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DISCLAIMER: I am aware that there are regulatory and legal problems with the idea I’ve outlined below. Obviously we are not going to put the Mycroft project in jeopardy by pursuing this idea without careful vetting, nor are we going to invest precious resources in pursing expensive regulatory approvals. What I’m looking for is a conversation with the Mycroft community to get feedback on this concept. It may be unrealistic or just plain dumb.
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As our community already knows, our vision here at Mycroft is to build a strong AI. We are working to achieve this vision by integrating a variety of skills and abilities into a cohesive and comprehensive framework. We’ve had a ton of users, developers and techno-jedis express an interest in helping make this happen, but this approach to AI is resource intensive and is going to take a lot of work on the part of the community. Though the open source community is very generous with its time, we feel the Mycroft project will be more successful if we can compensate developers who make substantial contributions.
The simplest way to handle this would be to offer cash payments to developers. Unfortunately we don’t have enough cash on had for this to be feasible, so we’ve been discussing an alternative solution: Mycrobit.
Mycrobit would be a cryptocurrency backed by a fixed percentage of ownership of the Mycroft corporate entity. We would use Mycrobits to compensate developers who make a significant contribution to the Mycroft development effort. For example a developer who spent 200 hours developing a module that performs facial recognition might receive 5,000 Mycrobits as payment. These Mycrobits would be issued using a blockchain mechanism similar to Bitcoin, but taking into accounts improvements that have been made to the technology.
Contributors to the project could obtain Mycrobits in one of three ways:
- Contribute a significant skill or ability to Mycroft
- Purchase Mycrobits directly from Mycroft
- Purchase Mycrobits from an existing Mycrobit holder
Obviously there would have to be some processes and/or procedures in place for developers to get credit for a skill.
Initially Mycrobits would be backed by a percentage of the business, we are thinking around 5%.
As Mycroft becomes a functioning company, our financial team would look for ways to buy back all of the Mycrobits or exchange them for common stock. In the mean time this mechanism, if we can figure out how to implement it within the SEC’s regulatory framework, will allow us to make our developers into owners of the business.
Of course Mycroft’s source code will be licensed under GPLv3, so in a way the technology behind the company will belong to everyone no matter what. This mechanism simply allows our development community to participate financially in the success of Mycroft the company.
I’d be interested to get feedback from the community, especially from folks who have experience in securities and currency regulation. We don’t want to end up on the wrong side of the SEC, but we do want to provide an incentive for developers who work hard to improve Mycroft’s skills in a significant way.