The idea of Proof of Brain hit me hard when I first encountered it sometime in 2017, when I read the Steem and SMT whitepapers. Delegating the distribution of currency and value to users/holders/stakeholders in an economy, through vote based interactions on pieces of content. Not only that, but to also influence the spread of information via the same route. That blew my mind.
It was and is an interesting algorithm that leverages human input to achieve consensus of value on communication streams.
Steem Hive was the first implementation and the experiment brought to light some design challenges that hampered the efficacy of the entire algorithm.
The underlying value drivers for the currency were governance, resources and the future speculative value of them; with a potential attention market value. It was a mix. A rather unstable mix, in my opinion.
Chain governance and resources as use-cases go well together in consensus algorithms. The potential attention market value was the odd one out.
Looking at other crypto ecosystems...
Bitcoin uses hash power for governance and block space for resources; and the two aspects use one currency.
Ethereum was the same, and with the move to PoS, it uses ETH as a primary source for resources and stake for governance.
Hive uses stake-weighted voting for governance. It uses chain space, identity and actions within the network for resources. These all use the same currency and it makes sense. Proof of Brain is applied to the selection of witnesses. During the hostile takeover people communicated and decided to support witnesses they trusted. The collective intelligence of every stakeholder had a say.
Now, to move on to a separate application of Proof of Brain: attention value. People pay attention to things that matter to them, things they assign a value higher than other things at a certain point in time. It's a hierarchy of value constantly evolving in our minds.
The term attention value encapsulates a number of facets; here are some I've learned:
- expressive value
- usefulness value
- knowledge value
- artistic value
- relevance value
Through well-designed Proof of Brain algorithms, I think we can enable communities to reach consensus on all these facets, by leveraging the decisive opinions (votes) of the people within the communities who are participating in the communication process.
I'm aiming for this with HAT, by designing algorithms that allow people to create tokens catered to the different facets, for different communication styles, paces and environments. Tokens suited for art, tutorials, microblogging, citizen journalism, etc. Each has different needs: reward schedules, distribution mechanisms, economic policies, etc.
I'll write more on this.
Join the discussion: imwatsi Projects community
Hive Attention Tokens (HAT) is a sidechain I'm working on.