Some are having difficulty getting donations or funds for things they want to work on. To me, what seems to be lacking in fundraising for Grin projects is a lack of transparency.
This product would be something that the Grin community could “dogfood” immediately with their own GrinCC projects.
If someone wanted to donate to a project right now, they don’t really know if it is already fully funded, or what the status is without asking. And if you simply ask, you’re just going off of someone’s word (unless it comes from the full community council where people keep each other accountable).
A fundraising app (or plugin or toolkit etc) would also enable people to work on projects outside of the purview of the CC and still be transparent with their donators.
What if each project gave the website its goal amount, address, and viewkey (project owner keeps the other keys of course). The website could then take that info and dynamically populate the project financial progress by doing a little ajax lookup to something like grinnode.live
If I understand correctly, when a proposal is made at first stage, one needs to fill a form, with goal amount/ address which should be stored in a db and progress of the project should be updated at later stages. There needs to be authentication/authorization to update specific project status also, so a backend is necessary. (Of course one can use firebase or a similiar third party service for data storage and authentication to avoid a backend but it would also need some work )
Would it be possible for Grinnode.live to add an API endpoint for this feature? You send the address and the view-key and grinnode.live returns the wallet contents?
Well yes, you can have a wallet, query its content and publish that online. The problem is that it is not more transparent since you cannot confirm yourself, you are still relying on a third party.
I think it would be best to work towards support import and export of view keys as well as having addresses on the account level. In this way a user can naturally compartmentalize funds.
The major challenge is to have all these accounts with their slatepack-address/tor-address online at the same time. We discussed this during the last CC meeting on KeyBase. Maybe a bullet board system would best solve this since running multiple instances of tor is difficult if not impossible. David T will work on this if his funding request gets granted (I assume it will be), as well as community we can brainstorm on such solutions.
Well if it is a fundraising platform that provides one API to view wallet contents of projects, then either all of the projects would be wrong or none of them would be. The API wouldn’t return a wrong result for just one single project, for example
That is right, unless the third party is malicious and for example filters out transactions for a specific project, or worse, show those transactions as being donated to another project. In any case, if such a wallet would be run and occasionally verified by for example the CC, it would be a nice improvement.
The current bottleneck is still having multiple accounts online to segregate donations to different projects. Another way to solve this is by barcoding in the transaction itself. E.g. donating 1.000001 would mean donation to project 1 donation 42.000002 would be to project 2. This is a simple but non ideal solutions/workaround that works with the current wallet softwares. Preferably we first build in support for multiple accounts and then build such an APP and/or support import and export of vieuw-keys.
Lastly, we should question if such a system is needed at this stage of the project. With the current number of donations, people can already indicate to us they donate for a specific purpose before donating the amount. We already provide descriptions labels to transactions. As long as there are not massive numbers of donations coming in, this system works fine. Although I fully agree such a system should be build in the long term, it is not solving a problem we have, since the few monthly donations coming in can be manually labelled just fine.
that’s why it would be best for something like grinnode.live to provide a general API endpoint for this. the fundraising website / app wouldn’t need to make their own API then.
A product that I would like to see, would be decentralized WI-FI hotspots payable with grin. That would give people the opportunity to earn some grin similar to mining, by offering a service. Or pay for internet access just by POW.
Platform Hardware could be an modified open-WRT Router or a raspberry PI.
To make the service anonymous the WIFI hotspot might use TOR and rotate MAC-Address regularly.
To reduce the need for trust in the service and on-chain-data, a payment channel based ‘stream payment’ with small payment chunks would be helpful.
grin related data, like blockchain synchronization and payment channel updates could be prioritized since it is already local data.
