Experiment with 'Pay What You Want' proposals / initiatives

[monsieurbulb]

In general people agree that common good treasuries should spend on something - so far so good.

Sadly, beyond that it’s a free for all of subjective opinion.

Most contentious of all is the funding amount - if you want to trigger people, just set your request to anything above $10k and watch the treasury guardians implode.

• How much should an event cost?
• What is your code worth?
• Are we underpaying or overpaying for media?

Solution

Pay what you want (or PWYW, also referred to as value-for-value model [1][2]) is a pricing strategy where buyers pay their desired amount for a given commodity. This amount can sometimes include zero. A minimum (floor) price may be set, and/or a suggested price may be indicated as guidance for the buyer. The buyer can select an amount higher or lower than the standard price for the commodity.[3][4] Many common PWYW models set the price prior to a purchase (ex ante), but some defer price-setting until after the experience of consumption (ex post) (similar to tipping). PWYW is a buyer-centered form of participatory pricing, also referred to as co-pricing (as an aspect of the co-creation of value). - Wikipedia

The aim is to hack together an approach where we merge elements of Gov1 - amount set by median of council tips, with Gov2’s open tracks and referendums.

A group of Tippers is determined through the config Config. After half of these have declared some amount that they believe a particular reported reason deserves, then a countdown period is entered where any remaining members can declare their tip amounts also.

After the close of the countdown period, the median of all declared tips is paid to the reported beneficiary, along with any finders fee, in case of a public (and bonded) original report.

Have already explored with Ideal Network whose new Kusama pallet + bridge enables some of this stuff via timelock encryption.

Timelock Encryption: drand's output enables us to build timelock encryption capabilities on top of the beacon, enabling new kinds of use cases for trustless protocols, such as trustless asset swaps, keyless crypto wallets, and more.

See https://forum.polkadot.network/t/kusama-rfc-pay-what-you-want/3709 https://ideallabs.substack.com/p/p2p-semi-autonomous-games-on-the-978

[driemworks]

A prototype of something like that would be fairly straightforward to build imo. It's not far off conceptually from some contracts we've already built https://github.com/ideal-lab5/contracts/blob/main/examples/transmutation/lib.rs

[olanod]

This also seems to relate to the prize discovery topic Shawn Tabrizi started in the forum. I'd be interested to integrate something like that with pallet-referenda and allow special kinds of proposals meant to discover a value(a prize in this case) to then be used as input of a regular payment proposal that considers a "secret minimum amount" a proponent previously submitted.

[monsieurbulb]

@olanod yup. shared concept a while back here https://forum.polkadot.network/t/kusama-rfc-pay-what-you-want/3709

would be a fun experiment and as @driemworks says could be very quick to implement an interesting experiment.

[driemworks]

I elaborated on some further specifics here, with some inspiration from Shawn's usage of the median (rather than average) in the forum post above: https://hackmd.io/@Y5vcBYL4SyeRG_CqQq0DoQ/rypzvOHq0 .