Cred Boosting

[decentralion]

@burrrata

Is the general idea that if cred/mana is freely traded it will achieve a market rate, and as demand for bounties/governance/stuff increases then so will the value of a projects cred/mana, so then that project can bootstrap it’s development/maintenance by allowing outside contributors to purchase cred/mana to request features or boost bounties?

This is mostly correct. However, I don’t intend for cred to be purchasable. I want cred to be inalienably connected to the person or people who made contributions. (Remember that according to Marx, alienation of labor is what makes capitalism awful.) Concretely, this means it would be impossible to do a financial takeover of a cred-enabled project.

@burrrata

Has an analysis been done as to all the ways that SourceCred, and specifically cred/mana, can capture and create value? Thus allowing open source communities, or really cool project, to become self sufficient and/or profitable?

I have plans, ranging from

• the prosaic: stakeholders who want to guide feature development will fund the project by buying grain
• moderately ambitious: projects will flow some of their mana to upstream dependencies; cryptocurrency projects will make mana redeemable for their native cryptocurrency, providing ‘baseline value’ in the system
• staggeringly ambitious: we will coordinate a mass re-licensing of the open-source ecosystem, using a harberger license that forces all for-profit usage to pay taxes that fund the ecosystem (taxes distributed based on cred). Every corporation using open-source will need to decide whether they want to fund the commons, or get left behind.

@burrrata

Or is the idea mainly that SourceCred will be the distribution mechanism, but it will be up to each community/project to find ways to create and/or capture value on their own; SourceCred just channels that incoming value once it starts flowing into the system?

This is the baseline offering from SourceCred: it acts as economic scaffolding for flowing value within projects. Once this scaffolding is built, we will start on more ambitious projects (^ see above) that hook into this scaffolding.