Adding Economic Incentives To Cryptoeconomics.Study

#1

Fun idea… what if we created an economy around the course?
Users could login with their Ethereum address via Metamask (like ethernaut or Capture The Ether](https://capturetheether.com/leaderboard/) does), and users would earn STUDY tokens every time they complete a section of the course. They could also earn tokens by creating upvoted content/comments on the forum. It could even go so far as there being monthly/quarterly hackathons where users compete and earn tokens as a prize. There’s a Uniswap pool for STUDY tokens.
These tokens would be transferable. Users could then us the tokens to tip each other for helpful comments on the forum. They could also attach bounties to requests for help understanding concepts. They could also use tokens to by “study” hours where someone who’s been through the course can mentor someone new who’s going through it (there would be a registry of available mentors with their rates denominated in STUDY token). With a Uniswap pool for STUDY/ETH people could actually derive real value from contributing to the course/community.
If we wanted to make this a social signalling/reputation thing, the dual token model described here could be used.

It would be a lot of work, but it could be really cool and help create more engagement/energy around the project. It would also give people a direct experience of what Ethereum/web3 can do vs just a theoretic perspective. Thoughts?

#2

I definitely think there’s potential to add incentives around the course. My initial MVP idea was to take donations to an ETH address and allow users to claim donations based on the # of likes their topics + comments received in the forum that month. We could even poll students as they complete chapters, asking them which community members helped them the most, and divide up donations to community members based on the number of votes received. As far as paying for mentorship with STUDY tokens, I’m a bit worried that as a medium of exchange token it may have some of the problems described here. Also as soon as we start rewarding people financially for completing coding assignments, we could accidentally create incentives to complete the course many times with puppet accounts! Once we finish content and launch the course, I think it’d be really interesting to explore further and figure out some solutions to these problems together though.

#3

Agree there’s hella attack vectors, but you’ve got to start with something and then improve from there lol

The mechanism you described to claim rewards based on contributions in a time period is being developed by Daonuts as the Distributions app. It allows you to measure community contributions and reward engagement on a recurring basis.

The mechanism you described to poll the community and allocate rewards to top contributors is live as the Autark Allocations app. Note, that’s not their actual website, but a demo I did for an automagic doc generation mechanism I was working on, but I don’t think they have official docs yet so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You could then roll out an Aragon DAO to tie this all together.

  • A main vault that accepts donations
  • the Distribution and Allocation apps to mint tokens for the community on a recurring basis (inflationary supply reduces many attack vectors and incentivizes using/spending tokens vs hodling)
  • a Redemption vault that allows users to exchange their community tokens against the vault’s assets whenever they want (1Hive Redemption app).
  • on a recurring (weekly/monthly/whatever) basis the main vault could transfer ETH to the redemption vault. Then users can use their community tokens to redeem ETH and/or to purchase “in-game” features/things (study sessions, badges, extra lectures, an hour of @karl’s time, whatever… lol). It’s a recurring game with minimal risk at each time period because the majority of the ETH is in the main vault. If a flaw is found with the current system it can be paused/upgraded without affect the main funds.
    Sure there’s lots of problems with this model so it would need to be fine tuned, but the mechanisms to make it happen are live on Rinkeby and will be on mainnet soon :slight_smile:
#4

Yeah making a Decentralized Autonomous Organization is easy, you just need:

  1. Projects
  2. Tokens (to buy/sell/invest/vote)
  3. Token price set by bonding curve (see https://hackmd.io/@themathematicianisin/BkikbN2kr)
  4. Community/Reserve split ratio
  5. Tokens continuously determine % conviction which determines % incoming funding received by each project/subproject/…/milestone/task/subtask/contributor (see https://medium.com/giveth/conviction-voting-34019bd17b10)

This allows the organization to be self-sustaining, governed by meritocracy, enforced by game theory, and have the option of making their product free and open source (they can charge a price, they just don’t have to).

You may wonder: What if there’s something that can only have 1 project proceed (like what to build on a plot of land) and the community conviction keeps switching projects every day? Or 2 contradictory projects try to proceed at once?
Then the community could just create projects/proposals on how to resolve the situation, until they reach a consensus (which the game theory incentivizes them to do).

#5

UPDATE: We have a DAO! It’s in beta to test things out, but we’re essentially going to combine ideas from 1Hive and Daonuts to create ways for the community to become self sufficient, self governing, and self funding (tbd on that last one lol)

Information on the DAO can be found in the Contributing section of the new website :slight_smile: