Building a sustainable blockchain, part 2

In our previous plan for the initial distribution accounts, we tried to address concerns that we might dump coins on the market. While this plan was thoughtful, reasonable, and enjoyed a positive reception from the community, it left some lingering concerns about the number of coins we still controlled.

We have never had any intention to sell large numbers of coins. Our reluctance to release more coins sooner, as we have explained many times, was to try to allow for a more equitable distribution of coins. With the previous plan, we only intended to sell a small number of coins to provide us with the resources necessary to cover our modest expenses and devote more time to this project.

However, to an outside observer, there was still an appearance that we were hoarding a large number of coins for ourselves and were looking to cash out a large number of coins at some point. This, the second part of our plan, should lay those concerns to rest.

We will be transferring 100% of the remaining distribution funds to the cycle account.

We have not sold any coins from the distribution accounts, and we will never sell any coins from these accounts. We have only used them for purposes that we felt were reasonable, responsible, and positive for the community: bounties, airdrops to the mesh, a single reimbursement to someone who lost coins due to a confusion between private and public keys, and a single payment to the first non-Nyzo verifier who found this project on GitHub. We will carefully document every transfer from these accounts, and we will gladly explain any transfers that anyone finds to be of concern.

We will complete the transfer of all coins from the distribution accounts to the cycle account by 2019-10-01 00:00:00.000 UTC.

This additional funding will make the initial cycle account more than 150% larger than was initially planned. We hope and expect that this fund will be used wisely to reward positive contributions to Nyzo. We have already seen members of the community provide significant value to this project in the form of tutorials, documentation, analysis, monitoring, and integrations. The community should decide what contributions are valuable, and it would be unfair for us to continue to hold any coins over which we have unilateral control.

The distributed, flexible consensus of Nyzo makes it uniquely amenable to heterogeneity among verifiers in the mesh. With the exception of the version-1 blockchain upgrade, Nyzo has been highly compatible across versions. We hope that other implementations of Nyzo arise — both forks of our version and novel implementations. And we hope that verifiers adopt whatever version of Nyzo works best for their particular needs. If we make a change to the Nyzo software that you don't like, don't use it. If you want other verifiers to use your version instead, fork the repository and convince other verifiers to run your version instead of ours. This has always been an option with Nyzo, and we hope to see this option exercised more in the future.

After we transfer the remainder of the initial distribution funds to the cycle account, we will no longer control Nyzo in any significant way. The official verifiers are gone. The nyzo.co website has no special access to the mesh, and it never has. We will hold less than ∩610,000 after we complete the transfers to the cycle account. This is the sum of all coins that all of our verifiers, official and anonymous, have earned since the beginning of Nyzo. To this date, we have not sold a single coin that any of our verifiers have earned. We currently have only 9 in-cycle verifiers — we had 10, but we recently lost a verifier due to the version-541 sentinel issue.

Overall, we will have far less control over the cycle and, we suspect, control of fewer coins than some early adopters. However, advocating for democracy and decentralization while trying to maintain control of the system doesn't make sense to us.

Nyzo is wonderful in a lot of ways, but we think its strongest attribute is its community. That's why turning over the remainder of the initial-distribution coins to the community is the right thing to do.