 Welcome to the Daily Decrypt, my friend. The forecast for currency competition today is a hundred percent. I am your host, Amanda B. Johnson, and today's episode is brought to you by The Miracle. If you have visited nodecounter.com recently, which is a site which tracks the node numbers and blocks mined by competing variants of Bitcoin, namely corn classic, this is the message you would have been greeted with. Bitcoin development has been bought out by a private company called Blockstream. Blockstream is currently paying off many of the key Bitcoin Core software developers. Blockstream has directed the crippling of Bitcoin in order to provide the solution for their own future financial gain. These Blockstream paid Bitcoin developers for the Bitcoin Core software are enforcing a limit on how much information can be transacted in Bitcoin. This is limiting the number of transactions to just three per second approximately. Blockstream is concurrently developing a solution to this problem called the Lightning Network. This solution is to be placed on top of the crippled Bitcoin network to allow it to scale. Blockstream will monetize the Lightning Network in the form of fees required to use their service. Additionally, for the past eight months, Blockstream has been utilizing censored discussion forums for their communication, thus preventing awareness of the issue from being widely known. All discussion mentioning this has been and continues to be deleted and banned. In short, Blockstream has created a problem so they can provide the solution, and they are doing everything they can to keep it that way. What we have here is a network in which users cannot be sure whether developers work for them or for someone else. And this is understandable because after all, Bitcoin users don't pay their developers and never have. And if users don't pay developers, someone else will. And that someone gets to decide the direction that development goes because they're the ones paying the bills. So how can you prevent this problem from arising within your favorite crypto network? You may be thinking of the natural and obvious answer. Oh shit, we need to pay our developers. You do, but the solution is likely more technical than that. Anyone can start a not-for-profit foundation or hold a fundraiser or solicit donations and occasionally kick funds to developers. But the top talent in development, the best developers, are going to gravitate to systems where pay is most steady and most guaranteed. And non-profit foundations and asking for donations is anything but a steady and guaranteed funding model. But you know what is? Blockchain payouts. Yes, blockchain payouts, either in the forms of block rewards or revenue pools or a form of blockchain payout yet to be invented. Such payouts come directly from a blockchain and can be cryptographically voted upon by stakeholders. This is already being done in both Dash and BitShares, by the way, making those networks decentralized autonomous organizations, DAOs. In the early days of Bitcoin, there was a sort of sentiment going around that its governance was by numbers. In fact, there was a coined phrase in cryptography we trust that was popular that seemed to indicate that there was no amount of human folly or error that could steer the network off course. We now see that that's not true. Crypto networks and networks in general are 100% dependent upon human incentives. And a good way to start future-proofing your favorite crypto network against improper human incentives is to make sure that your developers don't have to go looking around for a steady paycheck. Adopting a sort of DAO model to cryptographically direct funds in development according to the wishes of stakeholders means that a blockchain works for its users rather than the other way around. Today's episode is brought to you by The Merkle, a place to find technical analyses of all of the top coins as well as tutorials on new crypto products and even noob-friendly guides like what is a blockchain? You can get The Merkle's offerings sent directly to your email inbox by signing up for their newsletter at TheMerkle.com. Now leave a comment why don't you? I'm serious either here on YouTube or on the DailyDCrypt subreddit or somewhere on Twitter because I am eager to hear your feedback. In case you haven't noticed it's a little bit lonely here at the DailyDCrypt studios so give a shout out why don't you? All right have a good day. Ironically or perhaps not, in the decentralization of all of the things governance is of the highest importance and there are some good implementations cropping up out there.