[tonyarkles]

Something to think about with that, wearing my black hat:

What's to stop me from putting up a stake, using a second email address as my "supervisor", and just confirming at the end of the month that I've reached my goal? Without doing anything, that makes me eligible for a chunk of the reward pool.

[monokh]

Exactly. The difficult part of creating these kind of value systems isn't just providing more beneficial incentives. It's also about providing the right combination of incentives that remove (as much as possible) any malicious intentions.

[frisby]

Nothing, you make a good point. We were going to use github commits as a trusted oracle in our first prototype of this idea so that a supervisor would not be needed (i.e. you would pledge to commit to a certain project a given amount within the month) but this would still be easy to game in the way you described.

Maybe there isn't a great way to implement this.