Yeah, it’s definitely worth digging into all of those skeptical questions. Whether or not we have time to do it, so far (of course) we know that the team that’s putting all this together, we’re reasonably satisfied that we’ve actually addressed, that we sort of have an economic system here that is actually at least potentially sound, that doesn’t have any obvious, glaring faults. Now, time will tell, of course, but just to flesh it out a little bit more…

[ ] So the people that are voting, what are they voting with? Well, it’s not just a radio button in a UI, and some entry in a distributed database; what they’re actually voting with is their BSQ. So this is the third function of this token. The first one is that you can pay trading fees with it, the second one is that you can be paid in it, and the third one is that you can vote with it. And voting with BSQ is actually a Bitcoin transaction; it’s actually literally the creation and signing and sending of a Bitcoin transaction.

If you remember, BSQ is actually backed by Bitcoin underneath, these tiny fraction/token. So it’s a Bitcoin transaction with all the virtues of it, all the irreversibility and all the transparency and all the verifiability and so on and so forth, it’s now representing a vote. I won’t go deeper into the technical side of that, but it’s important to understand that people are actually voting with their stake in BSQ.

For someone who has, say, just 100 BSQ, maybe they’ve just done some very small tasks a few times - they can vote, but they can vote proportionally. They can only vote with the power of 100 BSQ, whereas somebody who’s been contributing to the project for years and has thousands, or tens or hundreds of thousands of BSQ, can also at least potentially vote with all of that proportion as well. That can create its own problems of course, because if people can buy BSQ, they can buy up a whole lot of BSQ and they can manipulate the project, right? That’s why also part of the plan and part of the roadmap and the design is that reputation; another function of BSQ here is that it’s actually a proxy for reputation.

In the end, people will not only vote just proportional to the stake of BSQ that they have, like literally the number that they have, but they’ll also vote in proportion to the reputation that they’ve demonstrably earned. They have been paid, let’s say, X number of times in BSQ; they’ve been paid this amount of times in BSQ - we count that not just as holding the BSQ, but as having been someone who earned BSQ, earned reputation. People had to agree that the work that you did was valuable. That’s a measure of how useful and trustworthy you are as a person in the network.

So in the end, the voting arrangement will actually be mostly reputation-based and only partially stake-based. This takes a while to bootstrap and make happen, but that’s the plan.

So if you start to put all of these pieces together and you start to see this larger crypto-economic system forming, then what you have is the ability for us as the current team, the actually very centralized team - centralized not that we’re collocated with each other, but centralized in the sense of I’m playing a dozen roles, and Manfred (the founder) is playing a dozen roles, and there’s only a few of us. So the opportunity that this affords is that we can now do things like bounties; that’s not a new concept in open source but these bounties can be for an amount of BSQ, or for a range of BSQ. And the only thing standing between a potential contributor and the realization of that bounty is doing the work, and of course, doing it in a fashion that’s acceptable and actually accepted. That’s a radical lowering of the barriers that we have today for people being able to be compensated monetarily for their work.

[ ] Generally speaking, no one is doing open source contribution at a distance, outside of a traditional organization or company structure, and being compensated economically for it. That doesn’t happen today, by and large. The idea of DAOs is that it makes that possible in a rather dramatic way. So the biggest challenge for us is being able to articulate this stuff and make it really clear and observable for people and so on, as you can tell – how long have I been in a monologue here, right? That’s a challenge. So that actually gets to my role - what am I actually doing on the team? Like I mentioned, I’ve just recently sort of rejoined in a serious way just over the last few months, and we’ve landed on the rather tongue-in-cheek kind of oxymoronic-sounding title of Director of Decentralization… [laughter] As silly as it sounds, it turns out that’s exactly what I don’t think just Bisq needs, but any organization, any open source project who wants to take this idea of decentralization out to its logical end, and really decentralized not just the code, not just the network, but the people, the operation, the management - all of it. That never starts decentralized. That’s always gonna start with one or just a few people, and then have to become decentralized.

It’s funny to say it, but it actually does require kind of centralized directing that process of decentralization. And when people are listening to this and they take a look at the Bisq website (bisq.network is the website), when they see that, they’ll be able to see all the links that take them to the boards of GitHub issues. We’re using GitHub and [unintelligible ] and just all modern stuff for this, where people will be able to see all the bounties and they’ll be able to see beyond just individual bounties. They’ll be able to see what we call the roles that make up the Bisq network, the kind of persistent, often privileged roles that are necessary to make a network like this happen… Because while it’s just peer-to-peer code and anybody can just download the client and run it, well, there is a website, right? However simple it may be, there’s a website, there’s a domain name, the domain name costs money… Just any number of the services and products that a team needs to consume, somebody needs to have owner rights in GitHub, somebody needs to operate a Twitter account etc.

So what we’ve put together here is not just individual bounties - “Hey, implement that better chart” - but also roles. “Be the Twitter account operator.” And those roles, because there’s a risk involved - if somebody goes rogue here - it’s not just about that they don’t get compensated that month, but that they start disparaging the project or something like that on Twitter… That’s a real damage to the overall network, or at least it potentially is. So for this reason, there’s yet another function of the BSQ token, which is bonding.

For people to take on a role that has this kind of potential risk involved that’s of importance to the network and so on, they’ll put up a bond in BSQ that’s in proportion to the kind of amount of risk that’s involved to the network with somebody, having the keys to Twitter, or having the keys to our domain name registrar, or what have you… Or for being an arbitrator, by the way. In the future, arbitrators will be bonded to the tune of probably hundreds of thousands of BSQ, because arbitrators can potentially wreak havoc if they’re a rogue actor.

When you put all of this together, we’re really excited that we have a kind of arrangement that can properly incentivize good people to come and work and get paid and build something fantastic, right?

And just one last thing on that is that if you think about being able to get bonded for one of these roles, being able to become the operator of the Twitter handle or whatever it may be, you have to first have BSQ, right? You first have to have Bisq tokens. And well, you could potentially trade for them, but actually in the early days, what we call “phase zero of the DAO”, which we’re just rolling out right now, trading is not possible. It’s only earning that’s possible. So the only way people would ever be able to become bonded and take on a very important role in the network is that they would have to do things like bounties or just individual tasks, earning BSQ bit by bit, until they have naturally demonstrated their value to the project.

In this way, we actually also think that we have a way to build up a team largely of developers, largely of technologists - this is a deeply technical project - that are people who have just demonstrated value all along the way, and then start to take on greater and greater responsibility, as opposed to just saying “Hey, get yourself enough BSQ and you can do whatever.” That doesn’t work, if people can just buy it up. In the beginning, people can only earn it.