Later tonight, I’ll be uploading a contract to Ethereum mainnet to raise 20 BTC for open sourcing John Tromp’s GPU miner, with a deadline of 14 October 2016 (in less than four days) at 12noon EDT (16:00 UTC).
I’ll do a test run through several accounts I own and any volunteers who happen to be awake, then I’ll post the annotated transcript from the blockchain to explain how the contract works.
The contract will accept contributions in ETH, and OgNasty will accept contributions in BTC. Both will count towards the funding goal of 20 BTC, in ETH at the Shapeshift market rate at the time of the contract creation.
(Currently it’s at 1 BTC = 535.59914024 ETC, so 20 BTC would be 10711.98280480 ETH).
As contract owner, I will manually bump up the amount raised for any BTC donation that OgNasty receives, again at the Shapeshift market rate.
If the goal is met by the deadline, any ETH user can initiate withdrawal to OgNasty’s BTC account, which he will hold in escrow until Tromp’s software is verified. I will ask Tromp to post details of his terms soon.
If the goal is not met by the deadline, all backers can safely withdraw their money (ETH backers through the contract, BTC backers from OgNasty).
I will personally guarantee the funds in the smart contract. If, according to the blockchain, more ETH is withdrawn to an account than originally contributed from that account, I will reimburse whichever backers have not yet withdrawn their funds.
The crowdfund will level a 2% fee against the 20 BTC, 1% to OgNasty for his escrow service and 1% to me for running the contract.
As a bonus, if I have time, I’ll implement a token (perhaps transferrable) that will go to each backer in exchange for a contribution, and you can choose to have your name immortalized on the blockchain.