Comment by miki123211
19 days ago
The "money goes to the repo part" is the problem here, as it incentivizes maintainers to refuse legitimate pull requests.
Crypto has a perfect way to burn money, just send it to a nonexistent address from where it can never be recovered. I guess the trad fi equivalent are charitable donations.
The real problem here is the amount of work necessary to make this viable. I bet Visa and Mastercard would look at you funny if your business had such a high rate of voluntary transaction reversals, not to mention all the potential contributors that have no access to Visa/MC (we do want to encourage the youth to become involved with Open Source). This basically means crypto, and crypto has its own set of problems, particularly around all the annoying KYC/AML that a normie has to get through to use it.
> I bet Visa and Mastercard would look at you funny if your business had such a high rate of voluntary transaction reversals
Plenty of businesses do the “your credit card will be charged $1 and then reversed” as a verification method that I don’t think it would be a major issue. I do wonder how much those companies are paying for that, though… I am guessing they lose some of that $1.
You can reduce the transactions with payment providers. Instead of money exchanging from contributor to maintainer, have a token exchange. Contributors fund tokens with real money, and pull requests cost and refund tokens. Like an escrow account. But the money never goes to the target system. There are no perverse incentives to steal tokens. If you get a reputation of not refunding tokens (which have no value to a maintainer), then contributors will dry up.
"TrustTokens" or "EscrowTokens"
Probably just making it non refundable works almost as well (since time really is expended reading it), without the hassle of spinning up an intermediary layer blockchain.
> I bet Visa and Mastercard would look at you funny if your business had such a high rate of voluntary transaction reversals
…you might be right, but I do wonder if the situation would be different if “your business” was “Microsoft”. Obviously they would discuss this plan ahead of time.
> The "money goes to the repo part" is the problem here, as it incentivizes maintainers to refuse legitimate pull requests.
That's not true. The issue is that the system the comment you're replying to described is escrow. Escrow degenerates in the way that you describe. I explain it a bit more in this comment elsewhere on this post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938811
> all the annoying KYC/AML that a normie has to get through to use it.
There are always escape hatches. If your code is so great that people will want to pull it, then you don't pay to push. If it's not really that great, then what are we talking about? Maybe it disincentivizes mid code being pushed. So be it.
You can make friends, you can make a name for yourself, you can make a fork that's very successful and upstream will want to pull it in, you can exert social pressure / marketing to get your code merged in. Lots of options that do not involve KYC/AML.
For everyone else, I'd say KYC/AML are a good idea because of the increasing amount of supply chain exploits being pushed out into repos. If pushing by randos is gated by KYC/AML, then there's at least some method of chasing the perps down and taking them to justice.
That's a win-win-win-win situation. Less mid code, less exploits, earnings for maintainers, AI slop blocked. Absolutely amazing.
right, the ethereum gets spent whether the transaction is cancelled or not. and that's an issue