Comment by jarins on 04/07/2020 at 22:25 UTC

4 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)

View submission: The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off

Can you elaborate on the problem Reddit wants to solve? Why do you want a tokenized solution after all?

Community Points are a way for Redditors to own a piece of their favorite communities. As a unit of ownership, Points capture some of the value of their community. They can be spent on premium features and are used as a measure of reputation in the community.

We picked the blockchain as a technological choice for its inherent ownership guarantees.

Do you have any numbers about what percentage of users are online at the same time? Can we assume for the demo that all users are online if we provide an outlook for a solution with offline users?

Since conversations on Reddit tend to be asynchronous (unlike chat), the vast majority of users are not online at the exact same time, though it would be reasonable to assume that most users are online within a sufficiently long time period (say, 1 week). The demo should take this into consideration.

What are the balance transparency requirements? Is it necessary to know each user's balance? At any point in time? At some point in time?

Real-time balances would be ideal. However, if real time balance information isn't available, balance snapshots at regular intervals (<1 hour) should be available, and there should be some way of ensuring that the lack of real-time balances doesn't cause any fraud issues.

What is the (economic) incentive of burning for subscriptions? Scarcity of the token? Transparent record of subscription?

From the FAQ on Community Points[1] (at the end of the intro): “When people spend Community Points, the Points don't go to Reddit. Instead, the Points are ‘burned’ (destroyed). This makes everyone else's slice of Points larger, thus rewarding the entire community.”

1: http://reddit.com/community-points

Can Community Points of a different subreddit be used for a subscription?

Is there an easy "duck test" for understanding which interactions need to be decentralized / can't be decentralized? I.e. For Coin Voting, you imply that only "distributed" tokens can be used for voting.

We'd like our scaling solution to be as resilient as possible to the things that makes centralization undesirable: companies going out of business, bad centralized actors (or collusion between a small set of bad actors), DoS attacks, etc. That said, we are willing to make tradeoffs, for example having some centralization in the scaling layer if there is clear transparency and accountability to ensure centralized actors are not misbehaving. The ability for users to exit and get on-chain tokens without relying on a third-party is the main non-negotiable decentralization item.

To clarify, in the context of voting, the term "distributed" is intended to mean "distributed to the user based on their contributions to the community". In other words, earned points as compared to points gained through other means, not "decentralized" points.

Tipping: what are the finality requirements of sending/receiving a tip? Is a "pending tip" acceptable? For how long?

Pending tips sound OK. The shorter the time period, the better. >4 hours would probably be too long.

Payment Channels scale linearly but they face problems of liquidity in the network. Would Reddit be willing to support the liquidity of the network, e.g. by operating dedicated nodes in a decentralized network? Would Reddit subsidize 3rd parties for supplying liquidity?

We would likely run nodes to support whatever scaling solution we end up with.

Is the one-ERC20 per subreddit model set in stone? If there was only one CommunityPoint token, we could see benefits from network effects for payment channels

Communities should fully own their points and not share a pool with others. If there is a model to do this without one-ERC20 per subreddit, we're open to exploring it.

Replies

Comment by r08o at 06/07/2020 at 10:35 UTC

4 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Thanks a lot for the answers! We're looking forward to showing you guys what we come up with!

Comment by r08o at 07/07/2020 at 09:45 UTC

2 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Hey, we have a couple of more questions:

What is the purpose of tipping?

User gains a bigger "share" of the community/ has more monetary value to also tip and buy subscriptions?
Or is the purpose of tipping increasing the status of the user (similar to karma)

Voting

is the voting power based on the distributed CPs to the user (through claims by reddit)
OR based on the current balance of the CP (the user gains more voting power by receiving CP through tipping i.e.)

User Balance

Should all balances of all users be publicly available?
Or should the "explorer" only show the user's balances and interactions (tipping, payments, subscriptions)

*All the questions above relate to the following underlying question: Does the user need to prove his current balance to any other entity at any point in time? (Assuming the fact that the user cannot make payments if he does not have enough balance or double spend, etc.)**