First of all, I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to you Cass, for this incredible project. It is an exciting adventure, and the final goal and road map of the project is brilliant.
That said, many of us have been questioning the fact that you seem to be the sole developer for the entire project. While we are aware that there have been numerous contributions to specific aspects of the project, is there a plan to establish a full-time development team to sustain, maintain, and support Quilibrium?
I also believe that having and showcasing such a team would significantly boost investor confidence in QUIL. I’ve noticed quite a few persons expressing concerns or criticisms about the project being predominantly managed by you alone (not entirely alone, but you get my point).
This has already been discussed a few times.
The only piece of the puzzle missing is… funding.
I know that Q. Inc is actively still looking for funding, and we are in the process of creating a community treasury.
You are welcome to participate in the discussion on Discord Quilibrium Community in the community treasury sections.
We need fresh ideas to raise funds and volunteers to enact them.
I also want to highlight something else important here but on a positive note — Q is not a one dev show. To date, many folks have contributed to the protocol (in no particular order):
three different documentation sites, with various helper/service scripts (is it two of the folks in here or three? I’m finding it hard to keep track )
docker file work has been completely outside of my contributions, almost entirely by Marius
Jack added a few bug fixes to consensus a while back
a friend of Grin contributed a few different patches throughout (not sure if he’s here)
many different fixes, and the rust VDF itself was from all the hard work Agost has been doing
countless other fixes on GitHub I can no longer see thanks to GitHub (but they’re in the git history)
all of the folks participating in the signing ceremonies
everyone reporting bugs, asking questions, offering criticism (seriously, I welcome it). It takes a village, but all of you have made the village a metropolis.
It might not be a “one dev show”, but it feels like a one dev show
We’re approaching 2.0, but what would happen if @cassie couldn’t continue development of Q for whatever reasons? Sure there’s a white paper and some clever minds have contributed code, but is anyone capable of continuing Q’s development and @cassie’s vision of Q?
There are many people who have asked about the nature of the project’s development being individually driven.
I find this interesting for several reasons:
The status quo is a party you’re not invited to: Projects with many dedicated developers at the first public onset of the project typically are paying those developers. Quilibrium, Inc. has not closed an investment round – everything that has been done in service of the protocol has been out of my own and other volunteers’ pockets and time available. To have grown to the place we are, at the speed that we have on this without venture capital cannot be understated – it literally hasn’t happened before. Sometimes people compare us to projects in similar categories – of course there are other projects with massive marketing campaigns, announced huge partnerships, have more dedicated developers – VCs do a lot of things for projects, not to mention strongly encourage their portcos to build on top of each other which inflates the partnerships angle, but at the greatest cost: all of them demand token warrants. If a crypto project has announced tens of millions of dollars invested in them for a seed round by a venture fund, they took the Mephistophelean bargain, and by consequence, especially if an American company in the current regulatory regime, have agreed to get sued, or are implicitly agreeing to defraud the LPs of the fund (and the VCs know this) by never actually issuing a token. In either case, the public loses.
A little background: I have a history for making projects and companies that are under-resourced possible, and each one has a little bit of influence on the way Quilibrium has been shaped today. Specific to the field of MPC, in my two years at Coinbase, there are six patents under my belt (but don’t get me too fired up about software patents, I hate them immensely – that being said, Coinbase is wonderfully part of the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance):
The most important part of crypto history: All of this exists because one anonymous individual started it all on Metzdowd. It was certainly an easier time then because projects were able to live more quietly, with less rapid adoption, but the adversarial conditions existed all the same. And there’s something to consider about Satoshi: Satoshi left, but only after the project was in a state where there were maintainers contributing at or above their level.
And to that last point, I want Quilibrium to reach a “Satoshi point” – such that if something were to happen to me, the project can keep going strong. That being said, while a lot of startup founders operate on the notion of “what can I see myself doing for the next ten years?”, I’m working on the notion of “what can I see myself doing for the rest of my life?” Getting to 2.0 is an important point for the former notion of reaching a steady state, after which I can focus more on developer tooling, onboarding, and deeper educational resources.
I like the forum a lot as a project hub. I hope it attracts more bright minds with research and dev mindset.
If I can suggest something that could improve our chances of attracting those users: mods should reduce the noise to a minimum i.e. “How do I solve this node issue” - (unless it’s a critical bug) this really should be contained in other channels i.e. Discord or Telegram chat - those issues are distracting and can either be blamed for the user themselves not competent enough to venture into node hosting or the lack of tutorials/missing information - all of which could easily be solved with a little initiative.
I agree, but I still think we should offer support here and avoid spreading out to many different channels.
I don’t know Discourse, but there should be the possibility to have a segregated “support” category that does NOT show on the homepage
)
