TRUEos - True Open Synthesis

Inspiration

Uncertain times call for trusted facts. Any health crisis is simultaneously a credibility crisis: if common sense and common knowledge were not so common to begin with, they appear even rarer here, engulfed in fear, leaving millions feeling paralyzed, confused, and lost.

The masses crave a humanist fellowship, even bonding over peaceful protests against lies and other inhumanities. In the quest for shared discovery, empathy, and emotional growth, a private freedom emerges: to feel the darkness fade all around you, needing only a candle to discover new worlds unfolding.

Can we count on our bastions of knowledge to nurture this freedom? It’s not easy when colleges are faced with having to convince students that an in-person education is worth just as much online, and then pivot back before they believe them. MasterClass is seizing its moment, but can we rely on celebrities to be our prophets?

What about free knowledge on Wikipedia? As it’s designed today anyone can add whatever they want, so the Speculative Internet Fiction Database is used to confirm a birth date. It’s difficult to understand which sources have quality and are worth trusting at any given time.

Should we start putting bounties on provable insights, in an attempt to create luminous spaces for truth-seekers? Kaggle, for example, has thousands of users working on gamified data science challenges, restricted to machine-score-able tasks.

Quantitative evidence is much harder to game than qualitative, though the latter is often most crucial. Imagine a game for building verifiable knowledge, that can’t be gamed. A “serious game”, designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment.

Like all profits are not created equal, as those that carry a social benefit are better, could the same be said of games? We aim to present the most accessible knowledge service supply chain that challenges "players" not only to hold better opinions, but to arrive at them through better thinking and greater knowledge, rewarding crowd-sourced fact-gathering and analysis, in a land-grab of subjectivities for the survival of the fittest truth.

What it does

Users can register a public key through Scatter while creating their account on the website, then later use Scatter to login without having to use their password.
Users raise questions and stake EOS to the question's sole reserve. This prevents irrelevant questions from being asked. While creating the question, one hypothesis may be proposed. Any user will be able to create new hypotheses by staking more EOS to the question.
The reserve of EOS tokens dilutes in constant % increments hourly until the ratio of the EOS reserve is 10%.
The dilution of EOS tokens is expressed in an "equal and opposite force" through the hourly minting of TRU tokens, which instantaneously drain into the TRU reserves of each hypothesis contained in a question, inversely proportional to their popularity. This is meant to incentivize unpopular hypotheses to receive more attention.
Attention is symbolized by the LUV (Listen Understand Validate) token. It will be minted to users as a loot token for participating wisely in governance over time. LUV tokens cannot be bought, but they can be sold.
TRU tokens can be bought from a hypothesis' TRU reserve in exchange for LUV tokens from that hypothesis' LUV reserve, and they can be sold back for EOS from the question's reserve.
Each hypothesis has a TRU reserve and a LUV reserve, shares in both reserves are TRULUV tokens -- they will be used for stake-based weighted-median governance over evidence and sources.

How I built it

I bookmarked a neat open source website called opensynthesis.org while crawling Hacker News for advice on how to become a better thinker. When I later saw Vitalik's tweets about censorship, I realized I could apply my experience as an open-source contributor to Bancor Protocol's EOS contracts to add some tokenomics to this website. I needed to heavily customize the eosio.token contract, and the Bancor converter contract.

The contracts are deployed to the Jungle testnet. Instructions for locally deploying the website for testing: https://github.com/ricktobacco/TRUEos/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

Challenges I ran into

Practical challenges included using Django for the first time, and problems with Scatter. The most devastating practical challenge was being caught in the midst of Miami protests days before the submission deadline.

Philosophical challenges:

How to prevent allowing a majority viewpoint to silence a minority one, and combat bias thereby degrading into a Keynesian Beauty contest?
How to establish an effective method for weighing up competing sets of arguments?
Knowing that all discovery is tentative, pending improvements, and something considered right today may not be so tomorrow...how to ensure the only way for players to remain sustainably profitable is through sticking to principles and optimizing for long-term value?
How to prevent poor voter turnout and vote-buying?
How to enforce strict quality standards without being too policing/aggressive, and retain a free-mindedness culture without being too loose and degrading quality?

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Coming up with some pretty neat tokenomics and getting my wife excited about augmented bonding curves.

What I learned

I learned about Narrative Economics, Finite and Infinite Games, Occam's Razor, "suprisingly popular" outcomes, the game theory behind token-curated registries, intelligence analysis, circular economics, and “free-range” flocking algorithms.

What's next for TRUEos

Integrate the smart contract I wrote for weighted-median, stake-based voting to work with the site's functionality and the converter smart contract (which still needs LUV-minting logic).

Then, I plan to make the converter the owner of a Composable NFT, representing an entire question->hypothesis->evidence->source tree backed up on IPFS. The last part will allow there to be many instances of the website (good for censorship resistance), all interoperating harmoniously via EOSIO.

I'll also make the site prettier, and finally get it deploying properly to heroku :)