1 | In December 2018, the Tahoe-LAFS project engaged Aspiration[1], a US 501(c)3 |
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2 | nonprofit technology organization, as a "fiscal sponsor"[2]. A portion of the |
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3 | project's Bitcoin will be given to Aspiration, from which they can pay |
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4 | developers and contractors to work on the Tahoe codebase. Aspiration will |
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5 | handle the payroll, taxes, accounting, project management, and oversight, and |
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6 | is compensated by an 8% management fee. This provides the tax-withholding |
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7 | structure to use our project's BTC for significant development. |
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8 | |
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9 | We're using 25% of our ~369 BTC for this initial stage of the project, |
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10 | which will give us about $300K-$350K of development work, spread out |
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11 | over the 2019 calendar year. While it would have been nice to make this |
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12 | happen a year ago (given the recent decline of the BTC price), we think |
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13 | this is a reasonable value, and we're excited to finally get to use this |
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14 | surprise windfall to improve the codebase. |
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15 | |
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16 | Our initial set of projects to fund, drafted by Liz Steininger of Least |
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17 | Authority and approved by Zooko and Brian, looks like this: |
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18 | |
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19 | * porting Tahoe and dependent libraries to Python 3 |
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20 | * improving grid operation/management tools |
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21 | * community outreach, UI/UX improvements, documentation |
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22 | * adding new community-requested features, improving garbage collection |
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23 | * possibly run another summit |
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24 | |
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25 | If this goes well (and especially if the BTC price recovers), we'll |
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26 | probably do more next year. |
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27 | |
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28 | As usual, the transfer amounts and addresses will be logged in |
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29 | "donations.rst" and "expenses.rst" in the docs/ directory. |
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30 | |
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31 | Many thanks to Gunner and Josh Black of Aspiration, and Liz Steininger |
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32 | of Least Authority, for making this possible. |
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33 | |
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34 | [1]: https://aspirationtech.org/ |
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35 | [2]: https://aspirationtech.org/services/openprojects |
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