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Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

I predicted this might happen earlier this year (not that it's particularly hard to predict):

"You could sabotage some Kickstarter projects by pledging a large amount then blacking out a minute before it ends."

https://twitter.com/tlrobinson/status/305017672226205697

Interestingly, Bitcoin has features to make this sort of thing impossible, even without a trusted intermediary holding onto the funds: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Dominant_Assurance_Contracts https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_3:_Assurance_co...

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You can't back out in the last 24 hours if it takes a project under funding. Trust me, this isn't new and it's been debated in circles outside HN for a long while (I could list dozens of kicktrolled campaigns). The consensus is one of the reason Kickstarter is winning the crowdfunding game is it is possible to back out -- if they change that, they change the game. This gives consumers more freedom. But I think extra large amounts need new rules -- or just forbid them (as painful as that is).

Or allow campaigners to refuse pledges / backers? That would seem to be quite easy and also justified.

Kickstarter is not a shop, it's a way to meet people who are interested in making you succeed; it would make a lot of sense if you could have a say in who you want to work with.

Perhaps an extra degree of verification for pledges beyond a certain value?

And therein lies the problem, these "consumers" are consuming what exactly?

The pressure to please "consumers" is too strong, and this leads to putting all the risk on the "producers" side. Which means Kickstarter will be nothing more than a weird and sucky version of Amazon.

You could even allow backing out and limit trolling by adding a small cost to back out.

This works in the economic sense, not necessarily in the regulatory.

This is an interesting idea. And if the fee to back-out is proportional to the pledge even better.

I don't see why not, you see it all the time in the real world. e.g., book a vacation with a X% non-refundable deposit.

Good idea, but even the back-up fee is reversible on a credit card.

Require people to pay some amount to Kickstarter itself to buy a "large funding credit" (a virtual currency.) That credit must be spent, along with whatever actual donation you make, if you want to contribute over, say, $2000. The credits also don't "activate" until, say, six months after they're purchased--well outside of the (legitimate-vendor) chargeback window.

>The credits also don't "activate" until, say, six months after they're purchased--well outside of the (legitimate-vendor) chargeback window.

Who'd buy kickstarter credit just to hope that in 6 months there would be an interesting project to support?

The thing that wins kickstarter buyers over is the ease of supporting it. This would kill it.

I don't know if swapping easily-observed troll risk for impossible-to-predict currency exchange risk is a net win.

Nice segue to bitcoin... if there were karma here you would get it

Wouldn't Kickstarter just return bitcoins if the project was underfunded? Would fluctuations in price prevent this?

I think the price fluctuation is the biggest problem with bitcoins in this scenario. Let's say I need to pay my parts supplier $50000 in April, how many bitcoins should I ask for today, assuming the bitcoins will be transferred to me in February? Large companies struggle with this problem even when dealing with relatively stable currencies.

Is there a functioning futures market for bitcoins yet?

Is there a functioning futures market for bitcoins yet?

This is the classic solution for commodity price volatility. Both for real assets and currencies.

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