Musings on Tokens and Remuneration Strategies for Akasha

Hi guys,

I'm really excited about brainstorming about different ideas for the remuneration strategy of Akasha.

Idea #1 for Remuneration Structure - Swarm Voting: All Posters would pay a selected amount to post (not below some defined minimum to avoid spam) and a Supporters (up-voters and down-voters) would pay correspondingly smaller amount to up-vote or down-vote the Post thereby supporting the post and the community. However, the interesting thing is that up-voting and down-voting are a question of staking (maybe a scale of 1-5) as well as how early a given Supporter supports the project with their vote. So while a Supporter technically pays to vote, she can receive part of the total remuneration depending on how early she was and how much traction the Post gets in the end. The split of the Pot (total amount of contribution) between Poster and the Supporters would be set by the Poster so that famous Posters that are guaranteed to get traction can keep more of their value they generate while normal Posters that simply wish to gain traction and an audience can incentivize the community to support their post.

Yes, this looks a little bit like a pyramid scheme where early Supporters are remunerated by late Supporters but the benefits dramatically outweigh this one issue of optics. Such a structure would do away with sock-puppets and spam because the bots would essentially be paying each other along with the Poster and the global funds of the sock-puppets would go down over time thus making it expensive to spam or use a sock-puppet strategy.

You could also have an option where if a post is heavily down-voted the Poster stands to loose all of their initial payment and maybe even be fined further if the post is very aggressively voted down by a sufficiently distributed group of voters. Personally, I like the possibility to loose a lot of your money on the platform if you are spewing hate or incompetent nonsense, but I recognize such a draconian idea may not have widespread support ;)

Example Lets call the token "A$" or "Acash" for this example. Mihai posts an update about business development of Akasha. He decides not to feature the post (by paying more) and only pays 1A$ for his Post and he sets the remuneration split to 65%/35% - Poster/Supporters using a slider and then he can also easily set a decay schedule for Supporters such that the first 10 supporters get 25% of the Supporter pot, the supporters 11-50 get 25%, supporters 51-200 get 25% and the rest of the supporters get 25% (all of this is automatically redistributed if he gets fewer supporters). Each Supporter can support the post by up-voting or down-voting if they don't like it on a scale of 1-5 where 1 = .01A$ and 5 = .1A$. There are 500 up-voters for a total of 25A$ (500 * .05A$ as an average) and 20 down-voters for a total of 0.2A$ (20 * .01A$). So the total "pot" is 26.2A$ and is distributed according to the below table.

Total Pot 26.2A$ Supporter Pot (35%) 9.17A$

Distribution of A$ from Mihai's Post Particpant Average Contribution Pot Income No of Participants Income per Participant Return 1 to 10 0.05 2.2925 10 0.23 359% 11 to 50 0.05 2.2925 40 0.06 15% 51 to 200 0.05 2.2925 150 0.02 -69% 200 to 500 0.05 2.2925 300 0.01 -85%

We see that late supporters end up loosing a bit in order to support the post. That seems reasonable to me as someone may find the post interesting and useful and be willing to contribute by spending some A$. Early Supporters are more handsomely remunerated as they should be.

Down-voters loose all of their A$ since they were dramatically out-voted. This should make sense and be the case if there is more than a 2/3rds, 3/4ths or some kind of super-majority of voting in one direction or the other. If voting is more balanced, than down-voters could be remunerated in the same way as above thereby spreading the Supporter Pot more thinly between all groups.

Posters could decide to pay more for their Post and that could have an effect on distribution, audience, featured location on Akasha or the amount of tags that he can add to the post to try to get traction.

Note: I would like to thank the Founder of Polychain Capital, Olaf Carlson-Wee for this idea. It is his, not mine.

Thoughts on Tokens I think Akasha is a project that is ideally designed for a native token for the following reasons: A native token would allow Akasha to set the monetary policy and allow for users to contribute to posts without fear that their 1ETH contribution today won't mean that they paid USD10000 to make a post when they look back on it in 5 years (this is just an exaggerated example. I'm not predicting USD10000/ETH). Essentially, no one wants to be the '25000BTC Pizza Guy' and only through a native token can you have a monetary policy that promotes reasonable remuneration of posting and voting/staking on posts without the speculative FOMO that consumes much of the crypto community.

You would be free to program your token as you wish, have reputation account for something and that could be separate and distinct from the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem but still have interoperability as an ERC20 token. If ETH were to be the native token on Akasha than you are basically saying that Ethereum crowdfund participants and early supporters of the Ethereum project are also the most important and largest weighted or highest reputation users of Akasha. I do not think that those of us who were fortunate enough to be very early in Ethereum should given undue advantage here. This should be a meritocracy from the first moment and independent of ETH holdings imho.

Further, a token and potentially the crowdfund or distribution of said token could be very interesting in bringing more notoriety to the Akasha network and developing a distributed community around the project. Along with providing important resources to the project so you can grow your team and build out the functionality faster, you will incentivize more people to use Akasha and become part of the community. While a token crowdfund should be approached professionally with a certain amount of care and planning, I do think that the benefits outweigh the risks.

I would love any and all feedback on these thoughts and ideas. Feel free to respond below or reach out to me on Akasha. My handle is rzurrer.