Thread by @oscoin

Today, we are announcing the first release of our technical whitepaper: oscoin.io/oscoin.pdf 🙌

The paper describes Oscoin, a cryptocurrency that rewards open source software projects based on their relative value 👇

The easiest way to think about it is something like Bitcoin, but where a portion of the block reward is distributed to open source projects within the Oscoin network.

To distribute oscoin to FOSS projects we created Osrank. The intuition behind it, is that in order to determine the relative value of a software project in the network, we need to leverage the graph of FOSS dependencies and contributions. Osrank is informed by PageRank /TrustRank

We started working on this project back in May 2017, convinced that the only way to solve the problem of open source sustainability is through inflation funding (see original blogpost on oscoin.io).

Inspiration came from Bitcoin and the idea of Proof of Work, as well as from Dash @Dashpay , @decredproject & @zcashco, where we saw experiments in rewarding network participants beyond miners.

One of the key decisions we made, was to avoid coin voting in order to determine the payment and allocation rules for the treasury. We believe that the value of FOSS projects should be determined by the code itself and there is nothing more native than actual code dependencies!

To bootstrap the network, the treasury requires a set of actors that validate the information on the ledger. For the long term, we are researching oracle based solutions which could involve slashing dishonest projects.

We've came a long way thanks to the help and support of our community 🙏Special thanks to @aaronmblevin @peterbourgon @brapse @luqui @tsenart @nayafia @crainbf @msutherl @cburniske @jmonegro @BradUSV @ciaranoleary @pbanhardt @FEhrsam @MaxClaussen @teempai @colindhanna @MerschMax_

We plan to launch our public testnet in Q3 2019. 🌅 /fin

also @teabass and everyone at @librariesio for their work in mapping dependencies 👏