Can CRED be taken away? Thinking about regenerative equity

Hi all, loving this project. Been thinking about CRED.

I want to use it for our project to track contributions over time and reward people with our native bonding-curve based token.

I’m wondering: can CRED ever be taken away? If a contribution becomes LESS relevant over time, can the CRED get adjusted? Thus effecting the future grain payouts?

Basically we want to set it up in such a way that the founders today will be well rewarded, but not for a say hundreds of years.

We want contributions to be slowly LESS rewarded over time. So that new contributions are relatively better rewarded over time (and dont have to compete with massive amount of historic contributions).

I realize this may also come down to the grain distribution algorithm, but I’m not sure I fully comprehend if that can fulfill this equity-renewal requirement I just described?

For example, can the grain distribution be tweaked so that for example contributions get rewarded with grain for 10 years (and slowly relatively less over the years)?

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Cred is never given, so neither is it taken away. Unlike grain, cred isn’t an asset that you own. It’s a fluctuating number that’s retroactive: if a contribution becomes more or less relevant/valuable over time, its cred will increase or decrease, respectively. So, to the spirit of your question, “yes”.

We typically don’t directly decrease cred for contributions simply because they’re old. We say that cred doesn’t decay, but it does dilute: as new, valuable contributions are added, older ones begin to dwindle.

For example, Euclid still has cred for his foundational work on geometry, but many other people have enriched the field in the past 2000 years. Thus, Euclid’s cred is diluted, even though his contributions are still respected. By contrast, much of the work of the Italian school of algebraic geometers was later found to be completely wrong, so their cred has retroactively plummeted, not due to dilution but because we no longer think that the contributions are as valuable.

I realize this may also come down to the grain distribution algorithm

Yes: the “recent” grain distribution strategy is meant to achieve the kind of thing that you’re looking for. The SourceCred community uses a mix of “recent” and “balanced” (all-time) distribution strategies, with a heavy bias to the recent strategy (4-to-1 at time of writing) to better reward new contributions and new contributors, exactly as you describe.

(Welcome!)

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Great & quick answer, that clarifies it perfectly and confirms my assumption.

The mix of strategies is interesting. If I understand correctly you’re simply distributing a certain percentage of new grain with one distribution strategy (say recent) and a certain percentage with another (say balanced)? That’s really flexible and clever yet easy!

Thank you! (And thank you!)