Pivot Proposal

[ghost]

Howdy.

While developing ibGib, I've been researching your space for a couple years now: gratipay, patreon, open collective, probably some others that I don't remember. Recently I've released a more legit MVP of ibGib and I've been reading through #836 and #1139 (among others and blog posts, and pretty much all of your onboarding docs), and I am genuinely a huge fan of your committment, drive, and transparency.

It is for this last aspect, transparency, that I think you don't realize how special y'all are. You're completely in the open - not just finances, not just part of your product - but you. Gratipocalypse should not be your downfall.

And so I come to offer you a pivot proposal that should help you understand your possible value in the global context: Become the transparent alternative to cryptocurrencies.

I am quite sure I don't need to tell you the hype around that right now, but remember in the larger space, trustless transactions will always be only a small sliver of all transactions. Meanwhile, the financial space is just itching to get on board with the same type of technology for other reasons besides the trustlessness: integrity, transparency, and the crowd-sourcing, distributed architecture. As just a single data point, I'm sure you're aware of the recent sentiments like those by J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and others like him that say to hold off in investing in them. But as I'm also sure you're aware, there are many, many others who are predicting a bubble - just google "cryptocurrency bubble" and you'll get plenty of hits.

Also, consider crowd-sourcing services such as Uber (taxis), YouTube (video), AirBnB (hotels), Turo, etc. etc. I am unsure if you see yourselves in this light (you have quite a bit of online documentation!), but in terms of monetization/reimbursement you are basically offering granular, crowd-sourced, distributed money exchange.

AFAICT, you are focused solely it seems on Open Source software, but it's going to be a much wider space than that! Open Collective has this kind of expansion ready to go with the "Meetups" collectives - and I am sure they will expand also. And in the future, there will be IoT monetization - not just at the product scale, but people will want to create their own IoT devices (of course). And here's the kicker - there is going to be AI monetization! You're going to have competing Cortanas, Alexas, etc., but on a finer-grained scale, and there will need to be an infrastructure and that currently doesn't exist. There is some intermingling of AIs (Amazon/MS see this vision of the future), but they still don't necessarily have the infrastructure.

IbGib has the capability to do that side of it, and believe me this is a non-trivial architecture. There is nothing else out there remotely close, except IPFS if you have heard of it. I only recently became aware of it and it's nice to see something else in the world that is even remotely similar to ibGib. It is a YC product via Protocol Labs, and I love their work - especially Juan Benet's enthusiasm with which I wholeheartedly sympathize when speaking about the technology.

But like the cryptocurrencies (which of course they recently did the FileCoin $450M), IPFS is still largely geared towards the trustlessness target audience. With ibGib, I see how the pieces fit together built upon a foundation of transparency - not just for end users, but even for governments moving forward...but I only have limited resources working solo! There are still a couple technical challenges for scale, mainly distributed nodal identity and a higher level domain-level exchange - but I don't personally have that kind of knowledge. Certainly not in the business/financial domain.

So, I have other directions I can go with ibGib, like improving the web app, working on generic merge capabilities to expand on the version control aspects, etc., but I decided it was time to give this proposal to gratipay. In a nutshell, it would be gratipay, but for nodal resource management - with open source projects being only one type of node. ibGib would provide the "scaleable block chain" side of the infrastructure.

For a 10,000 ft explanation of this statement: ibGib uses merkle links in a DAG and DCG structure. This is in contrast with block chain's (and git's) linked list merkle linked structure. This is why they are unable to immediately scale, and why IPFS is going to be able to scale (and will take them and Etherium over), and why ibGib can scale. Think of OOP Objects pointing to each of its members (properties and methods) via hashed links with integrity. Then each member has its own hashed undo stack, with each operation on each node at every level being associated to the corresponding actors' identities.

So, I know y'all are busy getting ready for the YC meeting, which I can imagine must be very difficult for you (these past three years have been extremely hard on me also). But I highly recommend you check out ibGib and chew over this idea. I'd be glad to answer any questions you have.

• ibGib on GitHub
• ibGib - Architecture of the Future
• ibGib Examples
• Tutorials
• Just started doing some quick YouTube sketches for the web app side of things (I'm not proposing you to use the web app, rather the underlying tech):
  • ibGib as a bug tracker
  • Logging in, Brief security example

Much ❤️ for gratipay as it is regardless!
Bill Raiford