Secured
I would like to seperate out the capacities of running Authority Servers (which Factom, Inc is operating as an Infrastructure ANO, with 50% efficiency) from the development efforts. Even if Factom Inc were not running servers, we would still have the ability and desire to develop software. I understand the conflation, as many of the people who contribute at a high level in this community also have joined an ANO group, but there are many who contribute meaningfully without being part of any ANO group. I dislike the implication that there aren't non-ANOs who are meaningfully contributing.
Keep in mind, Factom, Inc is also viewed in a different light by the US Government than any other organization, since we created the system to begin with. We have a very different risk profile than organizations who formed years after the blockchain started. Comparing the risks other organizations take and expecting Factom, Inc, (who has a lot more to lose) to be as cavalier seems like an unfair comparison.
Indeed. The continuity plan does indeed talk about the resources being devoted during the period. It is between 5 and 9 people on average, depending on people's schedules.
As far as how much it costs, thats not something that I can release, but it isn't hard to infer. https://www.builtinaustin.com/salaries/dev-engineer/senior-software-engineer/austin Just looking at this website doesn't take into account the additional overhead that businesses with offices, insurance, accounting departments, etc face, which are part of doing business.
Good point, this was brought up during the discussions about the second grant round you are quoting. It was expanded on here:
https://factomize.com/forums/threads/factom-inc-006-protocol-development.1044/page-2#post-6650
And here I think we get to the meat of the issue.
One of the things that worry executives at Factom, Inc is that potentially this whole distributed blockchain project won't be viewed by the US government as a bunch of independent companies and instead will view the entire project as a single enterprise. If that were the case, the government could compel all the ANOs from all over the world to produce a single tax return. All the various ANOs from all over the world (very few of whom have accountants on staff) would all need to share all their internal finances with each other, figure out exchange rates across a dozen different currencies and jurisdictions using different accounting schemes (cash vs accrual, etc). This would end the whole Factom project.
None of the other ANOs are likely congizant of these kinds of risks. This goes back to the having more to lose. The more that this grant process looks like a department inside a common enterprise the riskier it is from a governmental perspective. What you are asking for is trending more towards something like internal controls that are applied to a department. Other grant recipients may be happy to share fine grained internal details, but it is much riskier for Factom, Inc. to do what you are asking.
Factom, Inc can't participate in things that can be seen as leading that direction. For example, Factom, Inc did not participate in the process for creating a foundation: https://factomize.com/forums/threads/vote-to-create-a-wyoming-non-profit.1374/
The question you should be asking yourself is: "Is this a good price for the value being delivered?" The value being continuous development, maintenence, and reducing the attack surface, leading to more stability and scale.
This is probably the best way of showing what we are asking for is delivering extreme value. I'm not sure I could give better evidence. This request is about 2/3ds of the amount requested for between 2x and 4x the number of people working on it. If you think that the BIF grant is a good value (where BIF is delivering self-education at this point) then the Factom, Inc funding is a fantastic deal!
