_{Video by @cypherglass}

$100000 Bounty!

Yesterday, one of the EOS Block Producer namely @cypherglass announced a bounty of $100,000 for developers who can code apps to support EOS for Ledger Nano S and Trezor hardware wallets.

Now, this is very important job because for secure storing of EOS tokens people need these most popular hardware wallets to support EOS. Presently, no hardware wallet support EOS.

These days, the voting to elect the first set of Block Producers for EOS chain is going on. But many EOS holders has complained about absence of user-friendly and secured way of voting. It's understandable that users are concerned about the security of their tokens and private keys. Many have stated that until they don’t get their EOS tokens in their Trezor or Ledger Naon S wallet, they won’t participate in voting.

The effect is quite visible too. It’s been over 3 days that voting has begun but it’s still far from reaching the minimum vote participation of 15% EOS tokens. At the time of writing this, it has reached only 8.5% of EOS tokens. It’s evident that users are concerned for the security of their tokens before they can use any voting tool to participate in voting. This necessitates the support from popular wallets like Ledger & Trezor.

Perhaps, gauging the importance of the need to have EOS supported hardware wallets, BP @cypherglass came up with this huge bounty.

But Can This Bounty Make Any Difference?

Personally, I don’t feel putting a bounty is a right way to invite developers to write a code from scratch. Bounties may be good for discovering bugs and security vulnerabilities and fixing them. But creating a competition like scenario for writing a fool-proof code doesn’t seem to be a good idea to me.

Suppose 100 developers or developer teams start writing a code for it. But only one will be the first to write and submit the complete code for each wallet. So the efforts put by all other 99 or 98 developers who may have finished more than 75% of the work would go waste. Would any serious and talented developer like to take this amount of risk?

A better way would have been recruiting an interested and competent team for this assignment to assign the job on contract. This may save a lot of human resources going to waste and give some ETA for completion of the project too.

This bounty puts the BP in poor light

By creating a contest for this, indicates one of these possibilities:

1. This BP don’t have an in-house team capable of doing this job.
2. They don’t have enough time for this, so this job is not their priority
3. They don’t have enough time to screen the best candidate for this job.
4. They are rich and willing to share the wealth to make the EOS chain stronger.

Overall, I didn’t get a very positive image of the BP through this gesture. It would have been better if they had announced this bounty in association with Trezor and Ledger. Although these are open source software but they may need to test before accepting the pull request.

Or is it another publicity stunt to get votes? Is this bounty being used to gain the credit and votes from EOS community? If so, I wish another BP participate and win this bounty 😊.

If it really happens, who will get the credit - the BP who created the bounty or the BP who developed the apps? I'll probably incline towards the one who created the software. What about you?

No deadline for completion of this project

This bounty is only valid if the app is approved by the respective wallet. But how much time they would take in approving it, no one knows. Surprisingly, there is no deadline for this bounty. No time-frame is announced for the developers.

Last year on 3 June, Trezor founder Slush had also announced a similar bounty of 5 BTC for XMR. But to this date, I don’t see any XMR integration with Trezor. Nor does Ledger support XMR. However, TREZOR2 & Ledger are expected to support XMR soon. But isn’t it a long wait?

I think a better methodology can be devised to achieve this objective in a shorter time frame. Efforts will need to be taken to promote this bounty enough to get competent talent on table. For now there are only 3,700 views for the bounty announcement video. In fact, the million dollar bet video, announced a couple of weeks back, from the same BP has got 10 times more views. So they will need to do some marketing for promoting their bounty video to on-board more developers for the project.

Whatever they do, I'd see it as success only if they can successfully integrate EOS with both those wallets in a month or two at most.. Only that will prove their credibility to me now.

• What time frame do you think is reasonable for completion of this project?
• Do you think this bounty will serve its purpose?
• Is a bounty good way to reward developers?