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by relyio 3172 days ago
It's still an interesting project, even if drama like this sucks.

Of course, I'd have preferred to see a technical article about the engineering backing the project. Rather than one about a bad apple making its way to a foundation board member sit and caught self-dealing by the rest of the team. But, it's not the end of the world. I hope people will move on soon. Guy was caught. He has been suspended. I guess his removal is pending modulo some legal process.

That being said, I'm a bit surprised the project hasn't had much more interest from HN readers though. Why is that?

It's going to be one of the largest commercial application of OCaml, alongside Jane Street's. There's lots of cool hacking going on and software engineering challenges associated to it e.g replacing wasteful Proof-of-Work with PoS, hot-swapping protocol upgrades (voted on by stakeholders) safely, figuring out constitutionalism etc. (https://github.com/tezos/tezos).

Among the thing that I'm most excited about is the inflation-funded innovation.

Every voting cycle, you can submit an amendment to the protocol alongside a potential token issuance (i.e an amount of tokens that will be issued to you if the amendment is accepted). That means you get directly rewarded for the added-value you bring to the protocol.

That's a great positive feedback loop. Right now, I believe that there can only be one amendment approved every cycle. So, the "great engineer quits menial technical job to work on state-of-the-art amendments to the Tezos protocol" scenario isn't quite feasible on the short term horizon. I'd wager that is a limitation that will be eventually engineered out. It has so much potential.

Disclaimer: author donated to the Tezos fundraiser.

1 comments

Do you have Tezos tokens? If so, it’s polite to disclose your stake, like on stock investment forums. Promoting an ICO that doesn’t have a shipping product is much like promoting a penny stock.
Disclosing cryptocurrency holdings can make you a target for hackers. Many people have been targeted by tweeting blockchain news on twitter.
I'll edit my post. I have donated what I could afford to donate at the time ($200). Thanks for the heads up.
I’m confused. When you say “donated”, what does that mean I’m this context? I thought ICOs are something you buy into to own the coins.

And as a follow up, why donate to an org that has $200M+?

In early July, the Tezos foundation ran a fundraiser to fund the project's development (R&D, Bizdev, etc.). At the time it did not have funding (or very little). Its current treasury comes from that fundraiser.

It is an "ICO" because in exchange of your donation, the foundation will recommend a token allocation for you in the genesis block. Nothing prevents anyone to create a "concurrent" genesis block with different allocations though. It's just that the chances are people are going to follow the one the foundation recommends.

So, in that sense... it's an ICO. Although not quite like an ERC20 token sale.

lol. I love how careful you are with your words. You know the SEC doesn't care how it's phrased, right? It's substance over form. Basically, "if it quacks like a duck, it's a duck".
I'm actually describing the process, which is what OP asked. I figured that the SEC doesn't seek legal advice from randos on HN.
They have $200M because people donated. The ICO is described as a fundraiser, not an investment, because it reduces liability and opportunity for government intervention. In exchange for "donation" you get XTZ. Presumably, you expect that XTZ to grow in value to make a net profit.

The upshot is that its a word that is synonymous with investment, but requires less responsibility. On the flipside, they could disappear and your are out of luck because the government won't regulate donations as carefully as securities.

So attempting to skirt and breaking the law is what is meant by 'donated?'
This is some weird kickstarter hybrid analogy... Basically you can fund a kickstarter for some reward (typically the product), say a sous vide machine or an oculus or a video game.. Maybe in the future these will be worth more than what you paid. Nominally if you et a sous vide machine for $50 but they sell for $200 later, then you could make $150. Now you could say here that you get a set of bits that might be useable in some network and might be worth more later? I dunno. Clearly the sous vide machine is not a security.. I guess b/c it has utility for heating water.. even if a limited amount of sous vide machines are ever made. The tokens have no utility until some other product/platform/network exists in which to use them? It is a weird argument.
No one has tokens, it doesn't exist yet.
Surely there’s some form of placeholder token for those who bought into the ICO, even if it’s not exchangeable? Otherwise what’s the point?