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The original was posted on /r/nanocurrency by /u/UsedTeabagger on 2024-11-10 16:36:07+00:00.
I would particularly like to ask the moderators for their opinion on such a thread.
Nano is supposed to be a non-profit grassroots technology, solely build and spread by volunteers upon the goal Bitcoin once had: a truly decentralized international and trustless currency. We don’t have the resources for expensive advertisement or full time developers and other contributors, working for loans. (Although there’re many arguments I can come up with why we wouldn’t even want agressive advertisements in the first place, with our goals in mind).
The great thing about a grassroots movement is that all community-members can make a difference. One of the ways to contribute is simply by criticisms/skepticism, which probably sounds controversial. But with the limited resources Nano has, we need to work together to get to know what we need to prioritize. By knowing Nano’s possible flaws, its shortcomings, and what our general worries are, we can fix it before it’s exploited. Just because developers are also just humans and can’t see/know everything: we’re the early testers and need to give as much feedback as possible, even if we think it doesn’t necessarily contribute a lot.
Monero’s community also uses a weekly skepticism thread (example: ) to give worthy feedback. And I think, as we probably ultimately share a lot of goals, cypherpunk mindset and core values with Monero, apart from the true privacy aspect, we can learn a lot from them and use it to our advantage.
As Nano and Monero aren’t companies, we wouldn’t want to act like one and can’t exactly compare ourselves to them. But succesful start-ups are often so successful, because for one they obviously have the resources (mainly funds and connections) to start with, which we don’t have and again can’t compare to (although the part about powerful connections is possible over the long term). But more importantly because they just try, knowing it will probably not work, fail miserably, stand up and immediately try again. They see criticism as a tool to ultimately get ahead of the game much faster than their bigger competitors, because they exactly get to know what problems they need to prioritize on. This is exactly what Linux does, which is why they, as a non-profit organization, are even able to take up the competition with slow and bureaucratic giants like Microsoft and Apple. How awesome is that?
Current weekly threads are also used for criticism, but is not meant for it solely, which is why people generally don’t give a lot of criticism. Starting a weekly criticism/skepticism thread (“Nano Devil’s Advocate Wednesday” for instance), solely focused on just that and nothing else, will ultimately incentivize people to be open to skepticism (which must be a core value of our community if you ask me, and raises the standard of debate). It would also make people think more critically themselves, which is important to ultimately propose possible and creative solutions, that developers maybe haven’t really thought about. (an example what it could look like: ).
So would you like a weekly/monthly criticism thread? Let’s make it a discussion: what would be your arguments for/against it?