Boys and Girlz,
At the moment of writing this post, GRC Wallet has more then 200 active users, and more then 12k (USD) equivalent in balances at any time. (transacted values are much higher). This amount grows each day.
| These are some figures that indicate we are most likely attracting small traders. In my opinion, is much wider adoption then expected. That could be a result of: |  |
- The fact it's the only OpenSource GRC wallet (not multiwallet) on android play.
- The fact it's the only 'Lite' wallet that does not require you to sync but do allow controlling keys.
It's very important to note this was a side project for me. Taking into account figures above, we should really start thinking of migrating it from 'one man band' into a community driven and hosted project.
Moreover, if this trend continues, it will only prove that we have much more public demand then we are managing to deal with.
In that spirit, I would strongly advise to discuss making a full legal non-profit for the purpose of developing, protecting interests, marketing GridCoins and all the other tasks that one organization can do.
Not to get me wrong, having a non-for-profit backed up coin, does not mean centralization. It means better visibility and control over the project. What we have at this time, is centralization with this project that I am trying to migrate into non-profit.
On the other side, the amount of donations, is, believe it or not - zero. (Except 300 GRC donated by @vortac, and about 0.0017 BTC donated by unknown person, both at the early stage).
This is the result of wallet being used mostly by traders. Therefore, once we agree about above we should consider should we move to ads supported version or paid version of the app in order to support infrastructure, or something else.
From the point of scalability, Personally I do posses enough resources to support even 1000% growth change, however, these figures do require level of policies and control. As you can see on the status page (https://gridcoins.org/status.php), there are still things of crucial importance that are missing such as backup.
Have in mind that everything we did in regards to GRC, no mind how big or small, always exploded if it was focused to end user.
These facts aim to open a discussion of forming fully registered non-profit with names and surnames behind it, for the purpose of maintaining this project, and possibly many others where developers express their wishes to get organizational help.
While discussion is open to anyone, I strongly encourage long term supporters to join.
I am not going to talk about things that could go wrong, as they should be clear enough, as well as their impact to trust people obviously put into GRC. (Or, in this case - developer name, and appealing design?)
In case discussion ends up with endless debates without clear Yes/No/OtherProposal, I am about to contact persons I believe are trustworthy, for the purpose of forming non-profit for this project. That organization is not going to officially represent anything other, but will gladly accept projects and developers and their projects who wants to join.
Looking forward for your contributions in creating what's next.
And by the way, it's nice to see we are doing good :)
S.
I also don't see the problem of centralisation as some others are always concerned. As long as not someone writes code, puts it out there and lets it sit forever, there will always be some sort of centralisation. Right now the devs and the large investors are kind of the centralisation, as they pretty much control what happens to the blockchain, wallet, etc.
Sure, everyone could get in and be a part of it. And sure, everyone can vote on issues and have his voice heard. But for someone like me, who has only 6k GRC and not the ability to help develop the coin further, I still can not really determine what is going to happen and what not.
I don't mean this in a negative way. I love that there are so many engaged people into gridcoin and drive it forward each day. In my opinion, the idea of complete decentralisation is just an illusion and one should rather weigh the cost of some sort of central organisation and what it is supposed to do than fighting it.
I do agree with you.
What we have here is an example of decentralization that leads directly into centralization.
If decentralized project, such as this one, start maintaining millions of dollars of somebody's money, every single issue such as downtime is going to affect whole community and trust into currency. It is an illusion.
It also put a lot of pressure on project maintainer to secure such implementation from abuses. Having a non-profit foundation behind it would be of great help.
Just to get a rough idea: Do you have answers for the following questions?
Who founds the organisation?
What is it going to cost?
Who pays those costs?
Is the target to "just" develop Gridcoin further or also marketing etc.?
Just out of interest. I really think such an idea should be pushed forward and taken into someones hands. I had a conversation here yesterday in the comments section about another marketing idea. This would fit perfectly into the role a non-profit might play, if marketing is also included.
Who founds the organisation?
What is it going to cost?
Who pays those costs?
The target is support, help developing, protect and take care of interests of projects that decide to join by their respective developers. That includes marketing as well as all the other aspects of 'taking care'.
Since some people think of such idea as a way towards centralisation, the approach to solve this is that such foundation will be 'Official Representative' only for these projects whos developers chose to become members and delegate these tasks towards organization.
In this specific example, this project of mine is going to be the first one. So the foundation is not goin to officially represent "Gridcoin community" but it will officially represent this project.
If one day, majority of developers join and delegate power of representing to organization, that's the only way it can become official 'GridCoin' foundation.
Maybe even forming few of such, that will merge one day, such as 'OpenSource Foundation'. - I think that Foundation could be a good example.
Sounds pretty reasonable. Thank you for the answers, I support the idea!
I think this is a very good idea. We could also run a gridcoin steemit account (unofficial only, representing this foundation). Hopefully this could be self funding.
But then I think a name would be needed that makes it clear that the account is not "official".
@donkeykong9000 Could not agree more. @applepiie agree with that too, we should come up with a nice name that clearly states it's not official to whole GRC community, but official to us and our projects.
I'll start another thread with a shared documents where we can start building up accounts, propose different names, as well as allow people who want to join to sign up and become a part of the working group.
There's the Coinomi, Holytransaction & Bitshares wallets (open.grc) for Gridcoin on Android though.
Agree, @cm-steem, thanks for the correction. I should add GRC Only, and Opensource. (Coinomi unfortunately closed their code). Also when searching for GridCoin Wallet we got listed before the multi-wallets. But your point is good, i'll correct it in post.
That's fantastic news. I'll check it out when I get my new phone. (It's broken after dropping it like a fool)