$100,000 to develop what essentially boils down to a suite of plugins to convert ERC-20 transaction data into JSON is a pretty decent ask. As a developer myself totally understand the dev team has got to eat but from a technical standpoint I'm hesitant to even begin to entertain the idea that something of this nature, assuming the foundation of it isn't already available open sourced somewhere, wouldn't take a team of a few decently skilled individuals a few months and about a 1/5th of the budget you're asking here to complete. This isn't a shot at the HE team or your proposal, merely an observation from someone who has inhabited this ecosystem longer than most people have even had a concept of development being possible within the cryptocurrency space.
What strikes me the most troubling about this whole idea isn't the money ask being put fourth here but the entire idea behind developing something that directly or indirectly tries to build upon the coat-tails of another network we should be aiming to become an alternative to, not for lack of a better term be assimilated by via actions striving towards integration. Perhaps my vision issue on this is clouded by the disdain I harbour towards what I can only describe as "crypto for people who don't crypto".. Etherium should be something that anyone who truly embraces the spirit of crypto isn't wholeheardedly excited to get involved with. It isn't immutable, it's built to suck capital from it's users and ultimately failed as a viable cryptocurrency fundamentals wise with the DAO. As a network Etherium is nothing which can be considered anything remotely resembling satoshis original vision for crypto currency.
With all that being said though, I will support your proposal even if I don't agree with the fundamentals of what you're trying to achieve.. The Hive-Engine.com platform is a cornerstone of what made steem and is making HIVE somewhat of an interesting environment to work and develop in and frankly without it my own development en-devours would be far less amusing. Between it's ability to create value from ideas spawned by communities to simply being able to create shitcoins for lulz with a cost to the creator amounting to less than a pack of smokes the economic and entertainment value of what's been built with Hive-Engine.com is something that I personally cannot downplay.
I'll support Hive-Engine, but getting deep into bed with Etherium rather than perhaps focusing on your own unique offerings seems akin to chasing after a sinking ship. If the broken fundamentals and gas price gouging aren't enough to make a person leery on that shit I don't really know what would be.
As for your HE rewrite I wish you luck on the update. Going from a single threaded, blocking process architecture to a multi-threaded asynchronous architecture is no small feat and I'm interested to see what you guys come up with. The idea of codeless smart contracts is a somewhat tempting thought.. and I'm sure to the non-technicals out there the sort of buzzword they froth at the mouth upon hearing.. however in practice a system such as that will be somewhat underwhelming both in utility as well as ability to spawn innovation, likely resulting in the system being overlooked by serious players, unless said system itself was designed around allowing developers to submit and modify their own code to be able to create unique instances of headless applications.
If done right a properly resource managed fully functional smart side chain could be an absolute game changer for all involved.. However bringing something like this to market that is both capable enough to get serious developers involved but at the same time simple enough for the average internet serf to be able to comprehend and use is going to be an extremely delicate balancing act.
As for making a functional BTC trading pair exchange given what you've already built it's simply a matter of changing a few variables and setting up some RPC calls differently to make HE BTC compliant. In all honesty besides the legal loopholes you'd need to cover given your pre-existing code base this could be knocked out in an afternoon over some beer.
The real question I find myself asking here at the end of writing all this is.. how is it possible after being quite well established in this ecosystem for what most would consider a decent length of time and having built number of seemingly profitable applications on top of HIVE that you've not been able to self fund your in house development with profits earned to avoid this whole asking for what is essentially a float to keep development moving forward? Now please don't mistake the tone of that question as being arrogant nor provocative as some would like to paint it as. Honestly curious as to what percentage of income from established services gets put back into R&D and what percentage in the future would need to be put back into development in order to avoid what is essentially crowd sourcing seed money for a privately held company.
Now if people get triggered by this post so be it however I certainly didn't come here to fucking troll nor am I here to piss anyone off or kiss anyone's ass. I'm merely expressing my point of view and potential concerns from the perspective of a developer who builds applications without the financial backing of established income sources or crowd sourced seed money for the most part. No part of this is meant to come off as salt or piss, but rather an objective look at what has been observed over a lengthy period of time within the ecosystem.
Can I get a link to the proposal to vote the thing here shortly or is it still being drafted?
Anyways, hope ya'll get your vision built even if it does involve fundamentally stunted network integration. Ya'll got's my support simply on the basis of having created Hive-Engine which regardless of some less than amiable ramblings from folks within the HIVE horde is a pretty friggin' decent service.
Keep on keeping on. Any development outfit that is trying to build things to give HIVE more utility even if in my opinions is not a great direction is still an ally to the community. /rant
Very interesting question, I see it the same way, therefore my reserves.
Wasn't trying to be a dink or anything expressing this.. Honestly quite confused why the team isn't reinvesting enough into future R&D to keep themselves fed and pay the bills.
I agree that H-E most certainly makes Hive an enjoyable experience for me. Good point!
Agreed! Our team is working on something similar and we are not asking for $1 let alone $100,000
Big tech companies tend to re-invest something upwards of 80% of their profits back into R&D in order to maintain a competitive advantage. You certainly don't hear of giants like Samsung, AMD and Intel looking for seed capital to fund their next advancement in technology, they learned long ago to put their profits back into themselves in order to grow in size and capability as time goes on.
If you build something successful and manage it all correctly it should easily cover it's own development costs for future iterations of it. For small time devs like you or I we work without a decent amount of income but do it because we see the capability to build something that will produce capital.
can't wait for the release!
I agree that Hive-Engine IS absolutely amazing but if this proposal is turned down, is there not a possibility that they might come up with another more closely aligned with your own vision for Hive? I'm confused.
Possibility. Although what I personally would be doing is taking existing graphene based chains that feature smart contract capability and gutting it to suit our own purposes.
Like reverse engeneering? So why vote for it tho?
Because as a small community of developers we don't have to see exactly eye to eye in order to support eachother.
Yes, I can see that you are very supportive, I love to see that, it's just that in my intuitive grasp of the current tokenomics, I won't take any risks. Proposals need to be spot on. If things were better though I would vote for it out of trusting Hive-Engine.
I'm an outspoken type. I calls it likes I sees it and will be the first one to raise an unpopular viewpoint or give praise where it's deserved but lacking.
End of the day we're all just trying to make a living by building ontop of the same platform. One can view other development outfits as competition if they wish or as different cogs of the same machine. All depends on how you wish to view the world really.
The future sure is unpredictable.