SourceCred and DAOs: A Sketch

[decentralion]

@Jack! Great to have you here!

@Jack

the mindset of unadulterated capitalism is one to which I formerly subscribed. I embarked on that career for no other reason than to get that money.

Funnily enough, the same was true for me. At one point I just wanted to be an uber-rich financier and planned to be a hedge fund manager. While misguided in retrospect, this period left me with a lot of knowledge of finance and economics, which I appreciate.

The Star Wars mythology is all about people being corrupted from the light side to the dark side. But it seems to me that for ambitious young people, getting corrupted to the dark side is a default state, but some people later switch to the light.

@Jack

My hope is that projects like SourceCred and Colony can prove a real alternative to shareholder capitalism, that competes with it on its own terms: rational self interest. Except this time, everyone gets to participate—not only financiers optimising for profit at any cost.

I believe that these systems will outcompete capitalism. I think open-source will be a big leverage point: I think it’s a fundamentally more productive economic paradigm in the digital age, and the existing shareholder-corporate economic model doesn’t know how to metabolize it. To continue my Star Wars metaphor, open-source is like this untouchable hideout for the Rebel Alliance that the capitalist death star can’t instantaneously co-opt and corrupt. In contrast to proprietary projects like WhatsApp, which may start out idealist, but can be taken over by the capitalist system with a single shot from FaceBook’s death ray.

To use a more historical metaphor: I see capitalism versus open-source-post-capitalism as kind of like feudal aristocracy vs the democratic-capitalist state. The aristocracy had all the power and all holdings that previously mattered (land), but the democratic-capitalists were much better at deploying the new resources and technology, so they won. (To our benefit; for all the faults of capitalism, I prefer it to a feudal aristocracy.)

@Jack

Sounds interesting. Is there a technical writeup somewhere?

There’s a few different resources, at varying degrees of stale-ness. I would recommend A Gentle Introduction to Cred. The cred for this forum is also an interesting test case to dive into. I have a formal writeup of the algorithm but it’s a few iterations out of date.

Most of the resources linked describe “legacy mode” cred, which didn’t split up scores based on time. You can read a description of how timeline cred works here.

@Jack

We’re not doing any of the fancy computational approaches to valuing contributions that SourceCred appear to be exploring, but if that’s something that can control an Ethereum address, if you so desired, you could easily make that the mechanism which controls payment creation and issuance in a colony. That would be really cool to see.

I hope to see that too. @rzurrer and team have been doing work on integrating SourceCred into smart contracts, you can read a summary here.

My sense is that getting a decentralized reputation/incentive metric is a really hard problem, and to make meaningful progress, we need a group that is focused entirely on this one issue in particular. If we succeed, we’ll have a protocol that we can then plug-in to all of the exciting projects building things like on-chain governance systems and smart contract infrastructure, both of which are out of SourceCred’s wheel-house.

@Jack

This is really interesting. I’d love to hear more about this: especially with regard to how the data provision, computation, and analysis/valuation of complex contribution patterns over time are provided such that DAO members don’t need to trust those providing those data. Are you using an off-chain mechanism a la Truebit?

Getting everything 100% trustless on-chain is not a current goal for SourceCred. Rather, SourceCred has a trust-but-verify model; anyone in the community can compute the cred scores, and validate that they’re getting recorded on chain accurately.

In the future, when on-chain scalability is improved by many orders of magnitude, and activity currently on centralized platforms (GitHub) has moved onto trustless decentralized platforms (Radicle?/Truebit?/IPFS?), it may make sense to create a trustless SourceCred. But it’s not needed to make progress on the core problem we’re tackling.

@Jack

Also interpreting how much something helped much later seems really difficult. How do you plan to identify the extent to which any particular contribution contributed to value creation ex post facto?

A great question. SourceCred has a framework for this: if a new contribution is created today, we can find all the past contributions that enabled it, and create edges from the new contribution to those past contributions. Then the value associated with any new contributions (which are relatively easier to explicitly value, e.g. through “boosting”) will pay out to all the past work, “discovering” its value.

A key question is how effectively we will find these edges. My intention is to make a sort of “curation/assessment” game within SourceCred, where individuals can use their “mana” to propose new edges in the graph, and are rewarded with cred if that edge is accepted. So the game has at least two kinds of players: contributors who do valuable work, and curators who upkeep the cred graph to ensure contributors are rewarded fairly.

I’m still working out the rules and mechanics for this game. You can read the intro here and I’d love your thoughts and contributions!

@Jack

We looked into PageRank style approaches quite a bit in the early days of our thinking about Colony’s reputation system. However, we found ourselves mired in sybil vulnerabilities which seemed intractable in the economically incentivised and computationally constrained context of smart contracts. How have you thwarted sybil?

This goes back to SourceCred not being trustless. Every community will have moderators (e.g. community leaders) who are empowered to protect the integrity of cred from attacks, Sibyll attacks being a particularly obvious one. The system is highly transparent, so everyone can watch the watchmen, call out moderators who are misbehaving, and fork the cred if needed.

In the future where this is all more mature, we’ll have more formal systems, e.g. cred-weighted election of moderators, the ability to recall or appeal a moderator decision.