I continue brainstorming around whacky crypto ideas. Here is another one. Original post is here:
https://blog.sourcerer.io/no-proof-of-work-required-cryptocurrency-for-open-source-8aa0b01371eI pasted the text below as well. Any thoughts are welcome. Especially, if you see something that does not make sense.
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No Proof of Work Required (Cryptocurrency for Open Source)Last time around (
https://medium.com/@sergey_surkov/random-a-marriage-between-crypto-and-ai-1a3f4aa752ca), I described a blockchain with a proof of useful work: a blockchain that uses processing power to train neural networks instead of hashing nearly the same data over and over. One of my readers said something interesting to me: “So it’s a proof of work by artificial intelligence? Is there a counterpart for humans?” And this got me thinking. Is there already a stream of verifiable work made by people that cryptocurrency can ride on top of?
Of course, there is. The work that the open source community does every day is exactly that. Every day, commits flow into myriads of open source projects all over the world representing human work that everybody can see and that is very difficult to fake, especially in more popular projects that have to follow strict code review procedures, require extensive unit testing, who are very careful about stability of their projects, and are interested in preserving their reputation. What would a crypto currency on top of open source activity could look like?
Let’s start with a commit in a respectable open source project serving as a proof work. The author of such commit then will have the right to add a block to a cryptographic ledger. Commits are usually not cryptographically signed although it’s possible for example for Git (
https://git-scm.com/book/id/v2/Git-Tools-Signing-Your-Work). But normally it’s just email that gets saved in a repository. This means that we will need some sort of verification process but I will leave this out of the scope of this post.
Once the author forms the block of new transactions, and lists their new open source commit ID there, they will also add a transaction that rewards them for participation in the system - and for their work on open source. This is a counterpart of a coinbase transaction. To promote open source effort, we could try to issue higher reward for more complicated commits, for instance; commits that are code edits versus README edits, commits that change older code, orr commits that change files that are imported from many places, and so on.
A single open source commit may appear a flimsy foundation, but it’s easy to strengthen it by requiring multiple authors from unrelated projects to sign the new block as well. They will verify all previous commits, and pending transactions, and then will add their coinbase transactions into their block, and sign the whole thing. Block acceptance by nodes will work similarly: all network nodes will need to clone open source repositories from well known locations, and verify that transactions, signatures, and open source commits all valid. A block then is considered valid if a majority of its commits are valid (to account for rare cases when an open source project by some reason somehow destroys the signing commit).
What this does is a very interesting thing. It puts newly minted tokens into the hands of open source developers. If there is a demand side to this somehow, for example, freelancers or outsourcers asking to be paid in this open source coin, it could provide a universal way of monetizing all useful open source effort. How cool is that?
Not doing an ICO for this one either. But it could be a useful feature for
https://sourcerer.io/.
