Fwd: You received a tip for your commit

[Sudhanshu Mishra]

This is strange. Is anybody else getting these mails?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <con...@prime4commit.com>
Date: Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 4:50 PM
Subject: You received a tip for your commit
To: mrs...@gmail.com

Hello, Sudhanshu Mishra!

You were tipped 0.53 XPM for your commit on Project sympy/sympy. Please, log in and tell us your primecoin address to get it.

Your current balance is 0.53 XPM. If you don't enter a primecoin address your tips will be returned to the project in 30 days.

Sign In

Thanks for contributing to Open Source!

prime4commit.com

Don't notify me anymore, I don't need tips.

[Saurabh Jha]

Yeah, I also get these tips while my commits get merged in scikit-learn. Not sure what to do with them :-/

Saurabh

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[Francesco Bonazzi]

On Wednesday, December 31, 2014 12:32:47 PM UTC+1, Sudhanshu Mishra wrote:

You were tipped 0.53 XPM for your commit on Project sympy/sympy. Please, log in and tell us your primecoin address to get it.

https://coinplorer.com/Charts?fromCurrency=XPM&toCurrency=USD

It looks like 1 XPM is about 0.097 US dollars (today's rate, may change over time). Practically, it's nothing.

[Aaron Meurer]

As far as I can tell, prime4commit does this automatically to every email address in the commit metadata for every commit that is committed to SymPy. Supposedly people donate into it and it is distributed to the contributors. The total XPM currently "donated" into the project is 52.77, which according to the exchange rate noted by Francesco, is about $5 USD. There have been other similar projects, some of which have been very negatively received (see https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/127).

Whether or not you take the money is up to you. I ask that you don't try to game the system in a way that negatively affects the project (by splitting your contributions into more commits than you would otherwise for instance). 

But most importantly, if you do want to donate money to the SymPy project, please donate to NumFOCUS. The donate button on http://www.sympy.org/en/donate.html will go directly to the SymPy NumFOCUS account, which we can then use to actually support the project in meaningful ways (for instance, we have used the money to help people attend conferences attended by other SymPy developers).

Aaron Meurer 

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[Joachim Durchholz]

Am 31.12.2014 um 19:45 schrieb Aaron Meurer:
> As far as I can tell, prime4commit does this automatically to every email
> address in the commit metadata for every commit that is committed to SymPy.

They claim they're doing that only for people that they already mailed
in the past.

> Supposedly people donate into it and it is distributed to the contributors.

Indeed, though they're keeping each tip until it is distributed.
Which happens at 1% per commit by default. Some people calculated that
it takes ~250 commits to give out 50% of each tip, so they're going to
accumulate quite some balance over time.

Their reactions to criticism sounds has displayed gross legal incompetence.
Things that might happen:
- They collect cease-and-desist letters for collecting money in the name
of various entities, without having approval.
- Somebody sues them out of existence, for the same legal reason.
- They go fraudulent and embezzle the uncollected tips.
- Somebody hacks them (if their technical incompetence matches their
legal incompetence).

Whatever the case, I do not think they should collect donations in our name.
THEREFORE, I SUGGEST THAT WE TELL THEM TO OPT US OUT.

> The total XPM currently "donated" into the project is 52.77, which
> according to the exchange rate noted by Francesco, is about $5 USD.

That's probably going to increase as tips go in, and decrease by 1% with
every claimed tip.

> Whether or not you take the money is up to you.

+0

> I ask that you don't try to
> game the system in a way that negatively affects the project (by splitting
> your contributions into more commits than you would otherwise for
> instance).

+1
Though given the amounts involved, it's not very likely to happen.

> But most importantly, if you do want to donate money to the SymPy project,
> please donate to NumFOCUS. The donate button on
> http://www.sympy.org/en/donate.html will go directly to the SymPy NumFOCUS
> account, which we can then use to actually support the project in
> meaningful ways (for instance, we have used the money to help people attend
> conferences attended by other SymPy developers).

+1

[Francesco Bonazzi]

On Wednesday, December 31, 2014 7:45:40 PM UTC+1, Aaron Meurer wrote:

Supposedly people donate into it and it is distributed to the contributors.

I don't think they are collecting donations. I don't know exactly how their mechanism works, but I can suppose that some people created the primecoin virtual currency out of nothing, which is currently being exchanged for real currency in some way, so they did effectively "create" money. At this point, they may be willing to advertise their currency in hope to increase its exchange rate versus real currencies, and maybe their trying to do so by donating small amounts to github developers.

Anyways, that's just a guessing, I have no evidence about it.

[Joachim Durchholz]

Am 01.01.2015 um 11:29 schrieb Francesco Bonazzi:
> I don't think they are collecting donations. I don't know exactly how their
> mechanism works,

Not sure whom you mean by "they", Primecoin or Prime4commit (they do not
seem to be connected).

Primecoin is one of the many bitcoin clones with a modified proof of work.
Prime4commit simply takes Primecoin donations and passes them on, no
special mechanism involved.

> but I can suppose that some people created the primecoin
> virtual currency out of nothing, which is currently being exchanged for
> real currency in some way, so they did effectively "create" money.

That's not how cryptocurrency fraud works, exchange with fiat money is a
zero-sum game.

With typical cryptocurrency fraud, the developers mine a substantial
amount of coins for their own use before the public release, to sell
these early coins off for fiat money afterwards.
Since cryptocurrencies rely on market consensus, and those early coins
are easily identifiable (they're publicly visible in the blockchain),
this works until the market decides to not accept those early coins anymore.

> At this
> point, they may be willing to advertise their currency in hope to increase
> its exchange rate versus real currencies, and maybe their trying to do so
> by donating small amounts to github developers.
>
> Anyways, that's just a guessing, I have no evidence about it.

The Prime4commit guys may be working to advertise Primecoin, or they may
not - available evidence is inconclusive.

[Ondřej Čertík]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 7:45 PM, Aaron Meurer <asme...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As far as I can tell, prime4commit does this automatically to every email
> address in the commit metadata for every commit that is committed to SymPy.
> Supposedly people donate into it and it is distributed to the contributors.
> The total XPM currently "donated" into the project is 52.77, which according
> to the exchange rate noted by Francesco, is about $5 USD. There have been
> other similar projects, some of which have been very negatively received
> (see https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/127).
>
> Whether or not you take the money is up to you. I ask that you don't try to
> game the system in a way that negatively affects the project (by splitting
> your contributions into more commits than you would otherwise for instance).
>
> But most importantly, if you do want to donate money to the SymPy project,
> please donate to NumFOCUS. The donate button on
> http://www.sympy.org/en/donate.html will go directly to the SymPy NumFOCUS
> account, which we can then use to actually support the project in meaningful
> ways (for instance, we have used the money to help people attend conferences
> attended by other SymPy developers).

Exactly. I think that paying our contributors is a great idea, but
paying them automatically based on number of commits, or number of
merged PRs, or number of changed lines or files is a bad idea.

I think a good idea is to put up a price for a given task, and then if
the task was done (no matter how many lines of code or PRs merged),
pay the money to the people involved, as decided by the owner of the
money. I think this website got it quite right:

https://www.bountysource.com/

Except there I think only one person gets the money, the person who
submitted the PR I assume, but there is always more people involved,
in particular the reviewers, who sometimes invest more time in than
the author. So there might be even better way to do this somehow.

Ondrej

[Colin Macdonald]

On 02/01/15 21:59, Ondřej Čertík wrote:
> So there might be even better way to do this somehow.

[Snowdrift](https://snowdrift.coop) looks promising, but early days. I
like that they (plan to) fund themselves as just another project on the
site (rather than taking a cut off the top of all transactions).

Colin

[Ondřej Čertík]

Indeed, that looks cool.


I just got an email myself with XPM tip from primecoin when I merged a
PR with my commits. Does every single contributor to sympy get this
email? I really believe that tiping for commits is wrong and it will
incentivize new (or old) contributors to do as many commits as
possible. That's wrong.

Aaron (and others!), if you agree, I am going to write them to stop
spamming sympy contributors with this.

Ondrej

[Sudhanshu Mishra]

> Aaron (and others!), if you agree, I am going to write them to stop

spamming sympy contributors with this.

​+1

According to the current exchange rates it is less likely but it may create problems in future.​

Regards

Sudhanshu Mishra

www.sudhanshumishra.in

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[Saurabh Jha]

I agree with the concerns here. +1

Saurabh

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[Ondřej Čertík]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 10:14 AM, Sudhanshu Mishra <mrs...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Aaron (and others!), if you agree, I am going to write them to stop
> spamming sympy contributors with this.
>
> +1
>
> According to the current exchange rates it is less likely but it may create
> problems in future.

Indeed.

I thought about it some more and I think there is nothing wrong with
tipping, but it needs to come from a human, i.e. somebody puts the
money in and then they should decide who to give this tip and how
much, based on how much they like the work (just like in a restaurant
how much you liked the service and food, as opposed to the restaurant
simply tipping 10% of your bill automatically). And if there is enough
of such people doing tipping, then I think that could work and not
create problems for our community.

Ondrej

[Aaron Meurer]

I think you just have to open an issue on their issue tracker requesting to be removed.

Aaron Meurer

Ondrej

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[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

There's a lot of data on the destructive effect of piecewise reward on
performance of interesting tasks; see [1] for a review, [2] for a
meta-analysis and [3] for a 20 minute TED talk,

Matthew

[1] http://www.alfiekohn.org/punished-rewards/
[2] http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/125/6/627.
[3] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation?language=en

[Joachim Durchholz]

Am 08.01.2015 um 18:11 schrieb Ondřej Čertík:
> I just got an email myself with XPM tip from primecoin when I merged a
> PR with my commits. Does every single contributor to sympy get this
> email?

I haven't, either because I'm not committing myself or because I didn't
get a PR in after they started tipping.

> I really believe that tiping for commits is wrong and it will
> incentivize new (or old) contributors to do as many commits as
> possible. That's wrong.

Any metric is wrong. Number of commits is particularly easy to game, but
more accurate metrics would just mean that gaming them will be harder to
detect...

> Aaron (and others!), if you agree, I am going to write them to stop
> spamming sympy contributors with this.

+1

They're either clueless about law and money, or they're a scam.
Either way, I'd prefer it if people found they couldn't donate to us via
them, and tried one of the other options.

[Aaron Meurer]

Oh I must have been thinking of this https://github.com/sigmike/peer4commit/issues.  It looks like prime4commit doesn't even have issues https://github.com/sigmike/prime4commit. I don't see a direct way to remove the project, so we will have to ask the guy who runs it https://github.com/sigmike.

And yes, I am +1 to do this.

Aaron Meurer

[Ondřej Čertík]

I found our project: http://prime4commit.com/projects/156, logged in
and disabled tipping. According to:

http://prime4commit.com/faq

"...each new commit generates an "Undecided" tip and the authors are
not notified." So that should solve the issue. I also left a "tipping
policy" (visible from the project page) as:

"At the moment, we do not recommend to use this website. There is no
way to remove our project, so we at least disabled automated tipping.
Ondřej"

So that should do it.

Ondrej

> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAKgW%3D6JoeZ%2BUsNogFFNGYZDjj4WRgA%3DVHDYerLx_8YptbsteiA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Ondřej Čertík]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 11:54 AM, Ondřej Čertík <ondrej...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I found our project: http://prime4commit.com/projects/156, logged in
> and disabled tipping. According to:
>
> http://prime4commit.com/faq
>
> "...each new commit generates an "Undecided" tip and the authors are
> not notified." So that should solve the issue. I also left a "tipping
> policy" (visible from the project page) as:
>
> "At the moment, we do not recommend to use this website. There is no
> way to remove our project, so we at least disabled automated tipping.
> Ondřej"
>
> So that should do it.

That did it for sympy/sympy, but now prime4commit decided to start
spamming all contributors to sympy/csympy (without our permission),
and unfortunately this time neither Aaron nor I can even log in there
to fix it. On their FAQ (http://prime4commit.com/faq), it says to open
an issue on github (https://github.com/sigmike/peer4commit/issues),
which I did:

https://github.com/sigmike/peer4commit/issues/125

as you can see, there is plenty of projects that are requesting the same, e.g.:

https://github.com/sigmike/peer4commit/issues/122
https://github.com/sigmike/peer4commit/issues/121
https://github.com/sigmike/peer4commit/issues/118
https://github.com/sigmike/peer4commit/issues/114

Ondrej