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This paper is similar to an idea I'm working on finalizing from a conceptual point of view. I call of "Proof of Help" (as opposed to Work or Stake). To summari

by tabeth 9y ago

This paper is similar to an idea I'm working on finalizing from a conceptual point of view. I call of "Proof of Help" (as opposed to Work or Stake). To summarize, the idea is that in a market for tutoring, people can tutor each other, however there would be some sort of way to confirm that tutoring actually took place. From there, you may receive help in exchange for the quantity of time you've helped others, represented by the Help that you have accumulated by helping. Unlike Bitcoin, this Help can never be converted for fiat and is only useful for receiving tutoring. Unlike Bitcoin, this wouldn't be decentralized though. It would effectively be a public ledger run by ideally a nonprofit. I think blockchain is a good use for this. Mainly because the quantities of Help should not be able to be manipulated by the centralized authority. Their role here is simply to confirm identities and serve as a sort of access control to the blockchain itself (e.g. They can ban people, but not change how much Help someone has).

pavel_lishin 9y ago
How do you prevent people from gaming the system? Alice and Bob vouch that they each tutored each other for a week straight, despite just leaving a Skype connection open facing a blank wall. Now they've got fifty Tutorbucks each, whereas I had to tutor a dozen college freshmen for a month to get the same amount.
- kipchak 9y ago
  Maybe something like a bitcoin faucet, with people getting say 1 "help" a day might work.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    Isn't that still gameable? It just means that those unfairly abusing the system are rewarded as much as the people providing the most help.
    - kipchak 9y ago
      Reading my comment again I explained rather poorly. I was thinking each user would have an income of 1 help token a day, which they could then use as a reward to those who help them, and the helper could then use the points they earned as a bounty to encourage others to help them in turn. Maybe something between Yahoo Answers and Steem? Hopefully if the tokens had a somewhat stable value, it would be somewhat difficult to convince people to give you the token versus being able to generate them easily. So say those dozen freshman have 100 tokens saved up, and give you 5 a day for a week of tutoring, you wind up with 420 and can then reward someone later for a somewhat proportional amount of help. But if I just pool my tokens together with someone else, we only generate 14 tokens over the week.
      - pavel_lishin 9y ago
        > if the tokens had a somewhat stable value If the tokens have any value outside the system, the whole thing grinds to a halt, as people start HODLing them like idiots, and people stop getting paid to actually do anything. The tokens having a dollar value would probably be the thing to kill this otherwise wholesome idea.
- tabeth 9y ago
  This is where centralization would come into play -- all sessions are recorded and publicly available. The situation you pose could occur, but could also be quickly identified, resulting in the banning of both Alice and Bob. Such a deterrent would hopefully prevent people from attempting to game the system. The point of recording and publishing the sessions, by the way, is to prevent repeated tutoring sessions surrounding the same question or content, ideally.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    This sounds more like lectures and less like tutoring sessions. And I think a lot of people might be uncomfortable with having their tutoring sessions publicly viewable - what if I need help preparing for interviews, and my tutoring sessions make me look like I'm not a capable software developer? It would be kind of embarrassing if a potential employer could look up videos of me asking someone to explain big-O complexity of various sort algorithms, or of a potential math teacher who needs help remembering basic algebra.
    - tabeth 9y ago
      You make good points, though I have to add that though it is "public", you couldn't actually identify the people involved in a particular tutoring session from just the video. This would be something the central authority would take care of. So tutoring is generally done via text and visuals, with no audio or video of either participant in the session. As for your situation, in that case the hypothetical system I proposed wouldn't make sense. In the case you're describing now, it would make more sense for your to simply give your Help to the person who assisted you in exchange for their assistance. This is in contrast to the "system" giving you Help for simply helping someone else (i.e. the person receiving help doesn't have to give you their Help).
      - pavel_lishin 9y ago
        > you couldn't actually identify the people involved in a particular tutoring session from just the video I guess it depends on what you're recording, but even if you don't save the audio, or the camera recordings, information can still leak. Am I sharing my screen with my tutor? Great; my browser bookmark bar is visible, and possibly my URL history if I start typing something in. Oh, look - my Gmail tab shows my entire full name. My anonymity is blown before the second frame of the video loads. > In the case you're describing now, it would make more sense for your to simply give your Help to the person who assisted you in exchange for their assistance. I guess I don't understand the system. I thought that if I tutor Thomas in some basic mathematics, I earn 20 Tutorbucks. I can then spend those 20 Tutorbucks by paying Jenny to help me understand how Spring's authentication system works. It doesn't really make sense to do tutor exchanges - what am I going to ask Thomas for help with? In any case, it seems like the answer to the submission's question in your case is a resounding no. There's nothing a blockchain brings to the table.
throwawayjava 9y ago
You don't need a blockchain. You need PHP and a SQL database.
mxwsn 9y ago
A semantic note -- under canonical definitions, "proof of help" is a bad name for your idea. Proof of work/stake means they're using work, or stake, to secure the blockchain; it's the answer to the question "Which blockchain do we trust?" The chain with the most work in it, or the most stake in it. Here, your "help" is the object you want to have on the blockchain that is trustlessly secure. The analogous object in bitcoin is money.

by tabeth 9y ago

pavel_lishin 9y ago

How do you prevent people from gaming the system? Alice and Bob vouch that they each tutored each other for a week straight, despite just leaving a Skype connection open facing a blank wall. Now they've got fifty Tutorbucks each, whereas I had to tutor a dozen college freshmen for a month to get the same amount.

kipchak 9y ago
Maybe something like a bitcoin faucet, with people getting say 1 "help" a day might work.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Isn't that still gameable? It just means that those unfairly abusing the system are rewarded as much as the people providing the most help.
  - kipchak 9y ago
    Reading my comment again I explained rather poorly. I was thinking each user would have an income of 1 help token a day, which they could then use as a reward to those who help them, and the helper could then use the points they earned as a bounty to encourage others to help them in turn. Maybe something between Yahoo Answers and Steem? Hopefully if the tokens had a somewhat stable value, it would be somewhat difficult to convince people to give you the token versus being able to generate them easily. So say those dozen freshman have 100 tokens saved up, and give you 5 a day for a week of tutoring, you wind up with 420 and can then reward someone later for a somewhat proportional amount of help. But if I just pool my tokens together with someone else, we only generate 14 tokens over the week.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      > if the tokens had a somewhat stable value If the tokens have any value outside the system, the whole thing grinds to a halt, as people start HODLing them like idiots, and people stop getting paid to actually do anything. The tokens having a dollar value would probably be the thing to kill this otherwise wholesome idea.
tabeth 9y ago
This is where centralization would come into play -- all sessions are recorded and publicly available. The situation you pose could occur, but could also be quickly identified, resulting in the banning of both Alice and Bob. Such a deterrent would hopefully prevent people from attempting to game the system. The point of recording and publishing the sessions, by the way, is to prevent repeated tutoring sessions surrounding the same question or content, ideally.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  This sounds more like lectures and less like tutoring sessions. And I think a lot of people might be uncomfortable with having their tutoring sessions publicly viewable - what if I need help preparing for interviews, and my tutoring sessions make me look like I'm not a capable software developer? It would be kind of embarrassing if a potential employer could look up videos of me asking someone to explain big-O complexity of various sort algorithms, or of a potential math teacher who needs help remembering basic algebra.
  - tabeth 9y ago
    You make good points, though I have to add that though it is "public", you couldn't actually identify the people involved in a particular tutoring session from just the video. This would be something the central authority would take care of. So tutoring is generally done via text and visuals, with no audio or video of either participant in the session. As for your situation, in that case the hypothetical system I proposed wouldn't make sense. In the case you're describing now, it would make more sense for your to simply give your Help to the person who assisted you in exchange for their assistance. This is in contrast to the "system" giving you Help for simply helping someone else (i.e. the person receiving help doesn't have to give you their Help).
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      > you couldn't actually identify the people involved in a particular tutoring session from just the video I guess it depends on what you're recording, but even if you don't save the audio, or the camera recordings, information can still leak. Am I sharing my screen with my tutor? Great; my browser bookmark bar is visible, and possibly my URL history if I start typing something in. Oh, look - my Gmail tab shows my entire full name. My anonymity is blown before the second frame of the video loads. > In the case you're describing now, it would make more sense for your to simply give your Help to the person who assisted you in exchange for their assistance. I guess I don't understand the system. I thought that if I tutor Thomas in some basic mathematics, I earn 20 Tutorbucks. I can then spend those 20 Tutorbucks by paying Jenny to help me understand how Spring's authentication system works. It doesn't really make sense to do tutor exchanges - what am I going to ask Thomas for help with? In any case, it seems like the answer to the submission's question in your case is a resounding no. There's nothing a blockchain brings to the table.

throwawayjava 9y ago

You don't need a blockchain. You need PHP and a SQL database.

mxwsn 9y ago

A semantic note -- under canonical definitions, "proof of help" is a bad name for your idea. Proof of work/stake means they're using work, or stake, to secure the blockchain; it's the answer to the question "Which blockchain do we trust?" The chain with the most work in it, or the most stake in it. Here, your "help" is the object you want to have on the blockchain that is trustlessly secure. The analogous object in bitcoin is money.