Cent - Chapter 1 Beer Money

*This is the first part in a fictional forward-looking series based on the site beta.cent.co*

It started out as a Quora-like imitator with a novel bounty smart contract attached to it.

Then it added a section for musicians to set bounties to attract fans who could fund them. Then a space for bloggers. Next a Reddit-esque platform. On and on it went.

The next thing we knew the big names showed up. The Navals. The Burniskies. The Wilsons. 

That's when Cent blew up. And after that, nothing was ever the same.

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Cent was already different before it took everything over. It solved the decentralized organization problem before anyone else. 

But I want to take you back through the series of events that led up to that defining moment in history.

The first step towards solving the decentralized organization was Cent's introduction of a hybrid 'centralized-decentralized' model led by a small coterie of users called Centurions. 

The Centurions numbered only seven in total and included the two co-founders, Max and Cam. They helped curate the site by  distributing weighted votes. 

Before Centurions were introduced, every registered user or Centian was able to up/down vote the responses of any other users. 

This led to pitiful payouts for all Centians. They were lucky if they made a few cents. It wasn't very attractive to new users let alone for those Centians who made well thought out and sincere responses. 

For every bounty posted on the original Cent feed, at first hundreds, then pretty soon thousands of responses were submitted by Centians vying for a piece of the bounty. 

And the Centurions faithfully read every response.

Each Centurion had the power to distribute 10% of each bounty across corresponding responses. Regular users were - and to this day still are - able to up/down vote any post distributing 20% of each bounty. 

For their efforts voting and curating responses, 7% and 3% of each bounty were distributed equally to Centurions and regular Centians respectively.

So for an easy example, imagine that someone placed a bounty of $1000 soliciting feedback on a new song they composed. 

Exactly 100 Centians responded, of which seven were clearly outstanding. Every Centurion voted, and the seven outstanding responses received all of their votes. Half of all Centian votes also went to those seven responses. The other half of their votes were evenly distributed amongst 75 responses. 

Thus when the bounty paid out, the seven top responses received 80% or $800 distributed proportionally to the percentage of the total number of votes they received. The 75 Centians who were up-voted received 10% or $100 which translated to about $1.33 per response, and each Centurion received $10 with 3% or $30 distributed to any other Centians who voted. 

Back when the Centurions first appeared the bounties were considerably lower - they averaged around $10~$30 apiece. On special occasions you may have seen a $100 bounty, usually set by the esteemed Sir Mckie himself.  

After the Centurions came onto the scene, every Centian who posted was still pretty much guaranteed to take home a few pennies per response which was unprecedented for any social network at the time, but for those who gave the best responses, they were bringing in legit 'beer money' payouts. 

That 'beer money' was a major game changer.