Biblepay Superblock Final Allocation Breakdown Modification Poll

All,

Around Christmastime, we will be going live with Sanctuaries.  At that time, the automatic 10% tithing block (for our Orphans) stops, BUT, with our superblocks and sanctuaries, we will continue to vote to fund the budget to pay for the orphans. 

The current breakdown for each Biblepay block is as follows: (With each block paying between 5000 and 20000 BBP, depending on network Difficulty and the deflation level):

5% is allocated from each block for IT expenses (such as payroll, web hosting fees, partner integration expenses etc).
10% is allocated from each block for Charity (this is where the budget will come from to pay for Compassion for example).

We currently do not have a budget for PR (public relations campaigns) or for P2P features (Features such as orphan letter writing, Pay To Preach, Pay to be a Priest, FAQ writers, Social Media functions, etc).

Since I personally do not wish to change the allocation breakdown now for integrity reasons, I will not make any adjustments at this point to the permanent breakdown. 

     However, with all of the recent good ideas that have been floating around, such as rewarding members for being Discipleship Leaders, or Pay for Priesting, or Pay for Orphan writing fees, etc, and with the positive impact of PR campaigns, I do not wish for us to miss the opportunity to vote  for the possible inclusion of PR budgets or P2P budgets permanently in our superblock reward ecosystem.

Hence the reason we are brought here for the poll.

The poll runs for 31 days (Ending 12-4-2017).

Please vote on potentially changing the superblock budget to include PR and/or P2P expenses on a regular basis.

 If the community decides to include a PR budget or a P2P budget, we will make the necessary adjustments in the Christmas Sanctuary mandatory release, and they will become a permanent part of BIblePay.

Thank you for participating!

I would feel that the PR budget should be part of the IT 5%.  My thought is 5% is likely to be more than IT needs on a regular basis (as over the long haul, there shouldn't be a lot of new features introduced to a mature coin) and in a lot of ways good IT is good PR.

I feel that 5% possibly will be barely enough funds (maybe not enough), and you severely discount the required IT maintenance expenses (even without considering an elaborate array of new features).

First, let me say that if we dont have IT expenses the whole coin risks dying (because there is a chance that if no one is being paid to maintain the coin everyone walks away) and I really dont want that to happen.  (Thats because the coin cannot live without an active dev.  There are mission critical issues that will arise over the next year that make or break the coin).

The other thing that people are obviously extremely shortsighted about are security commits and breaking changes.  If you want to be a piece of crap coin, where you dont take security seriously, then you dont need to worry about this.  Software TCO is 20% for the creation and 80% maintenance.  Here are two examples:  We are live 1 year, and 11 months in a new version of BEAST is in the wild.  This requires a patch in OpenSSL.  And, bitcoin merges a patch for SegWit that becomes the industry standard (sort of like JSON).  Lets say SegWit is not something you can just merge the class in and go live.  Lets say it requires an expert to integrate the constants and understand biblepay.  So thats $10000 right there.    Then we have testnet and the release schedule.  Since BiblePay went live there are probably already 40 bitcoin commits already that our devs have a backlog to potentially merge in.

Anyway, I feel that it is barely enough and we need it, and if we do not spend it, then it will just increase BBPs value because more money will stay in the coinbase which is a good thing.   Its better to error on the safe side than risk creating a timebomb that might die off for everyone.

We need 5 full time developers to make it in the top 50.  Thats going to cost us $50 an hour for good developers- if we compensate them.  Here is a good point for argument sake.  5 full time devs is over 500 hours of development per month.  I stipulate that we need at least 500 per month - forever.  Im already putting in 120 of them now for free.  So lets tackle that one, if you think we need less than 500 per month.

80% for Miners and Sanctuaries sounds good to me. Since 10% goes to charity, currently we are left with only 5% for IT and development. 
This is not like Zcash where 20% of rewards goes to founder's fund. Since we have DAO set up to manage the proposed 10% fund, the community has the control.

PR is very important for Biblepay since the coin is belief based and there are a lot of questions going to be raised again and again for which few dedicated members answering them would be helpful.

My take on the break down is
80% for Miners + Sanctuaries
10% for Charity
7.5% for IT and development
2.5% for PR activities.

Only constraint I would incorporate is the PR fund should only be used in periodic cycles (say 3 months) for prominent activities like branding/exchange listing instead of handouts for minuscule tasks like tweets every day. Long period because that way we can store a significant amount of coin and use it for expensive tasks like listing BiblePay on good exchanges like Cryptopia. Cryptopia alone charges about 8 BTC for listing.

Like Rob said, if we dig into the IT fund for other purposes we would end up compromising the life of the coin.

I think you both have a point.  I would suggest:
75% Miners and sanctuaries, 10% Charity, 7.5% IT, 5% PR and 2.5% P2P.
After all, we should be writing letters because we want to and not because we are getting paid.

I am not opposed to a larger chunk for development and PR.  I guess my real point is why earmark anything beyond the orphan fund and a "working" fund.  I'd be happy with 10% Orphan, 10% Working, 80% Miner/Sanctuary or really and number that makes the Miner/Sanctuary share between 75-85%.  The issue I see is if we say 5% is for PR, then we're likely to find times where we spend it wastefully.  Likewise if we say only 5% is for IT, what happens when we have a pressing need to spend on IT and are our of money, but have a balance in PR?   If you look at DASH, they don't differentiate where the coin share is spent, it can go for IT, PR or whatever.  And whatever doesn't get spent gets burnt.  Since the Sanctuaries will have to vote on all expenditures anyhow, it would be easier to only have two omnibus type funds, one for charity, and one "the coin".  Then the money can go where it is needed more so than to areas we though years ago would be where our future selves would want.

I think you make some very good observations here. And the idea of a budget that can be allocated according to the current needs attracts me. But will the Sanctuaries in the original idea be voting on all expenditures of just the allocation of the charity part?

I haven't voted yet by the way. Still poundering what would be the best way to go about this all...

I would feel that the PR budget should be part of the IT 5%.  My thought is 5% is likely to be more than IT needs on a regular basis (as over the long haul, there shouldn't be a lot of new features introduced to a mature coin) and in a lot of ways good IT is good PR.

i agree more for IT and R&D. the space moves way too fast to fall behind

on the other hand, PR is of value to get the coin on better exchanges. (if thats considered PR)

perhaps an exchange listing fund can be made. the coin needs alot more liquidity. right now its dominated by the 'tonywon' and others who just selling back for 1/10th of a cent or less

finally i dont think pay to preach is a worthwhile idea at this point.

What you say makes sense.  The amount can get quite large when the coin appreciates in value.  For paper trail purposes to it will cause you to have issues with expenditures.  So I agree.  Have two percentages.  One for charity and one for expense account.  Once the values of the percentages are available, then it can be decided where to allocate the funds.  There should be an expense projection(budget) for the next month ready before the time any way.  In conclusion, I agree with only taking off two percentages, because that way it will be easier to allocate the funds.

And they lived happily ever after.
The End

So here are my feelings on the whole thing.

Starting with where we are now and what I feel was conveyed to the investors before this poll:

The code contains a promise to transition from 10% via Tithing blocks to 10% for *Charity* via the budget, and 5% for IT.  I added the 5% IT expense in the mix 45 days ago based on experience, knowing that there is a real risk of not succeeding for the very long term without it.  So we know how we got here.  And I think those are good decisions.

I agree, Im not completely sold on Pay To Preach either, or spending any of the possible 2.5% allocation from that. 

However, Im calling Pay To Preach P2P as in Social Media Peer to Peer blockchain reward technology.  This is for absolutely anything that makes us great not just pay to preach.  I wanted to convey that I feel that is what that sliver of the vote is for.

Now Im not against combining the actual Allocation amounts for P2P and PR into one allocation, thats not it.  The poll is very specific because Im trying to sell something very specific to the community.  This is because I want this coin to have the utmost integrity to the investor.  How would you feel if you just invested $25k of someones retirement account one month ago and found out the lead dev was going to add a 5% allocation for Unknown expenses?  Not very good.  Thats why these are labeled.  There is another reason to be specific.  I stated on the other forum that I dont think we should Ever spend $1 from the Charity fund for IT or PR.  We should always spend it on the orphans or on charity.  Someday an exchange will ask us for $10,000 to go live - and we should NOT spend that cash out of the Charity budget for going live on an exchange.  Lets suffer on one.  So, in that respect its important to designate that we have a 10% budget allocation for CHARITY.  Not for this or that or something random.  And we have a 0-5% budget for IT.  I dont want to set a precedent where we deliberately try to fill up the IT budget with PR because we have money available in it.  I would rather set the precedent that we have UP TO $20,000 this superblock for IT related expenses, and have our IT department and Ops search and find the most bang for the IT buck.  (Things like Debit cards for biblepay, Zinc API, ongoing monthly payments to the partnerships, Lightning Network, etc).  Those are all IT related expenses.   E-Commerce integration.  Etc.

However, I will bend on combining P2P with PR if that is what the community wants.  I agree that since Dash did not know what they would be doing, they created a general fund for things like ATMs and anything that would popularize the coin.  Thats because they were pioneering an expense system at the time to create the first superblock.  We have more details now.

I wouldnt go as far as making the assumption that just because Dash did something this way, its the best way.  We are a DCO, they are not.  So we are a different animal.  There are things about Dash that are great, that we can model off of.  We are not out to be someones clone.  The differences that should shine through are:
- Effective Charity expenses, making a huge impact in the world
- A Christian community base (IE the light of the world)
- Some brand new technologies that other coins want to copy from US
  and this includes new novel processes that WE create

Regarding burning, burning is actually when you create a burn address and remove money from the money supply by spending it there.  In our case, I think if the community votes for a 5% addl allocation, and it is decided that allocation will not be spent, then what happens is very similar to a burn, because the money is never actually minted.  The block payments are less, but if the budget does not contain the item the money is never spent.  So yes, imo, I like that more than not having the flexibility to built the feature, or spend the PR, or get listed on exchange XYZ.  I believe we have set a precedent where we are frugal.  I dont want to change that one bit. 

Now that more light is shed on the subject, I understand your predicament better.  Changed my vote back to my original one