# Retroactive Initialization: Pre-requisite to distributing a lot more Grain

**URL:** <https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/retroactive-initialization-pre-requisite-to-distributing-a-lot-more-grain/359>\
**Category:** The CredSperiment\
**Created:** [November 29, 2019, 1:09am UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/retroactive-initialization-pre-requisite-to-distributing-a-lot-more-grain/359 "2019-11-29T01:09:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 4

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**Author:** ![decentralion](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/user_avatar/discourse.sourcecred.io/decentralion/32/7_2.png) [@decentralion](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/u/decentralion)\
**Post date:** [December 4, 2019, 6:11am UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/retroactive-initialization-pre-requisite-to-distributing-a-lot-more-grain/359/4 "2019-12-04T06:11:09Z")

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> [@burrrata](#):
>
> how does that take into consideration all the work that goes into formulating ideas (and the community) so that people are at the point where they are ready to take actions? Often it takes a lot of work to create a community. This involves reaching out to people, onboarding people, creating documentation for them to learn about the project, and keeping everything organized and running so that people can contribute. How will all this be factored in so that the model doesn’t just favor contributors who already know how everything works, but doesn’t encourage new contributors?

This is a key piece that this change is trying to address. Right now, cred is heavily biased towards activity on GitHub and Discourse, and misses a lot of “behind the scenes” contributions that are essential to the project’s health. By implementing the supernodes system ([Supernodes: Moving past raw activity](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/supernodes-moving-past-raw-activity/340)), we’ll have the ability to manually include or reference important but illegible contributions. Over time, I imagine there being “[Cred Historians](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/cred-historians-and-curators/194)” who use this system to keep on improving the cred graph.

> [@burrrata](#):
>
> The idea of having my cred taken away, however, is not pleasant

Cred isn’t really something that you “have” that can be “taken away”, similar to how a friend’s affection isn’t something that they are “taking away from me” if we part ways. Cred is a shared (and retroactively updating) social perception, not something you own.

That said, to make the psychology a bit easier, I expect that we’ll make the numbers go up. Right now there’s ~7000 cred across all contributors. I’m imagining giving important initiatives an average “cred bounty” of around 100, with the result that we would actually inflate cred quite a lot. So numerically, almost everyone’s cred will go up, not down.

> [@burrrata](#):
>
> When you do work, there’s a result. You plant seeds, you water plants, you harvest grain. The grain in your silo doesn’t just disappear without reason unless someone takes it.

This is exactly right. Grain is different from Cred! Unlike Cred, Grain _is_ something that you own. Grain distributions never retroactively change. @burrrata, the only way your 357,532 `¤` is going anywhere is if you sell, transfer, or seed it.

Once we’ve done this cred re-initialization, we’ll have a more robust cred instance. At that point, we’ll start issuing substantially more Grain. However, I do not expect this will devalue the current Grain, because there’s still so much “head room” for issuing Grain to reflect SourceCred’s value. So far, at the $0.01 per Grain price, we’ve issued $60,000 worth of Grain. Since SourceCred’s actual value is much higher than that, we have plenty of room to issue more Grain.

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_[View the full topic](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/retroactive-initialization-pre-requisite-to-distributing-a-lot-more-grain/359)._