8 ms·

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

163 points by chilgart 13y ago

hnha 13y ago
I have found (small) money to not be a good incentive or motivation for people to work on FOSS. It might be worth trying for small simple tasks but it really is a one timer and not benefiting the continuing work and maintaining on the software on the long run.
ErikRogneby 13y ago
I wonder how well this would work tied in to the stack exchange model?
- sejje 13y ago
  Now HERE is an interesting idea. That said, I'm not sure what field to try this on. StackOverflow is damn near perfect, IMO, in its current state. There are endless high-quality answers, without rewards.
Morgawr 13y ago
I think this is genius. Call me naive but this is a really nice idea. Reminds me of flattr except it's automated. The idea of having bounties to various project issues and setting up a commit/pull-request payout could be a real incentive for a lot of people to contribute to actual open source software. Bitcoin is just the icing, makes this really well integrated and anonymous too. I can't wait to see where this project leads us to. Maybe an actually fully decentralized open source employment career?
- mateuszf 13y ago
  One thing I see as a problem here is that anonymity enforces very careful code reviews focusing on security imlications of the changes.
  - matthudson 13y ago
    I think that can be a feature as well. Also, are the contributors anonymous in the sense that you have no way of knowing the identity of the contributor? Or, anonymous in the sense that the contribution originates from a particular pseudonym?
gkoberger 13y ago
My gut instinct was "this is perfect". However, sferik says it's made maintaining his repo much, much harder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882374 (SFErik had nothing to do with the bitcoin stuff; someone else put up the money and started it for his repo.)
- Morgawr 13y ago
  I hadn't thought about this... but honestly a simple solution would be to let the repo maintainer decide how much to give for each commit in a scale of importance. You can't obviously measure it on number of lines changed or something because that doesn't reflect the importance of a change, but maybe just say "okay, I can merge this but you get only 0.0001% because it's just a minor typo" or something like that. And if somebody is trying to abuse the system then just give them 0. A better way would be to set up issues with bounties (what is already mentioned in the article) so the actual developers can decide the worth of contributions before the contributions are actually made, in order not to do favoritism.
  - bdcravens 13y ago
    Doesn't fix the problem. Actually makes it harder: I shouldn't have this level of management forced on me. Perhaps the repo owner (or whoever manages pull requests) should receive an amount? Obviously this could be abused too.
    - Morgawr 13y ago
      What do you mean? You are the repo owner and you set up issues with a specific value, then whoever submits a pull request (merged) for those issues automatically gets paid. Or maybe I didn't properly understand how it works?
      - bdcravens 13y ago
        I was thinking more along of the lines of sferik's situation, where someone other than the repo owner funded the rewards. I certainly am not interested in paying anyone to improve any of my projects, but if any were valuable, a third party might.
joemocquant 13y ago
You should take a look at Devcoin (devcoin.org): A crypto-currency specialized in rewarding open source projects (hardware, software, music, blog posts ...). The main differentiator here is that 90% of mined coins go directly in rewards.
fatbat 13y ago
I think the idea has potential but would this not encourage users to purposely commit sparsely?
shtylman 13y ago
IMO bug bounty payouts are a more effective use of funds for a project. Paying per commit is like paying per line of code. At least with a bug bounty you (the giver) can specify which particular item interests you. If you want to donate money to the project as a whole, then it seems easier to just communicate with the project owner/maintainer and send them funds directly.
bdcravens 13y ago
In the line of worst case scenario that seems to permeate today's world, GitHub can now become a tool for money laundering. All you need is a few scripts creating puppet users and repos, and automate shill commits and pull requests.
munificent 13y ago
This seems like a terrible idea to me. I believe the entire world of open source functions based on intrinsic motivation: people participate because the act of participation itself is enjoyable. This has some flaws (less fun stuff like docs don't get as much love), but unlocks a huge pool of untapped motivation in people. Studies have shown that if you add in even a small amount of extrinsic motivation (i.e. pay people) it dramatically affects their perception of intrinsic reward. In other words, if you pay someone for doing the exact same thing, the task becomes less enjoyable. If we start throwing cash around, it's going to have a huge impact on the psychological aspect of open-source, and probably not for the better.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  Aren't you paid by Google to work on Dart? Apologies if I have the entirely wrong person. How is that different?
  - munificent 13y ago
    > 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.
spindritf 13y ago
You could use the m-of-n feature of Bitcoin where a certain number of people from a larger group have to agree to a transaction and manage the funds for the project collectively like that. Whether to set rewards for committers, or just pay for the new build box.
yan 13y ago
This is very cool, but my initial reaction was "this is amazing" to a misunderstood model of what this is. This is: Create a pool of btc, distribute to those who commit to current round. What I thought this is: Anyone can tip on individual commits that they find useful or of exceptionally high quality, akin to Reddit Gold for code. This way, not all commits are treated equally and great commits can be compensated. To further the reddit gold analogy, this can tip for premium features (i.e. tip some btc or usd for a month of free github premium) or just straight out money. I realize there's gittip, but this is on the level of commits, not developers.
- madcat123 13y ago
  Sure, except that tippers (users) are not likely to be in position to judge the quality of a commit, nor really want to wade through hundreds of commits to decide which ones might be worth spending money on, and for the most part, just want to support the development of the project rather than micro-manage it. It's a nice ideal us developers can dream of, but the model implemented BitHub is just easier to use. To use a restaurant analogy, a shared tip jar that gets split evenly at the end of the night results in much fairer distribution (and includes the chef and cashier as well) as opposed to personalized tips which get unfairly / unevenly distributed between waiters. Most people tip because of the full service, from ambiance to service and cooking, not just the front-man performance. And you can still always ways to tip individuals developers (or waitresses) personally if you so wish.
  - BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
    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.
- mr_luc 13y ago
  I think Open Source would benefit from having both models. Your model/the gittip model is good. So many times, there are only a small handful of people who care about a bug being fixed or a capability added -- but that small handful are both willing and able to tip generously for work that meets their specific need! We've all been there. Either as an individual, an agency, or a software company, we've been in a place, dependent on a relatively lower-profile project where we'd cheerfully tip in the $50-$300 range. That's probably good for everyone. There are a few ways of doing this, but what you've described -- 'tip for this specific commit' -- is how easy we all wish it was. I wish it was a feature of github. But their model is good, too. Some open-source projects are relied upon by thousands, tens of thousands, or more people, and they want to know that everything, small and large, is being done to keep the software stable. As others have commented in this thread, this would be a way to pump up the ecosystem for popular, highly-depended-upon open-source software projects. Sure, adding features like this might induce gaming. But if I understand their model, this may just mean that those reviewing pull requests may just need to take an additional factor into account -- whether or not the commits involved are substantive, or if they're too 'gamed'. It seems like it might be a self-licking ice cream cone, because larger-scale gaming (attempts to earn Real Money through mostly-frivolous PRs) could be caught by review, whereas minor cleanups for docs or comments in the commits of a PR that includes more substantive work might be, as other commenters have mentioned, perhaps just a few percentage points of 'wastage'. I don't think we really know if it's feasible or not, but I applaud these efforts tremendously. I also wonder if a hybrid system could work -- perhaps as a feature to be added to the 'tip for all commits' approach. Allow tipping for individuals, but a certain percentage (50%? 25%? something?) could go into the general pool for all accepted commits.
dlsx 13y ago
I think you would be better off implementing something easier to use like dogecoin. The reddit community seems to be adopting it, and it seems much more reasonable to buy 1000 doge for $1 than .00001 BTC BTC has a huge problem and the mBTC uBTC just ended up confusing people even more.
- OPISAFAGGOT 13y ago
  My words exactly.
salient 13y ago
Moxie are you communicating with the DarkMail guys at all? I'm sure they would appreciate your input.
dmix 13y ago
I'm going to try this out. I'm a freelancer who wants to contribute front-end dev/UX/UI to OSS crypto projects but don't have the ability to join a project full-time. Plus most of my "free" time where I'd normally contribute to OSS, I'm now writing or maintaining my own projects. I'm going to dig into WhisperSystems to see if there is anywhere I can contribute. Hopefully more OSS apps do this. It'd be nice if more projects open-sourced their marketing landing pages or homepage as well. I'd love to be able to do conversion-optimization and copywriting for OSS projects, instead of just programming.
j_s 13y ago
So right now the model is similar to tip4commit, but by running their own service the model can be changed to whatever works best down the line. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882374 http://tip4commit.com/projects/230 http://tip4commit.com/projects/230
j_s 13y ago
I look forward to when StackOverflow integrates BitCoin.
donpdonp 13y ago
I'm excited about the mix of coding and compensation. As a coder with a strong open source ethic, I feel there are enough secondary benefits to direct compensation to justify the potential loss in 'pure' motivation. The twist I would like to see, which I feel fixes the fluff commit problem, is to write unit tests associated with a coin bounty. It puts a burden on the test author to write tests that are not easily gamed, but thats good practice anyways.
jordigh 13y ago
The problem about handling donations can be given to an external party like Software Conservancy, the Apache Foundation, or for GNU software, the Free Software Foundation. We use the last one for GNU Octave. This seems to me like a better solution for collecting donations, which is a solved problem.
mike_hearn 13y ago
Hmm. I took a look at the code and was disappointed to see it's using the Coinbase API. Hardly decentralised. Unfortunately it's hard to replace with direct usage of the P2P network because it relies on sending money to an email address: i.e. a trusted third party has to hold the money until the recipient picks it up. What if they never pick it up? What if they don't actually want bitcoins? It seems to me like a decentralised solution would be easy to code up, if only we add an additional requirement: someone who wants a payout should put a Bitcoin address into the pull request or commit description. Then BitHub would be able to make payouts directly from its own wallet with no Coinbase dependency, and a committer has to opt-in to receiving the funds. I might take a look at coding this up soon. BitHub is Java so using bitcoinj and XChange would be very easy.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
shazow 13y ago
As many others in this discussion, I'm not sure whether this will be net positive or not, but I would try it if I could make the payments per merged pull request. Additionally, I would like to provide bonuses for each checked-off item of 1. Does it have appropriate tests? 2. Is there appropriate documentation? 3. Has it been peer-reviewed and signed off? (Reviewer shares this bonus.) These are the above-bare-minimum things I would like to encourage in my open source projects. Not everyone has time to go above and beyond when fixing a bug they encountered, but it's more than appreciated when they do. In fact, maybe the payments should only be for the bonuses, not the merged PR itself.
jnbiche 13y ago
I think this could work as long as you have very detailed contributor and style guides.
VikingCoder 13y ago
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.
- dustyneuron 13y ago
  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!
em3rgent0rdr 13y ago
This is great! I just sent them $100 in BTC! I love what WhisperSystems is doing!

163 points by chilgart 13y ago

hnha 13y ago

I have found (small) money to not be a good incentive or motivation for people to work on FOSS. It might be worth trying for small simple tasks but it really is a one timer and not benefiting the continuing work and maintaining on the software on the long run.

ErikRogneby 13y ago

I wonder how well this would work tied in to the stack exchange model?

sejje 13y ago
Now HERE is an interesting idea. That said, I'm not sure what field to try this on. StackOverflow is damn near perfect, IMO, in its current state. There are endless high-quality answers, without rewards.

Morgawr 13y ago

I think this is genius. Call me naive but this is a really nice idea. Reminds me of flattr except it's automated. The idea of having bounties to various project issues and setting up a commit/pull-request payout could be a real incentive for a lot of people to contribute to actual open source software. Bitcoin is just the icing, makes this really well integrated and anonymous too. I can't wait to see where this project leads us to. Maybe an actually fully decentralized open source employment career?

mateuszf 13y ago
One thing I see as a problem here is that anonymity enforces very careful code reviews focusing on security imlications of the changes.
- matthudson 13y ago
  I think that can be a feature as well. Also, are the contributors anonymous in the sense that you have no way of knowing the identity of the contributor? Or, anonymous in the sense that the contribution originates from a particular pseudonym?

gkoberger 13y ago

My gut instinct was "this is perfect". However, sferik says it's made maintaining his repo much, much harder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882374 (SFErik had nothing to do with the bitcoin stuff; someone else put up the money and started it for his repo.)

Morgawr 13y ago
I hadn't thought about this... but honestly a simple solution would be to let the repo maintainer decide how much to give for each commit in a scale of importance. You can't obviously measure it on number of lines changed or something because that doesn't reflect the importance of a change, but maybe just say "okay, I can merge this but you get only 0.0001% because it's just a minor typo" or something like that. And if somebody is trying to abuse the system then just give them 0. A better way would be to set up issues with bounties (what is already mentioned in the article) so the actual developers can decide the worth of contributions before the contributions are actually made, in order not to do favoritism.
- bdcravens 13y ago
  Doesn't fix the problem. Actually makes it harder: I shouldn't have this level of management forced on me. Perhaps the repo owner (or whoever manages pull requests) should receive an amount? Obviously this could be abused too.
  - Morgawr 13y ago
    What do you mean? You are the repo owner and you set up issues with a specific value, then whoever submits a pull request (merged) for those issues automatically gets paid. Or maybe I didn't properly understand how it works?
    - bdcravens 13y ago
      I was thinking more along of the lines of sferik's situation, where someone other than the repo owner funded the rewards. I certainly am not interested in paying anyone to improve any of my projects, but if any were valuable, a third party might.

joemocquant 13y ago

You should take a look at Devcoin (devcoin.org): A crypto-currency specialized in rewarding open source projects (hardware, software, music, blog posts ...). The main differentiator here is that 90% of mined coins go directly in rewards.

fatbat 13y ago

I think the idea has potential but would this not encourage users to purposely commit sparsely?

shtylman 13y ago

IMO bug bounty payouts are a more effective use of funds for a project. Paying per commit is like paying per line of code. At least with a bug bounty you (the giver) can specify which particular item interests you. If you want to donate money to the project as a whole, then it seems easier to just communicate with the project owner/maintainer and send them funds directly.

bdcravens 13y ago

In the line of worst case scenario that seems to permeate today's world, GitHub can now become a tool for money laundering. All you need is a few scripts creating puppet users and repos, and automate shill commits and pull requests.

munificent 13y ago

This seems like a terrible idea to me. I believe the entire world of open source functions based on intrinsic motivation: people participate because the act of participation itself is enjoyable. This has some flaws (less fun stuff like docs don't get as much love), but unlocks a huge pool of untapped motivation in people. Studies have shown that if you add in even a small amount of extrinsic motivation (i.e. pay people) it dramatically affects their perception of intrinsic reward. In other words, if you pay someone for doing the exact same thing, the task becomes less enjoyable. If we start throwing cash around, it's going to have a huge impact on the psychological aspect of open-source, and probably not for the better.

steveklabnik 13y ago
Aren't you paid by Google to work on Dart? Apologies if I have the entirely wrong person. How is that different?
- munificent 13y ago
  > 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.

spindritf 13y ago

You could use the m-of-n feature of Bitcoin where a certain number of people from a larger group have to agree to a transaction and manage the funds for the project collectively like that. Whether to set rewards for committers, or just pay for the new build box.

yan 13y ago

This is very cool, but my initial reaction was "this is amazing" to a misunderstood model of what this is. This is: Create a pool of btc, distribute to those who commit to current round. What I thought this is: Anyone can tip on individual commits that they find useful or of exceptionally high quality, akin to Reddit Gold for code. This way, not all commits are treated equally and great commits can be compensated. To further the reddit gold analogy, this can tip for premium features (i.e. tip some btc or usd for a month of free github premium) or just straight out money. I realize there's gittip, but this is on the level of commits, not developers.

madcat123 13y ago
Sure, except that tippers (users) are not likely to be in position to judge the quality of a commit, nor really want to wade through hundreds of commits to decide which ones might be worth spending money on, and for the most part, just want to support the development of the project rather than micro-manage it. It's a nice ideal us developers can dream of, but the model implemented BitHub is just easier to use. To use a restaurant analogy, a shared tip jar that gets split evenly at the end of the night results in much fairer distribution (and includes the chef and cashier as well) as opposed to personalized tips which get unfairly / unevenly distributed between waiters. Most people tip because of the full service, from ambiance to service and cooking, not just the front-man performance. And you can still always ways to tip individuals developers (or waitresses) personally if you so wish.
- BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
  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.
mr_luc 13y ago
I think Open Source would benefit from having both models. Your model/the gittip model is good. So many times, there are only a small handful of people who care about a bug being fixed or a capability added -- but that small handful are both willing and able to tip generously for work that meets their specific need! We've all been there. Either as an individual, an agency, or a software company, we've been in a place, dependent on a relatively lower-profile project where we'd cheerfully tip in the $50-$300 range. That's probably good for everyone. There are a few ways of doing this, but what you've described -- 'tip for this specific commit' -- is how easy we all wish it was. I wish it was a feature of github. But their model is good, too. Some open-source projects are relied upon by thousands, tens of thousands, or more people, and they want to know that everything, small and large, is being done to keep the software stable. As others have commented in this thread, this would be a way to pump up the ecosystem for popular, highly-depended-upon open-source software projects. Sure, adding features like this might induce gaming. But if I understand their model, this may just mean that those reviewing pull requests may just need to take an additional factor into account -- whether or not the commits involved are substantive, or if they're too 'gamed'. It seems like it might be a self-licking ice cream cone, because larger-scale gaming (attempts to earn Real Money through mostly-frivolous PRs) could be caught by review, whereas minor cleanups for docs or comments in the commits of a PR that includes more substantive work might be, as other commenters have mentioned, perhaps just a few percentage points of 'wastage'. I don't think we really know if it's feasible or not, but I applaud these efforts tremendously. I also wonder if a hybrid system could work -- perhaps as a feature to be added to the 'tip for all commits' approach. Allow tipping for individuals, but a certain percentage (50%? 25%? something?) could go into the general pool for all accepted commits.

dlsx 13y ago

I think you would be better off implementing something easier to use like dogecoin. The reddit community seems to be adopting it, and it seems much more reasonable to buy 1000 doge for $1 than .00001 BTC BTC has a huge problem and the mBTC uBTC just ended up confusing people even more.

OPISAFAGGOT 13y ago
My words exactly.

salient 13y ago

Moxie are you communicating with the DarkMail guys at all? I'm sure they would appreciate your input.

dmix 13y ago

I'm going to try this out. I'm a freelancer who wants to contribute front-end dev/UX/UI to OSS crypto projects but don't have the ability to join a project full-time. Plus most of my "free" time where I'd normally contribute to OSS, I'm now writing or maintaining my own projects. I'm going to dig into WhisperSystems to see if there is anywhere I can contribute. Hopefully more OSS apps do this. It'd be nice if more projects open-sourced their marketing landing pages or homepage as well. I'd love to be able to do conversion-optimization and copywriting for OSS projects, instead of just programming.

j_s 13y ago

So right now the model is similar to tip4commit, but by running their own service the model can be changed to whatever works best down the line. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882374 http://tip4commit.com/projects/230 http://tip4commit.com/projects/230

j_s 13y ago

I look forward to when StackOverflow integrates BitCoin.

donpdonp 13y ago

I'm excited about the mix of coding and compensation. As a coder with a strong open source ethic, I feel there are enough secondary benefits to direct compensation to justify the potential loss in 'pure' motivation. The twist I would like to see, which I feel fixes the fluff commit problem, is to write unit tests associated with a coin bounty. It puts a burden on the test author to write tests that are not easily gamed, but thats good practice anyways.

jordigh 13y ago

The problem about handling donations can be given to an external party like Software Conservancy, the Apache Foundation, or for GNU software, the Free Software Foundation. We use the last one for GNU Octave. This seems to me like a better solution for collecting donations, which is a solved problem.

mike_hearn 13y ago

Hmm. I took a look at the code and was disappointed to see it's using the Coinbase API. Hardly decentralised. Unfortunately it's hard to replace with direct usage of the P2P network because it relies on sending money to an email address: i.e. a trusted third party has to hold the money until the recipient picks it up. What if they never pick it up? What if they don't actually want bitcoins? It seems to me like a decentralised solution would be easy to code up, if only we add an additional requirement: someone who wants a payout should put a Bitcoin address into the pull request or commit description. Then BitHub would be able to make payouts directly from its own wallet with no Coinbase dependency, and a committer has to opt-in to receiving the funds. I might take a look at coding this up soon. BitHub is Java so using bitcoinj and XChange would be very easy.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

shazow 13y ago

As many others in this discussion, I'm not sure whether this will be net positive or not, but I would try it if I could make the payments per merged pull request. Additionally, I would like to provide bonuses for each checked-off item of 1. Does it have appropriate tests? 2. Is there appropriate documentation? 3. Has it been peer-reviewed and signed off? (Reviewer shares this bonus.) These are the above-bare-minimum things I would like to encourage in my open source projects. Not everyone has time to go above and beyond when fixing a bug they encountered, but it's more than appreciated when they do. In fact, maybe the payments should only be for the bonuses, not the merged PR itself.

jnbiche 13y ago

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

VikingCoder 13y ago

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.

dustyneuron 13y ago
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!

em3rgent0rdr 13y ago

This is great! I just sent them $100 in BTC! I love what WhisperSystems is doing!