How was it, when Gregory House put it... "...and no, I don't have a pain-management problem. I have a pain problem. But who knows, maybe I'm too high to tell..."
This is a friend of mine and I'm always skeptical of his ideas being overly technical, but sometimes we all tend to forget that programming can be a form of art and expression too, even in benign things.
Explain the mechanism. How do I know this organization made this much money and that the amount I'm being paid is fair in regards to their profits? How can this code track all the money the company is making? It's not like they're being paid with their tokens.
And for minority of projects where indeed they're expected to be paid using their own token, how do I know the company owners don't run away with all the money they raised? Because this is exactly what happened with 99.99% of ICOs created on Ethereum. Now, of course scams happen in the traditional financial system too, but not to the same extent, because there's an enforcement mechanism in place. So, following your example, what stops a YC company from declaring bankruptcy and spending all the money on things founders want for themselves? Well, an investigation may be launched: founders are known, they can be found, prosecuted and sentenced. With tokens issued online, where you may not even have a company registered or have a company registered in some obscure jurisdiction, there is very little incentive NOT to steal the money. And, once again, that's exactly what happened during the ICO craze, which Ethereum is directly responsible for. A lot of people lost a lot of money funding scammers - and nobody blinks an eye!
I don't argue that everything has to exist within the traditional financial system. On the contrary. But in order to provide real value and allow investors to have some level of certainty that at least their money won't be outright stolen, the solution MUST include an enforcement or incentive mechanism strong enough to deter scammers.
Explain the mechanism by which people who invest can exercise their rights as stakeholders, receive dividends etc? Who's to enforce they actually own anything? What's stopping this project from taking all the money and producing nothing (which is exactly what happened with pretty much every ICO out there)?
What has it delivered exactly? Where is it being used that's not itself a scam? MakerDAO - which seems to be some sort of token issuance thing - has no real world mechanism for enforcement. That is, if an autonomous decentralized organization issues a token, who's to make it pay you dividends or enforce your rights for whatever this token represents? This is the thing that ETH fanboys are completely delusional about. Securities only work because state regulators enforce the laws guaranteeing their value.
Whether or not you're aligned with Bitcoin political values and goals, please don't be duped by Ethereum. It may appear as something useful, without the stigma of Bitcoin being black market money. However, you ONLY need black market money. Everything else that's ok with being regulated, does not need a blockchain. The hard problem that Bitcoin solved was "How do we create money that wouldn't collapse and lose value once outlawed". The proof-of-work solution cannot be replicated (for reasons I won't go into here, homework for you). And that's a good thing.
Ethereum is a scam and has always been a scam from its inception. Multiple reasons for that:
1) Overly complex, obfuscating its lack of problem to solve by having lots of features and code
2) Constantly coming up with new terms and features and "new hot thing" to try and pump the price and keep the interest going.
3) No real world use case. Only promises and cryptokittes.
4) Literally controlled by one guy (see the now famous "Can you guys stop trading" quote).
5) Only produced scam ICOs with 99.99% of ICO projects practically stealing money from investors with no repercussions whatsoever.
There are many more, but the thing to remember is - Bitcoin solves a real problem: it allows people to escape and bypass existing financial system and continue doing business, save and not be subject to policies outside of their control. It is black market money which governments hate and will try to outlaw in some way. That is the real pain Bitcoin solves for people: not agreeing to unjust laws peacefully and quietly exiting the system.
Vitalik and ETH are the definitions of scam and scammer. He's very good at obfuscating it by appearing very smart: read his articles and tweets, they always sound complex, but can be rewritten in much simpler terms. And ETH is the same: it obfuscates its uselessness and nonsense by being overly complex, every year employing new terms and coming up with tons of code that only increases the attack surface and complicates things even more.
How this works? They send btc and people use them. You're thinking in the old frame of reference: you don't need banks, legal entities or identities even to produce code. Who cares if it's recognized or not.
Knowing the founder, find it hard to believe. The guy who fled Russia to avoid persecution has little tolerance for any government trying to mess with people's privacy. Culturally, Russia itself has a lot more in common with the west. China is completely separated, from, I would say, the rest of the world, in terms of mentality. It's even different from most Asian countries and Hong Kong. Find it hard to imagine why would anyone cooperate with China on doing things the western world considers immoral and unacceptable.
I feel like this is all insane and doesn't make any sense. At least to the general public. What difference does it make? It doesn't even improve our understanding of reality in any meaningful way, it doesn't impact us in any way. We might have as well been where we are now technology wise without knowing about Bing Bang at all. What is it even? Because when you actually ask that question - where did it come from - it's a question you can't really answer within the framework of our consciousness. And if you can't answer that question, yet another layer above Big Bang doesn't really matter.
Looking forward to it, very interested. However, I'm going to be honest with you - it'd be a hard decision to rely on a service rather than an open-source software. Like, you guys can go bust any time and while the runner is indeed open-source, as I imagine, the management console for it won't be. And I understand that's what people are paying for, but, perhaps, consider licencing it, rather than running from your own server and charging for the service.
I'll give you a counter example: whenever I change CI workflow for something that has nothing to do with the repo - like a new deployment scheme to staging - I have to go and ask people to merge/rebase from master into their branches or they won't be able to deploy. It happens pretty often and I'd rather avoid this.