Oddbean

Grants only seem to help build anything high-quality when given to someone who built high-quality things before they got the grant. It doesn't seem to make someone start building better quality and it doesn't appear to be an indicator of quality. That's why I think crowdfunding is superior to grants. You build up a reputation *first* and then people trust you and pay you to *do more of the same*. And they keep their money in their own pocket, until they give it to you, personally. But all the grant money flooding the Nostr space has dampened our crowdfunding-fu. https://i.nostr.build/Q7VDJ.jpg

these guys facilitated my first start ... now, i totally even forget what it was for! wasn't a huge amount, they were running a grant campaign, maybe related to https://github.com/indra-labs/indra iirc the funding value was around $500 in fiats at the time, about a year ago maybe, could have been sooner i did a lot of work on that codebase but it languishes because it needs more work and testing, and probably a hella refactor, it was not terrible as it was, included a whole bitcoin-centric SHA/secp256k1 cryptosystem for the connections between peers and clients

also, it was initially seeded by a nice irish chap who put up with me sharing his cambridge house for some time and i made the venture to help him (and me) move to madeira before his budget on my sponsorship was expired much respect and thanks, it was some crazy hard stuff at times and in the middle of it all i started to have all kinds of kidney/diabetes problems that really broke my productivity, and made me quite difficult to be around, many nostriches who know me from december last year would be able to relate

no but seriously, geyser was important in my life around a year ago, and if you go back to their history of grants the first round my indranet project won the first "second prize" from it (just ask @metamick he and i have had much dealings) and i bumbled onto that via the #dvadesetjedan group that i found from twitter, on discord, they pointed me to geyser i hope some day i will be able to advance the indranet concept, really, it's just the execution of a network transport built on top of the source routed onion TLVs used by lightning i kinda gave up on it not just because i ran out of funding but because of the complexity of network intelligence (p2p discovery) as i'd taken a shortcut to use libp2p but realised that it introduced a scaling limit ok, maybe that limit wasn't that big a deal, especially if it was just like bittorrent's mainline DHT, but it's not, libp2p puts you basically on the backbone of the same network routing protocol as IPFS which also has the scaling problem something me and my sponsor were getting excited about was building a p2p mesh that didn't require nodes to have a full network inventory in order to function, so that clients could send messages and relays didn't have to know who they were forwarding to, necessarily, this is a critical scaling feature and is also why bitcoin has over 20k replicas, which is far more than libp2p/ipfs could ever handle it was in the realisation of this problem that i was near the end of my sponsorship and i started getting sick

Geyser has an interesting combination of crowdfunding and grants, that we prefer to the OnlyGrants stuff. They sort of amplify crowdfunding with grants. That's where we're going to setup our funding page, after we launch Alexandria. OnlySats could contribute there, but who knows if they do that sort of thing.

Grants are cool 😎 Crowdfunding is awesome 🤩 Grants paired with Crowdfunding 🤯 We are already running community-voting Grants using 'proportional voting' (1 sat-1 vote), and the next one up is going to be even more powerful, powered by 'incremental voting' (1,2,3 votes per funder based on amount of sats sent). Let us know if you're interested. Would love to partner with @OpenSats to do a community-voting grant focused just on Nostr startup ideas. https://m.primal.net/JGlk.png https://geyser.fund/grants/7

I’m pretty uninformed here but couldn’t 1 sat = 1 vote be gamed pretty easily? Would it be more secure to do 1 sat per unique LN address = 1 vote? Or is the intent to also crowdfund the amount through the votes?

You're right, sir! The 1-sat 1-vote system we call 'proportional voting'. Which can be gamed pretty easily with 1 anon user sending 10M sats and winning all. We're now trialling an 'incremental voting', whereby each individual get's up to 3 votes based on sats sent. They need to login for their sats to count as votes, then1k-10k = 1 vote; 10k-100k = 2 votes; 100k and above = 3 votes. This can still be gamed though through fake new users created over nostr. To tackle this we'd need to apply a social graph analysis (ideally at a later time).

Interesting. As a little fishy I feel like that shuts out the little guys if people are passionate about it and want to vote but don’t have the spare sats to get the highest number of votes. Perhaps a mix of web of trust combined with a small minimum sat amount once per npub? And if an npub with too low a trust score votes it won’t be counted due to lack of trust? Idk just spitballing, not even sure if these are possible or realistic lol. Lmk your thoughts!

100%. the WoT/Social graph will be a coefficient. High trust = 1. Low trust = 0.01. We think this approach strikes a good enough balance between: 1. making any vote count 2. incentivizing people to send more sats.