CreditCash : Community-Based Social Token with CRDT
Team member names
Jiangplus
need to find team member
I am member of the Social Layer Project (https://www.sociallayer.im/), building modular social infrastructure for decentralized society. I am a active community builder, and have been getting involved in pop-up cities and events like Shanhaiwoo, Wamotopia and ZuConnect. I am also involved in Secure Scuttlebutt community.
1. Short summary of your improvement idea
This project is inspired by Secure Scuttlebutt, the decentralized social network, and the paper Local crypto-tokens for local economics (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3565383.3566113), which described a intra-community peer-to-peer token ledger without centralized bookkeeper or blockchain-based consensus. Community-bounded tokens could be issued by specific known identities and transactions are published in a local authenticated append-only log. Double-spending is detected rather than prevented, through immutable proofs linked to a specific identity, and the cost of fraud is ultimately the exclusion of that identity from future participation, which is very different from the popular way of Ethereum L2 scaling of today. This design is identity-first, has many good real world use cases, complementary to existing blockchain. And it is extremely beautiful and inherently social-focused by design! Transactions share the same spirit of CRDT mutations and the state is eventually consistent.
We would love to explore building a protocol of CRDT-based decentralized token ledger for real world use cases which is complementary to Ethereum and allows very very low transaction cost, instant confirmation time and hyper parallel-availability.
One important perspective of the design is how to create and manage the social identities of the community, detect bad behaviors and exclude bad actors. We could use Ethereum and L2s as the registry of community social identities and have some mechanisms to invite new members into the group.
CReDiTCash is a credit-based social token ledger, and also a CRDT-based cash system. We would also explore the design space of Byzantine Fault Tolerant CRDT (https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/bft-crdt-papoc22.pdf) to design such a system.
2. What is the existing target protocol you are hoping to improve or enhance? Eg: hand-washing, traffic system, connector standards, carbon trading.
Secure Scuttlebutt (https://scuttlebutt.nz/)
Local crypto-tokens for local economics (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3565383.3566113)
Scaling of Ethereum
4. What is your discovery methodology for investigating the current state of the target protocol? Eg: field observation, expert interviews, historical data analysis, failure event analysis
The protocol we are building has assumptions on the underlying social context: in what way you could trust people not double-spending tokens, how do you tolerate with small violations and how to exclude someone when significant violation happens. We will need to have interviews and system modeling processes to evaluate those situations and design proper ways to deal with these cases.
5. In what form will you prototype your improvement idea? Eg: Code, reference design implementation, draft proposal shared with experts for feedback, A/B test of ideas with a test audience, prototype hardware, etc.
Research notes:
Design of CRDT-based social token ledger
Prototype implementation:
Open Source Web App as a social token ledger
On-chain smart contract as community identity management registry
6. How will you field-test your improvement idea? Eg: run a restricted pilot at an event, simulation, workshop, etc.
We would build a prototype web app for field tests, and offer a local service in the community with social token.
7. Who will be able to judge the quality of your output? Ideally name a few suitable judges.
Professor Dr. Christian Tschudin, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
Erick Lavoie, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
Dominic Tarr, original creator of Secure Scuttlebutt
8. How will you publish and evangelize your improvement idea? Eg: Submit proposal to a standards body, publish open-source code, produce and release a software development kit etc.
We will publish research notes on the design of CRDT-based social token ledger.
We will work with local communities to provide social services with the prototype app.
9. What is the success vision for your idea?
Design and build a hyper lightweight social token ledger that has many good real world use cases, encourage non-financial use of crypto currency, explore a new way of scaling Ethereum and CRDT. It is also simple, sustainable and very low cost. We are building a new kind of social infrastructure which is leveraging the under social structure.
I really love and appreciate the design of Secure Scuttlebutt, that it is subjective, and it replicates and distributes data with friends-of-friends relationship, which is based on a weak web-of-trust and is surprisingly well-designed.