Earn ETH by committing to open source projects | Hacker News Reader

Earn ETH by committing to open source projects

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32 pointsshakedown8 comments

Very cool! Coincidentally, a group of us were just discussing this idea over lunch today. We also imagined that one could write a package manager which could link into 21.co and charge some minute amount of BTC / ETH to pull the latest version of <insert library here>. (HTTP 402: Payment Required) That pool of money would then be allocated to issues / features / etc, based on how many upvotes on Github, etc, which seems similar to what you've done.

This is a neat idea, although the implementation strikes me as being rather bizarre: users of open source projects, which they fetch from a distributed VCS, can pseudonymously send distributed cryptocurrency to an autonomous smart contract. OK. The contract releases the funds based on comments appearing in a proprietary, centralised CRUD Web app. WAT?

Could someone translate the 'How does it work?' section for those of us who aren't familiar with Ethereum?

Basically a github maintainer can add their project to commiteth so that whenever someone posts an issue with a label "bounty" a bot posts an address. That address is an ethereum smart contract. People all around can send ETH to that address in order to add incentive to the fix. In Ethereum, contracts can have balances just like wallets.

When a pull request comes in that says it fixes that issue, the bot sees that. Through the smart contract it authorizes the package maintainer to disburse the funds to the fixer at the maintainer's discretion.

It's a neat idea, but whether anyone actually wants this is debatable. Previous attempts to monetize open source contributions have not really taken off either — I think because of the relatively small sums. It feels better to spend a few hours creating a feature and opening a PR by donating your time than to get paid far less than market rate eg $10 for the branch. Also, I'm not sure if adding money to the exchange creates liability for the programmer with no contract in place.

Do you have any idea what happens if the smart contract isn't ever fulfilled? For example, could the reporter create a expiration? Otherwise the Smartcontract is tied up ad infinitum, and perhaps might never be fulfiled, hence locking up Ether forever? Any idea how this works?

While I haven't read the contract, that is a definite possibility. Most applications that require an 'Oracle' (a trusted source of information i.e the bot) can be written in a way that a deadlock would occur if their service was down, for example. That being said, a smart-contract can be written to give refunds in the case of an expiration, disallow the maintainer from cashing his own pull requests (though he could make another account), and other logic like that.

It's very powerful; but when the smart-contract world interfaces with the unpredictable outside sometimes the logic doesn't line up.

Sometimes I feel like smart contacts solve a set of problems by creating a whole new set of problems

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