You can always find some interesting things when you browser the Bitcoin subreddit on social sharing website Reddit.
An early adopter and self-proclaimed bitcoin millionaire Olivier Janssens took to the page to propose a $100,000 bounty to anyone who can develop a software platform that could replace the Bitcoin Foundation.
The Bitcoin Foundation, of course, is a major player in the bitcoin community. The Foundation says on their website their presence is critical in order to bring legitimacy to bitcoin.
But many in the community have disagreed with the direction the Foundation has taken in recent weeks — so much so that a number of members have even resigned from being annual members (not renewing their membership).
“The Bitcoin foundation has had its role in the last 2 years. Unfortunately, it is internally recreating the same archaic political system that fails to work for society. Bitcoin is the currency of the internet generation,” writes Janssens.
“You cannot expect its main representative organisation to be exactly the opposite: A non-transparent, political and secretive elite. We have been trying to push the BF for transparency and clear communication for years, without result. Meanwhile they started creating even more political structures inside, such as committees, which can only be accessed by knowing the right people.”
He adds:
“Half of their board gets elected by industry members (a group of about 100 companies), and recently lead to another extremely controversial election of Brock Pierce, which has a history of being connected to cases involving fraud and pedophilia. This needs to stop.”
“We as an internet community, don’t need public figures to decide what’s good for us. We need to stop politicking and start focussing on the projects directly.”
According to Janssens, the community needs to fund things like bitcoin core development and lobbying in Washington (to fight the big companies’ lobbyists) directly — sans intermediary.
“Therefor [sic], I want to announce today that I am organising a contest and giving $100k USD in BTC, to the group that can come up with the best platform to make this happen. I am thinking of a system where prominent people can voice their opinion, where people can propose projects, and where the core devs can actively show their roadmap with detailed features + costs, and where we can vote on the features being implemented by sending bitcoins towards the feature of our choice.”
He continues:
“This will allow the core dev team to expand by being able to add/pay more devs for feature requests which are fully funded. Maybe we can even evolve to a system later where anyone can work on a feature, which, when programmed properly (approved by the core team), will receive the bounty. The same applies to lobbyists, we just send bitcoins towards the one that we consider the most competent for the job. This will allow Bitcoin to grow and expand at a rate it deserves, a rate that a political organisation such as the foundation can never accomplish.”
Janssens says anyone can participate in this project to create an open-source software, adding that he would be able to cover initial costs until it could be self-funded.
His post was initially met with skepticism until he moved 250 bitcoins (a bit over $100,000) into a new wallet along with a signed message proving his identity.
The question now is: will anyone take him up on his offer?
For further reading, you can check out the original thread here.
[textmarker color=”C24000″]Image[/textmarker] Romainhk