Welcome to Skin In The Game experiment two! While sitg-one is ongoing, this time we’ll doing something a bit differently, namely play around with a liquid pledging model. As before, we assume a trusted setup (see previous post as to why this is an OK assumption for now).
This experiment directly targets Q3 OKRs re Liquid pledging.
Pre-requisite reading
- Future of Giving: What is the Future of Giving?. A description of the Giveth Donation… | by Kris Decoodt | Giveth
- Overview of liquid pledging: https://wiki.giveth.io/documentation/product-definition/
- SITG Experiment #1 Status.app
For context, please skim the above links to get a basic understanding of how this will work.
Assuming a base level understanding of liquid pledging, outlined below are the relevant groups, roles as well as how you can participate as an individual entity.
Groups
DAC
A DAC (decentralized altruistic community). A DAC is owned by a delegate who delegates donations to Campaigns linked to the DAC. In our case, this is is sitg-two / DAC0.
DAC0 is very simple. Its role is to experiment with high impact liquid pledging experiments that are clearly defined. Its goal is also to remove itself - assuming success, it should be replaced by other DACs that are encoded in contracts. Yours truly is the self-nominated delegate of this DAC0. This might be replaced by a multsig, but it’s likely this will instead happen in other DACs. Currently, DAC0 intends to self-destruct 19Q2 at the latest.
It will self-organize in #dac-zero in Status.
Idea
A campaign is literally an idea (https://ideas.status.im/) in our world.
Specifically which ideas will be financed remains to be seen, but the initial interest of this DAC is to finance Whisper Tests and Notes - HackMD. Why?
a) Clear purpose - simply to test the hypothesis:
Whisper will start to drop messages at network capacity, and capacity will never be large enough to adopt a sufficient userbase.
b) High impact - if we can’t scale Whisper, this is fundamental to our tech stack and means we need to prioritize other solutions.
c) Believability - high rigor and reasonable plan. the parameterized things to track show a good understanding of the problem domain / variables involved, as well as statistical distributions, both things which are requirements in order to talk about scalability rigorous.
The main thing that is missing is a clear plan of action in terms of milestones and participants. The funding decision is pending this missing piece, for example through an Idea proposal.
Other campaigns/ideas might also be interesting but probably not as an initial step, assuming above goes through.
Milestones
This is specific to the campaign and up to the campaign manager / swarm lead.
Roles
1. Swarm Lead (Campaign manager)
One agent. Assuming we go through with Breaking Whisper campaign above, that’d Corey. Anyone listed as swarm lead in our Ideas repo.
Responsible for creating milestones to fund work of people.
If Breaking Whisper doesn’t go through, another (set of) ideas might become relevant for this.
2. Swarm Reviewer (Campaign reviewer)
One agent. This is a person who can reject a milestone’s completion, cancel milestones and cancel milestones if necessary. This is largely useful for fraud, but also for things like “set goal for milestone not fulfilled”.
This role remains to be filled! Please volunteer for this role if this is something you’d be interesting. This person must be OK saying “not good enough” and not just go long with whatever swarm lead says.
3. Delegate
One agent. Oskar for DAC0. Probably a multisig later on for future DACs.
4. Giver
Multiple agents. Currently Oskar only at $1000 in SNT. Open invitation for anyone to join to either donate straight to DAC / Idea / Milestone. For example, if you think Breaking Whisper is a great idea but you don’t want to support other experiments done in DAC0, then you’d just donate straight to the campaign and skipping DAC step.
A giver can rescind their donations at ay time.
5. Milestone Manager
One agent per milestone. TBD by swarm lead.
6. Milestone Reviewer
One agent per milestone. TBD by swarm lead.
7. Recipient
One entity per milestone. TBD by swarm lead.
Practically speaking
A lot of the specifics around how value flows will instead be logged on paper, e.g. in this thread or in idea. In terms of end payment logistics, we’ll figure it out as we go, and probably need support from finance/people ops for this in terms of the “final mile” (recipients actually getting transactions).
The first steps in the process is (see state diagram, fig 6):
- Donate to DAC0
- Idea / campaign proposal
Also note that, for the time being, payments are currently in addition to whatever compensation you are already receiving.
As before, the $ is in SNT at the time of payment (which is TBD).
Example paper trail
As a sequence of events. Example only, at the time of this writing only 1 happened:
- Oskar gives $1000 to DAC0
- Alice gives $500 to DAC0
- DAC0 gives Breaking Whisper swarm lead $1000
- Bob gives $500 directly to Breaking Whisper
- Breaking Whisper idea breaks up into 3 milestones and funds each with $250
- Dr. Celsius gives milestone 2 directly with $250 extra
- Bob rescinds their funding from Breaking Whisper because he think they are solving the wrong problem
- Dangerine gives $500 to DAC0 pool
- DAC0 adds another $250 to Breaking Whisper idea
- Elvis completes milestone 1 successfully and gets $250 reward (actual tx)
After all the steps this is what the balance would look like:
- Giver Oskar: -1000
- Giver Alice: -500
- Giver Bob: -500+500=0
- Giver Celsius: -250
- Giver Dangerine: -500
- DAC DACO has 1000+500-1000+500-250=$750
- Idea Breaking Whisper has 1000+500-(250*3)-500+500=$500
- Milestone Breaking Whisper 1: $250-250=0
- Milestone Breaking Whisper 2: $250+250=$500
- Milestone Breaking Whisper 3: $250
- Recipient Elvis $250
DAC next
Future editions of DACS are likely to (a) be encoded in smart contracts (b) involve multi delegates and e.g. multisig/oracles to some extent (c) some restriction/recycling of funds to make sure we don’t pay double salary (i.e. promise X of salary for potential 120%*X, etc - separate discussion) and (d) principles signature as a registration step. These points are outside the scope of present interest.
How to participate
There are a few roles open to participation, in rough order of priority:
- Become a giver to DAC0, campaign or a specific milestone. For the purpose of this experiment, DAC0 would be most useful, but this is ultimately up to you.
Note that there’s no minimum (or maximum) limit for this. Whatever you feel comfortable with.
-
Become a swarm lead and post idea with specific ask. This might be Corey or it might be you.
-
Pending swarm specifics: become a swarm reviewer, milestone manager, milestone reviewer or recipient ($$$ ^H $). If someone wants to volunteer as a swarm reviewer already that’d be useful too.
