Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@RichardRed0x
Last active September 14, 2020 09:46
Show Gist options
  • Star 0 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 1 You must be signed in to fork a gist
  • Save RichardRed0x/22c584e7fd9413c1a3f3284069998892 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save RichardRed0x/22c584e7fd9413c1a3f3284069998892 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.

Stakeholder-Governed Sound Money for a Fairer Financial System

See it live! (thanks @jholdstock)

Summary of changes

The tagline would change to: Stakeholder-Governed Sound Money

This proposal would add a new element to the explanation of Decred on decred.org: Fair

Where the string "Secure. Adaptable. Sustainable." appears, we will add "Fair."

This theme will have a box on the front page and its own page, as with Secure, Adaptable and Sustainable.

Box copy:

Fair
The Decred network is available to all, and the rules are the same for everyone. Decred is governed by its stakeholders, who time-lock some of their decentralized credits in exchange for tickets, using these to vote and make decisions about the Decred network and DCR asset's future.
Links at the bottom:
Read More About Building a Fairer Financial System
Read the Decred Constitution
Read about the Decred Airdrop and Founders' Reward

Page copy:

Contributors to the Decred project have a shared ambition, to build a fairer financial system by leveraging open source cryptocurrency software. Decentralized Credits (DCR) are the currency of this fairer financial system, everyone can own and use them - and have a voice in governance of the network if they choose to.

The Fiat Currency Game is Rigged

Our national fiat currencies and associated payment rails are controlled by a network of elites representing banks and public institutions. Cryptocurrency is about producing an alternative infrastructure for money, which is less susceptible to being captured and controlled by an elite because it is decentralized and permissionless. Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin, which relies on transparent distributed records and a game of computational power to ensure that everyone follows the rules and the network as a whole operates as intended. The consensus rules of the network bind all of its users together, and they stipulate an issuance schedule for the currency, which has been followed faithfully since launch. The distributed network and permissionless mining means it is difficult to stop or censor someone's transactions as long as they follow the network's rules.

Blockchain Governance Matters

Cryptocurrency networks rely on their software to enforce the rules of the network, known as consensus rules, because it is consensus on how to apply these rules that keeps the network together and functional. Software must be continuously maintained and improved, for cryptocurrencies this means in practice that sometimes the consensus rules need to be amended. Decred was founded on the insight that governance is a major challenge for decentralized networks, because there are many competing interests when it comes to making changes. Decred's solution was to include a formal method of making these decisions from the beginning, so that new users know from the outset how its governance works, transparently managing expectations.

Aligned Incentives, Skin in the Game

Decred's position is that the best way to decentralize governance of a cryptocurrency fairly is to distribute decision-making power among the people who hold its asset - DCR in this case. However, giving voting rights to everyone who is holding DCR and could immediately sell it is open to abuse. Therefore Decred's design introduced a requirement that in order to participate in Proof-of-Stake voting a user must time-lock some of their DCR to secure a ticket. When stakeholders use DCR to secure a ticket, they cannot spend it until that ticket has voted - which can take up to 142 days. For more information about Proof-of-Stake voting, see the documentation site.

Box footer text:

Learn about Decred's rules, which are the same for everyone, and put the holders of decentralized credits in charge of running the network.

You can see these changes mocked up (without new graphics) on a test site here.

You can see a diff of the proposed copy changes here.

Supporting work

The extra box on the home page would need a background graphic, and the Fair page would need three images. The cost for these to be produced by the same design contributors who worked on the rest of the site is estimated to be $600-1200.

To be consistent with the other pages, the Fair page would need a video. However, the videos are not very prominent on the page so we have decided to forego a new "Fair" video as this would be a significant additional cost and would likely take quite some time to produce.

The new elements follow existing patterns so the amount of work needed to add them on the site is relatively small. @jholdstock has already done the key parts of this to put up the demo site, the estimate for implementation is $400.

I (@richardred) am estimating the cost of producing the new copy to be $400, which covers the work already done to prepare the draft, plus some time spent considering and implementing feedback on further changes to it.

As decred.org is in 12 languages, this new copy would have to be translated 11 times. I am estimating $100 for each translation for an estimated total of $1,100. This is a difficult one to estimate, and my estimate is based on the information that translation of the other site content took 5-8 hours per language.

Costs

| Item           | Estimated Cost | Maximum Budget |
|----------------|----------------|----------------|
| Design         | 900            | 1200           |
| Copy           | 400            | 600            |
| Translation    | 1100           | 1400           |
| Implementation | 400            | 600            |
| Total          | 2800           | 3800           |
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment