Gitcoin Grants Round 5 Retrospective | Hacker News Reader

Gitcoin Grants Round 5 Retrospective

vitalik.ca

64 pointsfeross18 comments

It's quite disappointing that Vitalik keeps pushing something that fundamentally doesn't work in a decentralized setting.

The proposed mechanism "assumes" identity, otherwise the mechanism is gamed easily. Which is what has been happening.

can you give more details on why this doesn’t work in a decentralized setting? It sounds like the proposed collusion plan will be effective and if they need decentralized identities, those do exist in the blockchain ecosystem.

Noone has solved identity in decentralized systems.

Quadratic funding allocates a pool of funds based on the number of unique donors a project has.

The proposed solution will exclude a very significant portion of potential contributors. Vitalik hints politely on that by saying that there are trade-offs between security and inclusiveness...

AFAIK there's nothing mutually exclusive about using a service that requires identity (in this case, proof of unique human-ness) on a decentralized blockchain. In fact there are services that are actively working to create DIDs (like brightID, 3box, etc).

"working on it" vs "works today"...

Curious if you believe that because it's not working today it means we shouldn't talk about it as a path forward?

A decentralized identity system that works will be a very significant component to the dweb stack.

But people that have experience building decentralized protocols will tell you that it's a very hard problem to solve, for many reasons.

This is an engineering community, so I believe that it's important to focus on things that exist today. Not on speculative solutions.

I agree it's a hard problem to solve, and we've got no illusions about that.

This post (also, coincidentally by Vitalik) talks about different levels of collusion (from unsophisticated to sophisticated) https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/04/03/collusion.html

Gitcoin's approach thus far has been to stop collusion from unsophisticated actors, then progressively get more organized (as more money gets involved, and as we learn from each round) about stopping collusion from more sophisticated actors.

This thread talks about some collusion that we founnd in Round 5. https://twitter.com/owocki/status/1250097472694702080

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. But if it's that the identity mechanism on Gitcoin (aged github accounts) isnt perfect, then I think you're absolutely right.

I think a more important question is "are the round results valid?" Vitalik goes into this in his post - As Vitalik notes in his post, we are certainly reaching the limits of our existing identity framework as more money/users get involved.

Identity networks are a chicken and egg problem. My view is that Gitcoin being one of the first widely/actively used Ethereum products (https://gitcoin.co/results) we have a unique opportunity (and challenge/responsibility honestly) to bootstrap a DID network.

Here's some incremental improvements were gonna make in round 6: Identity - https://github.com/gitcoinco/web/issues/6549 Collusion - https://github.com/gitcoinco/web/issues/6548

One thing I forgot to add: In pockets of the ethereum community, it is widely considered that having identity mechanisms that can be relied upon is one of the things that is holding blockchain services back from going mainstream. There are all kinds of applications (decentralized social networks, payroll, voting, etc) that could benefit from having an identity overlay on a blockchain network.

Hi all, I'm the founder of Gitcoin Kevin Owocki (https://twitter.com/owocki)

Happy to answer any questions. Its Saturday so will be AFK for a bit here & there, but will keep an eye on this thread.

You have done great for the community. You have helped programmers in Africa to get involved and exposed into something serious. You have helped to bridge the digital divide and also increase social mobility.

Thank you! But honestly its the gitcoin team/community that is doing it, I'm just helping the team/community coordinate at this point :)

Hopefully this (https://gitcoin.co/results) is just a start and we can build information age native institutions that support all sorts of public goods (Open Source Software being the focal point right now) at 100x this scale one day.

Can someone explain what this is to me please? Is it a coin where work on the coin/it's promotion is rewarded with more coin?

experiments with "quadratic funding"[1].

[1] https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html

You have a pool of funds as well as a number of donors that donate to a set of projects.

The pool of funds is then allocated based on the unique donors each project had.

The math is quite interesting, but unfortunately it assumes identity in order to be implemented in a decentralized setting.

Here's a good intro post on Quadratic Funding that someone wrote. https://ethgasstation.info/blog/quadratic-funding-in-a-nutsh...

> Is it a coin where work on the coin/it's promotion is rewarded with more coin?

Gitcoin never did an ICO and doesnt have a token. During the 2017 ICO craze, we opted instead to just focus on product/community.

Our network supports any ERC20 token or ETH. Here are the top ones on the Gitcoin network https://gitcoin.co/leaderboard/tokens?cadence=all&keyword=al...

More on why we didnt do an ICO at https://gitcoin.co/not_a_token

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