I’m growing more and more concerned about the reliance on GitHub.
And starting to think a bounty isn’t the right way to fund this work.
Discussion
There's more connecting all of this. It's all in a poem, funnily enough.
The key part is to look at the components as they present themselves in real life.
Bitcoin replicated meat-space money, best version of it at that.
What are we replicating digitally? It's so simple to see if you stumble upon that poem.
As soon as "chat", "social network", "such as Y" is used you've gone miles past the exit. Lower level than that. With everything connecting it.
At a more abstract level of analysis, I think the problem we're trying to solve is a distributed consensus mechanism, not for transactions, but arbitrary data. Solving decentralized GitHub and Wikipedia are the same problem.
I have a feeling that a chain of Nostr events linked by digital signatures will be part of the solution. I'll keep making hellthreads until someone builds a UI for them.
😉
Agree
The first big escalation will provide incentives.
does it need a larger bounty? maybe have the bounties split up among smaller feature sets?
Not sure the bounty model incentivizes the right work
Time to build the BTC Cup! Similar to the Stanley Cup, but different. 
do you generally suspect the builder of such a thing might be able to capture some value long term despite it being open source/data?
e.g. open source/data paired with an enterprise commercial service?
Agree. It might sometimes. But for example, my teaching colleague and I have worked *really* hard to develop a team/brand that teaches Bitcoin basics to other teachers during Professional Development Seminars. So far we've presented to 450 teachers in our Metro city of Canada.
Feedback shows that we do an exceptional job of delivering objective, vetted and easily digestible learning. Smash success!
But we are burned out trying to run a start-up while also working our day jobs. We need help. We need resources. We need to be able to leave our jobs for at least a year and build full time. Jeff Booth gave a talk I attended recently about leaving your job to work on BTC full time. I'd love to curriculum build full time... but we need funds. We've done the #ProofOfWork... but in a sense haven't received enough mining. 🤙⚡️ Not complaining. Just saying talented people are honing their skills in day jobs and passions.
Bounties are an anti-pattern that spawn from centrally planned thinking 😉
If we knew exactly what problems to solve ahead of time, bounties (and many other forms of central planning) would be the most efficient way to discover solutions, and we also wouldn’t need two hemispheres of the brain.
Two old engineers were talking of their lives and boasting of their greatest projects. One of the engineers explained how he had designed the largest bridge ever made.
"We built it across a river gorge," he told his friend. "It was wide and deep. We spent two years studying the land, and choosing designs. Then we hired the best people and designed the bridge, which took another five years. We contracted the largest engineering firms to build the structures, the towers, the tollbooths, and the roads that would connect the bridge to the main highways. Under the road level we had trains, and a special path for cyclists. That bridge represented years of my life."
The second man reflected for a while, then spoke. "One evening me and a friend threw a rope across a gorge," he said. "Just a rope, tied to two trees. There were two villages, one at each side. At first, people pulled packages across that rope with a pulley and string. Then someone pulled across a second rope, and built a foot walk. It was dangerous, but the kids loved it. A group of men then rebuilt that, made it solid, and women started to cross, everyday, with their produce. A market grew up on one side of the bridge, and slowly that became a large town, since there was a lot of space for houses. The rope bridge got replaced with a wooden bridge, to allow horses and carts to cross. Then the town built a real stone bridge, with metal beams. Later, they replaced the stone part with steel, and today there's a suspension bridge standing in that same spot."
The first engineer was silent. "Funny thing," he said, "my bridge was demolished not long after it was built. Turns out it was built in the wrong place and no-one wanted to use it. Some bastard had thrown a rope across the gorge, a few miles further downstream, and that's where everyone went."
I think that any time you require incentives or guaranteed payment (e.g. a bounty) to solve a problem then 80% of the time whatever gets built is already obsoleted by people solving their own problems for their own reasons (just takes a while to become obvious).
IMO the "github" problem is implicitly nested under a more urgent and important problem facing Bitcoin (and humanity), and solving it nullifies the github problem. Currently implementing the solution, if correct then it will percolate up to you.
Worth a zap man spent hour writing that!
I volunteer as a smoke tester, whenever that comes to play ▶️
Can't zap you bro
Nevermind I can #hehe
I suggest we start already to code on nostr, does not matter what, just do it. This brings to light what is needed for code sharing.
For example, integrating a prettifier inside Nostr could already be significant. Also, a search and replace.
Funding the whole ecosystem seems to be still a gigantic question at this stage, and I have not seen much discussion about it. I might be following the wrong people…
What are the popular ideas/models floating around? Any pointers?
Maybe it’s way too big of a project for one or two people to take on?
It’s a large undertaking that will take multiple well funded people a lot of time to implement. Or, we could just fork something like GitLab and develop it into something independent. Then there are things like maintenance and making sure it runs smoothly. I don’t think bounty is the solution here! 🐶🐾🫡
Time for a job req? 🙂
Probably thinking too small. How do you bootstrap an open source product or organization? Esp in the face of stiff competition from an established, well-funded, and free-to-use competitor.
I don’t really understand bounties. Am I supposed to drop what I’m doing and put hundreds of hours into something and hope I win? Maybe that makes sense for a teenager or a new developer but not a professional with a family and bills to pay.
Agree. Thinking this through more
My thought, would integrate the v4v model in kinda way
v4v is cool but corporations are willing to pay more for a skilled developers time. It then becomes hard to justify putting in the hours for such a small reward. This might not be the case if you have a large social media presence and can get eyes on your work and people to promote you. Most developers don’t have this. There’s a lot of passion in this space so it kinda works but you are still missing out on the majority of the talent pool with that model.
Maybe pay someone to manage the project using bounties to get code written.
I was about to write the same 🤙 It would be an amazing thing to help build, but with this setup, there is no option.
thinktank hackathon. on site
There’s gotta be a way to create the #nostr equivalent of a GitHub.
Any particular event recently occurred to cause concern?
How about smaller bounties with clear objectives?
A complete GitHub replacement would take significant effort and probably a team effort which might be challenging to start working on without funding confirmed (for a business).
We’ve been working on the bounty daily. Canceling it would kill the developer traction I’ve got going (1 guy on UI, 1 guy integrating UI into backend, & 1 guy coding the backend for repo storage). We’re each working on a different part of the project and it was even enough to get Robin from ZeroSync to make Sats4File — a new cryptographic scheme for trading sats for files/repos off-chain over Lightning, like an atomic smart contract. 
At this point, we’re going to finish building it either way… really hope you don’t cancel it though! We’ve got quite a motivated team.
You should just open it all up and build it in the open, nostr not bluesky, ppl want to help you and review I’m sure
I agree…
We were only hesitant to open up until we were further along because it would be easy for someone to steal our code & make a poorer functioning version to claim the bounty before we completed it.
It was a financial competition afterall, so we had to act accordingly.
If you develop in the open it’s clear to all who did what work, with zaps the value flow can start immediately from those you deliver value to.
#[2] you did incentive something, but you’re right to think harder about if it was the correct thing, maybe grants to promising teams and devs who are making progress to the goal.
I’d love to sit down and discuss how this works in-depth if they’re interested. If we had some coders at square/spiral help us, we could definitely move faster. ⌨️
Git was made for email. Use the intended workflow but with Nostr messages instead. Layer in GitHub features one by one, creating pubkeys to “follow” for each repo to get updates. Probably needs its own client and UX.
Maybe directly recruit developers who feel strongly about the project and they have already completed projects of similar scale.
The bounty wasn't specific enough, because "replace GitHub" is really broad. GitHub does a really wide amount of things really poorly.
Could you list the feature list you were hoping for?
This seems like something the folks at protocol labs (IPFS) would be well suited to help with. Using nostr as the event later and IPFS/IPLD as the storage layer seems like a winning combo.
IPFS is a nightmare, though merkle trees are indeed vital to storing large repos. That’s how IPFS handles storage.
What's nightmareish about it?
1. Centralized bootstrapping: you must rely on a centralized set of nodes to connect into the network.
2. No user-server model: users are forced to spin up a server to browse their decentralized web. You can’t even turn a file into a merkle tree without being forced to spin up an IPFS blockstore server.
3. Their Merkle Trees/DAGs are not optimized for downloading one branch at a time, because you must download a list of all children hashes when downloading any parent hashes — creating excessively bloated merkle branches.
1. Centralized bootstrapping: you must rely on a centralized set of nodes to connect into the network.
2. No user-server model: users are forced to spin up a server to browse their decentralized web. You can’t even turn a file into a merkle tree without being forced to spin up an IPFS blockstore server.
3. Their Merkle Trees/DAGs are not optimized for downloading one branch at a time, because you must download a list of all children hashes when downloading any parent hashes — creating excessively bloated merkle branches.
We’ve invented a new type of Merkle Tree/DAG that has the ability to map file directories like IPFS Merkle DAGs, and maintains the small branches of Merkle Trees for quick user validation.
This achievement may help projects independently of Nostr.
Jack, would you like our team to write a paper explaining everything? From how we store repos, to our optimized trees and layered architecture… happy to share.
That way you and the communities on #nostr can assess our approach before we complete the project. Thoughtful criticism is always welcome.
Hmm. I believe you have the ability to specify bootstrap servers. And my understanding is that IPFS is more of a foundational protocol on which to build services that can offer a user-server model (like https://web3.storage/ ) so I'd imagine a service that acts as a nostr relay and has an ipfs node in combination to provide git services.
I don't have knowledge of your third item though.
We’re replacing IPFS with a layer 2 off-chain storage system that stores files with our optimized merkle trees, like IPFS does, but we ditch their bootstrapping system for a trust-minimized relay discovery system.
The node running this storage system also runs a git server, as you suggested. I have to say, I explained the basics of our storage system with merkle root on-chain — but I haven’t gone in-depth on how we’re doing the GitHub itself in context to the storage system.
Happy to share, just was trying to finish it before someone else did — it was a competition afterall.
Cool. I'm curious to learn more. Got a link?
Haven’t released the new merkle trees yet. We’ve only released the whitepaper on how we put merkle roots on-chain to sync the nodes hosting the merkle trees. I think it’s time to reveal how everything else works, given the concern around the bounty and everyone’s curiosity.
https://medium.com/@colbyserpa/nostr-2-0-layer-2-off-chain-data-storage-b7d299078c60
Fully agree that a bounty doesn’t work for this;
the work needs to be broken into smaller pieces and let the magic of nostr’s by-default data interoperability integrate the pieces organically
I agree #[3] #[2]. Even as someone with time who tried it a variety of ways w nostrich feedback - there’s not enough consensus re: what the interlocking foundational systems would be to make it work. It’s totally doable. Maybe just like, mirroring Nostrasia; a doc that people dive into/talk through what works/why then work on it.
Maybe Codeberg.org could be an alternative to GitHub, and it is still git based.
Berlin Non-profit. Membership based voting.
Code is Built on Forgejo (Forgejo.org)
I agree that a large bounty doesn't put the right incentives in place. I'd love to work full time on this problem. Would you consider sponsoring a lead developer? I outline the key challenges as I see them here:
And the bull case for this here:
Why not just host a Gitea instance as intermediary step?
Low hanging fruit: simple to install and 100% compatible with GH workflows (PRs, SSO, comments, etc).
Removes dependency on GH until a proper replacement shapes up.
This is exactly what I do and recommend.
Everyone writing code should be handling their primary/authoritative git served in house, and use GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, AWS Code, Sourceforge,Launchpad etc as mirrors only. Gitea works ok at small scale. One caveat is when pushing commits to mirrors the refs to issues won't line up and this can be confusing in GitHub and others that render links
The bigger challenge is projects that are intended to be open and decentralized like Bitcoin. They need a publicly accessible authoritative home without risk of a single corporate or gov organization controlling, or being rugpulled.
I periodically fetch and backup projects I deem important, and recommend also running local maven and npm registries as needed
Which specific projects do you want to see move? The issue is usually somewhere between “people don’t have an account at the alternative” plus “self hosting means finding someone to host”.
The first can be solved with software, the second can’t (modulo some decentralized thing but that makes the first problem 100x worse - “install software X to report an issue or open a pr, and if you have issues with X good luck”).
It’s really more of a motivation question - can you convince the devs of a project it’s worth the pain to move.
Anything ever happen with nostrocket? I feel like that sort of funding model could be better and easier to buy into that one large bounty
Put a squad together...
What other tricks up your sleeve
Does Radicle do most of what you want? https://radicle.xyz/
been having issues with github and vercel around my ourchan nostr project recently (probably fair, but lol)
preach brother !
break down into stories and bounty those instead of the whole enchilada?
#[1] I’m a python engineer, have the staples of good engineering and am worried about layoffs. I’d love to send my resume your way.
There should be a YC-type program (perhaps grant-based + non equity) with hundreds of projects built on nostr 🔥
As in devs pitch their project ideas and have time frame to deliver MVP and final product ?
Equity-based, capitalism not a bad thing, but 99% of the time shitty people abuse it. That 1% is valuable. Also YC has SAFE program to fund for future equity
The idea of funding hundreds of small teams in parallel trying to solve for important use cases on nostr.
With a time boxed structure.
Nothing to do with YC tho
Sorry, I think what was running on my mind was on bringing out the best outcome as well as long term sustainability of devs
Nostrocket
GitLab has done very well challenging a seemingly intractable incumbent. Could a nostr-based NewCo do it again?
Ask gpt4 to make decentralized GitHub for you.
Get off Git
Oh shit… Jack’s about to start a new social media company
Reliance on the official app stores for mobile is also a single point of failure. F-Droid helps for Android but I'm not aware of anything for iOS.
I believe they were forced into letting go of the monopoly
These look sketchy to me. I wouldn't use these app stores unless I was in a country that denied access to the official app store.
it will happen precisely when it is supposed to - just like #Bitcoin did.
Completely Agree
Is the assumption that we will still use git? Is it similar to image hosting for Nostr. We will then have people running git servers and communicate through relays?
I'm sure, git itself will be part of the solution. I could imagine there being an extension to git so you can clone a repository without caring about the IP of the server - instead of "https" or "ssh" you would use "nostr" - but that's details.
I don't think you can say GitHub here, moderator cyborg told me off for using pleb he told me it's an italian insult. Git is English insult. Be careful. Website is v strict. Good luck. I am new too
Git is already decentralized. Just ask Linus.
Bounty is the last apple that quenches my hunger.
We need user base that depends on this piece of tech.
Looking at that user base developers feel interest on the platform.
A user base closer to the bottom of the pyramid better for the purpose.
Let’s fund such user base first so that bounty begins to work it’s magick.
Do it
Conversations about the projects over Nostr too. No more Slack.
No more slack
Slack is horrible, sets all the wrong incentives for orgs.
I'm a fledging web developer, and slack makes me want to puke.
First thing it asks me is "What are your pronouns?'
Get fucked.
Slack is awful
Github will be censored at some point, it’s inevitable.
Why not organize and lead a fully open source team to create what you want to see? Your vision is so strong and your such a great leader! Lots of folks would absolutely love to work with you on this 💚
You've got the sats as a bounty, but I wonder if you'd get more traction if you could start to describe some journeys and perhaps rough requirements as a starting structure?
You could always use the sats as fuel for the fire then, instead of a tool to start the fire to begin with. 🔥
💯
Agreed. Bounties might work once the foundation is laid and there‘s a group of people that formed consensus and have a clear direction. nostr:note16yflkmz3y6rdl8sy3a3say982sltazaca09r9ys6gl0va8fn4eesraysse
Self-hosting a Git instance can be relatively straightforward. There are several options available, such as Gitea, Gogs, and GitLab, with Gitea currently being a top choice. Migrating the Bitcoin repository to a self-hosted instance would be manageable, although transferring issues and other related content might require some effort.
Developers would need to transition to a new domain and register, which may take about 5 minutes. While this could be a minor inconvenience, it's still feasible.
Nostr could play a role in this process as well. By having all developers on Nostr with a keypair, it's possible to verify their identities on another instance. An app could be developed for this purpose, or developers could simply include their npub in their profiles and sign something. This can also be done with ssh keys, and the new git verification mechanism.
Setting up mirrors as contingency plans could be a proactive approach to address potential concerns.
The Linux model using email is the lowest common denominator foundation. I think nostr could improve on this dramatically…but there is a system that works at massive scale just using git and email.
yes and unix, everything is a text file
Your proposal has merit and could be worth exploring further. However, it's important to carefully consider the potential benefits and drawbacks of any major changes to the development process.
it's worth noting that there may be some potential challenges and trade-offs to consider. For example, self-hosting a Git instance may require more resources and maintenance compared to using a hosted service like GitHub. Additionally, transitioning to a new domain and registering on a new instance may require some coordination and communication with developers, and could result in some initial disruption or confusion.
I'm surprised there hasn't been anything notable yet.
What is the right way?
DMed you 🙏 #[1]
May I suggest to break out smaller bounties. It's $290k to fulfill a seemingly herculean task that requires to assemble a team and work out many details that you have not defined and neither does anybody know what others are working on.
How about awarding $10k of that money for the 3 best proposals (5k, 3k, 2k) to tackle the big task in time and budget. These proposals have to detail sub-tasks that again can be accomplished in short sprints.
Pay out +$10k every week or two so people see it's real and in reach.
On the gitea repo there is doubt about the goals of the bounty and I would appreciate clarification from you nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m
Is the bounty only for a solution on nostr or could at least part of it go to contributions that do not use nostr but ActivityPub?
The issue if you want to reply there yourself instead of here: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/18240
The bounty can go to fund free data storage and projects incubation