
Ask HN: Is a cryptocurrency for funding community projects a viable idea? - bryanchappell
It appears that most people are dissatisfied with politics and civic engagement can be difficult to measure.<p>What if there was a cryptocurrency that gave every participant a vote on the usage of a portion of the funds? Directly linking a member&#x27;s participation in a fund with the projects within their community. Each member would have a single vote.  Theoretically this could act similar to an infrastructure bank but not limited to a certain type of project.<p>There are obvious issues with this idea: Does the amount of money required to initiate the fund prevent it from being viable? Will members from outside a given community attempt to &quot;steal&quot; its&#x27; funds? How could the identity of a member be authenticated without being intrusive? Are people truly interested in improving their community?
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slimshady94
I wonder if crypto-tokens could be used as an easy way of quantifying open
source contributions? Famous GitHub projects could assign and pay their own
custom tokens (not exchangeable for money, permanently tied to an identity),
on the basis of issues and PRs. It would also be easy for developers to link
these tokens on their resume while applying for jobs. The proof-of-PR token
could even be used to skip interviews altogether.

All these ideas seem pretty low-hanging fruit for cryptocurrencies.

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BjoernKW
Git already provides a proof-of-PR with its commit history. You can have a
look at someone's GitHub profile so see the projects that person has
contributed to.

While it's not a permanent record you'd have to go to great lengths to
permanently delete someone's effort from the record. You could also still keep
the repositories for yourself on some local machine as a permanent record.

The permanent, tamper-proof record feature of blockchains only provides a
significant benefit if many or all players in the game have an incentive to
tamper with the data in the first place.

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coryl
What's the difference between this and a Kickstarter project?

The problem isn't the funding format, it's the politics of getting people to
agree on decision making.

Design by committee doesn't work, that's why all organizations empower a head
honcho to make important decisions.

Any kind of project would be better off centralizing decision making in a few
people, and the rest of the participators can passively fund or promote.

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nnn1234
You should look up the DAO which attempted to do similar things.

Incentive for trading the token is something to be vary of. Political and
governance problems are the issue here. Tech is here

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TaylorGood
If philanthropic, there are a handful of projects already attempting this.
It's not taking off but $PINK is coming closest. Traders aren't charitable.

