Lighthouse: Decentralized Kickstarter | Hacker News Reader

Lighthouse: Decentralized Kickstarter

blog.vinumeris.com

55 pointstikhon7 comments

When you decentralise something, you tend to take away moderation and curation, which keep the general quality of offerings above a certain bar. I'd be curious what the author of this project suggests in this regard, or what measures he has put in place to mitigate the degradation of quality that can come from not having any kind of moderation or curation.

Hi, I'm the author. Thanks for your interest! If you'd like to follow the project, you can sign up for email updates on vinumeris.com (they will be quite rare so don't worry about being spammed).

Once launched, I plan to host a curated collection of projects for upgrades to Bitcoin and related software. In fact Lighthouse is partly software I'm writing for my own company, because that's how I would like to make money - by implementing open source upgrades and raising the funds to pay for it through per-project assurance contracts.

As mentioned in the other replies, obviously a decentralised solution can't have any central curation built in, but people are free to run their own curated collections of projects if they like. Often though, it won't be necessary, because the creator of the project already has a good reputation and the reputation of an aggregator is inconsequential.

In other cases, the entire notion of curation may be irrelevant. Consider micro assurance contracts like someone who wants to rent out a house with a pool and organise a big party with friends there, but only if enough friends commit to going for the party to be fun. This would not be allowed on Kickstarter, but Lighthouse lets you do it by simply attaching the contract file to the announcement email. Replies can have the pledges attached (you can drag the pledges right out of the app into an email compose window). So this is the kind of ultra light weight contract that might be possible in future, when you have a totally decentralised solution.

This is true to a certain extent... but those moderation and curation features can still be added on at a higher level. In fact, opening the storefront itself to competition could result in a better curation and moderation experience for the user.

So just like bittorrent, which is decentralized but has many (centralized) trackers of varying quality.

Yes, thank you for articulating that better than I could.

This is what I find interesting in bitcoin :)

It seems to me that instead of having to manually sync files or setup a server, Lighthouse itself could include a small BitTorrent library, and then you could just share a magnet link (with its own protocol handler, of course, e.g. "lighthouse:") and have the software fetch the contract and pledge files from other peers.

In fact, using the protocols which are behind Tribler[1], you could even browse and search for projects in a decentralized way, and probably even allow the project creator to automatically fetch the pledge files.

Fun stuff!

[1] http://www.tribler.org/

I think "BitTorrent Sync" already provides a shared folder that works this way, does it not?

I guess it could be integrated into the app, but often if you can share a link you can also just share a file. For the serverless case I guess pledgers and project owners will often not be online at the same time anyway.

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