Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by slimsag 1659 days ago
I don't fully understand your approach here, but I would like to.

How is this different from individuals donating to people e.g. developing software via GitHub sponsors, or donating to artists they like on Patreon, or funding development of physical products on Kickstarter?

The best answer I can come up with is that gitcoindao tries to ride the "DAO", "Web3", "decentralized" buzz words.

Unless the goal is really to have investments to people on gitcoindao give real-world returns, using a DAO to skirt SEC securities regulations?

How do you plan to resolve the issue of basically just crypto stuff being sponsored with this? seems like another missed opportunity if it only applies to the crypto community, but not surprising

1 comments

It's not just crypto, and it's not just software. The grants round that opened today can be seen here: https://gitcoin.co/grants/#match-pools

It includes grants for climate change and grants for longevity.

To answer your question, the difference from kickstarter is that grants for public goods don't produce products - they produce public goods.

It is possible to have many cynical takes, but if you scratch the surface, you'll see that funding public goods really is what this is all about.

> To answer your question, the difference from kickstarter is that grants for public goods don't produce products - they produce public goods.

There are Patreons that work like that, where the work being funded gets released publicly (for example, Evil Hat Games was releasing Fate RPG books as "pay what you want" downloads on RPGDriveThrough. Patrons just got early access and similar privileges). Reminiscent of the Street Performer Protocol: https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/1998/11/the_stree...