Apply HN: The Decentralized Internet Endowment

5 points by jameswilsterman 10 years ago | 2 comments

The Internet Endowment is a decentralized pool of capital that will be used to crowd-fund projects in support of the Internet ecosystem.

Historically, the Internet community has demonstrated an incredible ability to come together to support causes and projects that benefit and protect the rights of Internet users. Recall the coordinated protests by many websites to stop SOPA and PIPA in 2012 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA).

Internet users should be able to quickly deploy financial resources when future threats appear or when there are opportunities to invest in ambitious pro-Internet initiatives.

Existing charities and interest groups have little oversight and offer little recourse to those who contribute. With a decentralized endowment, we can collectively determine how our donations and accumulated capital should be allocated. A decentralized model will encourage more donations and broad voting participation from Internet users with diverse perspectives and ideas. Until very, very recently, only highly centralized institutions such as universities and charities could operate endowments. Recent innovations around trust-less organizational structure now enable any loosely-affiliated group of people to create an endowment and invest in common causes with complete transparency.

We will use the concept of a DAO ("Decentralized Autonomous Organization") that was pioneered recently on the Ethereum blockchain to provide anyone who donates to our Internet endowment the right to vote on proposals for investing the endowment's funds and/or proposals for spending fund proceeds.

A decentralized Internet Endowment will enable:

  - funding for open-source projects

  - funding for political efforts

  - perhaps, funding for novel technologies and research

For more information on how the endowment would function as a DAO, I recommend:

  https://blog.slock.it/on-contractors-and-curators-2fb9238b2553

  http://daohub.org/principles.html

brudgers 10 years ago |

Does a person's status as funding or not-funding affect their ability to participate in determining the endowment's actions?

jameswilsterman 10 years ago | |

Yes - there are different ways I could see it work, but right now, effectively, the amount of money you contribute determines the number of votes you have on ANY action of the endowment. Anyone within the DAO or not can submit investment proposals to the DAO to vote on.

Of course, 51% attacks become possible with anything decentralized, so there are provisions to split the endowment itself or pull out your share of the funds whenever you desire (another benefit vs existing charities and endowments).

Check out Stephan Tual on Medium for more info on how his DAO supporting the Ethereum ecosystem awards votes to token-holders and incorporates 51% attack protections (https://medium.com/@stephantual).

I'd be interested in ways to non-linearly scale votes with donations (such as quadratic voting: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531) but that would require some sort of decentralized identity to prevent dupe accounts.