evelopment of the Dawn Network continues, and I just want to report the progress and general sketch of the state of affairs and where we are going.
I had some very long discussions over Skype with both @ebryans and @frankbacon yesterday - well, it was quite eye-opening actually talking to Frank, in particular, who in person, is not the same joker as his posts might suggest... though just to be clear, he and I most definitely and strongly share our spiritual vision, and have a lot in common in terms of things that have gone on in our lives.
More relevant though, was the very long discussion I had with @ebryans, as he is our chief fundraiser. I explained to him a lot of things, especially about the Refractory Token Ledger and this new concept which I am calling Rock Paper Scissors Consensus Protocol.
During the discussion we became fairly clear on exactly what the plan is, and firstly, the design that has been partially implemented by @faddat, which essentially amounts to an abstraction (superset) of Steem's content monetisation model, is the first cab off the rank. Not just because it is nearer to being ready, but also because it is essential for the way in which we will enable people to fund development by what they get back.
We have a provisional plan for 32 initial Validators who will be composed of 12 workers building and managing the development process, and 20 open slots for those who will be seeding the development. We are currently working on estimates for the exact costs for each element of this, and once we have defined the budget, we will be setting the price for these 20 validator slots.
Validators will have the option, of course, at any time, to delegate or indeed trade the cryptographic token that grants their authority in the network to others. There will eventually be a framework for enabling this exchange process to be on-chain. Possibly in round two, after the initial estimated 12 months to complete implementation of RPS/RTL, we may expand the number of validators, if there is a need for a second round.
The monetisation of the provision of hosting service is something else that is on the agenda for this first 12 months of development. It is vitally important that there be reward for providing content hosting. We want to avoid the error in the architecture of Steem that sees the situation where hosting RPC nodes for users to access the network are so scarce.
Ideally, by this point in the process we will be extending the development to include the market in network relay, storage monetisation, computation services (VPS hosting, etc), derivatives exchanges (distributed exchanges), anonymous tokens, operating systems.
The second round of funding will be aimed towards building a completely open source hardware platform and operating system that is tightly integrated into the Dawn Network. We will be building some of these early, such as the Dawn Tractor, a turnkey Validator node (router) and small PC, but we will be aiming towards building a completely open platform, with open drivers for all hardware devices, which will include a smartphone, tablet, laptop and full sized desktop computer.
Ideally, the second round of development will be purely through blockchain currencies, and we should have the initial derivatives marketplace operating at that point, which can then be used to implement more conventional forms of shared ownership of the development process in the future, in the network itself.
You can see the draft plan for the ownership structure here: https://quip.com/RpZHAahm90MZ
If you are interested in joining the development discussions, you can also come to our chat at https://chat.anisotropic.systems