Decentralized Content Suggestions Using Two Of Two Scorched Earth.

The goal of the project is to deliver a proof-of-concept implementation and demonstration of the Two of Two Scorched Earth mechanism, in the hopes of convincing other would-be product builders that it can be useful in their applications. The project is supported by a grant from the Ethereum Foundation.

The mechanism in question was proposed by Vitalik Buterin in a September 2018 ETH Research post titled List of primitives useful for using cryptoeconomics-driven internet / social media applications. In the post, Buterin credits Oleg Andreev for the original idea.

The core premise of the scheme is a behavioral "resentment" assumption. Briefly, if a buyer has the opportunity to punish a dishonest seller, even if it causes harm to themselves, they will do so.

Our hypothesis is that if the seller knows this possibility exists, they will be unlikely to provide a good or service they know to be subpar. In order to test this, we propose the following experiment.

• This project was conceived of and championed by Barry Whitehat, who also wrote much of the specification.
• Koh Wei Jie also contributed to the development of the specification and architecture of the project.
• Thanks to Liam Horne and the team at State Channels for support with their developer toolkit.

The system has two roles: a User and a Suggester. The User looks at pictures and the Suggester suggests them.

Suggesters make deposits into a main-chain smart contract as escrow to cover the creation of payment channels. Users can view available Suggesters and choose to open a channel. When the User makes their own deposit, the contract uses a portion of the Suggester's escrow to create a 1-to-1 channel between the two.

Before the channel is officially open, it must be approved by the Suggester. Suggesters can do this automatically— but at a rate limited frequency— to mitigate sybil/spam attacks.

The Suggester recommends a piece of content for the User's consumption, for example, the URL of an image for a funny meme. The User can respond in one of two ways:

• If satisfied, the User pays Suggester the reward amount
• If dissatisfied, the User and Suggester are both burned pre-determined amounts

The process repeats until the User chooses to end, or the Suggester runs out of content.

For a more detailed description of the envisioned application, including user stories and more detailed system mechanics, checkout SPEC.md.

Here's an overview of the high level project milestones and current progress:

✅ Find An Appropriate State Channel Implementation (see channels-testing/README.md)
◻️ Smart Contracts And Tests (🚧)
◻️Suggester Backend
◻️User UI
◻️Soft launch on mainnet

Scorched Earth is available under the MIT license.

Copyright (c) 2020 ScopeLift.