Skaro

Wow, what a thread!
Jorge told me of his intention to post this, and I told him that although I had some feedback to give he should post anyway and I will provide my own thoughts as a comment. Now that I've wrapped up being a block chain trainer at the BC-2 workshop in Japan, I actually have time to do so.
First, I'm very thankful to see that most of the community are of the same mind regarding this issue (also, hi galambo!). The foundation was created for the purpose of solving a problem we perceived with the two competing requirements of the distribution mechanism: we wanted it to be fast so that the monetary base stabilized quickly and we could test Gesell's theory of money, but we also wanted to avoid plausible allegations of pre-mining. Sadly we must recognize that we accomplished neither -- the inflation rate of freicoin is unclear so long as the future of the foundation funds is undetermined, and the "foundation" has been misconstrued by many to resemble other foundations with more centralized purposes.
Really all we did was punt the issue. We hoped that we could come up with another fair, decentralized mechanism for distribution of the foundation funds. In reality that task proved nearly impossible, and certainly not doable with the manpower available. Republicoin remains on the drawing board as we were unable to come up with a suitably decentralized version that didn't compromise privacy and fungibility goals, let alone implement any of the half-working solutions. The charity matching program is technically still live but hasn't been operational as the backend suffers some major exploitable flaws.
So reason number 1 to kill the foundation is that it seems we are unable to meet the technical goals for distribution, and arguably we should all prefer to see those funds destroyed in a publicly verifiable way rather than compromise on those ideals and do something that could be construed as an actual pre-mine.
The second reason is regulatory.
Coin Center released in 2016 a good legal brief for deciding whether a cryptocurrency offering should be considered a security or not, which has grave regulatory implications. You can read the report here:
https://coincenter.org/entry/is-bitcoin-a-security
https://coincenter.org/entry/framework-for-securities-regulation-of-cryptocurrencies
That's how people in bitcoin space were hoping the issue would be handled. Just a few weeks ago any uncertainty about what regulators are thinking was cleared up when the SEC announced that they would use basically the same rules for deciding whether a crypto token is an unlicensed security offering. Notably they say that the DAO was a security, and presumably so was most if not all of the ICOs. You can read that report here:
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2017-131
What would it mean if the SEC decided that freicoin was a securities offering? Well, in the frightening worst case it could mean that those responsible for creating the currency (gulp, me and a few others) could be forced to pay exorbitant fines AND go to federal prison for decades of our lives, as well as prevent us from ever working in the financial industry ever again. Conceivably it might not even matter if those involved are US persons given the way the US uses extradition treaties to enforce its laws around the globe. So please, let's take this seriously.
(In case I frightened anyone too much, note that the SEC decided not to take action on the DAO, presumably because the regulatory situation was not clear at the time it was created. Now there's no excuse. The legal advice I received is that as long as we take proactive action to to make maximally sure we're in complicance, we should be okay. So as long as we take the actions I mention here, I'm still in this for the long run )
The gold standard for whether an offering is a security is the Howey test. Quoting the Coin Center page: "An investment contract for purposes of the Securities Act means a contract, transaction or scheme whereby a person . . .
  invests his money in   a common enterprise and is led to   expect profits   solely from the efforts of the promoter or a third party Invests his money? Well people can buy freicoin on exchanges, does that count? Unclear. Certainly it would be bad if the Foundation (a kinda-sortof pre-mine) sold its coins to investors. If this were a regular proof-of-work mined only currency the answer would be no, but honestly the existence of the foundation complicates this in hard to determine ways. Whether freicoin meets this test is really up to the prejudices of the SEC, which I have no insight into. So let's assume yes, but things would be much better if the foundation ceased to exist and the coins it managed were destroyed (this precludes, for example, directly giving out the coins to existing holders).
A common enterprise? We're all here for demurrage money, right? Check.
Expects profits? Let's be honest, everyone expects the freicoin price to rise if/when it sees significant usage. I would like to say that as demurrage money the freicoin price will be stable and only used as a medium of exchange. But while that might happen in the future, we are not there yet. Someone investing in freicoin today is probably expecting a return, not actually using it themselves (yet).
Finally, expects those profits to come solely from the efforts of the promoter or a third party. Here again the foundation rears its ugly head. I'm happy to say that since freicoin was created we ALWAYS had an idea of the foundation only being involved in the initial issuance and then disbanding, and not doing anything else. The foundation doesn't even pay for the official freicoin website -- I pay out of pocket for those negligible hosting costs. However the SEC will be judging not based on what the foundation does but what a reasonable investor might think they do. And I'm sorry to say there's a lot of misinformation out there. Would a reasonable investor think that the Freicoin Foundation is like, say, the Litecoin Foundation or Ethereum Foundation, both of which pay for both development work and promotion of the coin itself? I don't know.. and that worries me.
Both points (1) and (4) would be made SIGNIFICANTLY clearer if the foundation was unequivocally disbanded, and the funds it controls destroyed.
I think there are some concessions that can be reasonably made. Namely we promised 1:1 matching of charitable contributions, which we haven't delivered on. In fact, those donations are still sitting on keys controlled by the foundation. We can forward those funds and do a retroactive 1:1 matching, before destroying the rest of the coins.
The foundation has a few non-charitable causes listed on it. We'll have to figure out what to do with those. The original donations can obviously be forwarded, but I'm not sure we can reasonably match the contribution. We'll also have to figure out what we do with donations to the foundation itself -- both foundation and the freimarkets bounty fund.
I think we CAN'T do anything like distribute the coins to current holders. Destroying the coins is the same economically anyway, and much clearer intent in the eyes of regulators.
Finally, my own vote is for option number 1 (sorry!), but with a twist. I will separately be making some posts on this forum about my intention to release an elements-derived sidechain to freicoin that is proof-of-work mined (Rik, this addresses your comment from page 2, but is off topic for this thread). It is possible that we could, for example, allow pegs into this sidechain to be doubled in quantity 2:1 so that up to 50M freicoins can be moved from the old chain to the new chain, resulting in 100M on the other side. The new chain would also have its own subsidy so, if all goes well, there is a period of coexistence where both chains are used, until the peg pool is exhausted and the old chain is archived. We can quibble the details, but something LIKE this would allow us to maintain 100M total freicoins and achieve full issuance more quickly without the complications of a miner-incentive-reducing soft-fork.
In any case, the option 4 is just option 1 followed by a soft-fork. So can we at least say that we are in agreement to finish the donation matching, destroy the funds, then start a conversation about the best way to handle the mis-match between subsidy, demurrage, and the total monetary base? Even if you guys want to go with the soft-fork, which I respect, the coins can be destroyed first whereas the soft-fork requries some development and testing.

Well, that's as official as things get here. We got a majority of 'Yays' agreeing that Option 4 represents the communities choice for ending the foundation. So its done, decided. LET'S DO THIS!

Well, that's as official as things get here. We got a majority of 'Yays' agreeing that Option 4 represents the communities choice for ending the foundation. So its done, decided. LET'S DO THIS!

Well, that's as official as things get here. We got a majority of 'Yays' agreeing that Option 4 represents the communities choice for ending the foundation. So its done, decided. LET'S DO THIS!

Well, that's as official as things get here. We got a majority of 'Yays' agreeing that Option 4 represents the communities choice for ending the foundation. So its done, decided. LET'S DO THIS!

YAY!
 Yes on option #4,
 
 

Oh me too. Just updating the wallet for a couple of weeks takes longer that the initial load a month ago. I think this has to do with the denial of service attacks. 
Apperently there is a 'fast load' method, but I don't think this makes a difference for recent attacks. I too gave up.
I will try 'fast load'. We have to figure this out so we can put Ethereum on the exchange. Honestly, I'm not sure how Ethereum can even function right now. I mean, my lap top has 12G of RAM and it can't update the wallet! To me, it's like Rick's animation ^^, a total car wreck.

Oh me too. Just updating the wallet for a couple of weeks takes longer that the initial load a month ago. I think this has to do with the denial of service attacks. 
Apperently there is a 'fast load' method, but I don't think this makes a difference for recent attacks. I too gave up.
I will try 'fast load'. We have to figure this out so we can put Ethereum on the exchange. Honestly, I'm not sure how Ethereum can even function right now. I mean, my lap top has 12G of RAM and it can't update the wallet! To me, it's like Rick's animation ^^, a total car wreck.

Damn... tought i had double vote ????

@Fabrizio, regarding the parameters for option 2, I too did ask if @jtimon could maybe share some thoughts on that. And thanks for presenting your ideas too--although I wanted to wrap this up. He has so far clarified: 1)funds to go through miners, not POS; 2) one of the reasons we want to end the Foundation is because no alternative method for distribution was developed by us, so we shouldn't pretend that we will developed one now, 3) the goal is to end the Foundation, not to create another one. So option one represents the maximum time to distribute the funds, option 4 thier complete destruction. I think your suggest kinda falls under (2), we haven't got the basic income up and running yet. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea, But it may not materialize.
We could reasonably target having a round figure still of say 30 million. I think people reading Freicoin history will think, "they saw a problem and fixed it while still keeping that character of the coin the same."
anyway keep discussing, but let's aim to get this wrapped up soon.

@Fabrizio, regarding the parameters for option 2, I too did ask if @jtimon could maybe share some thoughts on that. And thanks for presenting your ideas too--although I wanted to wrap this up. He has so far clarified: 1)funds to go through miners, not POS; 2) one of the reasons we want to end the Foundation is because no alternative method for distribution was developed by us, so we shouldn't pretend that we will developed one now, 3) the goal is to end the Foundation, not to create another one. So option one represents the maximum time to distribute the funds, option 4 thier complete destruction. I think your suggest kinda falls under (2), we haven't got the basic income up and running yet. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea, But it may not materialize.
We could reasonably target having a round figure still of say 30 million. I think people reading Freicoin history will think, "they saw a problem and fixed it while still keeping that character of the coin the same."
anyway keep discussing, but let's aim to get this wrapped up soon.

I agree on alternative 4 as the community choice.
I vote YAY for alternative 4.

regarding distributing mining coins in a different way, could CPU mining be a solution? Obviously not for the hash rate, but for identifying a participant. Then mining rewards can be distributed on a weighting factor between hash rate and no of participants (as identified by the network of wallets configured for mining). I suppose this has nothing to do with developers but rather P2pool. 

Well Fab and Bick weighed in. A total of 10 people voted. That's pretty good.
 
It's a little difficult to count and rank as some people voted for one option, some ranked their choices, and some gave equal rank to two or more options, then some changed their minds ... . I also know Fedde's second choice is option 4, which I included. So not counting 3rd or 4 th rank, and giving equal weight to 1st and second choice, I count:
option 1 - 7
option 2- 4
option 3 - 1
option 4 - 7
It appears that option 4 is most people's second choice and the philosophical 'middle ground' as it creates no inflation and privileges miners less. I think it may be the technically best option, and has good appearance. It also makes Freicon coin generation truely complete, which is sociologically unique and consistent with the original concept. Option 4 is also JTimon, Fedde, and Arc's second choice. I grant the tie to devs and active programmers.
I recommend option 4 be regarded as the community's choice.
 

Yeah you mentioned that before, the merge mining and the explorer. I believe you, but I don't really understand it. The way I see it, the explorer reads and parses in info from the wallet block chain files. as long as the block is valid it should read? But it's true that ABE  also surmises the current longest chain ...
 

Well a half-assed update is better than none at all ... lol.

A plan moving forward please. Seems we have agreed to some things. And again somethings like POS vs POW have already been discussed before Arc and I would defer to what Mark and Jorge have said on this issue we don't need POS. As for freimarkets colored coins etc... what are the developers willing to do? I think 1 and 4 seem agreeable to most. Let's see that done and maybe we can see a more concrete plan moving forward. If everything now is going to be run through the forum and discussed great. But what is the agenda? What do we need etc. The foundation question seems mostly solved. Someone write it up and lets vote and then move forward.
 
Note: Fab. Well I have said my piece and it needed to be voiced. As for attendance and the community? Really? A lot of those past options and plans were debated within a larger community and assumed that would be acted on. If we want to keep discussing things already discussed and posted then in reality it is a waste of time and it is a delaying tactic at best. I am not asking for anything other than following up on what the devs want to do with their established plans and they were discussed at length in the past I don't see how things have change demonstrably since 2014 or 2015. I am not asking for the devs to make this their job and put in 40 hours a week and cut everyone out of the process. I just want them to engage with us in a reasonable way so we can expect some sort of progress. Have a look at the old forum you will see what I mean on that. It would be worthwhile for those two to put their vision on paper and get us the community to sell that with our input. But you can't keep limping along with no one leading this thing. Someone needs to step up and moving things forward.
 
 

regarding distributing mining coins in a different way, could CPU mining be a solution? Obviously not for the hash rate, but for identifying a participant. Then mining rewards can be distributed on a weighting factor between hash rate and no of participants (as identified by the network of wallets configured for mining). I suppose this has nothing to do with developers but rather P2pool. 

@jtimon, could you maybe say what you thought would be a good set of parameters for Option 2? I assume this would set the time frame and payment regime for the Foundation funds?
Anyway, option 3 looks bad. One thing there is to learn about the Foundation is that bad optics should be avoided. While the Foundation funds have remained mostly untouched, people had viewed it as a possible scam.  So then we distribute the Foundation funds and the richest people get richer--pure POS. After we multiply all address balances by 5, what then? Where are you going to spend it? Its like you and your friends declaring leaves money then dividing all the leaves in your backyard amoungst each other. At least miners need to pay an electricity bill--that's legitimate economic circulation. (LOL I digress.) Also, we don't want to replace it with another type of Foundation either.
Increasing users and  use for the coin is the end game. With increased use the hash rate fixes itself, money circulates, the value will be more constant etc, and there will be more volunteers and community members! So we want to keep the optics good.
Presently, debating here, we are actually agreeing on important things: 1) the Foundation must end, and 2) that the community is welcome to code and develop things that interests them.  All options 1,2 and 4 are fine. 
 

I would've liked to see the Foundation continue. At the current moment in time though, I understand the wish to end it since there is no tested-to-work tech for the fair distribution (self-sovereign/decentralized ID, WOT, voting systems).. as well as the inability of our small community to launch the many centralized experiments we've discussed/planned/outlined to attract wider user base  

Option 3 I dislike, since there are a bunch of coins in lost privkeys (and possibly in questionable entities possession; case Cryptsy) -> Drags out the "full supply" of coins available for circulation.

I'd prefer option 4, but option 2 could be as acceptable  Option 1... I wouldnt like to see inflation added, but it wouldnt drive me away from Freicoin neither.

Edit: Short off-topic comment @ Arc and Bick: I totally see both of yer points and comments and theres validity to them.. especially with that theres not been that much communication with the devs during the past years with the couple of channels we tried (Forum/IRC/Mumble/Blab etc.), but there wasnt too much attendance from the community neither  To make this short; the Bitcoin development team has done some mindblowing codewizardry during these years that will benefit Freicoin too once the client gets updated  Theres also the things from Blockstream projects that Jorge mentioned above that are really neat and should help with the experiments we've discussed before. So dont be too harsh with Jtimon and Maaku, I think we've (the world) benefited more with them working on those projects ^^ (pfft.. not that short.. I'll try to trickytrick with smaller font :D)

@jtimon, could you maybe say what you thought would be a good set of parameters for Option 2? I assume this would set the time frame and payment regime for the Foundation funds?
Anyway, option 3 looks bad. One thing there is to learn about the Foundation is that bad optics should be avoided. While the Foundation funds have remained mostly untouched, people had viewed it as a possible scam.  So then we distribute the Foundation funds and the richest people get richer--pure POS. After we multiply all address balances by 5, what then? Where are you going to spend it? Its like you and your friends declaring leaves money then dividing all the leaves in your backyard amoungst each other. At least miners need to pay an electricity bill--that's legitimate economic circulation. (LOL I digress.) Also, we don't want to replace it with another type of Foundation either.
Increasing users and  use for the coin is the end game. With increased use the hash rate fixes itself, money circulates, the value will be more constant etc, and there will be more volunteers and community members! So we want to keep the optics good.
Presently, debating here, we are actually agreeing on important things: 1) the Foundation must end, and 2) that the community is welcome to code and develop things that interests them.  All options 1,2 and 4 are fine. 
 

It might be tangential to this discussion, however it is not tangential to this community in that if you promise to deliver changes on what we are voting on then fail to follow up on developing the coin further why should we invest time? You and Mark have not really been setting development goals and updating the coin over the past two years. I think it is also important to note that giving up on the idea of foundation (Mark and Jorge's idea) is just one more signal that you want to divest yourself of responsibility to this tiny community. That might not be the intention but it sure is what some people think. Let me be really frank here. It would be best that you come up with a plan with goals and then tell the community what this road map is and begin doing it.
I agree with what you are proposing and I agree with your assessment about what FRC should be and I think option 1 is the right move as is option 4 as well, so please make that happen asap or at least cap debate here and move on already it is bogged down at this point. POS vs. POW is not a relevant debate and way way way off topic really. As for anything else well I want to see a clear outline with at least something that can be measured. I think the community here has done what it can given that we have seen promises for updates and changes to the coin before and nothing substantive has happened. Passing some of the blame to the community is fair but to be honest without developers pushing changes and improving the coin what do you expect a community to do? We basically have no users because the coin is not promoted by those who developed it. If you don't have the time or want to let it die then tell us now or make a real effort to plan a revival of the coin.

Sorry but the real issue here is that we lack a community of sufficient size to really to do much of anything to progress the coin it would entirely rest on the developers shoulders to provide the stimulus to engage a much larger community.  Without any direction and lack of updates this coin has failed to attract a larger community. You two need to have a greater vision or plan ala Vitalik Buterin. He was willing to step up and put in time and draw more developers to his way of thinking because of his vision. Freicoin has a greater potential to be disruptive compared to Ethereum given core economics of Freicoin. Do you guys want to push that or just keep debating here in this obscure corner of the cryptocoin world with people who are not necessarily your peers? To me that is a waste of time given the debates on these issues were already conducted 3 or 4 years ago.
Rather than debating 3 or 4 people on things, what you really need is a real cabal of developers to move FRC forward not us laymen see Vitaly Buterin again as the gold standard for drawing people in with an idea out of nothing with zero base. Where have those people gone you had originally supporting development? They left for a number of reasons but I suspect there was little or no interest remaining as there was no active development. No challenges. No vision. No plan. Don't make the same mistake.

This is not a community large enough to be a relevant sounding board for you two  to develop the coin into something that is targeting a user base of millions of people. You need to bring in a larger team of people with ideas for growth that will draw a real user base. Until you need to involve more people in decision making from a wider community of coin users it be better to make a plan, invest time into carrying that plan out and when the millions of users do come on board you can work like Ethereum or Bitcoin Core etc. and talk to the community about options. I value that you are trying to fix mistakes and work with this community but your time is limited and should be focused on developing the coin not debating the very core concept of the coin or the foundation. It is great you want to engage with us but really. Set your vision and make it happen then we can debate the validity of your choices or offer up suggestions to make the coin easier to use.

Hooray!

Hi again, since my commet is off topic for the other threads it fits most in here. Thanks to @fedde 's exchange, the fresh ideas from @Skaro , @Adilado and @jtimon i am now again looking at freicoin with confidence. I am really exited to see the "freiexchange 2.0" in action and think that we will find a way to adopt Freicoin to the new situation to make up a worldwide freiconomy without debt and dangerous bubbles, because that was what we are here for since 2013.
I am now fully in FRC again and given up the positions in all other coins feeling good with it. I hope our ( @Bicknellski  , @Arcurus ) call  for do or die was the wake up call we needed.
Thanks Rik.
BTW i am fully standing behind a HF if we need it to bring new needed features to Freicoin.

> So what is your vision for the coin moving forward Developers?

My priority regarding Freicoin is starting to do rebases much faster and continuously, getting all the new improvements, bugfixes and features.
As for new consensus changes features, apart from those included in more modern versions of bitcoin (cltv[bip65], csv[bip68/bip112], segwit[bip141]), it would be nice to get features from https://elementsproject.org/ which now also rebases periodically. Specially I would like to have confidential transactions https://elementsproject.org/elements/confidential-transactions/ and confidential assets: https://elementsproject.org/elements/asset-issuance/ This is similar to freimarkets' basic asset issuance but with much better privacy. But that requires a hardfork, so it strongly depends on support from the community. There's also some incentive problems with the utxo, but I think we can solve them.
In general, that's my basic plan for Freicoin development: rebase and get new features from elements and bitcoin.
I'm also working on a block explorer for bitcoin, elements and liquid that I would like to adapt to freicoin as well.
But of course other people can work on other things.

In any case, this is rather orthogonal to the foundation's funds. So please, let's try to stay on topic.
New developments, new webs and potential consensus changes are all fine to discuss, but I don't think they are directly related to the question at hand, which is admitting we have failed as a community (and as devs) with the foundation and non-mining distribution, put an end to it and move on to other things.