Author: BlockchainBud
Date: February 4, 2018

1.- Intro

The purpose of this document is to lay out some initial ideas for the group I would like to establish.

Important: You should not join this group to make money. Our primary motivation is to learn and build together while contributing to the blockchain ecosystem. We will utilize tokens as motivation, but there should be no expectation they will ever be worth anything.

Additionally:

  • We will never do an ICO
  • We will not pre-mine or pre-issue any tokens (we start with zero)
  • The only (current) use for our tokens will be to reward each other

2.- What Our Group Will Be

A self-organizing, self-governing group dedicated to advancing the blockchain ecosystem.

Every member of the group will be an owner. Initially, some assets will be stored with an “owner” for convenience during the startup phase, but we will transition to community owned in a timely manner. Any work contributed will be open source, and therefore any member is free to “fork” the group if they so choose.

3.- Why (Our Purpose)

The purpose of this group is to connect with like minded individuals, build a community around common goals, and to collectively build new skills that will be useful in a blockchain future. You could think of it as a talent incubator.

Eventually we want to be an all-inclusive, permissionless group. This would allow anyone, no matter their age, experience, or skill level, to contribute to our projects in whatever way they can, building their skills in the process, and receiving value for their contributions.

4.- Token Incentivisation and Economic Model

In order to align incentives and award participation, members of the group should earn tokens for contributing value. All contributed value will be rewarded and the reward amount will be set by peers both before and (for a certain amount of time) after task completion.

Any value contributed can be rewarded, not just commits / merged pull requests. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Testing and submitting bugs;
  • Writing up documentation;
  • Marketing our completed apps;
  • Creating graphic designs;
  • Writing up new feature requests;
  • Project management work;
  • Contributing value to discussions; and,
  • …anything else the group assigns value to.

We will start out with zero tokens. The only way for tokens to come into existence is for value to be contributed.

There are ideas in place on how to quantify the value per task as well as to prevent abuse and hoarding, but those specifics will be discussed among the initial smart contract team rather than in this initial planning phase.

Our tokens will start off with zero real world value. But remember why we are doing this. The tokens are not about making money, but about receiving recognition for the value you contribute.

Once our internal economy is kicking along, we can collectively work on tweaking the issuance model (and future inflation) until it is mature and stable.

5.- Phase One

To pave the way for an incentivized collaboration system, we first need smart contracts for token issuance and token management.

Two options raised for this were Colony.io and GitToken. I sent an email to Colony requesting access to their beta program (waiting for reply), but I’m not sure if we should use either of those. They do, however, provide very good food for thought.

Since our goal is to expand our blockchain based skills, it may be more advantageous to build our own smart contracts as our first project. This would be a launching point for opening up the group to more members and spawning sub groups, each with their own projects.

Our focus should be on making our custom contracts as minimal as possible, and using other open-source contracts/tools to augment them.

First, and most important, we should consider following Standard Bounties

Some other examples of future features we could add using open contracts: Identity and reputation management Dispute resolution

6.- Phase Two

After we have a system in place for rewarding value contributions, we can continue building more open source blockchain based projects together, even contributing to existing open source software.

The next logical project might be a user interface for interacting with our custom smart contracts.

Sound Like Something You’re Interested In? If so, please follow this link to join our Slack team