Core Team Announcement

Posted by: The Core Team

The year 2018 is well underway, with many exciting new technologies on the horizon for Monero. Technology is not the only thing that needs to adapt if Monero is to stay at the forefront of privacy and blockchain technologies, however. With that in mind, the Core Team would like to remind the community about their role in regards to Monero followed by an announcement regarding the membership of the Core Team.

The role of the Core Team can often be a confusing topic, especially with the various leadership structures employed by other cryptocurrencies. As the technology for a completely trustless society is not yet a reality, all projects, even decentralized ones, benefit from having individuals that can carry out tasks that require trust. A quick example of this is owning a domain name (like getmonero.org) or maintaining servers (on which getmonero.org is hosted). Ultimately, there is not yet a way for a domain name to be owned by a decentralized community, so someone has to be the name holding this domain. It's in scenarios like this where the Core Team are able to work on bridging the decentralized world we are trying to bring about with the centralized reality in which we are currently living.

The responsibilities of the Core Team are as follows (in no particular order):

Act as primary trusted arbiters of the Forum Funding System on behalf of the community, so as to ensure the completion of all projects to the satisfaction of the community.

Manage the codebase of the Monero Project, which includes merging code on Github, keeping backups, and ensuring the safety, security, and free access of the code from any party.

Steward the general donation fund, and spending the Monero there on anything they see fit to further the Monero Project.

Act as trusted signers and distributors of reference clients for the Monero coin, and other related technologies.

Set a direction and vision for the Monero Project

In the event that the community deems the Core Team unworthy or lax in their duties, they are free to fork the project away from the current Core Team, as happened with thankful_for_today.

There are some things that the Core Team are NOT responsible for, despite misconceptions from the community. Some of the more common misconceptions are listed below:

Members of the Core Team are NOT anyone's boss, and no permission is needed from them to do anything.

The Core Team does NOT act as a centralized point of failure, but encourages organic, self-started initiatives that further the ecosystem of Monero.

The Core Team does NOT equal Monero. In the event that one, or all of the Core Team goes rogue, we are to remember that Monero is a movement. A global initiative to further privacy globally, and provide real, fungible, digital money for everyone. This can happen even without the presence of the Core Team.

Another requirement that the Core Team has internally however, is that each member be sufficiently active. In the event that someone is not able to be active in Monero, they are expected to step down from their position and the remaining members elect another person to replace them. For the aforementioned reason, tacotime is stepping down effective immediately. Those that were not present for the first few months of Monero will probably not remember tacotime, and will not understand the large role that he played in making Monero what it is today. Together, he and smooth championed the early days of bitmonero, and helped the budding community to navigate the project post-thankfulfortoday. He acted as the lead maintainer of the codebase, a role now filled by fluffypony. It's safe to say that Monero would not be what it is today without the early leadership and work of tacotime, and the members of the Core Team are very thankful for his past dedication, and wish him well for all future endeavors.

But every change brings new opportunity, and the Core Team is delighted to welcome Jeremie "binaryFate" Dubois-Lacoste on board as the newest member. binaryFate holds a PhD in computer science, with academic expertise in combinatorial systems and optimization algorithms. After working for a couple of years in academic research, he made the decision to become a full-time entrepreneur in the cryptocurrency space. He has been actively investing, trading, and creating businesses in that field since 2012. He has been involved with Monero since May 2014, and has been an active advocate of privacy and fungibility-protecting technologies ever since, both online and in real life

All members of the Core Team, past and present want to thank all volunteers and contributors for their consistent and tireless work. We look forward to what 2018 has in store for us as a project, and as a community.

Image credit: helloluis