How is Monero going to defend itself against future attacks on the community, politics etc? [closed]

Question

While Monero has been under attack by trolls since day one and has become quite resilient. Bitcoin and Ethereum communities have lots of tension with corporate takeover and stalling development(divide and conquer is quite common among adversaries). How will this be stopped in the Monero community? The Forum funding system I hope would be able to address a lot of these shortcomings Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer.

EDIT: Not sure why we are downvoting a genuine question, but by 'stalling development' I am referring to the bitcoin ecosystem. General corporate takeover is a threat in both bitcoin and ethereum ecosystems.

Answer 1

I think that Monero community is adamant at keeping the corrupting money away (the kind of money which could force another direction of the project). This is amplified by the fact that many of contributors are already having a steady cash flow by other means, so they can't really be bought easily. There was an interesting related question on whether the developers should be employed full time.

It is in the nature of open source projects that people just come and do what they like to do, by their own free will. Most of the worlds open source projects don't involve money, but solve some other problem, so it's hard to corrupt those. I believe it is important to keep that kind of open source spirit in the Monero community, and so far it looks like it isn't going anywhere :)

Ideally, contributors would be motivated by only wanting to solve a problem, or build and improve something, just because they like doing it. Pick a problem you like to solve, and just go ahead and solve it. If you involve money in the equation, in a way "you will get paid X to keep doing Y" then it becomes a job and it could mean you're not anymore doing what you like, but are forced to do "Y". It would suck - who wants a 2nd job like this, or even to replace the one they're currently doing just to have all this pressure from various "investors" on their back? That's why I get annoyed by people thinking they can "push" for GUI, it shows that they don't respect people's free time or the open source spirit. In the end, it is the beauty of open source that you're free to say "No".

Also consider, that if someone believes in the project and is willing to spend his time and energy working on it, that he probably loaded up on Monero while it was still around 2$/xmr. I mean, if you're investing your time in future of money, you might as well invest some of your money to capitalize on your efforts. I certainly hope that all the contributors had their bags filled before the run up to 10$.

So to answer your question: by maintaining awareness of how money can corrupt, and keeping the spirit of the project going.

Answer 2

First, it is kind of silly to think of Monero as a sentient thing that needs to defend itself. Monero is a protocol.

That being said, Monero will defend itself against all of your proposed vectors by being really good at being decentralized. What I mean is that the developers of Monero are striving to create a cryptocurrency network that needs no human interaction. As it stands now, the Monero protocol and network could thrive in the absence of any future human consensus. The adaptive block limit means that Monero will continue to scale in the absence of any human intervention.

That being said, there are plenty of developments that are still to come, but there's nothing so critical that could derail the primary function of the network.