Setting up an Independent SourceCred Foundation

[decentralion]

@wchargin

It sounds like the idea is that SCF would sell its endowed grain to VCs and/or PL to bootstrap its funding. If that one-off endowment is intended to amount for a handful of full-time salaries for at least (say) 2 years, the grain generated in this endowment would need to dwarf all current grain, right? How does this influence dynamics—e.g., of people who currently want to sell part of their grain?

Good question. At time of writing, we’ve issued $45k worth of Grain, which is very small relative to the value of the project. By the time we are endowing SCF, we will have issued a lot more Grain to contributors. You can read about my plans for “retroactive initialization”, after which we’re going to issue a lot more Grain to contributors.

I think that in order to get VCs on board, we will need an explicit framework for how much Grain we will issue, and how it will inflate. A simple model might be to provision for (say) 2B grain upfront, of which 500M will be distributed upfront to contributors, 500M will be given to SCF as seed funding, and 1B will be held in reserve to distribute to contributors based on future Cred. Then, we could also create a process whereby the Cred-earners and Grain-holders can approve issuance plans that create more Grain every year to keep rewarding contributors. See this post on separation of powers for some related ideas.

@wchargin

If the goal is that the full-time employees should be “weaned off” the salary/advance hybrid onto pure grain within a relatively short time frame (say, 2 years), that certainly creates a strong requirement about the ability of the system to recognize contributions from people like lawyers, community organizers, or other non-engineering contributors working full time. I’m curious—how do you imagine that working in the near term? Are Discourse posts enough? If a nontrivial portion is from manual nodes, how do you avoid capriciousness or nepotism, or perceptions thereof?

Creating a strong internal pressure to recognize non-technical contributors is a feature, not a bug. I’m confident that the supernode system will give us the right primitives to recognize all kinds of value. As you note, capriciousness or nepotism (or perceptions thereof) in configuring the supernodes will be an important issue. We’ll need to think more about the governance processes that will regulate this. (Will we have a sort of “SourceCred judiciary” that makes judgements in disputed cases? Will there be an elected “Cred Executive” who has final say in such questions?)

Also, I don’t necessarily intend for FTEs to get “weaned off” of the salary hybrid model. The SCF will be rewarded for the risk it’s taking on, in that they get repaid more than 100% of the advance to compensate for the risk they’re taking. If the SCF is doing a good job, its Grain endowment should actually grow over time.

However, contributors that are very confident in their future Grain rewards may generally prefer to exit the official salary arrangement, since they aren’t taking on as much risk by just taking all their Grain directly. So people might choose to wean themselves off.