A few months ago reddit user anarchystar created a $100,000 bounty for a software platform that can replace the Bitcoin Foundation. Specifically, the goals were to support a project to fund Bitcoin core development and another to fund Bitcoin lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C. The platform was also supposed to allow commenting on developer roadmaps and monetary contributions to be directed as desired by contributors.
The bounty was open for proposals for a month, at the end of which, the Lighthouse project submitted by Mike Hearn was chosen. Lighthouse was planned to include:
[list]
[li]Crowdfunding platform, running completely on the Blockchain. Assurance contracts which send money back automatically if goals are not met.[/li]
[li]Will be able to fund Bitcoin core devs directly. They propose their schedule and goals, and they can set extra bonus features when they get extra funds (such as with Kickstarter).[/li]
[li]Will allow lobbyists to make proposals and be directly funded by the community, according to their capabilities[/li]
[li]Will allow many other community initiatives, such as supporting adoption in Africa by sponsoring ATMs, etc[/li]
[/list] So my question is, how much of the above can be done with Counterparty? Where outside any software platform would trusted third parties be required? What additional software and database work would need to be done to provide a user interface to such a system?
Edit: Here's a link to the winning proposal announcement: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/29n8o0/100000_bounty_winner_announcement/
crowdfunding ? SWAMP is supposed to be the lighthouse in Counterparty
I guess making crowdfunding using bitcoin protocol alone is way harder than using meta coin platform
The funds could be escrowed until x amount or y% of people agree. Counterparty can handle this easily with a head-start of a year on its code. Quite frankly I'm surprised XCP didn't win.
[quote author=deliciousowl link=topic=543.msg3398#msg3398 date=1410420505]
The funds could be escrowed until x amount or y% of people agree. Counterparty can handle this easily with a head-start of a year on its code. Quite frankly I'm surprised XCP didn't win.
[/quote]
I actually find more interesting that 3 months ago, Counterparty or XCP aren't even mentioned in the original thread!
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/25sf4f/100000_bounty_for_software_platform_that_can/
Despite that many, many people were interested in it when it launched and contributed to the burn, XCP seems to be in hidden gem mode in the last few months.
Source code for Lighthouse has been posted to github here: https://github.com/vinumeris/lighthouse
It appears from my initial perusal to use the Bitcoin network only to do the multisig transactions and allows users to revoke their pledge somehow At a high-level, it's decentralized as far as the payment goes but uses a server to store the project data outside of that.
Here's the reddit announcement thread: https://pay.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2g828l/lighthouse_now_open_source/
I thought about this the other day, a ‘GovCoin’ with full bookkeeping could be done on counterparty pretty easily I think.
We’ll need our own Foundation “replacement” or supporting infrastructure now - https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/overstocks-medici-partner-counterparty-announces-counterparty-foundation/
I have suggested various enhancements on github that could surely assist in managing foundations and DAOs. These include escrowing funds based on broadcasts (in addition to multi-sig), and timelocking funds.
Ouziel further suggested:
- Automatic expiration
- The ability for (userA, userB), (userC, userD), etc. to use the same broadcast
- Ability for the escrow to broadcast the percentage of the amount that should be released/paid
XCP can handle the infrastructure for such a project, with some work. And voting is already possible.
Timelocking funds is a great idea.