View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | View Status | Date Submitted | Last Update |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4955 | Composr | points | public | 2022-09-28 17:02 | 2022-09-28 23:43 |
| Reporter | Chris Graham | Assigned To | Guest | ||
| Priority | normal | Severity | feature | ||
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Summary | 4955: Bridge point ledger transactions and forum votes onto a blockchain (holding issue) | ||||
| Description | With v11 we are bringing autonomous organisations to the Composr community via the points and cns_forum addons. Points and forum polls are being rewritten to be far more serious and powerful, people will get voting power over the Composr project (and member's of other Composr-powered communities over those projects) as a function of the points they earn. A lot of the inspiration is derived from ideas in the Blockchain communities, but none of this actually is decentralised blockchain - it's all centralised on Composr sites. We could actually move the points ledger and forum votes onto a blockchain, and just have Composr read that (it'd probably need to do it via a cache). Points would actually be crypto tokens. People could trade points and cast votes directly onto a blockchain, and the blockchain would serve as an enhanced trust that the points and votes were not being misappropriated by people who have control on the central Composr site. Maybe we'd need to write some kind of smart defi contract for casting votes on the blockchain by recording the voting power for the voters on the chain at the point of voting, and votes would have to go through that smart contract - or maybe off-chain code would just look at the votes compared to the points, and calculate voting power elsewhere. The Composr site would probably need to store a private crypto key for each member, and use that key to sign tokens onto the blockchain for user-to-user point transaction and vote making activities. Users could then use the same keys to do the same directly on the blockchain, or even remove them (or never have them) on the Composr site if they want to disassociate from the actual website. As to what actual blockchain to use... Cosmos makes sense. Cosmos allows you to make your own blockchains, which are then linked together with other Cosmos blockchains. This would be a relatively low barrier to entry, so long as we encourage people to host our chain. We would control the transaction fees by virtue of it being us hosting the chain. Polkadot too, which has a lot in common with Cosmos, although fundamentally the technology is different. Another option would be Solana for it's very low gas fees. $0.00025 per transaction at the time of writing, Ethereum is probably not an option, as gas fees are still about $0.534 per transaction after the merge (as far as I can tell, it fluctuates a lot). We can't have every single point transaction or forum vote costing that much money. | ||||
| Additional Information | I need to be upfront that I am not sold on the idea that this actually makes sense for Composr. I'm not against it (it's cool, it has some utility, it doesn't hurt), but I'm not willing to donate years of man hours into it, so it would rely on new developers to take us in this direction if they think it worthwhile. I wanted to get it onto the tracker as I do think it deserves to be here, given the direction things are moving in both with the Composr project (autonomous-organisations) and the broad Web 3.0 movement. It's important to me that the Composr community is not sold down the river for the purposes of 'get rich quick' schemes, so I am definitely against the idea of getting massive investment to implement all this in return for that investor essentially getting complete control over the Composr project due to their multi-million-dollar contributions just in the area of blockchain. That's not to say an investor couldn't come along, pitch the idea to the community for them to vote on, and go ahead for some very large but non-controlling amount of points. Given Composr nowadays largely serves as an alternative and disruptor to the dominant centralised Big Tech companies (Facebook, Google, etc), there is very obvious natural resonance with what is being done in Web 3.0, so there does seem potential for building on that alignment. We're already approaching the centralised trust issue blockchain solves by making it easy for members to export ledgers from the Composr site and track live transactions via RSS, so people can compare notes to see if meddling has occurred on compo.sr. To me this is 'good enough' to not warrant any urgency on actual blockchain. That said, I do not need to be convinced if people want to make contributions. And what about Web 3.0 in general?... This issue is just looking at things which are obvious matches for blockchains. There is a whole dApp movement of moving from private servers, to websites hosted on blockchains. In theory we probably could host Composr sites on blockchains, but we'd essentially have a massive inefficiency trying to dynamically cross-compile a PHP/SQL app to blockchain code and data, or we'd have to rewrite everything from the ground up to be fundamentally different. That's not to even speak of the inefficiencies and privacy concerns with hosting all-data and all-code on thousands or millions of machines, and the lack of an efficient query model (think joins etc) on a blockchain database. Who knows what the future holds though. | ||||
| Tags | AutonomousOrganisation | ||||
| Attach Tags | |||||
| Time estimation (hours) | |||||
| Sponsorship open | |||||
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-09-28 17:02 | Chris Graham | New Issue | |
| 2022-09-28 17:02 | Chris Graham | Tag Attached: AutonomousOrganisation | |
| 2022-09-28 17:05 | Chris Graham | Additional Information Updated | |
| 2022-09-28 17:08 | Chris Graham | Additional Information Updated | |
| 2022-09-28 23:43 | Chris Graham | Description Updated |
