start and increment, instead of trying to get it perfect right away. It's fairly easy to start with well-defined and smaller "donation items" and have whoever is the executor/lead be the direct recipient.

But longer term, a foundation is likely a better answer. In the open source field, I can see quite a few advantages, listing maybe the top ones:

- Clearer IP and less developer liability. No one in this space has been personally sued yet but that would mightily suck (not trying to give anyone bad ideas). A foundation can host all the IP and provide a legal umbrella.
- Some clearer responsibilities. When everyone is a volunteer, you can't really have deadlines. For the software itself it's usually fine, it's not like devs get fired for not respecting deadlines. But it's problematic for some legal/press/administrative issues. A foundation formalizes that some people will have to handle those things in a reasonably timely fashion.
- More transparent money handling. Especially if/when the amounts start getting larger and the projects more numerous.

It'd be nice for a few people to step up here just to have an idea of what that would entail first. Not sure if there are geographical advantages as well, especially when ICOs are out of the picture (otherwise it's seems pretty clear you have to deal with the Swiss).

- Igno

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [Mimblewimble] Grin status
> Local Time: 4 December 2017 9:47 AM
> UTC Time: 4 December 2017 09:47
> From: 0xb1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> To: Ignotus Peverell <igno.peverell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, mimblewimble@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mimblewimble@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> Always nice to get the rounded updates from you. Exciting to see the chain evolving and eating itself and spitting itself back out, cheers to all the hard work everyone is doing.
>  Couple questions: what's governence and outreach entail from a high level? And, I know this one came up in the past,  but should grin get a foundation type thing going to take donations, or are there benefits to keeping it casual? anybody with non-profit experience that has any insight?
>
> hear here ear to ear!
> 0x-art
>
> Sent with [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com) Secure Email.
>
>> -------- Original Message --------
>> Subject: [Mimblewimble] Grin status
>> Local Time: December 3, 2017 5:33 PM
>> UTC Time: December 4, 2017 1:33 AM
>> From: igno.peverell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> To: mimblewimble@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mimblewimble@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I haven't sent one of these status emails for some time. It's long overdue. A lot has happened that it's hard to summarize. And more still needs to happen, that is also hard to summarize. But I'm grateful for the passion, interest, perseverance and openness of everyone involved. Everyone has been very welcoming, it's really something to be proud about. And writing this, I'm just reflecting on how far we've come. Just know that the next year is going to be a special time.
>>
>> Now let's get to business! Testnet1 has been bumpy, but extremely useful. We have a unique chain format, a brand new proof of work, in a new and immature implementation, and have to figure out all details to make all of this work in a widely distributed network. The absence of bumps would have been worrisome. The following have improved materially:
>>
>> * The storage of UTXO sum tree is complex and has been the source of multiple consensus issues. I think there's still a lot to come, but the concept originated by Merope has proven sound and this implementation is a good first foundational step.
>> * While the storage of UTXOs was happening, the chain got split in multiple ways, as did the network. We learnt a lot about patholigical network states and topologies.
>> * The blockchain download is considerable better, thanks to a lot of help from Antioch. The download alogorithm is simpler and more robust, and he got ASCII and SVG art to boot!
>> * There have been multiple improvements on the wallet side. We can now restore the wallet state just from the key and seed.
>> * Mining has been extremely solid, some of you rocking serious CPUs; the 2 lasts are courtesy of Yeastplume.
>>
>> Thanks to Antioch and Yeastplume for many late nights and also everyone on gitter who's asked questions, helped one another, added documentation, testing and filing detailed bug reports. Please continue sending test grins to each other and exercise the network as much as possible. Don't forget to git checkout regularly!
>>
>> The next step is testnet2. I've spent some time doing some triage and filing all the larger tasks required for a more full-featured implementation on Github:
>>
>> https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+milestone%3ATestnet2
>>
>> I'm sure I forgot some, but that should give you an idea of the largest remaining efforts. There's also the complex issues of a formalized governance and outreach program. I'm hoping to get more time to focus on these between testnet2 and mainnet.
>>
>> Finally, the development team has been toying with the idea of opening up donations to help finance additional time from some of us, and to get additional resources in the future. Casey and Derek genereously donated to the logo (more on that soon). More details on how donations will work is coming soon.
>>
>> - Igno