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Re:Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the exist... by kodablah on Saturday October 28, 2017 @08:21PM (#15577403)
I understand the plan is to be open source, but can someone help me understand why it's not developed in the open? I mean, you can tell people you're not accepting external input at this stage, but why not let people watch it being developed? I can't think of any reason that doesn't make me think that the goal may be openness/transparency but not the practice. Or did I miss the link to the repo?
Re:Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the exist... by saurik on Saturday October 28, 2017 @08:34PM (#15577441)
This is an interesting question; one which I feel for greatly, and one which we have been discussing internally. Not having this detail worked out before going public was probably a mistake of ours, particularly as now we keep getting distracted, but we are rapidly working on addressing the issue as quickly as possible. I am going to give you an answer to this but want to stress that this answer has not been vetted through anyone else and is a look behind the curtain (and I hope you can give us a little benefit of the doubt here, at least based on the track record of some of our developers).

One issue is that we have put a lot of effort into the whitepaper, and we really want people to review the concepts in the whitepaper and give us feedback on that, but I will say that it is highly likely (if not a foregone conclusion) that if we have source code available, code which we know isn't done yet as the whitepaper design has been leading ahead of the implementation in the code, that we are going to have people only downloading the code and giving us feedback on the code... but what we really need is feedback on the design, not the first draft implementation :(.

On the other side of this, our team includes someone from the Free Software Foundation who feels some strong moral pulls towards doing all of the development in the open immediately and yesterday. I have made sure that my code is ready to release on a moment's notice and still feel proud about what is out there (though there is one last super high-level thing in the organization of how the code for the network connects with code for services that I want to fix tonight, and issue that will be much easier to deal with fixing at the git level if I didn't think I'd be breaking anyone's clone).

Re:Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the exist... by kodablah on Saturday October 28, 2017 @08:54PM (#15577504)
Thank you very much for the response. I empathize with the noise-vs-signal concerns with premature public feedback. Just wanted to share my thoughts because the first thing I look for in these cases is code. While y'all's credentials are clear, we've just seen so much snake oil in the decentralized tech industry.
Re:Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the exist... by yyzhero on Saturday October 28, 2017 @11:06PM (#15577791)
There is no code. This is a cash grab. The author politely states they needed review of white paper concepts, so no they are not sure it will even be worth writing. The idealology of decentralization also reforms the patent system, so this project will fall like other over hyped icos, will get normalized on listing. Probably a huge discount for "seed".
Re:Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the exist... by saurik on Sunday October 29, 2017 @01:06AM (#15578027)
Yet... there has been no monetizaton mechanism described that doesn't involve us releasing code, as we have been very clear that we refuse to do a token sale until such time as we have a fully working system. So, I am not sure how your theory works out here, but it will be interesting to see if you comment back here once we release code for you to actually run.

As for why we want whitepaper feedback: that is because we believe in peer review of design.