A lot of questions have been raised about Matchpool's functionality, we drafted some of them, please read and share your thoughts with me
What stops people from spamming the network in search of people who may accept matches (no penalty for number of proposals created)?So there are three ways we will deal with this attack vector.
A) Sock puppet accounts are difficult on Matchpool because we intend to associate accounts with the user's identity. First of all by using Facebook or other social networks to sign up, and in the long term integrating a decentralized identity protocol like uPort.
B) Many business models involve the two "matchees" paying to create a match, and when a match is accepted, it is posted on the both participant's "notebook" which is a public record. This means it is highly unlikely that you will find other people who are willing pay out of their own pocket just so you can gain a certain number of matchpoints. There may be an attack vector if the potential reward from gaining matchpoints exceeds the cost to matchees for accepting the match- in which case the matcher could reimburse his co-conspirators while keeping the profit. In this case we could build a warning/notification when the pool host is setting the various rewards for different match categories, or we could make the cost to the matchees proportional to the reward the matcher would recieve so that attack vector would become impossible.
C) It is up to pool hosts to set the rules about the kind of matches that are possible, including setting a price for matchees. They also have the ability to ban pool-members who are exploiting trust.
If rewards are highest for matching new users, and someone hasn’t been matched in a long time, could you argue that they are harder to match/engage? Should longer term users not be just as high a priority as new users?The way I look at this is that there is a "bonus" for matching new users, but you will still be rewarded for matching long term existing users. There is not some constantly deteriorating rate the longer one is in the pool (although that would be an interesting experiment...). It's best to think of it in terms of the "normal rate" for existing members and a "bonus rate" for new members. It certainly doesn't mean that existing members are harder to engage, it just makes new members feel more welcome.
If levels of relationship status carry varying incentives, who proposes the next step after the initial match? How to people know what the next step is?There is no next step necessarily. Match Categories are created by the pool host and are not necessarily part of a particular "workflow"- remember pools can be set up for many purposes besides just relationships. All that happens is that both matchees must agree to the match, which is then posted on their public notebook. For relationships, Matchpool will probably create a new dapplet backed by a different contract which creates a kind of narrative through steps in a relationship, but for the early version of Matchpool we will be using the Poolmaker dapplet which does not have such checks.
20% of tokens are held back for new user acquisition (divided amongst the first 250,000 users).
How will you ensure that users only signup for one account and not take advantage of the new user reward to just “signup with new wallet addresses and sell GUP in the market”?See answer to Question 1A. People must associate their identity to recieve an incentive. Firstly by checking a Facebook profile and ensuring that it is at least 1 year old (to stop sock puppet sign ups). Secondly by integrating an identity service like uPort when it has reached maturity. Users on Matchpool can also have a testnet account with limited functionality without having to verify their identity.
