Content Kiosk Report: Week of February 11th

Introducting the Content Kiosk Report!

Hi everyone! This is our first Content Kiosk weekly report! This is a digest of all of the links that were posted in the #content-kiosk channel on the DappSociety Slack. I did my best to catch all of the information and present it in a way that can help you quickly find articles and content which can help you on your projects (or ones which you are just interested in reading!). As always, this is open to additions, edits, and suggestions! We are always looking to improve moving forward. Enjoy!

Note: All of the information provided below is digested from the publications of the attributed individuals/organizations. Anything not in quotes is an interpretation and isn’t meant to be presented as original content.

Chaos vs Order -The Cryptocurrency Dilemma

The article briefly outlines how cryptocurrency alters the way our world operates and brings up important questions about how cryptocurrency will change societies. For example:

"Who has the right to know about our personal productivity and speculation?"

"What could happen with provincial taxation in an age of global financial anonymity?"

Top Highlight:

"For the first time in history we see the possibility of financial freedom that is not aligned with the interests of sub-states, governments and global cooperatives.  This will be the real narrative to watch in the next 10 years."

Dharma Tutorial (less guided crypto zombies)

This tutorial is less guided than crypto zombies and tests familiarity with Solidity. It isn’t challenging per say but does require a level of comfort navigating Solidity smart contracts. The following are some of the skills tested throughout the tutorial:

• Importing contracts
• Function declarations
• Simple return functions
• Assigning a value of ether to a variable
• Using Methods
• Instance variables with mapping
• And more! Check out the tutorial to get even more familiar with Solidity!

Announcing Aragon Labs

"Where research meets development"

An organization focused on creating governance platforms for organizations. They settled upon focusing their initial efforts on governance for open source blockchain projects! They started reaching out to people in November of 2017 to get feedback on their needs.

"Our goal is to enable individuals to organize freely, securely, and transparently. We want to provide a decentralized digital jurisdiction for blockchain-first organizations"

They are working on initial experiments with governance over a registry due to the potential high upside and limited downside.

"registries as a general data structure have broad utility. We see them as having tremendous potential across the entire Ethereum ecosystem"

They currently have 2 main working groups:

1. Modular Token Curated Registries
2. Liquid Democracy

Blockchain as a Service: 23 Million Reasons to Help Advance the Future of Blockchain

In this article, Mustafa Inamullah address adoption, scope, industry disruption, and limitations of Blockchain as a Service (BaaS)

Key takeaways:

• ICO market grew over $4 billion in 2017
• Estimated that Google’s computing power is only 5% of the total computing power of the bitcoin blockchain
• “Technology becomes truly useful when it becomes invisible” (talking about HTTPS and relating it to BaaS)
• Demand for blockchain connection outpaces supply by about 88,462%
• Need to implement Proof of Stake to solve the massive electricity consumption problem
• Implementations such as Plasma can help solve the need for high transaction speeds
• Polkadot: Uses proof of stake mechanics to allow for token interoperability, allowing blockchains to interact with each other seamlessly, helping solve the massive influx of tokens.
• MIMIR relies on a distributed model where nodes can get paid to share blockchain access to help meet demand
• Unfortunately, at this point BaaS requires a certain level of centralization

Persona: Zero Knowledge Identity Blockchain

The following takeaways are from their Executive Summary

• A solution for identity management
• Working to empower the individual, granting them control over their personal data and the ability to secure access to their private details
• Allows companies to offer Know Your Customer (KYC) services to a third party
• Allows individuals to provide selected services access to their info, offered at a document-level
• Identity Fragmentation using ARK Ecosystem provides cross-chain verification
• Composed of a blockchain, Web app and dashboard, and a mobile app to help with data management.
• They use Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS)
  • Delegates selected by vote mechanism built into DPOS)
• Provides an Inter-planetary File System (IPFS) type system for sharing documents and files between users.

Different Approaches to Ethereum Identity Standards

Identity standards are challenging to create and explain to people they will impact

“Core Identity Concepts: * Identity has some sort of unique identifier * Parties (sometimes including the identity themselves) can make claims about an identity. Claims are basically attributes, such as a name, address, email, etc. The reason the identity world calls these ‘claims’ is that they are not necessarily treated as fact unless you trust who makes the claim. * There is some way of asking a user for their identity. * There is some way of looking up claims about an identity”

ERC 725 implementation can help manage identities using Ethereum

Top Highlight:

"One important concept and a major difference to note about uPort is that each Identity manages all the above [bullets about ERC] in a single, monolithic smart contract instance owned by the Identity holder."

Summary of uPort’s implementation

"The number one fear people/implementers/regulators have about blockchain identity is if private information has to be stored on the public blockchain."

Diagram of the layers used for basic identity use in uPort and ERC 725

"The key takeaway here is that ERC 725 has almost everything incorporated into a single Monolithic Standard/Contract."

5 killer-apps to take blockchain mainstream, whilst civilizing the planet

Blockchain is still waiting for an application which can show the world the benefit of blockchain and help them understand how to adapt it into our society. He states that this is how society has always adapted new technologies.

Proposes 5 apps:

1. Medicoin: Get paid Medicoin’s for donating DNA or blood. Used to help further research in the healthcare industry.
2. RailCoin: Interesting idea surrounding revolutionizing the rail transportation system, using coins to align incentive in the new rail company, creating a cooperatively owned and run rail company with additional benefits for members.
   • I really liked the following statement: “By having a personal relationship RailCo can tweak incentives: “Hey Jo, it’s raining today so demand is higher because fewer people are cycling. If you can work from home, brave the weather and cycle, or travel after 10am we’ll give you 5 RailCoins to use on any off-peak journey.” Those ‘gift’ RailCoins represent capacity would otherwise go unused, so can be allocated for ‘free’, with the benefit that the services are improved for all users.”
3. BasicIncome / Generational inequality coin
   • Give everyone “30,000 BIGI coins and see what happens”
   • Base it off of something useful to create value
4. Unburnable Coin
   • Coal that can’t be burned due to global warming limits has created stranded assests with estimated values of 4 - 100 trillion dollars
   • Create 4 trillion unburnable coin which can only be spent on clean energy generation or trade
   • Give 3 trillion to fossil fuel companies to compensate for the unburned coal to give them an out.
5. EcoCoin
   • Say that trees have a much higher value than their cost, and people would go plant trees to make money.
   • Trees would need tracking
   • Associate it with unburnable coin

A lot of interesting brainstorms. I really appreciate the authors ability to not shy away from radical ideas. There’s a lot that can be developed from the ideas hes presented, even though they aren’t worked out to their functional state. This article demonstrates the value of brainstorming projects.

Decentralized Startups

Video of Assembly which describing who they are. Particularly interesting especially given how DappSociety operates. Briefly touches on how the system works on a more detailed level but definitely hits on all of the benefits.

Product Hunt briefly considered letting the community build the product opposed to hiring locally, but that introduced a lot of challenges, which are now being solved by blockchain.

Challenges with decentralized startups:

* "mediocrity through committee design.  Innovative products aren't built by a democracy. 
* Protection against competing startups in a fluid, open market. NDA's exist to protect IP and combat gaming (imagine if Facebook's news feed algorithm was entirely transparent).
* Loyalty of talent.  While vesting and exclusivity may be a disadvantage to talent, they're a feature of centralized startups, incentivizing people to push through hard times. Many successful startups may not be here today if employment was as fluid as the shoes one chooses to wear each morning."

Now assembly’s mission is being revived by a new wave of people who believe in decentralized startups:

• Ellcrys
• Origin
• District0x
• Aragon
• SDKD
• Horizon State
• Colony
• Comakery
• Gitcoin
• Bounty0x
• The Dao

Top Highlight:

"While early and unproven, decentralized startups may pose a serious threat to centralized startups. In a mature market, the former will be attractive to talented people, enabling contributors to choose which projects they want to work on without being tied to vesting schedules or exclusivity commitments and receive direct compensation (and potentially financial freedom) working on projects they truly care about"-Ryan Hoover

This quote is super exciting. As I was typing it, its implications started to hit me. This could create an entirely different world than the one we know now.

State of Decentralized Exchanges, 2018

"Trading comes with risks, but traders should not face any other risks than those they are already willing to take."

"Exchanges are centralized because it is the simplest way to proceed, and it is either too costly or technically complex to build fully decentralized platforms - for now, at least"

More than 99% of cryptocurrency transactions go through centralized exchanges.

"Centralized crypto-exchanges may soon become obsolete as they lose the opportunity to leverage blockchain technology to improve their capabilities and efficiency."

"Decentralized exchanges promises two major benefits: Security & control and global marketplace": Sounds like three benefits?

No single point of failure solves a lot of the issues with centralized exchanges, a result which appropriately fits blockchain technology in the first place.

Comprehensive list of projects which are working on decentralized exchanges in some capacity.

The main two factors slowing the adoption of decentralized exchanges are education and technology.

Top Highlight:

"Centralized exchanges will continue to play a critical role in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, because they offer fiat on/off-ramps."

Cryptozombies

A great tutorial for anyone whose interested in smart contracts but isn’t quite sure where to start!

Introducing Curation Markets: Trade Popularity of Memes & Information (with code!)

Top Highlight:

"Each topic/meme/idea/goal has an associated token of value that is used to curate information inside it."

Ethereum allows groups to mint tokens of value, according to agreed upon rules, without centralized third party involvement.

The core functional components of curation markets involve: * A token that can be minted at any time (continuous) according to a price set by the smart contract * This price gets more expensive as more tokens are in circulation * The amount paid for the token is kept in a communal deposit. * At any point in time, a token can be withdrawn (“burned”) from the active supply, and a proportional part of the communal deposit can be taken with. * The tokens are used to bond it to curators per sub-topic, who then curate information with their proportional backing. “

Whitepaper for Curation Markets

Top Highlight:

"Any open source project can have an associated curation market attached [to] it, helping it to make sure what pull requests should be merged and what features to consider."

Memetic Singularity Economics using Curation Markets & Meme Futures (Prediction Markets)

"In short: it's a low-barrier system that rewards participants directly for surfacing relevant information." 

Top Highlight:

"Combining prediction markets with the ability to value information, allows us to make direct bets on how the world's knowledge will grow."

Systems such as these which thrive off of information asymmetry will eventually end up “Curating all information in existence, up to the point where it becomes valuable to directly produce new, novel information in order to earn from doing so.”

Top Highlight:

"Instead of encapsulating information into legacy forms (such as a corporation) in order to earn from its arbitrage, the game will simply become the act of producing novel information."

My favorite line:

"Instead of relative linear growth of the economy, we could see the world economy grow at the same rate that we produce information: exponentially?"

Tokens 2.0: Curved Token Bonding in Curation Markets

"Curation Markets is a set of protocol designs that aims to reduce information asymmetry through the use of tokenized signals. Tokens are minted as needed through a continuous token model."

Top Highlight:

"Within the projects announced the past few months, the most important facet from Curation Markets that these projects are adopting is the continuous token bonding curve. They are adopting it a level much more granular than I expected."

Premise of a bond curve:

1. Project tokens can be bought with other tokens, like ETH. The ETH acts as a deposit in the smart contract and isn’t disbursed.
2. The “buy price” is determined by the current supply of the new token which is hardcoded by an algorithmic curve.
3. At any time, someone can sell back their Project token to the communal pool and get out an appropriate reward that is set by a sell curve.

This creates a market within itself which rewards participants for being early to project buy-ins. Setting different tokens for different projects makes it easier to fit the value being produced from these separate projects.

"The crypto economic feedback loops necessary to sustain certain systems will only work if the value being produced is mapped to its own token."

Lists projects that have been announced using bonding curves.

The article is hard to digest given the topic. I definitely recommend reading it for a better understanding. Only takes ~7 minutes.

StandardBounties Complete Documentation by ConsenSys

I’m going to leave the summary below, however I recommend reading this document in its entirety as its challenging to digest without losing important information and understanding.

Summary: “A bounty is a simple mechanism for individuals or groups to pay out for the completion of tasks. The issuer of the bounty begins by deploying a new bounty contract, during which time any of the storage variables (like bounty requirements or payout amount) can be altered. Once sufficient funds have been deposited into the contract, the issuer may activate the bounty, allowing bounty hunters to submit fulfillments for the bounty task. The issuer can then approve the submitted work, releasing the payout funds to the bounty hunter in question.”

Contributions to this weeks Content Kiosk Report

@ericbrown99: Content digestion and editing of initial publication