The end of the foundation

[Skaro 129]

@jtimon and @Mark Friedenbach, may I ask how the Foundation closure is coming along? After the last couple comments here, the direction to end the Foundation wasn't quite decided.

[Mark Friedenbach 92]

The last few posts got sidetracked onto a separate unresolved issue, but I think the core question of this thread is resolved: the delayed coin matching will be performed, completing our obligations for 1:1 donation matching, and then the remaining funds will be provably destroyed. The two blockers on this are updating the coin matching scripts, since code atrophy means they no longer run on recent versions of linux. The bigger problem is making sure that the funds being sent out are sent to wallets people still hold the keys to and haven't been compromised. I'll be reaching out to the contact points for the larger donations to make sure that those funds aren't being black holed, or worse.

The problem with volunteer effort is that it comes in fits and spurts though. The past month I've had ~zero disposable free time due to both our annual company meeting and a drive to get a new feature to crypto currency in general:

https://www.coindesk.com/master-plan-better-bitcoin-smart-contracts-go-live-year/

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-September/014932.html

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-September/015028.html

This approach to MAST and the opportunity to deploy it quickly presented itself rather unexpectedly, and most of my free time the last month was spent on that. We've hit a milestone though and work on it won't be as crazy going forward, meaning I have disposable volunteer time again. I'll get a dry run of the matching script running, and then reach out to the largest recipients to get signed messages proving key ownership. I can probably process them individually however, and destroy the funds which won't be needed, so the process isn't bottlenecked on a few missing responses.

[magius 32]

@Mark Friedenbach the role of Foundation in Freicoin seems conceptually very similar to the role of Association (Winc e.V.) in Solidar. In Freicoin the Foundation owns funds that distributes as grants to noprofit associations, instead in Solidar the Association owns funds that distributes as basic income to individuals. 

IMHO could be good to merge Freicoin and Solidar code to start a new Freicoin. Could be interesting to reuse the Foundation coding to implement a way to distribute basic income without the need to use the Facebook Messenger bot.  

 

[Mark Friedenbach 92]

For transparency's sake, here is the current listing of charitable organizations and the donations + matched funds that are owed to them:

'Abundant Currency Project', 29 (rejected)
  Donation:	0.00000000
  Matched: 	0.00000000
  Payout:  	0.00000000
  Todo:    	0.00000000
'Community Forge', 17 (validated)
  Donation:	1,996.60765506
  Matched: 	1,996.60765506
  Payout:  	1,096.20734614
  Todo:    	2,897.00796398
'Complementary Currency Resource Center', 28 (validated)
  Donation:	1,000.00000000
  Matched: 	1,000.00000000
  Payout:  	1,099.54585847
  Todo:    	900.45414153
'Cooperativa Integral Catalana', 14 (validated)
  Donation:	15,477.73483244
  Matched: 	15,477.73483244
  Payout:  	9,094.37501836
  Todo:    	21,861.09464652
'Drupal Commerce Marketplace', 16 (validated)
  Donation:	798.57617174
  Matched: 	798.57617174
  Payout:  	438.40659107
  Todo:    	1,158.74575241
'F-LAT', 27 (validated)
  Donation:	100.00420000
  Matched: 	100.00420000
  Payout:  	109.69829446
  Todo:    	90.31010554
'Free Knowledge Institute', 15 (validated)
  Donation:	3,695.07701553
  Matched: 	3,695.07701553
  Payout:  	2,623.76520409
  Todo:    	4,766.38882697
'Freicoin Alliance', 32 (validated)
  Donation:	1,286,335.57425855
  Matched: 	1,286,335.57425855
  Payout:  	1,105,617.40589899
  Todo:    	1,467,053.74261811
'Freicoin Foundation', 13 (validated)
  Donation:	79,751.56464159
  Matched: 	79,751.56464159
  Payout:  	16,930.21046862
  Todo:    	142,572.91881456
'FreiHemp Project', 33 (rejected)
  Donation:	0.00000000
  Matched: 	0.00000000
  Payout:  	0.00000000
  Todo:    	0.00000000
'Freimarkets protocol extension', 20 (validated)
  Donation:	17,595.86014102
  Matched: 	17,595.86014102
  Payout:  	13,304.66222175
  Todo:    	21,887.05806029
'IFLAS', 22 (validated)
  Donation:	1,997.61752895
  Matched: 	1,997.61752895
  Payout:  	1,097.31815021
  Todo:    	2,897.91690769
'INEVAL', 30 (validated)
  Donation:	500.00420000
  Matched: 	500.00420000
  Payout:  	524.24229693
  Todo:    	475.76610307
'Lifeboat Foundation', 19 (validated)
  Donation:	998.31990102
  Matched: 	998.31990102
  Payout:  	548.11904312
  Todo:    	1,448.52075892
'Munitario', 26 (validated)
  Donation:	1,000.00000000
  Matched: 	1,000.00000000
  Payout:  	1,096.49968184
  Todo:    	903.50031816
'New Economics Foundation', 21 (validated)
  Donation:	2,007.61912687
  Matched: 	2,007.61912687
  Payout:  	1,108.31726563
  Todo:    	2,906.92098811
'NWACPE Institute', 31 (validated)
  Donation:	88.91380667
  Matched: 	88.91380667
  Payout:  	93.40596225
  Todo:    	84.42165109
'Post Growth Institute', 24 (validated)
  Donation:	1,010.00420000
  Matched: 	1,010.00420000
  Payout:  	1,107.94076708
  Todo:    	912.06763292
'The Zaryvakhin Foundation', 23 (validated)
  Donation:	2,008.45545557
  Matched: 	2,008.45545557
  Payout:  	1,109.23580475
  Todo:    	2,907.67510639
'Umeed Foundation', 25 (validated)
  Donation:	0.00000000
  Matched: 	0.00000000
  Payout:  	0.00000000
  Todo:    	0.00000000
Totals:
  Donation:	1,416,361.93313501
  Matched: 	1,416,361.93313501
  Payout:  	1,156,999.35587376
  Todo:    	1,675,724.51039626

The first number "Donation" is how much freicoin in aggregate has been received at the donation addresses. "Matched" is the (tentative) amount the Freicoin Foundation would be contributing in up to 100% matches from initial-distribution funds. This number might change when the cycle-detection code is turned back on. "Payout" is the amount that has been paid out to the organization already, and "Todo" is what still needs to be paid.

[Skaro 129]

I see a lot of consolidation of foundation funds are being made in the original foundation public keys. Have some funds also been destroyed?

The explorer API for foundation balance which simply sums funds in and out of foundation keys (including demurrage) shows the Foundation balance around 44 million. 

[Mark Friedenbach 92]

A few months ago I was working on the donation matching code in order to perform an audited final payment. In the process I was consolidating funds from the 320 cold-storage foundation addresses into a single master key that has never been on a computer connected to the internet. No funds have been destroyed, except those lost to demurrage as part of the consolidation. I don't have the address for this key on hand wihle typing this, but it shouldn't be hard to work out -- I believe it's currently the highest value address on the chain, and you can find it simply enough by following the foundation funds.

Additionally the current plan is that no funds will be destroyed. I believe this is explained elsewhere in another thread, but the idea is to use the remaining funds after the final donation match as a sort of protocol-controlled slush-fund buffer used to pay out cross-shard transfers, movements in and out of confidential transactions, and other forms of "coinbase payouts" defined by the forward blocks protocol. This will allow freicoin to continue operating and be responsive even if growth in the forward blocks outpace the 1MB main chain and a confirmation backlog develops. Once added to this fund the coins can never be removed from it, so it is effectively the same as destruction but in a way that benefits the protocol.

However since this involves soft-fork "anyone-can-spend" outputs, the funds obviously can't be moved there until the forward block rule set has been written and activated. Until then, I regretfully remain keeper of the keys.

[jtimon 36]

I'm sorry for not having responded for so much time.

I still need to read the whole thread, but at a glance it seems clear that we can safely discard option 3.

I need to read all the responses, thank you everyone for responding. But it seems option 4 isn't very liked either.

And mark proposes another option related with his proposal. But I must admit I haven't fully reviewed and thus I don't fully understand his proposal yet. Mark, sorry one more time about that, I did promise you to do it.

Having all the foundation funds in one output is fine with me.

After all, if mark tries to spend them we will all see. And if someone else has access to them and tries to spend them we will see that too. Not that I have looked, I should. It also simplifies things for whatever we're going to do next.  

So re-summarizing (and before reading it all, sorry again for the things I may be missing), I think we now have these 3 main options:

A] Send all the funds to a single OP_RETURN output to destroy them (see option 1 in OP).

B] Send the funds to many OP_TRUE outputs with different locktimes that miners will be easily able to claim. (see option 2 in the OP).

Let's say, just to distribute all the funds in the next 2 years, but there are many options here.

C] (requires softfork) mark's proposal about forward blocks.

I'll try to get more involved again, sorry, everyone.

My preference is still option B.

B.1) I propose constant distribution per block for simplicity.

B.2) But doing a linear reduction like in the initial 3 years for the initial 20% shouldn't be that hard, so that we avoid a theoretically possible hashrate crash when that constant temporary subsidy goes away in the b.1 case.

But then again I haven't written the code to create the tx or set of txs needed for that. 

Even though I don't understand option C well enough, I think it would be good to separate the end of the foundation from any softfork that may come afterwards.

I feel it will be simpler to understand for everyone else too if the two events are clearly separated.

I don't doubt Mark's forward blocks proposal has many merits, but I feel it's a very big step.

Any such step should be taken on solid ground, and I don't think the foundation being in the air is near that ideal solid ground.

Just my opinion, obviously.