Introducing the Carlson Protocol: a decision protocol for seeking the truth

General Intros
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Hello fellow nerds,

I’d like to introduce to you what I called the “Carlson Protocol”: it is a decentralized decision system where people vote using ckBTC. These ckBTC are transferred back to the user after a period of time that can vary according to specific rules. When reimbursed, users get rewarded with additional tokens that depend on how their past vote aligns with the current view.

:sparkles: The Carlson Protocol leverages how much people care. If you don’t care enough about a vote, you will find better usage for your bitcoins elsewhere.

:crossed_swords: The Carlson Protocol is a double-edged sword. The more bitcoins you lock in a vote, the greater your voice, but the lesser the reward and the longer your bitcoins will stay locked.

:statue_of_liberty: The Carlson Protocol is stateless. Votes never end, and results decay. Even the most one-sided votes will decay over time, offering the opportunity to reevaluate past consensus.

:muscle: The Carlson Protocol rewards the bold. Stand for your beliefs against the crowd. If the future proves you right, you will be rewarded.

I already started a POC here.

I’d like to have your opinion on it: is it something that you think can have a utility, or do you see any major flaw in the design. Maybe people from Factland might be interested (@kaxline), since I think it’s a bit similar to how Factland works (but stateless).

Thank you!

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It’s really great that you keep re-improving the design ideas

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Hello community!

I am glad to announce that the finalization of the Dfinity grant is approaching and that I will make a demo very soon. These past months have been intense mostly in term of polishing the rules of the protocol, but also on establishing a solid codebase that can be continuously built upon. I am planning to release the platform in early version in December. Until then stay tuned for updates!

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Hi there!

I started a documentation for the project, you can find it there:

As you can see I decided to go with two tokens instead of one. I think it is the best move because I want to reward the users both for their participation and their accuracy. I was thinking of doing one token for both usages but I realized it makes it very hard to convey what is happening to the user, hence the two.

The first token, called presence :milky_way:, rewards the users based on their contribution to the protocol. Two thirds of it go to the users who locked tokens into a vote (in proportion on how much they locked compared to how much is locked in the protocol). The last third goes to users who opened votes, the more popular the more tokens.
The idea is to give an incentive for users to participate, especially when not a lot of tokens are locked in the protocol.

The second token, called resonance :crystal_ball:, rewards the users based on their accuracy. It is disbursed only at the end of the lock, depending on that formula:

resonance=amount∗dissent[t0]∗consent[t]

Where:

amount: Bitcoins locked by the user.

dissent[t0]: opposite_tokens / total_tokens at the time of locking.

consent[t]: same_tokens / total_tokens at the time of unlocking.

This makes people accountable, such that the minority has a greater incentive to give their opinion at start, but still both sides need to be “right” in the future to be rewarded well.

The idea behind it is that it assumes that more time passes, the more truth becomes clear, so that if the current consensus does not reflect that truth on the platform (yet), there is a great incentive for users to vote to shift that consensus to the now obvious side.

For the tokens to have value, I’d like to be able to burn them against SNS tokens or ultimately a Bitcoin yield that has been generated from the locked Bitcoins. The relative value of presence compared to resonance could be managed by the protocol so that after the launch of the platform, burning presence rewards you with a good number of tokens, but the more time passes the more the resonance tokens get valuable.

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