My favorite site and personal passion project, beta.cent.co, just got a shiny new design upgrade.
I recently spoke with Max and Cam, the decentralized social network's two co-founders, and this upgrade marks the beginning of their planned v2.0 iterations for the site.
The next most likely addition will be the build-out of an entirely new feature. Currently Cent only offers a bounty-based Q&A feature, but soon they will release an entirely new and separate space based on a brand spanking new smart-contract they are busy working on.
I cannot wait.
In the meantime, head over to Cent, register (if you haven't already) and respond to some questions for a chance to earn cold hard currency.
I just posted a bounty (here) worth 0.05 ETH or about USD 25 asking people when they listen to their top 5 favorite podcasts. Go check it out.
2018년 3월 17일 토요일
2018년 3월 11일 일요일
CryptoCountries: Smart Contract Innovation
Smart ideas often first appear to be ordinary; indistinguishable from whatever idea came before it.
A lot of big ideas first arise in the most unlikely or common places imaginable. Some have appeared in peoples garages on weekends. Others have surprisingly sprung out of efforts focused on totally unrelated ends.
The current crop of dapp development is witnessing an enormous amount of energy focused on smart contract development and deployment. My bet is that the biggest ideas - at least initially - will spring out of projects that people simply consider games, scams or both.
CryptoCountries is one example where some interesting smart contracts and incentive structures have been developed for what appears to be a somewhat scammy game.
In its current iteration, countries and cities are represented as smart contracts. Ownership of each country and city is transferred to any user who sends double the amount of ETH the current owner paid.
The scammy nature of this dapp seems to stem from the fact that ETH from the initial purchase transaction goes to the developer (though this has never really been confirmed).
It's either that or people just don't realize that 95~98% of ETH paid when a user usurps control of a country goes straight to the current owner of the country, with the developer receiving only 2~5%. For cities, the developer receives 1% of the ETH paid to usurp control of the city, with 5% going to the current owner of the country that the city is located in, and the remaining 94% being sent to the current owner of the city.
Regardless of whether or not it's a scam, that last bit is the idea that's really interesting to me. But instead of trivial tokens, imagine that this fluid ownership structure was applied to something else, like original content.
Imagine that you can fund creators so they post more artwork, drawings, music recordings, podcasts, blogs or any other creations and you, along with any other supporter, would automatically (via the underlying smart contract) become entitled to a recurring portion of future revenue earned by that specific creator.
Just like CryptoCountries, however, someone could take your shares over by paying double what you did. In order to prevent someone from doing that, for example because you expect your stake in their future revenue to continue to increase due to their increasing popularity, you could simply pay the same smart contract double what you paid.
You would receive all of that money back to your own digital wallet though, save for a fee of say 6% where 5% would go to the creator and 1% would be paid to the developers.
If shares in a musician, for example, were that valuable I think that it would make sense to help increase their value by helping to book new venues, sell tickets or merchandise, or anything else that could increase the artist's revenue and popularity, since a percentage of that increased value would come back to you.
This is kind of amazing to think about. It really feels like this is kind of perfect. And I think I know of the perfect test bed to try this out. I truly feel like this is the beginning of one of those big ideas.
A lot of big ideas first arise in the most unlikely or common places imaginable. Some have appeared in peoples garages on weekends. Others have surprisingly sprung out of efforts focused on totally unrelated ends.
The current crop of dapp development is witnessing an enormous amount of energy focused on smart contract development and deployment. My bet is that the biggest ideas - at least initially - will spring out of projects that people simply consider games, scams or both.
CryptoCountries is one example where some interesting smart contracts and incentive structures have been developed for what appears to be a somewhat scammy game.
In its current iteration, countries and cities are represented as smart contracts. Ownership of each country and city is transferred to any user who sends double the amount of ETH the current owner paid.
The scammy nature of this dapp seems to stem from the fact that ETH from the initial purchase transaction goes to the developer (though this has never really been confirmed).
It's either that or people just don't realize that 95~98% of ETH paid when a user usurps control of a country goes straight to the current owner of the country, with the developer receiving only 2~5%. For cities, the developer receives 1% of the ETH paid to usurp control of the city, with 5% going to the current owner of the country that the city is located in, and the remaining 94% being sent to the current owner of the city.
Regardless of whether or not it's a scam, that last bit is the idea that's really interesting to me. But instead of trivial tokens, imagine that this fluid ownership structure was applied to something else, like original content.
Imagine that you can fund creators so they post more artwork, drawings, music recordings, podcasts, blogs or any other creations and you, along with any other supporter, would automatically (via the underlying smart contract) become entitled to a recurring portion of future revenue earned by that specific creator.
Just like CryptoCountries, however, someone could take your shares over by paying double what you did. In order to prevent someone from doing that, for example because you expect your stake in their future revenue to continue to increase due to their increasing popularity, you could simply pay the same smart contract double what you paid.
You would receive all of that money back to your own digital wallet though, save for a fee of say 6% where 5% would go to the creator and 1% would be paid to the developers.
If shares in a musician, for example, were that valuable I think that it would make sense to help increase their value by helping to book new venues, sell tickets or merchandise, or anything else that could increase the artist's revenue and popularity, since a percentage of that increased value would come back to you.
This is kind of amazing to think about. It really feels like this is kind of perfect. And I think I know of the perfect test bed to try this out. I truly feel like this is the beginning of one of those big ideas.
2018년 1월 24일 수요일
Human Proof of Work (PoW)
I saw a tweet the other day that - for some reason or other - I didn't 'heart' or re-tweet so I couldn't find it to reference, but has still nonetheless stuck with me.
The basic gist of the tweet was this: Graduating and receiving a diploma from university is the human equivalent of Proof of Work. It signals to others that you were able to literally put the time and effort into something and can be trusted in some way now that, before receipt of that document, would have been perceived as higher risk or not even considered at all.
Although the poster was drawing a direct link with the consensus mechanism for Bitcoin, I was reminded of my late Great Uncle John. The last summer before heading off to college I was visiting his beach house down in Rehobeth, Delaware.
He and I were chatting when he asked me if the rumors were true that I was heading to Pittsburgh in the autumn to study. I replied yes, and then he put his hand on my shoulder, looked at me with a serious expression (which was out of character for a man who was *always* laughing) and he just said: "A degree is just a piece of paper to prove to others you are willing to put some hard work in and stick around for a little, so make sure you get one."
It was a simple comment, but so many people stil believe that which I guess makes it profound. I can appreciate that profundity, but like many these days, I just can't help but feel that such an expensive and time consuming PoW model is no longer necessary anymore - there are far cheaper, much quicker and more varied ways to verify the same thing.
Anyways after seeing that tweet and thinking about Uncle John, I started to think of some other human PoW examples besides 'graduating from a 4 year college' and I came up with this list:
These are all things that people can do that, whilst difficult and time consuming, tend to result in regular, consistent recognition if not outright admiration from others.
So then I got to thinking, which PoW examples could be changed to a human equivalent of Proof of Stake? How different would those examples look after switching to PoS? How many more people would benefit if it was not only much easier to accomplish something, but if that accomplishment would also provide an equal if not better reward or response from others?
There are many daily activities in many peoples lives that could be accomplished with a fraction of the effort and time, but still provide a similar if not better result as the traditional PoW activity. And this is where I think a lot of Dapps are going to find extremely broad adoption by allowing an easy but powerful way for anyone to stake their reputation, wealth or confidence in order to quickly and efficiently do work that gets them the results they need. I have a few ideas cooking myself that I hope to share soon.
If you are curious about this stream of thought, I recommend you check out the article by @twobitidiot on Medium entitled “Skin-in-the-Game Coins” and pay particular attention to the section on 'Token Curated Registries' which is essentially a human PoS consensus design architecture.
Source: https://medium.com/@twobitidiot/skin-in-the-game-coins-da0afdfdc650
The basic gist of the tweet was this: Graduating and receiving a diploma from university is the human equivalent of Proof of Work. It signals to others that you were able to literally put the time and effort into something and can be trusted in some way now that, before receipt of that document, would have been perceived as higher risk or not even considered at all.
Although the poster was drawing a direct link with the consensus mechanism for Bitcoin, I was reminded of my late Great Uncle John. The last summer before heading off to college I was visiting his beach house down in Rehobeth, Delaware.
He and I were chatting when he asked me if the rumors were true that I was heading to Pittsburgh in the autumn to study. I replied yes, and then he put his hand on my shoulder, looked at me with a serious expression (which was out of character for a man who was *always* laughing) and he just said: "A degree is just a piece of paper to prove to others you are willing to put some hard work in and stick around for a little, so make sure you get one."
It was a simple comment, but so many people stil believe that which I guess makes it profound. I can appreciate that profundity, but like many these days, I just can't help but feel that such an expensive and time consuming PoW model is no longer necessary anymore - there are far cheaper, much quicker and more varied ways to verify the same thing.
Anyways after seeing that tweet and thinking about Uncle John, I started to think of some other human PoW examples besides 'graduating from a 4 year college' and I came up with this list:
- Growing Twitter followers organically
- Climbing the corporate ladder
- Building up Reddit reputation
- Earning regular avc.com upvotes
- Attending church regularly
- Creating a successsful newsletter
- Having a baby with your spouse
- (Feel free to add more)
These are all things that people can do that, whilst difficult and time consuming, tend to result in regular, consistent recognition if not outright admiration from others.
So then I got to thinking, which PoW examples could be changed to a human equivalent of Proof of Stake? How different would those examples look after switching to PoS? How many more people would benefit if it was not only much easier to accomplish something, but if that accomplishment would also provide an equal if not better reward or response from others?
There are many daily activities in many peoples lives that could be accomplished with a fraction of the effort and time, but still provide a similar if not better result as the traditional PoW activity. And this is where I think a lot of Dapps are going to find extremely broad adoption by allowing an easy but powerful way for anyone to stake their reputation, wealth or confidence in order to quickly and efficiently do work that gets them the results they need. I have a few ideas cooking myself that I hope to share soon.
If you are curious about this stream of thought, I recommend you check out the article by @twobitidiot on Medium entitled “Skin-in-the-Game Coins” and pay particular attention to the section on 'Token Curated Registries' which is essentially a human PoS consensus design architecture.
Source: https://medium.com/@twobitidiot/skin-in-the-game-coins-da0afdfdc650
2017년 12월 31일 일요일
A Cryptoeconomic Solution for Modern Oppression
Today there is nothing as oppressive as the expectation of unremunerated attention.
Attention should be understood here as a temporary donation of, at the very least, one's time. This presupposes that actions, objects, programs or messages that attract and capture the attention and time of others *do not* constitute a sufficiently compensatory benefit.
Uncompensated attention should cease to be an assumed expectation or requirement to engage in atomic experiences (e.g. reading or commenting on blogs, voting in elections). Instead, inducing or attracting said attention in exchange for *any* form of acceptable remuneration should be pursued. In my view this is only possible by adopting and applying newly emergent economic incentive architectures facilitated by tools provisioned by cryptoassets and blockchain technology (particularly with regards to 'Smart Contracts'). By pursuing such a strategy we seek to emancipate our global citizenzry from the de facto compulsion to relinquish and forfeit valuable personal time and information in exchange for unremunerated experiences.
Thus, my claim is as follows: All experiences should be *potentially* remunerative.
As the title of this post indicates, we are seeking a cryptoeconomic solution - or at the very least an orientation towards a solution - to the problem of unremunerated attention. It may be helpful if we provide a brief definition here. Cryptoeconomics should be understood as an emerging field of study of how we use digital incentives to drive specific resources and behaviors on decentralized networks that lead to some globally desired result such as security or network effects. There is a site called Cent that has been accessible to anyone around the world with an internet connection at beta.cent.co that is conducting an extremely novel and at the same time deceptively simple cryptoeconomic experiment.
First of all, despite only being around for three months or so, Cent has already established itself as a community - to be sure it is still small by modern internet standards. It aspires to be the de(cent)ralized reddit-meets-quora that in(cent)ivizes users by way of Ether (ETH) bounties. Users pose questions or requests to the community that, crucially, carry with them a set bounty denominated in ETH to incentivize as many respondants as possible, and based on the number of upvotes respondants get from other respondants, they will receive a proportional share of that bounty. The key innovation here is that the payout is carried out by a Smart Contract that runs on the Ethereum network - after a question is submitted it triggers an unstoppable automatic application wherein a pre-set timer begins its countdown with payouts released automatically as soon as the bounty period expires.
So to summarize: Cent allows users to offer ETH (digital incentive) in order to drive other users to provide quality responses vying for that Ether which attracts new users who provide ever more quality responses and pose new questions with bounties to attract new users repeat ad infinitum. They have bootstrapped an active community where users are referred to as Centians. Hundreds of bounties have been set and respondants have received thousands of dollars worth of ETH for their attention. Users even receive a portion of the bounty simply for either upvoting or downvoting responses. This is an *almost* perfectly structured incentive architecture. Almost.
The shortcommings - in my view - stem from how the question/bounty-posing feature has been incentivized - or the lack thereof - and the potential for abuse and gaming of the system as it is set up today. Whilst there may be marginal benefit in being able to relatively reliably source a certain amount of responses, it is a shame that there is no way to at least subsidize bounty setters. As a result bounty values have remained trivial, ranging between $3~20 (relative to the given value of ETH to USD at the time a question/bounty is set). Trivial bounties beget half-hearted responses.
Additionally, there is the growing problem of users setting up multiple accounts to game the system and win a larger share of the bounty. There is currently no mechanism in place to prevent someone from setting up multiple accounts in order to game the system by upvoting their own posts and downvoting others. It isn't hard to imagine even passionate contributers becomming frustrated over time if their attention is undercompensated whilst scammers are receiving 3~5x more, at least. Of course if these issues are not addressed they will most likely inhibit any real growth for Cent and its community. Fellow Centian @Maxsterly has already voiced frustration regarding the inability to subsidize question/bounty-setters and multiple users including @dreambig and @soothsayer have complained about the scammers with multiple accounts. Operating a system based off of decentralized logic makes it more difficult - but not impossible - to minimize or prevent such behaviour.
So to conclude I would like to propose a few potential novel solutions:
Firstly, Cent should provide the option for users to 'tip' bounties that they have an interest in. Tips could be split 50:50 between a) the user who set the bounty and b) the bounty itself by adding to it thus incentivizing better responses.
Secondly, Cent should designate those Centians who have been active and provided thoughtful responses over time as arbiters of up upvoting; create a class of 'Centurions' if you will. This will a) eliminate the negative impact that gamers could and have had whilst b) ensuring that Centians who provide original and thoughtful responses are duly compensated. Of course there should be a mechanism created that allows newer Centians to become Centurions as well. A sufficiently decentralized approach could be setting up a hard threshold. Say that if a Centian receives over 100 upvotes across a minimum of at least 5 posts then they are automatically upgraded to Centurion status.
Projects like Cent are paving the way forward towards a very exciting future. The creators behind Cent deserve a lot of praise and all the support they need. Hopefully the proposed improvements I have included may be of some assistance in creating not just a better user experience on Cent, but a better future for everyone around the world.
Attention should be understood here as a temporary donation of, at the very least, one's time. This presupposes that actions, objects, programs or messages that attract and capture the attention and time of others *do not* constitute a sufficiently compensatory benefit.
Uncompensated attention should cease to be an assumed expectation or requirement to engage in atomic experiences (e.g. reading or commenting on blogs, voting in elections). Instead, inducing or attracting said attention in exchange for *any* form of acceptable remuneration should be pursued. In my view this is only possible by adopting and applying newly emergent economic incentive architectures facilitated by tools provisioned by cryptoassets and blockchain technology (particularly with regards to 'Smart Contracts'). By pursuing such a strategy we seek to emancipate our global citizenzry from the de facto compulsion to relinquish and forfeit valuable personal time and information in exchange for unremunerated experiences.
Thus, my claim is as follows: All experiences should be *potentially* remunerative.
As the title of this post indicates, we are seeking a cryptoeconomic solution - or at the very least an orientation towards a solution - to the problem of unremunerated attention. It may be helpful if we provide a brief definition here. Cryptoeconomics should be understood as an emerging field of study of how we use digital incentives to drive specific resources and behaviors on decentralized networks that lead to some globally desired result such as security or network effects. There is a site called Cent that has been accessible to anyone around the world with an internet connection at beta.cent.co that is conducting an extremely novel and at the same time deceptively simple cryptoeconomic experiment.
First of all, despite only being around for three months or so, Cent has already established itself as a community - to be sure it is still small by modern internet standards. It aspires to be the de(cent)ralized reddit-meets-quora that in(cent)ivizes users by way of Ether (ETH) bounties. Users pose questions or requests to the community that, crucially, carry with them a set bounty denominated in ETH to incentivize as many respondants as possible, and based on the number of upvotes respondants get from other respondants, they will receive a proportional share of that bounty. The key innovation here is that the payout is carried out by a Smart Contract that runs on the Ethereum network - after a question is submitted it triggers an unstoppable automatic application wherein a pre-set timer begins its countdown with payouts released automatically as soon as the bounty period expires.
So to summarize: Cent allows users to offer ETH (digital incentive) in order to drive other users to provide quality responses vying for that Ether which attracts new users who provide ever more quality responses and pose new questions with bounties to attract new users repeat ad infinitum. They have bootstrapped an active community where users are referred to as Centians. Hundreds of bounties have been set and respondants have received thousands of dollars worth of ETH for their attention. Users even receive a portion of the bounty simply for either upvoting or downvoting responses. This is an *almost* perfectly structured incentive architecture. Almost.
The shortcommings - in my view - stem from how the question/bounty-posing feature has been incentivized - or the lack thereof - and the potential for abuse and gaming of the system as it is set up today. Whilst there may be marginal benefit in being able to relatively reliably source a certain amount of responses, it is a shame that there is no way to at least subsidize bounty setters. As a result bounty values have remained trivial, ranging between $3~20 (relative to the given value of ETH to USD at the time a question/bounty is set). Trivial bounties beget half-hearted responses.
Additionally, there is the growing problem of users setting up multiple accounts to game the system and win a larger share of the bounty. There is currently no mechanism in place to prevent someone from setting up multiple accounts in order to game the system by upvoting their own posts and downvoting others. It isn't hard to imagine even passionate contributers becomming frustrated over time if their attention is undercompensated whilst scammers are receiving 3~5x more, at least. Of course if these issues are not addressed they will most likely inhibit any real growth for Cent and its community. Fellow Centian @Maxsterly has already voiced frustration regarding the inability to subsidize question/bounty-setters and multiple users including @dreambig and @soothsayer have complained about the scammers with multiple accounts. Operating a system based off of decentralized logic makes it more difficult - but not impossible - to minimize or prevent such behaviour.
So to conclude I would like to propose a few potential novel solutions:
Firstly, Cent should provide the option for users to 'tip' bounties that they have an interest in. Tips could be split 50:50 between a) the user who set the bounty and b) the bounty itself by adding to it thus incentivizing better responses.
Secondly, Cent should designate those Centians who have been active and provided thoughtful responses over time as arbiters of up upvoting; create a class of 'Centurions' if you will. This will a) eliminate the negative impact that gamers could and have had whilst b) ensuring that Centians who provide original and thoughtful responses are duly compensated. Of course there should be a mechanism created that allows newer Centians to become Centurions as well. A sufficiently decentralized approach could be setting up a hard threshold. Say that if a Centian receives over 100 upvotes across a minimum of at least 5 posts then they are automatically upgraded to Centurion status.
Projects like Cent are paving the way forward towards a very exciting future. The creators behind Cent deserve a lot of praise and all the support they need. Hopefully the proposed improvements I have included may be of some assistance in creating not just a better user experience on Cent, but a better future for everyone around the world.
피드 구독하기:
글 (Atom)