Switch App Mining to Quadratic Funding model

[pstan26]

What is the problem you are seeing? Please describe.
App Mining doesn’t allow for adding skin in the game as an outside investor, and doesn’t leverage wisdom of the STX hodling crowds.

How is this problem misaligned with goals of app mining?
People who hodl STX don’t get a say in what apps get funded, but they have the most upside from seeing a valuable ecosystem arise.

What is the explicit recommendation you’re looking to propose?

Allow quadratic funding to guide what apps get funded.

1. Put proof of hodl STX login on app.co/blockstack (this is where people could vote on apps via funding the apps wallets directly). Require a min # of STX to be in the wallet you’ve signed in with ($100-$1000 worth perhaps?)...this enforces stakeholder participation and can be something that mitigates some bad actors, because you have to hodl or gtfo.

2. Allow voting quadratically. Vitalik actually goes into this on https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html “ In any case where there is more than one contributor, the computed payment is greater than the raw sum of contributions; the difference comes out of a central subsidy pool (eg. if ten people each donate $1, then the sum-of-square-roots is $10, and the square of that is $100, so the subsidy is $90). Note that if the subsidy pool is not big enough to make the full required payment to every project, we can just divide the subsidies proportionately by whatever constant makes the totals add up to the subsidy pool's budget”

Side note: When funding, maybe you can even vote for and against apps like so:

3. Work with Chainalysis to ensure new people logging in with proof of hodl are unique individuals based on their on chain transactions. Call this function they do “proof of individuality”. If they detect that a handful of accounts are from the same person, those individuals can be removed, maybe even along with anyone that referred them.

4. Funders can negotiate investment terms with app builders outside of this experience.

What is the dry run period?

Could do this right away with a small amount of BTC being paid out. To get this done most quickly I would have the Stacks Foundation administer moderation and the token treasury (~30M+ tokens today).

Describe your long term considerations in proposing this change. Please include the ways you can predict this recommendation could go wrong and possible ways mitigate.

If proof of individuality gets gamed that hurts this. You just need to ensure the proof of individuality doesn’t break, and Chainalysis stays ahead of the gamers.

You could add a referral fee for bringing new hodlers into the game if you get proof of individuality right.

I think also you’d want to avoid STX from being recycled from subsidized app funding back into investment..think Chainalysis could additionally help with this.

[hstove]

Chainalysis is not a silver bullet to enforcing individuality. Or even close. Lots of pretty easy ways around any on-chain analysis. Doing this in any non-KYC manner is a pretty unsolved problem, from my understanding.

Why need to prove that you own STX if you have to pay STX to participate?

IMO, this might be directionally correct, but would only work with a limited set of participants. Like a DAO. But if you used a DAO, I think you'd be good with just quadratic voting - not necessarily quadratic funding.

And, it might be hard to convince good actors to part with their money in order to participate. At best, you help improve the ecosystem. Bad actors have a stronger incentive.