Rethinking incentives with coretime bounties, collectives and recoupable loans

[rich]

@alice_und_bob

1. Increasing coretime demand is very high in the hierarchy of possible goals, but not the only one; for example the advancement of Web3 or the delivering of value to humanity as a whole might align with the core values of Polkadot, but not be directly measurable in coretime usage.

Sorry to be blunt but right now ‘Web3’ is just a bullshit marketing slogan, so before we bang on about delivering “value to humanity” we should probably just focus on making the basic system work.

As Ghandi famously said…

Be the change you want to see in the world

@alice_und_bob

2. There are more immediate goals that can be argued to feed into increased coretime usage, but might not immediately measurable or only indirectly correlated. For example, initiatives working to improve the developer experience in the ecosystem will arguably lead to increased coretime usage in the future, but will have only minimal short-term impact. Initiatives working towards the establishment of value-adding collectives might increase short-time usage, but could be hard to measure in a direct way.

Yes people are discussing a lot of stuff, and yeah maybe this will have some impact in the future, but its irrelevant because it’s all subjective.

Let me illustrate with an example leading on from the Agilecoretime RFC1

(Agilecoretime)… provides a means to allow Polkadot to capture long-term value in the resource which it sells.

Let’s assume DX is terrible per your point. When is it ‘good enough’?

It’s good enough when there is demonstrable demand for the product being sold - aka coretime.

Now imagine DX makes fantastic strides, everyone agrees that it is fantastic, super easy to use and yet there is still no demand.

Now see an alternative perspective where we assume DX is fine, it’s other stuff that is missing. Now imagine coretime demand is generated through some witchcraft without improving DX. Where does that leave everyone?

Now imagine that people stopped dancing around the problem and focused collectively on trying to stimulate direct demand for the product polkadot sells.

“Usage for your product is like oxygen for ideas.” - Matt Mullenweg

The real elephant in the room, is no individual, team or project has done it yet.
People have tried a lot of stuff, but it hasn’t worked, hence, maybe we should start from scratch.
Driving coretime demand this is HARD.
There is NOWHERE TO HIDE.
You either SUCCEED or your DON’T.
That is a meritocracy.
This is a GOOD thing, unless you’re just here to grift whilst the ship goes down.
All else is an excuse for pissing more time, talent and money down the drain.

This future is inevitable

@rich

• treasury culture will inevitably shift towards financing (subsidising) coretime experiments.
• proposals will have fungible (cashflow) and non-fungible components (coretime periods).
• economic game is simple, take a commodity resource (blockspace) and refine it into something more valuable.

Coretime collectives

@alice_und_bob

As a next step, it would be useful to more explicitly lay out how “coretime collectives” can be imagined.

Soon.

You can see some of the early thinking here Outcomes over Activity - evolving Kusama’s chaotic credentials:

Stop thinking PMF (Product Market Fit) and start thinking CMF (Coretime Market Fit).

Think of coretime as some newly discovered resource - like Crude Oil - only before people knew what it could be refined into.

In Mesopotamia around 4000 B.C., bitumen - a tarry crude - was used as caulking for ships, a setting for jewels and mosaics, and an adhesive to secure weapon handles. Egyptians used it for embalming, and the walls of Babylon and the famed pyramids were held together with it.

We are all “Coretime Prospectors”.