#257 Kevin Owocki: Gitcoin – Aligning Incentives in Open-Source Development

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Dutch X the fair and secure decentralized exchange platform bike Knossos to learn how you can build apps which leverage excess liquidity tool visit epicentre TV slash X and buy microsoft azure configure and deploy a consortium network in just a few clicks with pre-built configuration and enterprise-grade infrastructure spends less time on blockchain scaffolding in more time building your applications

learn more at AKA OMS slash epicenter hi welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the technologies projects in startups driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution my name is Celeste ink with you and my name is gonna be cans and today on the show we have Kevin Milwaukee Kevin's the founder of a real interesting project called get coin that is creating a two-sided market between project funders and so basically people who work on open source projects and contributors who who pick up bounty

requests and it's a really interesting project where there is this sort of it's all incentive mechanisms are aligned between you know people who need bounties picked up for their open-source projects and people who are willing to pick them up and make a bit of money while they're at it so what did you think of the interview FeliCa I thought it actually integrates the the project actually integrates into the existing ecosystem really nicely it's one of the biddings bucks that that was missing I really enjoyed the interview yeah well I thought was fascinating too is that like they built this and bootstrapped it and haven't done an IC o---- I mean it's it's just like it's a very simple

platform in fact I mean we'll get into this insurance show like they haven't yet figured out their business model but there's a you know this guy bootstrap this project and now a bunch of projects are using it for bounties so yeah it's it's quite interesting yeah that's actually quite quite acquitting and I mean I think this has been lost a little bit in the in the blockchain word building something um first making sure wax and then selling it later so it was very refreshing yeah it does it does work it was like quite a few projects that the build on and in fact so kenosis did use it I think you mentioned during a hackathon can you

talk about that yeah so basically there was East Berlin that we had here in been in a couple of weeks ago and we actually used git coin to actually dole out the bounties to the developers who Patrick in the hackathon and it worked it worked nicely so yeah kudos to get coin great yeah so we'll get to the interview in just a second first I just wanted to mention that we will be at web 3 summit in Berlin that that is next week it is Monday Tuesday and Wednesday I believe and we're also going to be at DEFCON 3 so both Brian and myself oh and sunny will also be at DEFCON DEFCON 3 diff gone four things are moving so fast

already yeah so we'll all be at DEFCON 4 so you can come say hi to us there and we'll be glad to see you yeah without further delay here's uh here's Kevin Noah kawaki of get coin hi so we're here with Kevin walkie who is founder of get coin Kevin thank you for coming on the podcast thanks so much for having me so before we get started what you tell us a bit about your background you came from software development what got you involved and interested in cryptocurrencies and hiriam yeah so I have a degree in computer science from University of Delaware in 2006 and I've

sort of always been interested in entrepreneurship and technology and and how I could how it could beat a path for myself that was outside of outside of Corporate America and out sort of a traditional career path and I think that that's always been driven by my intellectual curiosity and in in the evolution of the web and futurism and in cypherpunk ideas so I I spent the first two years of my career in corporate America and absolutely hated it I found an opportunity to move out to Colorado where I was the CTO of an online-dating start-up of all things for

about five years and that was a great experience that sort of threw me in the deep end of technology and entrepreneurship I've bounced around between technology startups for the last 10 or 12 years and was sort of captured in in 2011 by the Bitcoin white paper and the idea of non-state money the idea that money could be a native protocol of the internet but it wasn't until the etherium white paper more around 2014-2015 that I really got into the idea of programmable money and was really it was conversations with my friend Piper Miriam who is now a Python team leader at the etherium foundation that

really got me into the idea of programmable money and what if we could program our values into our money and that money those values and those smart contracts were immutable what kind of world what kind of better world that the could we create and so sort of just sort of sort of really curious about exploring those themes on today's show and in general and professionally awesome I mean I definitely can relate reading the theorem white paper was also quite eye-opening for for me and for us in general here on the podcast and before we get into get coin and go more in depth here I'm curious what was the single most single most important lesson

you learned while working for a dating company what was the most single more most important question that I learned oh you said you learned a lot of things what's what's your takeaway from working a couple years of the dating company I liquidity matters we uh we ran an online dating company for five years and I think that we had 90% men on our platform and only 10% women it created a real liquidity problem for supply and demand problem in the double-sided market that was it was a dating site I think that's probably the case for a lot of dating sites if you just look under the under the hood yep yeah under the

hood cool so you said you transitioned out of that and into into blockchain so as a developer and working on open source projects you what what did you see as some of the fundamental issues there and some of the fundamental problems in open source development yeah so uh been an entrepreneur and software engineer for pretty much since I since I joined that TechStars company in 2008 so about 10 years now and the one thing I noticed was that everything that I was doing in all of my cohorts we're doing is built off of open source web servers and database servers and technology but there's no the value that's created by

open source technology is in the billions of dollars but the value that's captured by it is is much much less than that and it just seems like a real incentive problem that you can create billions of dollars of economic output with with open source software but you can't capture any of that so I am interested in exploring how to solve that gap and I think that programmable money might be a useful tool in in solving that problem good so way then you started get coin um can you explain to us what get coin is and how it addresses that problem yeah sure happily so get coin is is not a token we have not decided our business

model yet and there's no IC o---- or no token get coin is a place where you can get coins if you're a software engineer so it's a double-sided market where people who want to fund development specifically open-source software development can put an ear seat 20 which is the etherium token standard bounty on any github issue github issues being where people check track change requests whether they're bug requests or future requests on github and that will be paid out when that github issue is closed to date we've done about 2,000 transactions between about 200 funders and 600 coders all across the world and so our mission is to support open source

software to grow and sustain open source software and bouncies is just sort of the first the first act in in how we're going to grow and sustain open source software and allow software developers to capture some of that value that open source software creates in in the world quite so quickly with em can you describe how with the user experience is both as a funder and as a contributor because they differ from each other right yeah that's right so if you go to get coin Co slash new you will see our funder onboarding experience and basically the way it works is that if you have a github issue you can paste that into the github issue URL field on

that form and then we'll pull in a title a description of that issue a bunch of keywords and then you can basically tag that bounty with some metadata and attach aetherium or any ERC 20 token to that to that bounty and when you click Submit you'll be asked to confirm the submission of that bounty to get coin in the staking of those tokens to that bounty once the transaction clears your issue will be posted on the github issue Explorer which is the repository of open work on on get coins and it will also be emailed out to our community of 11,000 software developers who are looking to contribute to open source software so we

found that the combination of the tooling with trustless bounty posting and then also the the community that's watching that tooling has been a killer app for funders to instantly add software developers to their project and as we know in the blockchain world soft for development developers are a pretty important addition to to any project and you know we're happy to be sort of a recruiter for software development projects in that respect and and that's why people have put over $300,000 worth of bounties on get coin to reach our audience of 11,000 software developers so and then to answer the second part of your question if you are a coder on get

coin you can go to the get coin issue Explorer or just keep an eye on your inbox and if there is a issue that matches your skill set and you have the time and gumption to turn around that issue you can click a button called start work which basically is a signal to the rest of the network that I'm working on this please don't work overtop of me and then typically because software development is sort of an abstract thing there's a little bit of back-and-forth that happens with the funder or the repo maintainer on the github issue and we think that github is an excellent collaboration layer for open source software we are not in the business of reinventing the wheel we're

just adding an incentivization layer on top of github x' collaboration layer and so we put a lot of the collaboration type stuff over on the github thread because it's working really well and that's where open source software is hosted you'll probably go back and forth with the funder a couple of times about what they meant about specific parts of the scope you will turn around a pull request which is a change request for that piece of software and then when you have when you're ready to attest that you have finished with the work you will press a button called submit work which is basically a way of saying here is my my my aetherium address please pay me for the work that I've done and then once the funder is happy with that work they will submit the payment to you and

that's sort of the life cycle of a git coin bounty what we found is that this is a low-risk way for coders and people who would hire them to work together and oftentimes people take their relationship off get coin after they've found someone who can provide value to to their project and vice versa so are very happy to have facilitated over a dozen full-time people working in the space that otherwise would not have built those relationships so it's a that's the one metric that I'm most proud of is is lives changed people who are now working professionally in the blockchain space and otherwise wouldn't be and yeah that's the user that's the user experience of get qohen on both sides of the market interesting so if I

just sort of recap here as a as a project maintainer let's say I maintain an open-source project and there are those issues coming in so I could be creating these issues myself my team could be submitting these issues users could be submitting these issues as well they show up in in github this is you know typically what people are used to when using github as though they'll use the issues tool there and then usually there's there's some sort of you know curation of issues so issues might get tagged as like a bug feature like a critical security pass or something of

that nature then as as the software maintainer as a project maintainer or I guess the funder I I put that issue up on on get coin that creates sort of the call to the market to call upon developers to address this issue on the other side of the market developers or contributors can pick up these issues I guess when when they're picked up there's of no longer available to the market while that person's working on them and when

there's so you mentioned there might be some back-and-forth that makes sense then when the issue has been resolved the pull request gets sent on on github and the project maintainer then when he approves that the git coin automatically makes the payment which I forgot to mention which is sort of an escrow I guess while the issues being worked on is that so summarize it correctly yeah that's pretty much the long and short of it yeah okay now so if looking at this I could see a couple things I don't want to address so the first would be with regards to just like I mean get github itself seems pretty well placed to

implement the system I mean if github wanted to implement some sort of a bug bounty reward system I mean it would be pretty trivial for them to implement that you know implement it into the issues platform like a project maintainer can put up a bounty that money gets held in escrow by kick by github and then when the issue gets resolved it you know the payment gets made they could even you know handle dispute resolution this sort of thing I mean like these types of things exist you know if you just look at five or any type of like gig economy platform these things exist why do you think this has never been part of you know github you know business model to implement this

sort of thing why do you think they've not went down that path it seems like it's like a pretty easy thing for them to do you know it's funny it's apropos that you're asking me this question right now while I'm in San Francisco I'm actually from Colorado but I'm out in San Francisco cuz we're sponsoring github universe right now we think that they've built an excellent collaboration layer and our aim is to be the incentivization layer that's built on top of that collaboration layer and to your point this idea has been tried before I think that for the first three months of when I started get coin every hackathon I went to a couple of software engineers who were like why don't we combine an open source in blockchain and

you know see what happens but you know there's a certain amount of I think of a lead that get coins built up because of my backgrounds 10 years of doing tech startups and experience with with software engineering that that I think has created some momentum for us in the brands category and also in marketing and you know we'll get into it later but we're backed by consensus which is the largest blockchain accelerator in the world so I think we've achieved a scale in in our user experience and the liquidity of the pool of software developers on get coin that's that's that's sort of approaching a competitive advantage but the thing

that I'll say is that there there is a people have noted this this incentive problem in open-source software in the past namely that it's easy to create value but it's hard to capture value the fundamental difference with git coin relative to let's bounty sources for example a web 2 version of git coin and they've been around for about ten years the the reason why get coin has a fundamental competitive advantage is because there's actually funding available for open source software in blockchain the combined market cap of all these crypto currencies is in the hundreds of billions of dollars and this is even in a bear market and everyone's chasing too few developers to get attention to their projects so there's there's a fundamental shift in the way

software development is being funded associated with blockchain and I think that were probably the first the the first company that's that fits figured out how to capitalize on that and create a liquid market for for software bounties and you know just to bring it back to the to the github question we would absolutely love to to partner with them and to bake our features more into the user interface so you know we'll see what happens with our sponsorship of github universe but looking to exit the blockchain echo chamber and to bring the goodness of software development bounties and funding to the broader open source community you know the Dutch have given us so much orange carrots

Bluetooth artificial hearts even donuts were invented by Dutch people but they also gave us Dutch auctions which as it turns out are great for decentralized exchanges Dutch X is a decentralized trading protocol for er C 20 tokens and it's invented designed and built by kenosis current order boat based exchanges whether centralized or decentralized have a couple of issues miners and exchanges can front-runner trade when they step in front of a large order to gain an economic advantage not to mention issues with securing funds high listing fees lack of liquidity and pricing efficiencies the Dutch tax exchange platform uses a Dutch auction mechanism to determine the fair value for a token and participants in a trade are encouraged to reveal their true likeness to pay which eliminates

front running as a permissionless on chain protocol it's useful for BOTS and other smart contracts needing to exchange tokens and Dutch checks also acts as an oracle for - requiring a price feed so to learn more check out the documentation at epicenter TV /x smart contracts are live on a theory main net so you can start building today we'd like to thank gnosis and Dutch X for their support of epicenter well maybe get into this a bit later into sort of like the the usage of the platform but it sounds about what you're saying that most of the projects and I guess it doesn't make sense the most of the projects that are on the marketplace are blockchain related projects are you seeing any sort of adoption from web to projects other open source projects no

not really I think that 95% of the projects that we've that we've seen on the platform are blockchain based projects and I think that that's a that's that's sort of a result of where our efforts have been and where we are have been able to find funding for for open source software we've gotten grants from the etherion Community Fund in the etherium foundation themselves maker Dow stable fund all of these projects want to accelerate blockchain development and help if their iam 2.0 and projects based on aetherium go to market faster and we also want to see that happen so it's went been where our focus has been and I think that that's healthy for where the

the blockchain space is right now but eventually we're gonna shift our focus to the broader open source market and our sponsorship of github universe in San Francisco this week is just sort of our first litmus test for what that's going to look like in 2019 and 2020 so you so you've already mentioned a couple of names Kent can you go into what projects have already successfully bound to a successfully posted bounties on your project yeah sure happy to and the other thing that I'll note is that I think transparency is a really important value for a blockchain project and as part of that ethos we've built to

the get coin leaderboard which you can access a get coin Co slash leaderboard and always see an updated version of the answer I'm about to give you but yeah to answer your question we've done a handful of bounties with meta mask which is the largest aetherium based browser wallet in the world we have done some bounties with the etherium foundation itself get coin is built with get coin so anytime I have a software development task that I don't have time for or I am NOT a subject matter expert in we put a bounty on get coins open-source repo and build Bitcoin with get coins so it's been a way that we've been able to do a lot with a with a small team market protocol which is a derivatives trading

platform on etherium has used dust a lot and if you go down the list you can see names like decentraland in Ferrara Cybercom cyber Congress augur web 3j givethe we've we've done projects or bounties with a lot of different projects in the space and it's been a real blessing to learn from all of the different use cases that people are trying to build an aetherium because they're they're quite vast so maybe this is the time to go into some stats you actually have quite an extensive stats section on your website and so how many bounties are there and get coin total right thanks yeah as you noted if you go to get coin Dakota slash results you can

always see our updated stats and the reason that we've done that is because people typically see the get coin landing page and they say oh this looks well done and it's a good idea but does it work well hey flip over to this stats section and here's all our numbers do you think it's working and yeah the to answer your question we've done almost about a thousand bounties on on get Cohen over the last year and we also have this feature called tips which is just it's just sending money from from person a to person B and we've done about a thousand of those for a total of 2000 transactions we have done a total in of 343 thousand dollars worth of total platform value on get coin and if you

break that down by month it's sort of on an upward slope as we get get more adoption in the space over time and we've helped let's see the stat the most current stat is 220 funders reach an audience of just over 10,000 developers and complete 2,000 transactions with 550 unique coders so that's that's sort of the volume that's going through the double-sided market in total on a per unit basis if you post a bounty on get coin you can expect that it'll be started within seven hours that's the median bounty start time and you can expect that it'll be turned around at about eighty-five percent success rate once it's started and that will usually

take about six days for the median bounty the hourly rates on the platform are between 20 and 60 dollars which is quite a wide range but I think that uh you know we're starting to put more analytics into what the hourly rates are for specific bounty types because we think that right now get coins buoyed by the fact that everyone's searching for software developers in the blockchain space and so there's a lot more demand than there is supply but over time we think it's really important for the brand that there's healthy hourly rates forget coin bounties because you know we don't want to be another fiver or another upwork where it's just sort of seen as a race to the bottom we think it's really important to provide

leverage for software developers to to lead better lives and to get involved in a work in a space that's that's making the world better and so we're really we're really focused on that hourly rate number as get coin grows from having 200 funders to a thousand funders and and beyond good and so you know I think you do you name the numbers so we could do the math so what's the what's the average funding M of a bounty yeah the average funding of a bounty is about a hundred and seventy dollars cool and other bounties that don't get collected yeah one of the things that we found is that and I'm really glad you asked

this question because if you think about the gig economy I think an example everyone's really used to is uber right with uber you take me from A to B and you do it safely and you know there's no weird quirks and I'll give you five stars and I'll give you a tip right but with software developments it's a little bit different because I if I'm asking you to do software development for you I'm inherently asking you to do something that's pretty abstract right I would like feature X but then maybe I'll get a submission that looks like feature X subprime and then and then I'll say back to the to the coder oh you know I really wanted X subprime one but I just was only able to elaborate it

progressively and and I think that you know that's that's sort of one of the more happy paths on get coin and we always ask that people set aside a little bit of budget to deal with progressive elaboration on on their bounties but I think that I I think that there's there's sort of like a failure case here in which I either ask for too much and I haven't funded the bounty at a level in which it's gonna get picked up we call that underfunding there's a failure case called under scoping of your issue so if you just put up something that's not really comprehensible and you don't provide the right documentation for how to understand the mission of the project and the ethos of the project and how to

spin up the docker container for it then you're not gonna get a lot of bites and I also think that quite candidly get coin is not one giant double sided market we're a bunch of small double-sided markets for Python development and JavaScript development and solidity development and security bug hunts and each of these little niches are their own little double-sided market it's kind of like if you go on Airbnb and you search for a house in New York the liquidity in Florida doesn't help you with your with your house or with your with your search in in in New York and it's very much the same way when you're searching for a bounty hunter on get coin so I think that there are some some niches that we haven't

figured out exactly how to penetrate within within software development probably compiler compiler bounties I haven't seen a ton of those so I'll just we'll call that the example and get coins trying to get better at at building the muscle to instantly scale a double-sided market as soon as there's demand but we're only a small team and we haven't quite gotten there yet so the the third category of failure case that I'm sort of trying to describe here is not enough liquidity in the market and it's it's that's the one that I think that we're really focused on improving in 2019 I have a two little follow-up question so one for the first one is um so how much back and forth is there typically

between the funder and the person actually working on the bounty um and secondly what kind of dispute resolution do you offer so basically if I fund an issue and I get an absolutely subpar response and they want to collect the bounty for that how do what would I do as the funder yeah so to answer your question we've seen on average three or four comments on github threads between when the bounty is posted and when it's actually submitted so I think that's the answer to your first question the band's here it's here second question is how does dispute resolution on on get coin work and so the the thing

that we're trying to instill in our funders here is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and so the first thing that you can do is do a really good job of scoping out what you want to see and what your coding standards are what the acceptance criteria for your bounties is would not all funders do this but the ones that do see see way less disputes another feature that we offer is called permission bounties so if you're asking for something that requires an each skill set or subjective submission criteria for example I do a lot of design bounties on get coin and if I don't like someone's design aesthetic it doesn't mean that their submission was wrong it just means that I'm not gonna be able to use it because it

aesthetically doesn't vibe with with what I'm trying to do so approval approval required bounties or another way to prevent disputes from happen and so we've we've tried to do that convinced funders to use that as much as possible that's that's prevented a lot of disputes and then and then so the the the question becomes well what if those two preventative measures don't work then what happens and so I think that there's two levels of answering your question with respect to how dispute resolution works on get coin one is what's the trustless dispute resolution immutability layer forget coin and the second one is what are the social norms

that are acceptable in open source software and specifically on get coin now get coin is is one of the first bounty networks that actually has scale and that people are actually using aetherium smart contracts to work for their first crypto instead of buying their first crypto and so I think that we're an interesting test case here we're also very lucky to be working on open source software where there's sort of social norms around what's acceptable because everything you do is for the most part tied to your real identity your github profile which is tied to your to your real identity so we're lucky that there's an ethos an open-source software where we treat each other like humans and also it's connected to our to our real-world identity and that creates a social norm where the acceptable you know if someone

submits it something that I truly isn't usable and it's it's not against if it's against my specifications then I'll go back to them and say hey can you please revise this and maybe they will maybe they won't if they do then maybe we're back on the happy path and if they don't then we're maybe I'll tip them twenty percent in in exchange for their time and move on to the next contributor we haven't seen any disputes actually escalated to get coin core yet but we do know that as we scale that it's something that we're gonna have to be able to deal with the plan is to leverage Delfy network which is an arbitration platform that's being built by by the Bounty's network another

consensus project and the way it's gonna work is that in in our bounty smart contract there's there's an address which right now is the null address but eventually it'll be a smart contract that's the represents five arbiters and three out of five arbiters will have to vote in your favor in order to send the stake to the to the funder or to the coder so we've put a lot of thought into this and we don't have it live yet but in the the TL DR is that in the meantime social norms have have sort of allowed us to create a good user experience without the backing of that smart contract trustless layer if you've listened to previous episodes with merlin grey and matt Koerner you know that microsoft is

committed to providing enterprise-grade tools and infrastructure for blockchain developers well the azure blockchain workbench is perfect for organizations building consortium networks take the etherium proof of authority template for example it's ideal for permission networks where consensus participants are known and reputable if the area manager has on chain network governance that leverages parodies extensible proof Authority client each consortium member has the power to govern the network or delegate their consensus participants to a trusted operator and parodies webassembly support allows developers to write smart contracts in familiar languages like C C++ and rust Azure blockchain workbench was created on the same principles that drive all production services in Azure so you know you're relying on secure redundant

infrastructure that can scale and with built-in services like authenticating api's off chain databases and secure key management services you can scaffold your infrastructure in just a few hours to learn more about Azure blockchain workbench and how Microsoft is advancing blockchain usability and enterprise check out akms slash epicenter and start building today we'd like to thank Microsoft Azure for their support of epicenter on the topic of dispute resolution I mean this is something that we've covered I feel like in in previous episodes but do you so you know you mentioned Delfy network as a potential dispute resolution mechanism I'm not super familiar how it works but do you envision that as you said earlier you

know there's sort of like different markets so you might have JavaScript development or Python development or you know at some point that if get coin is successful you might see get coin open up and get into other types of software development that isn't you know specifically over the blockchain it could be like security or athletics development or Windows development do you envision a future where as a as a project funder I would specify my dispute resolution mechanism and so the one that best works for my specific use case and also where I know that I'm gonna find competent dispute resolution arbiters yeah that's a really

good question and I think that dispute resolution is is something that's hopefully we're gonna see a lot more momentum in the broader space in in blockchain in 2019 the way the get coins smart contracts are architected is that we're using standard bounties which is a standard VIP one to 1080 one which is the standard for bounties on etherium and there's actually a an address field on the smart contract that allows you to plug and play any arbitration network that exists on aetherium and so I think that we're most excited about the Delfy Network and what they're doing with with arbitration but as a funder you'll be able to build in any number of

arbitration networks because of the extensibility the modular design of that smart contract so at the moment get coin primarily is hosting bounties for the sort of blockchain ecosystem blocking projects and I guess what would be desirable and would be to see that expand and to sort of broader development broader open source development so companies like Facebook and Google and other large web to companies you use bounties to identify security vulnerabilities on their systems for example that has been quite successful I think for for many of them

do you see get coin moving into the closed source software space and how that play out in your in your view yeah I think they by and large the ethos of the project right now it's stayed read our mission page is to grow in sustain open-source software the Commons of the software development world and I think that our mission is is one of the big reasons why people choose to do bounties on get coin people I like to say that you we as as web 3 designers need to design for humans and not just wallets and one of the things that we've learned about human beings is that they decide to do work not only based upon

the compensation that they're doing but also upon the impact that that work is going to have both on their own lives and skill sets but on the world at large and also whether or not it aligns with their values and I think that the open-source eat source ethos of git coin has really buoyed us as we've as we've been coming out of seed stage and growing a little bit larger now that being said there is a large portion of the world that operates on norms of closed source software and we do plan on building a bridge from the open the community of git coin contributors that are right now focused on open source and building a bridge to - close source

bounties and you know you can expect that in the future if you post a bounty on git coin on a closed source repo it'll maybe have an option to NDA a contributor and give you instant access to the code base as soon as you're accepted on that bounty so that's a feature set that you could that you could hope to see in the future and really what I think that we're disrupting when we go into closed source bounties is software development recruitment and anyone who who who's been on LinkedIn for more than six months knows that software development recruitment is broken and there's not you know it or if you've spent some time doing white board interviews then I think that you you might think that your interview for a position as a software

engineer in in in a major tech company maybe doesn't approximate what the real world user experience of working in that company is and the reason why we want to enter closed source bounties is we think that bounties are fundamentally a better way to hire software developers than then whiteboard interviews or spray-and-pray LinkedIn messages you can basically just set up a screening bounty for your your company and not work on something that approximates what it would be like working at that company but actually work on work that you'd be doing if you worked at that company and that's a really great way to understand in a low pressure way no whiteboard interviews no long phone calls no recruiter screens

that's a way to try before you buy on hiring and so we think that that's a potential not only new feature for get claim but that's a potential revenue opportunity for the project in the future so just a side question what's a whiteboard interview Oh a whiteboard interview is if you're recruiting for a software development job you'll probably go through a phone screen and then you'll get it invited on-site and then you'll be asked to stand up in front of a whiteboard in front of a couple people who would be your teammates and sort of binary tree or something like that basically the complaint that software developers often have about whiteboard interviews is that if you want to sort of binary tree in your day job you just

Google how to do it and then you just code it in front of your computer but a lot of software developers aren't socially anxious and so standing up in front of a whiteboard and writing something down in explaining your thoughts in front of a panel of three to five people is not really a good approximation of what it's like to do the job there and so that's sort of what a whiteboard interview is and why it's bad in in 25 seconds so um you're saying you see this more as a springboard to actually get a stable employment with with a company yeah I mean I think that in some cases bounties are a springboard to get stable employment with a company we've also seen people that are interested in just

working for bounties because they like the variety and we have a contributor in Nigeria and we have a contributor in in India who are making Western wages by just working for get coin and so we've sort of seen both categories of people on on the application so so typically people also see themselves as part of a company I think this is one of its kind of where people obtain meaning it's one of the things that lets people have a narrative about their own life and tell people what they do for a living and who they work for

what what what they do exactly so in the gig economy that that is something that it's lost a little bit right so basically the connection between the company itself and the employee and my question is its twofold so do you think this is this is something that a lot of people actually won do they want to be freelancers and not be tied down but also not have that feeling of belonging to a company but also how does that actually pan out for the companies so basically if your company and you actually have to you do you do a lot of your development work you external

externalize it by by funding bounties you actually have to specify everything to an excruciating detail to actually get good results and to me it seems like that wouldn't work for any kind of task and of course there are tasks where this works perfectly but as soon as they actually if they actually have an effect on the system architecture for instance this kind of breaks down I mean obviously that there were contain tasks like security testing and and did small issue with small tickets that you can specify well but do you think this actually scales can you build an entire company just by putting out bounties okay so a good really good question I

think that we're building and I'm gonna come back to your question but first to frame me my answer I think that we're building a completely open-source financial system that's based on money becoming a core protocol of the Internet as opposed to something that was just bolted on on the on the side and I think that right now 95% of the applications in the open source financial system are web wallstreet 3.0 sort of financial spec applications and I am very very happy to be exploring the ideas of what do open-source financial system jobs look like and I think that there's one macro theme that sort of is is perpendicular to that open-source financial system

jobs idea and that's what happens to jobs if and when they're unbundled from what traditional employment looks like so you know not to expand the scope of your question but I think a lot of like what keeps me up at night is you know what happens in in this new ecosystem to health insurance and to into retirement plans and to the stability associated with with a traditional employment agreement and there's there's a company in in Boulder Colorado called appleís which is which is working on that which I'm very excited about they want to provide self sovereign employment that you carry with you from job to job and so your health insurance and your

retirement is just sort of like part of this this dowel that comes with you from company to company but to specifically address what you asked me about which was which was which was you know do people want to go from company to company and do you have to specify things in excruciating detail if if you for every single task that's out there in in your company I think that there's two major axes like there's a trade-off here between stability and variety both stability of work and variety of work and stability of who you're working with and variety of recruitment that comes in and so the thing that I'll I'll say is

that we think that bounties are just our first act and we're going to be expanding outside of just bounties in the future we think that so there's this computer science cliche that they taught me in computer science 101 which I'm going to repeat here and that's that if the only tool you have in your hand in your toolbox is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail and bounties are amazing I love the Bounty's Network I love the ability to instantly recruit software engineers to to coin but I think that they're only good for for specific nice tasks where you don't need to have a lot of trust you don't need to provision access you don't need to give a lot of context and so the next product that we're going to be

launching on get coin is going to be a tool for you to basically give a stipend to an open source contributor over time to contribute to your software development repo and the idea there is that I will use the the standard for subscriptions on aetherium the IP one three three seven to give you a grant or a stipend of four hundred dollars per month let's say that I've worked with with you Frederica on on three or four bounties I've gotten to a point where I can trust you I know that you deliver good work and I don't want to spend a bunch of time specifying every single task that you do for get coin I will give you a four hundred die die is a stable coin that's worth $1 I will give you a four hundred diam unthe bounty and

I'll just say give me four hundred dollars worth of value to my repo you figure out what it is here's your roadmap and you know thank you very much for becoming a maintainer of my repository so I think that the short answer to your question is that bounties are great for adding variety to your repository but people need they stability of traditional employment and that will be our second act and you can expect that feature to be launching some time in q4 2018 on get coining ok quiz that's super interesting so you don't just have bounties you'll also have grants and the third thing that I actually thought about when I read your white paper is public goods so do you

think there's a way to actually fund public goods on your platform so the thing that came to mind was a it was a dominant assurance contract yeah so I mean I think that a couple answers ago I had mentioned that people want to do work not only the compensates well but aligns with their values and has a positive impact on themselves and on the world and one of the things that we found is that we're building this substrate for an open source financial system and in a way you can make an argument that that some of the stuff that we're doing with the etherium foundation and out the protocol lever is a public good and one of the dynamics that I'm really excited about talking talking about with respect to this is the prospective of crowdfunding a bounty

so basically if you put forth an idea that's going to help increase the Commons then everyone should have an incentive to pile on and to add funding to make sure that that bounty actually gets gets turned around and get coin does support crowdfunding bounties and I think that we do need to do a better job of soliciting donations in in crowdfunding bounties but I think that one of the key things with with supporting the Commons is to align the individual incentive of the profit incentive of a software developer everyone has to pay their mortgage and everyone has to put food on their table you want to align that individual incentive with what's good for the community and I think an open-source financial system is is a really good

place to start and there are other Commons that we need to support and structure once we solve the problem of an open-source financial system so I'm excited about the work bounties Network is doing in bounties for the ocean which is a bounty that you can get paid out if you if you clean up trash off of a beach I'm excited about the way bounties can be applied to combine individual incentives with community incentives in a number of different areas and I hope that we see more of that once we solve the fundamental incentive problem with the with the traditional financial system by creating an open-source financial system quick so if as a contributor actually start working on a

bounty and you actually have to press a button that says start work right so in that way I can actually stop other people from working on the same problem and and I understand why so you don't want to create race conditions for contributors which is nice for contributors and but as as a funder um how do I actually make sure that the person who said they were going to work on this actually works on this says I'm sort of reputation that that is at stake should they should they not deliver or in the in effect there's an opportunity cost for the funder so should locking these issues be priced in some way yeah that's a really great question and I'm glad that you asked it

the one thing I'll say is that the start work button locks the bounty in in our traditional bounty type but we do have contests in cooperative bounties which cooperative bounties allow you to work together with other people say you're a designer and I'm a front-end engineer we are skill sets complement each other and we can complement that we can cooperate on bounty with competitive bounties it's more of a race to get things done and these are sort of dicey because you don't want to introduce spec work onto your platform spec work is is speculative work that you don't know if you're actually going to get paid now so there's a predatory element to to spec work that we want to keep off of the

platform but there is a valid use case for contest bounties namely in the sense of like a security bounty where if you get an exploit then you should be able to get paid for that that exploit and I think that that's a healthy use of of contest type bounties but specifically to your question I'm sorry could you so your question was was was about the race condition of start work would you mind repeating it real quick yeah so sure so basically the question was as a contributor and the the issue actually gets locked for other contributors because they know someone is working on this and fast but there's a funder do I have control over the contributor that

actually takes this do they have reputation can I say no I don't want this guy they haven't delivered on the past three issues and all they say I'm working on this and then they then they then they're never heard from again so should they actually have to put up some funds that are slashed if if they don't deliver or should they have a reputation system where you can see oh this person has consistently delivered for other projects I should trust them as well with locking this bounty and making this unavailable for other people right okay yeah thanks for reorienting me there yeah so the we have permissioned bounties which is I'll select the contributor they'll apply and I'll select them and then we also have permission list which is just anyone can start and work on the bounty we have found that there's a

all issue with bouncy abandonment which is basically someone claims they're going to work on something and then they go I'm gonna sail sailing for two weeks and then they don't come back or they're just not being responsive and so we have sort of a slashing condition there and which will mark prominently on their profile this person is not commutative and they might just bail on you so I think that reputation is sort of being built there and one of the items on the roadmap for early 2019 is the ability to not only have permissions bounties and permissionless bounties but have a third option to stake some ether that says that you're actually serious about getting this done and so I think that that's a crypto it's taking is a crypto

economic primitive that's obviously the etherium foundation is excited about with respect to Casper and other projects are excited about and we will be building that into get coin in early 2019 so moving on to the next topic and you mentioned it briefly previously is the EIP 1-2-3 37 or elite and is a it is a proposed standard for subscriptions on the blockchain this is a proposal that you made an EIP system and is for the ERC 948 token standard tell us about this token standard and why you're advocating for

it right well so as you noted it's Epione 337 which was an EFP number that I was watching for about about a month and a half for those of the those of you who don't know 1 337 stands for elite which is a short for elite and it's one of the I think it's it's from gamers back in the day if you got like a headshot in Doom or something you'd say oh that's so neat but old geek reference it's an it's an old geek reference thank you you're more how many people how many people you think we're looking at this VIP like just waiting for it to come up and posting comments I've met at least one person who was like aw man you got

it and I didn't but the way I got it was I wrote a pie a conscript that sent me a copious number of text messages when it was available but anyway so that's just the number and its really lead search yeah that's that's sort of some of like the geeky history there but the the reason for the for the standard is that I think that we're building an open-source financial system and I think that tokens in icos are just the first act of this world financial computer that we're building I think the I SEOs are really great for a lot of things but I do think that subscriptions are a very healthy way of aligning the incentives of DAP founders with consumers of DAPs and the issue that I always give to illustrate

this is that when you want to subscribe to Netflix which is ten dollars a month you just subscribe to Netflix because it's pretty low risk and there's not a high information barrier to subscribing to Netflix I just pay ten dollars a month and I cancel down the line if I'm not getting value from it there's no white paper to read you know we're competing with utility tokens by the way which there's a 45 page white paper to read you have to understand who the founders are what their vesting schedule is what is the crypto economic primitive of this white paper I just want to use your product I don't want to have to do a ton of research and so and so paying $10 a month is something that people are used to in the legacy web and it's a low-risk way of trying things that that

you can always cancel over time if you're if you end up not using it or not getting value from it the other side of the coin is for a DAP founder so if you're a DAP founder and you choose to do an IC o---- then you get a lot of money in the door you have a little bit of regulatory uncertainty associated with that money if you're in the United States like I am and you basically have to build utility and then and then assume that your the people who bought your tokens the speculators are going to be the same people who are going to derive utility from your platform we think that subscriptions are a fundamentally better way to monetize your DAP because your specula there there are no speculators it's all just product market fit who's going to use my

platform and also if I have X number of subscribers and I have Y conversion rate and I have Z turn rate then I know my cash flow months down the line if you can find an ICO or token based system that knows their cash flow and twelve months come find me and and tell me about it because I don't think that that exists in the tokenization model and to be clear I think that ICO is in token tokenization is fundamentally innovative but I think that subscriptions are meant to provide an alternative funding model for adapts that's proven out it works in web 2.0 and and we think that it should exist in in web 3.0 and so what myself and the many many other smart people who were

involved in AI p13 37 have done is we've created a standard for subscriptions on the blockchain that you will be able to just drop into your dap when we launch in two weeks at DEFCON four in prague so basically the idea is that you just clone our repo and then you can instantly put subscriptions into your dap in we have a we have a reference implementation that's been security audited and is ready to just be dropped into your repo so you don't have to do a bunch of research in order to put subscriptions into your dap you can just you can just clone the repo and put it in there and hopefully we'll see a proliferation of projects that monetize with subscriptions instead of tokenization after we launched at DEFCON

at the end of october this year okay so just to understand how this works so I'm a I'm a top developer I'm building I don't know some sort of adapt to like a marketplace for give issues or whatever okay okay I'm Ben I'll be I'm building a widget you know typically I would I would I would fund that with an ICO utility token or not that's not really the question here but you think that an alternative funding model and guess what make sense would be to build that DAP and rather than go out and raise a bunch of money through an ICO and distribute

these utility tokens you can simply open that product to the the community as a user I paid your monthly subscription and in ether and I get access to the to the dap how does that how does that work from a user's perspective because i presume i mean you would want to have it done in such a way that the price would be maybe fixed to something that more stable like dollars is that does that is that part of the standard or not yes so IE i p1 337 is built off of ER c 20 which is the token standard on aetherium and we do

think there is a use case for for any ER c 20 token but the ones that were most excited about our stable coins and so basically the way it works is that you will as a consumer that's going to Sebastian's widgets comm and wants to subscribe to it you'll you'll be prompted to purchase the subscription and you will sign in a transaction in meta mask that is your consent to debit the let's call it 10 died a month just to stick with that price point for Sebastien's widgets Sebastien's widgets ships widgets to you once a month and you can revoke that consent at at any time using the smart contract and

basically once you revoke consent the provider will never be able to charge you again for for that widgets purchase and if you've coded Sebastien's widgets com correctly you'll stop sending widgets to the to that consumer and so the idea is that you can trust lessly create and revoke consent for those ERC 20 tokens to be debited from your accounts using the smart contract you know this seems awfully similar to you know other other solutions that people have implemented in the past for things like video streaming where there's essentially a payment channel that's opened up and there's sort of transactions that are signed every

second or whatever every time period and content that is delivered in in exchange how different is that from from like a typical payment channel implementation got it so uh yeah you're right the this sort of streaming money use case I think is a really really important one for the future of the open source financial web and the one thing I'll I'll say is that I'm on the business models ring at eath magicians in in Prague this this fall and I'm by no means the subscriptions maximalist I just I just think that you know the more that we can explore these different business models the better the

difference between subscriptions and payment channels specifically is it's a difference in granularity subscriptions the use case is a little bit more once a week and once a month and also there's an expectation of how you meter the charges so basically if if I'm paying for a video stream just use your video streaming example and I accidentally leave on my my video stream for 72 hours then I'm liable to get charged for way more than I would if there is just a fixed price $10 a month subscription to to your video channel so I think that the two primary differences between the streaming money use case and

subscriptions is a the granularity and B whether you're metered based off of exact usage or just on a monthly or weekly basis quickly that's a fantastic EIP well when do you think it's going to be available so we're in a pending state right now and there's a reference implementation that has been been security audited that you can just drop into your DAP right now on in the middle of October the official launch is at DEFCON 4 in Prague which is two weeks away and so if any of your listeners are gonna be a DEFCON four please come find me and I will give you a copious amount of swag that all says be leet on it so come find me at DEFCON

four that's the alert that's the official launch date October 30th Kota fantastic so we've spoken a lot about financing just thanks but we have we haven't spoken about financing get coin so how do you finance yourselves and how do you make sure you can pay out your own bounty good question the get coin was initially funded by myself with the gains I made it in the 2017 bull market for aetherium and I was lucky enough to be introduced to Joe Lubin who is a co-founder of aetherium and also the founder of consensus the largest blockchain venture studio in the world was lucky enough that he believed in our mission of growing and sustaining open source software and also realized that get coin is a bolt-on accelerant to

his portfolio of 50 to 100 blockchain based projects so he has agreed to fund us while we explore the intersection of jobs and open source software and bounties and subscriptions and all of that good stuff and I'm super thankful to to Joe into the Consensus mesh for being a supportive place to experiment on it in in this area I think that long term were we're trying to figure out what our business model is we have made a decision that I SEOs are just the first killer app of the Internet of money and we have a wider view than than just tokenization and I SEOs and don't want to just take the first exit ramp

that's that's made available to us I also think that tokenization and I SEOs don't fundamentally align the incentives of our users and of the founders of the network and I think that for that reason we've decided not to do an IC o---- at least for now I'm very excited about the possibility of subscriptions on get coin for all of the reasons that I've mentioned to you while we were talking about AIP one 337 I think that subscriptions are a great way of aligning incentives between users and Comm there's over time I do think that another model that we're looking at is the just taking a percentage of every bounty that's on the platform that's completed successfully if if we're

providing software developers to people who need software development we think that if you consider the the blockchain development rush to be a gold rush I think that we're selling pickaxes to the gold miners so to speak and that there's there's a there's a I think there's a valid reason why we should be taking maybe five or ten percent of each bounty but you know we're not exactly sure about that that monetization model and then the the last answer to your question is that get coin is launching a non fungible token at DEFCON floor this year and we have a business model that's built into that non fungible token that

we're launching at DEFCON and so I'm pretty excited to see whether or not people use the non plunge able token and whether or not it's something that can provide us revenue at scale so I guess that's my my sort of like overview of the different monetization models that we're looking at but III will just repeat that Jo Lubin has been the ultimate backer and consensus has been the ultimate support system with a long term view that is allowing us to explore this space and focus on our users without having to worry a ton about monetization yet and I'm very thankful to to Joe and consensus for their support wait can you expand on the non fungible token that you mentioned a little bit sure so the official launches

at Def Con and reading between the lines we've been pretty busy launching a IP one 337 and and the non fungible token at the same time but we're supported by bounties and get coin is made made by get coins so our our small 11 person team is really chugging but we're supported by a community of 10,000 that's that's helping us build this so trying to launch two major things and in one week is is uh is something that I think's within the realm of ability for us but anyway enough framing the the non fungible toking that we're launching is called kudos and what it is is say you turn around a bounty on get coin and you

did a really spectacular job get coin is issuing a marketplace of beautiful artwork that are at test stations that you can attach to your your get coin profile and so you can as your pay the bounty let's call it a hundred and seventy dollar bounty because I told you that that's the average bounty on get coin for the price of a postage stamp which is about 40 cents you can show your appreciation for the software developer in your life and send them a JavaScript ninja badge or a open-source sustainer badge that they will be able to trade if they want to if they don't care about it or they can just display it on there get coin profile and again this is like LinkedIn endorsements but it's got beautiful art associated with

it and it costs 40 cents so the price is negligible enough that people won't mind attaching it to 170 dollar bounty but it's high enough that people won't just like endorsement spam you like you kind of see on on LinkedIn so the I guess the short answer to your question is that we're launching an art marketplace on get coin that you can use to show appreciation for the software developers on your team that you're trying to recruit or build a relationship with awesome that's a great way to get people really excited about software development open-source well Kevin thank you so much for coming on today it was great to have you talking about get going I'm looking forward to seeing how

the platform evolves in the future it sounds like already it has picked up quite a bit of attention from the from the open source development community in in so the broader ecosystem and I guess probably you know could we could point to as it at to it as you know one of the one of the platforms that's getting actual usage and so congratulations for that yeah thank you both for having me on the show and kudos for being great podcast hosts thank you and I guess we'll see you at Def Con see you there all right thank you again thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes every week you can

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