A mere month after having been elected to the Bitcoin Floundation, Olivier Janssens has gone public to announce what most of us already knew – the scam foundation has very little money left and that the way in which it has been run to date is to blame for its coming bankrupty.
NOTE TO THE PRESS: The Bitcoin Foundation does not represent Bitcoin in any way. It has historically hired some Bitcoin developers, lobbyists and organized a conference.
Dear Members,
I was elected on a platform of transparency and decentralization of core development. Since the beginning, the Foundation has been sorely lacking any transparency of its actions. I can no longer in good conscience hide the truth on what I have witnessed in the Bitcoin Foundation since I was elected last month.
First of all, the Bitcoin Foundation is effectively bankrupt. As a result of 2 years of ridiculous spending and poorly thought out decisions, they almost ran out of money in November of last year. In extremis, but way too late, they decided to select a new executive director during that time. That new director decided that the only way to still get funds at that point, was to focus solely on funding core development, in the hope that people would see that as a good cause. But people were smart enough not to trust the Foundation anymore. Despite it’s intentions, they failed to collect the necessary funds to support this idea. With the election in February-March, it became clear that people did not want the Foundation meddling with core development. The truth is that the Foundation’s plan was to hire even more core devs + to start a Bitcoin Standards Body. No organization should have this much control over Bitcoin, and a disaster was avoided.
When I joined on my first Board meeting, Jim Harper and myself immediately put forward a vote to have the board meeting recorded. We followed Robert’s rules of orders, and everyone else basically shut us down and failed to follow procedures. There were “more urgent” things to discuss (as you will see later, the urgent pattern was an excuse to just continue on their course and shut us up). It was critical for us to vote on a plan that would save the Foundation. When I mentioned that such a critical vote is all the more reason to make sure the whole meeting gets recorded, I was ignored. The Bitcoin Foundation hates transparency. If they would have been transparent then everyone would know there is no money left. Something I think the members have a right to know, wouldn’t you think? Members have a right to know that the current board failed to tell them the truth, and that their way of running the organization resulted in it going bankrupt. But instead of taking responsibility, they want to find the next executive director, that will come up with another magic plan. Ironically, being transparent from the start might have prevented this whole thing to begin with.
Everyone has the right to know the truth:
– The Foundation has almost no money left, and just fired 90% of its people. Some will stay on as volunteers.
– Core dev can no longer be funded by it, and Patrick Murck is trying to re-create a new Foundation just for core dev, because the current name is tarnished. Do not fall for this.
– The current Executive Director (Patrick Murck), will be gone in 2 weeks, and they are trying to find the next person to blame everything on.
– Jim Harper was threatened for doing a press release which was (barely) critical of the Foundation after he got elected. The Foundation tries to make sure we hide the truth by subtly threatening us on a regular basis.
– If I get asked to leave the Foundation for telling the truth, so be it. The truth is being told.Moving forward:
– A special trust fund is being created and I will donate several 100k to pre-pay Gavin’s, Wladimirs and some other core devs wage for the next year (if they choose to accept). The control of this trust fund will be handed over to the core devs, who can decide who can join it. Alternatively, we can give voting power to everyone who puts money in it (pro-rata). I will also organize crowdfunds and help make this fund public. At no point do I want to have any control whatsoever.
– It is up to the members of the Bitcoin Foundation to decide what they want to do now. The bylaws allow for a special board meeting to be called by 15% of members. I would recommend you to do so and ask for all information to be released so you can learn the truth. Additionally I would recommend for you to replace the whole board if you want this organization to last. Alternatively you can vote to shut it down and get your money back. There might not be enough money left in the Foundation to pay its members back, but I will personally try to help make up the difference, even though I have not been part of it.
The lesson for all of us in Bitcoin is to never put any trust in a centralized org again that wanted to represent Bitcoin or the Core Development of Bitcoin.
Please provide feedback here on the Bitcoin forum.
Note: I totally expect the current Board members to try to place blame on me for whatever reason. They are very bad at taking personal responsibility. I have had several threats, but I'm releasing this anyway.
Olivier
HuE http://thebitcoin.foundation/
To call bitcoin a payment network the protocol should be able to scale to VISA transaction rates. Luddites like yourself refuse to accept the fact that 7000 nodes is trivial to upgrade/replace. Pull your heads out.
Note: To stall core development 6 years after inception is perhaps the stupidest thing anyone has ever recommended in the history of time.
There is no "core development" occuring. There's a bunch of posturing monkeys ("Foundation", "Power Rangers" etc etc) that have not even conceptualized the core problem of the Bitcoin prototype let alone made the tiniest steps towards addressing any of them. The thing still leaks like a sieve, among many other things.
Yes, posturing monkeys will spend their time going oo-aa and adding leaves and assorted debris they found in their environment to the "core". Dancing savages engaging in their usual cargo cultish practices added more cardboard to their cardboard rendition of an airplane to increase its magic power, too.
Imagining that this does anything makes you an imbecile. And imbeciles have by definition no way to distinguish the men who make planes from anything else.
Upping the blocksize is trivial.
Removing the 'foundation' has driven development straight into the hands of academia (*MIT)- may as well be government.
The only imbeciles are the ones arguing that an install base of 7000 is a hindrance to forking the chain.
No, upping the blocksize is not trivial. Try reading before talking.
As to forking, it's the miners who decide to fork or not to fork, much in the way that it's the landowner's responsibility to decide which seed to plant in the spring. The farmhands, like the nodes, will agree to pretty much anything and aren't much plussed whether it's corn or coffee that boss chooses. The workerbees are important, sure, I'll grant that the system doesn't work without them, but they don't call the shots.
As to the core development, if you think that USGavin's illegitimate foundation was anything other than the government in a googly-eyed Satoshi costume, you haven't been paying attention very closely. You've not even heard of the legitimate foundation, it seems.
Also, MIT and US 'academia' has as much to do with Bitcoin as Bugs Bunny does with the carrot industry. These two entities cannot possibly cross paths, much less interact.
You can run a node on minimal hardware with minimal bandwidth. It's trivial.
Your farming metaphor is tiresome. The miners will follow the nodes and be more leveraged because of the increased system requirements.
Legitimate foundation? and here I am thinking you were against the idea entirely? Pick an idea and go with it.
Unless you either think I'm Mircea or that I wrote this article, I dunno where you get your 'thinking' from.
Being against state-backed shills and in favour of the #b-a WoT is actually quite reasonable. Very much like being disgusted by McDonalds' sewageburgers but being quite fond of the delicious homemade hamburgers your friend grills up on his BBQ.
As to your imaginary 'minimal' node requirements, have you tried running a node using 0.10.x or whatever on 512 MB RAM ? It. Doesn't. Run. 0.5.3.x, as supported by the aforementioned legitimate foundation, can run just fine on 1/2 that. What this demonstrates was the concerted and several efforts of USGavin and his merry band of poseurs to increase system and bandwidth requirements beyond 'minimal.'
So yes, you can run a node on 'minimal' hardware and with 'minimal' bandwidth, but not if you follow the wrong shepherd.
512MB of RAM- lol
You people talk like Moore's law didn't just happen in front of your face for the last 40 years.
I agree the core is in a terrible state. The node is what makes the system work- the seeders. The miners will follow because the seeders ARE the network.
Decentralized = shit loads of nodes.
Off-chain transactions are a complete abomination to bitcoin. And exactly what happens everyday in the ACH clearinghouses. (The idea is to rid ourselves of off-chain transactions)
If you have a better way to share the complete blockchain- I suggest you bring it to the attention of the legitimate foundation?
We should be evangelizing about the node. Instead, we're talking about McDonalds and farming.
"You people" << classic, this. Feeling like you're shouting at the rocks, do you ? And no one understands the world quite like you do ? Heh.
Anyways, Moore's Law is on its death bed with an IV in its arm. I just spoke with the doctors and it doesn't look like it'll make it to 10nm, much less 7nm, on-time, if ever.
Where did you go to school to learn to draw such straight lines from the past, though the present, and into infinity anyways? Was it economics you took?
You don't understand, transistors are spherical! (sarcasm)
Yes, I know the node is more important than the miners and the block size needs to be increased.
you have no sense of time- if ever.