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I think he describes the current crypto landscape accurately, but I'm becoming more and more bullish on the long term decentralized finance vision. Imagine solv

by abiro 5y ago

I think he describes the current crypto landscape accurately, but I'm becoming more and more bullish on the long term decentralized finance vision. Imagine solving open source funding by OSS developers selling insurance for their projects on decentralized programmatic insurance markets.

dan-robertson 5y ago
When does this “insurance” they sell pay out? What risk are they insuring against and how is it underwritten? I think this doesn’t make any sense but maybe I just don’t understand.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> selling insurance for their projects on decentralized programmatic insurance markets One of the problems with crypto is people treating it like fairy dust. There are remarkably few, perhaps vanishingly so, business models that do not work centralised that do decentralised. This is one. What is the pay-out? Who makes what guarantees? How are they enforced? If a business plan requires crypto—as opposed to being enhanced by it—it’s probably dead on arrival.
- abiro 5y ago
  This is a super undeveloped idea, but I was thinking about something along these lines: 1. OSS users pay a monthly premium for insurance on the software (incl transient dependencies) that is critical to their business. 2. Part of the cash flow from premiums is pooled into an insurance fund that pays interest to OSS developers. The rest is payed out directly to OSS devs. 3. If there is a bug in an insured OSS project, policy holders have a claim on the pool. The magnitude of the claim depends on the severity of the bug and the time it remains open. Future payouts to the OSS project with the bug are directed to the fund until the payed out insurance benefit is covered. The hardest part is coming up with a decentralized consensus mechanism for establishing the existence, severity and resolution of bugs, but there is a lot of experimentation going on in DeFi to solve similar problems. As to why it should be decentralized, it's the same reason OSS is decentralized: you don't want a single actor to control OSS funding. edit: wording
  - SkyMarshal 5y ago
    > The hardest part is coming up with a decentralized consensus mechanism for establishing the existence, severity and resolution of bugs, but there is a lot of experimentation going on in DeFi to solve similar problems. Pretty much. Getting real world data like this onto a blockchain such that the representation of it on the blockchain can be trusted is as yet an unsolved problem. Blockchains are great at managing data created internally in a trustworthy way, but not data created externally.
  - perlgeek 5y ago
    What what you want is a kind of business or foundation where: 1. users pay monthly fee/premium 2. part of that is kept in a pool, part is payed to the developers 3. when bugs happen, funky stuff happens with the pooled money. See, I didn't need any crypto for that. Maybe one day crypto can reduce the legal overhead, maybe not. The hard part is getting people to actually pay for things that they could have for free. Do you know what the reminds me of? RedHat. RedHat sold (and still sells, I guess) Open Source software together with maintenance contracts (pretty close to what you call insurance). They needs lots of marketing and sales staff to attract customers. Who replaces the marketing and sales people in the crypto world? Who does the convincing?
  - Scarblac 5y ago
    All this would work much better with simple old fashioned money. OSS isn't decentralized at all, there's always at least some group of core devs who hold the commit rights and who make releases. And they will want to control their funding.
    - abiro 5y ago
      Individual OSS projects aren't decentralized, but the process of building and distributing OSS mostly is (leaving GitHub is relatively low barrier). See iOS for a centralized ecosystem. If there was a central entity controlling OSS funding they could for example prevent forked projects from succeeding.
    - leppr 5y ago
      > All this would work much better with simple old fashioned money. That's the thing, on the internet, simple old fashioned money is not like simple old fashioned money. Keeping accounts and transferring old fashioned money between peers on the internet is not trivial. Discounting the on-boarding problem, crypto is way closer to cash than payment processing networks like Visa, Mastercard, Paypal. Accepting crypto for any kind of work is trivial, you just generate a standard address/QR code that can be read by any other standard wallet, and receive a standard crypto that can be exchanged freely.
speedgoose 5y ago
What?
NicoJuicy 5y ago
While GitHub has transaction free donations...
mcv 5y ago
Like the tweeter points out, they're not really all that decentralized. They're controlled by an anonymous cartel that's not accountable to anyone. At least national currencies are controlled by central banks that are accountable to governments that are in turn accountable to the people.
snarf21 5y ago
The problem with OSS funding isn't the technical mechanism that money is sent. The problem is that people don't want to pay period. The ONLY viable crypto use case is currency. The blockchain can't solve issues that require attachment to the real world.
- abiro 5y ago
  There is a lot of experimentation going on in DeFi currently to solve the real world bridge problem.

by abiro 5y ago

dan-robertson 5y ago

When does this “insurance” they sell pay out? What risk are they insuring against and how is it underwritten? I think this doesn’t make any sense but maybe I just don’t understand.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> selling insurance for their projects on decentralized programmatic insurance markets One of the problems with crypto is people treating it like fairy dust. There are remarkably few, perhaps vanishingly so, business models that do not work centralised that do decentralised. This is one. What is the pay-out? Who makes what guarantees? How are they enforced? If a business plan requires crypto—as opposed to being enhanced by it—it’s probably dead on arrival.

abiro 5y ago
This is a super undeveloped idea, but I was thinking about something along these lines: 1. OSS users pay a monthly premium for insurance on the software (incl transient dependencies) that is critical to their business. 2. Part of the cash flow from premiums is pooled into an insurance fund that pays interest to OSS developers. The rest is payed out directly to OSS devs. 3. If there is a bug in an insured OSS project, policy holders have a claim on the pool. The magnitude of the claim depends on the severity of the bug and the time it remains open. Future payouts to the OSS project with the bug are directed to the fund until the payed out insurance benefit is covered. The hardest part is coming up with a decentralized consensus mechanism for establishing the existence, severity and resolution of bugs, but there is a lot of experimentation going on in DeFi to solve similar problems. As to why it should be decentralized, it's the same reason OSS is decentralized: you don't want a single actor to control OSS funding. edit: wording
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  > The hardest part is coming up with a decentralized consensus mechanism for establishing the existence, severity and resolution of bugs, but there is a lot of experimentation going on in DeFi to solve similar problems. Pretty much. Getting real world data like this onto a blockchain such that the representation of it on the blockchain can be trusted is as yet an unsolved problem. Blockchains are great at managing data created internally in a trustworthy way, but not data created externally.
- perlgeek 5y ago
  What what you want is a kind of business or foundation where: 1. users pay monthly fee/premium 2. part of that is kept in a pool, part is payed to the developers 3. when bugs happen, funky stuff happens with the pooled money. See, I didn't need any crypto for that. Maybe one day crypto can reduce the legal overhead, maybe not. The hard part is getting people to actually pay for things that they could have for free. Do you know what the reminds me of? RedHat. RedHat sold (and still sells, I guess) Open Source software together with maintenance contracts (pretty close to what you call insurance). They needs lots of marketing and sales staff to attract customers. Who replaces the marketing and sales people in the crypto world? Who does the convincing?
- Scarblac 5y ago
  All this would work much better with simple old fashioned money. OSS isn't decentralized at all, there's always at least some group of core devs who hold the commit rights and who make releases. And they will want to control their funding.
  - abiro 5y ago
    Individual OSS projects aren't decentralized, but the process of building and distributing OSS mostly is (leaving GitHub is relatively low barrier). See iOS for a centralized ecosystem. If there was a central entity controlling OSS funding they could for example prevent forked projects from succeeding.
  - leppr 5y ago
    > All this would work much better with simple old fashioned money. That's the thing, on the internet, simple old fashioned money is not like simple old fashioned money. Keeping accounts and transferring old fashioned money between peers on the internet is not trivial. Discounting the on-boarding problem, crypto is way closer to cash than payment processing networks like Visa, Mastercard, Paypal. Accepting crypto for any kind of work is trivial, you just generate a standard address/QR code that can be read by any other standard wallet, and receive a standard crypto that can be exchanged freely.

speedgoose 5y ago

What?

NicoJuicy 5y ago

While GitHub has transaction free donations...

mcv 5y ago

Like the tweeter points out, they're not really all that decentralized. They're controlled by an anonymous cartel that's not accountable to anyone. At least national currencies are controlled by central banks that are accountable to governments that are in turn accountable to the people.

snarf21 5y ago

The problem with OSS funding isn't the technical mechanism that money is sent. The problem is that people don't want to pay period. The ONLY viable crypto use case is currency. The blockchain can't solve issues that require attachment to the real world.

abiro 5y ago
There is a lot of experimentation going on in DeFi currently to solve the real world bridge problem.