[Passed] Motion to Make the Nu Source Code Available

I agree that at the end of the day, assuming that the source code is open, what differentiates Nu from its competitors is the team, the community and the level of innovation sparked by the ideas of the early shareholders. But we need to remind ourselves that Nu is first and foremost a business.
As every business, we cannot afford disclosing our corporate secret sauce.
Yet Nu is also a software that benefited from bitcoin’s open source code.

Well Bitcoin released with no competition. I haven’t heard anyone say we should never open source, just not yet. I am more inclined for the second half of this year.

That’s my thinking as well, around 3-6 months. Just look at all the community has accomplished since September. I can only imagine what kind of position we’ll be in half a year. Everyone will want to be working with Nu.

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I noticed there are 19 votes for a hash that is intended to represent this motion, but it has a typo in it:

0f361693a7b248730b41d4292f89dc6f6f166bc8

The first digit should be a 6, not a 0. If you are voting for this motion, please check to make sure your hash is correct.

Putting it off will slow down overall development, releasing the source code equates to having many many more people join the development team.

All the new eyes on the project will increase the number of reported bugs, new developers can review old code and add features.

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It is a devil’s dilemma. New developers can also take the code and launch a copy of Nu and work on that. At this stage that might be more profitable especially if they can get marketing power behind them and are willing to invest.
I’m still taking Desrever’s list as a guide (link). Will assess the situation on where we at around Easter again.

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I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about this issue the past couple weeks, and have reached a point where I have cast my vote in favor of becoming open-source. It is somewhat earlier than I expected to vote for this motion.

We are in the beginning stages of seeing a widespread movement towards stable-value digital currencies. 2015 will introduce many new projects aiming to replicate what Nu has accomplished. As this global discussion begins to form, discussion will expand beyond simple project comparisons (such as NuBits vs. BitUSD) to structural comparisons based on the pioneers of specific approaches (The “Nu model” vs. “The Ethereum model” vs. “The BitShares model”).

I believe our competitive advantage will actually be reinforced by new projects imitating/forking our Nu model. As many of you may have noticed, there has been a recent increase in the amount of criticism of our project. This is the natural precursor to intense competition in a growing, lucrative niche.

By open-sourcing, we can build legitimacy for our model if other groups create Nu forks. If the “Nu model” had ten forks a year from now, and the “BitShares model” had three forks, there is a strong chance that public consensus will be more positive to our approach. Previous concerns I had – namely, that these forks might not succeed in maintaining a peg – may not be as serious as I thought either. There are two possible outcomes that will occur:

  1. The “Nu Model” succeeds in that the majority of forks maintain price stability. The outcome is that our design is validated and Nu is seen as a brilliant design.

  2. The “Nu Model” fails in that the majority of forks fail to maintain price stability. As long as NuBits are still $1.00 US, the outcome is that the NuBits project is validated, as it is clear that it requires a very talented team to manage peg stability operations successfully. If this happened, NuBits has a sustainable competitive advantage that is inimitable.

Also, every fork of Nu will either be open-source (meaning Nu can simply incorporate any additional features developed for other projects), or the project will be closed-source (and will suffer from the same criticisms we have heard so far). In both scenarios Nu has an advantage.

There are still downsides of course. It is almost certain that some groups will fork the Nu code, hold 99.999% of the shares for themselves (even if they publicly claim to have sold them to many users, there is no way to verify numbers), and achieve a massive market capitalization that might surpass NuShares in the short-term before the price collapses. This problem really isn’t different from what Bitcoin faced in April 2013 with identical-clones being released and dumped.

I think I’ve come up with a solution to this problem. This risk can be mitigated by adopting a set of standards and best practices around using the Nu model, such as committing to selling shares to a minimum number of users to ensure sufficient decentralization. A list of best practices would protect the Nu brand from reputational risk when three budding entrepreneurs create a Nu clone, distribute only 0.01% of shares, achieve a very high market cap, and then have their peg fail. This list of best practices will also reinforce our project’s position as a source of expertise and knowledge in the field of stable-value digital currencies. We want people to say “Project X’s stable-coin is far riskier because they have not demonstrated compliance with four of the ten best practices that are being used by the successful pioneering Nu project.”

In short, I think that open-sourcing will not only help quicken development of Nu, but it will also provide us with a significant advantage in structuring the debate in 2015 to not be “project vs. project”, but instead “design vs. design”. We want people talking about the “Nu model” of splitting currency and equity into fungible units, just as people currently associate “Bitcoin” with blockchain technology. The solution isn’t to hold every other car on the race track at the start line until we get far enough ahead; the solution is to open up the technology so that our car can go even faster. Open-sourcing will speed development of not only our project, but the public acceptance and validity of the Nu design versus other designs.

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Enlightening vision you wrote there.
There is one last thing that bothers me.
What if a group of people with far more funding and resources than Nu currently has pops up and competes with us?
I believe that funding is important but what is even more important is the quality of team and the community behind the project. In other words, rather than the funding, what will make Nu succeed is the intellectual and marketing assets produced by the team and the community.
So if Nu is enough confident in its current design and community, I believe we should open source now.
What is your view on that?

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If this occurred, the Nu design has been validated. If the new competitor is open-source, their innovations can be merged into our protocol. If the new competitor is closed-source, they are unlikely to ever gain widespread acceptance.

I think we may be overestimating the number of groups that have the capacity to duplicate us. BitShares and Ethereum are two that come to mind, and neither has shown much enthusiasm for the Nu design yet. In the case of BTS, they’ve shown outright hostility and they would lose all credibility with their users if they adopted our design. More mainstream companies like Apple or Google would face a mountain of legal and risk compliance challenges in offering a pegged digital currency. I think we’re in a very unique position of competitive strength right now as a global project with no national identity, and a team of talented contributors. Our talent base would only increase after open-sourcing in my mind.

Right. If Nu opens source the project, Nu will be benefitting from improvements.
At the same time, the competition is reluctant to implementing the design of Nu for they have their own PoS algorithm (they want to keep their uniqueness and their proudness of doing differently than us)
Open sourcing the project now will put some positive pressure on Nu immediately to act quickly (for example regarding the acquisition of new LPCs)
At the same time, pegged cryptocurrency cannot be produced by conventional companies because they need the legal framework which is not yet in place.
Open sourcing now would boost our credibility, bringing new fresh blood into the project.
I believe the success of Nu is in its ability to bring new LPC on a regular basis.
Those new LPCs will come in masse if they are confident in the integrity of the system (a bit like miners are confident in the ability of bitcoin-qt to prevent double spending) and the integrity of the system depends on its transparency.
If the code source is transparent, there will be an immediate consensus on whether or not Nu is a standard for
Humanity (1) or a shadowy secretive corporate group aiming at easy cash (2) .
To me, if Nu is something it will be (1) but for the rest of Humans, as long as it is not open sourced, it could be (2).
That is why I will cast my vote today in favor of open sourcing now.

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voted

voted

They could gain widespread acceptance, if they have bots with ultra-deep liquidity, deployed on most exchanges and payment processors, on all major currency pairs. The users don’t care or even understand whose one-dollar coin it is. They will just use it. For example Ripple is gaining acceptance despite it is centralized at some level.

However Nu can still survive by keeping innovating, even its market share drops. It won’t be the end of the world. I am almost positive on open source.

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voted

In my opinion, you may be discounting how far the Nu Project has come along. I don’t believe at this point the Nu project is entirely defined by its source code. It has now developed a mature and professional community with good leadership. No one can clone those valuable aspects of the project.

Competition is nothing to be afraid of because the Nu project and the community are capable of competing. This is why I believe the benefits of making the source code open source outweigh the risks.

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I believe so too.

Getting some traction. 9.82% of votes now.

Yes I believe I was convinced by @tomjoad’s post. If it’s going to increase competition it’ll set everything in overdrive. Might as well get the party started.

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If there’s one thing I’m still concerned about, it’s the losses on NBT/crypto pairs and the inability to find LPC’s because of it without paying huge fees. It seems it will probably take NuBot a while still to address those problems…

If there’s one thing I’m willing to wait for, it’s for some of the solutions in that thread to be coded up and confirmed to be working. Then we’d have multiple custodians operating on the same non-USD markets and the risk of loss will hopefully be minimized. I’m also very excited about Jordan’s plan for increased liquidity and shooting for the goal of intermediary currency. NuBot will help take us there, but it’s not developed enough yet. What do some of you think about this, @desrever?

If there’s enough volume at NBTUSD you might be able to stay away from NBT/crypto pairs.
This is less convenient for traders as they need to convert to USD first before they can convert to NBT, but it prevents from losses in the crypto trading pairs.
As NBT is pegged to the USD I consider NBTUSD the most important pair, anyway :wink:

Once it’s more convenient than it is now to place a NBTUSD NuBot at an exchange, we will have much more LPCs!

Hell, I’d consider being a NBTUSD LPC at an exchange if I knew how to (technically, apart from making a proposal) and if it would be worth it doing that with a few hundred NBT!
But like I wrote here: We need much more liquidity providers....Let us think of strategies
I don’t know how to…