More thoughts on this - it doesn't really work:
nostr:note17w0p3jyzxnkmc35xw8e79czlda9g9y2sr00amvtt64c0nmh9lqrquznmfp
After I've continued thinking about it, I just can't really get myself to try it without feeling like it's pointless. People are just too brainwashed against working with each other on a peer-to-peer basis. They need some kind of platform to act as an intermediary to handle the money.
This wouldn't seem like such a problem if it weren't for the lack of any current technology I'm aware of for decentralizing that intermediary. We need some way of making impartial judgments of when a project has or hasn't been completed (thus whether the bounty should or shouldn't be paid out).
I haven't been able to figure out any full solution to this.
An idea I've thought of for the sake of inheritance would also be useful here: timebomb transactions. This would be where a transaction has a timer where funds will be transferred to a given wallet address when the timer runs out, but until the timer runs out, the sender has the ability to change the wallet address the money will go to. I'm not sure if any real cryptocurrency currently supports a transaction like this on-chain.
This would be ideal for setting money aside where loved ones can inherit it if anything happens to you, but another benefit of this would be to also kinda (not fully) let people contribute funds to a bounty where the money will be paid out to the person managing the bounty as long as a fund contributor doesn't change their mind. This wouldn't stop malicious people from adding funds to a bounty just to remove the funds when the bounty is complete. It also wouldn't stop malicious actors from offering to manage the money, only to keep it instead of paying out. The devs working for these bounties should be warned some of the funds probably come from malicious contributors who won't actually pay out, but they can at least get some idea of the amount of funding available based on the amount pledged for a given bounty, along with the reputations of the people involved in creating the bounty.
This still has the problem of most people being too brainwashed to use it - most people prefer an intermediary who can completely fuck them over on a whim, instead of a p2p group of people who will be partly reliable and partly unreliable.
Sometimes a problem can be a good thing though. I don't really want any bounty I create being collected by the kind of dev who's brainwashed in favor of centralization. Large transactions with such brainwashed people seem bad for cryptocurrency as a whole in my view. Using timebomb transactions to let people manage the fund pools for bounties would carry a tradeoff, because you lose some momentum due to not as many people wanting to be involved, but you gain some momentum due to the people involved being "the smart ones."
A full solution that somehow ensures impartial judgment would still be better though. It might be possible to balance a system of incentives so that malice is always unprofitable, and then run that system until malicious actors have their wealth drained to the point the system stabilizes (because the amount of money malicious actors can waste on attacks shrinks to the point of being easily offset by the funds available for protection and recovery from those attacks). I'll keep trying to figure out the perfect plan, but maybe timebomb transactions are a good first step.
Anyone find these thoughts interesting?
#nostr #cryptocurrency #decentralization
