Using ICOs to fund science

[Perun]

@david.hite

What do you think about this: scientist or developer may make a proposal to community to solve some problem and provide proofs of experience to realise it. Community may support his work in safe manner paying for milestones. It’s some kind of (DA)ICO but in model when results became a public property after some time. It’s a kind of open source but in science. Anyway, it’s better to use ICO rating, if you want to invest your money the best way.

The main problem with this approach is that in academia contracts for, e.g., PhD researchers or postdocs are usually for at least 3 years, and hence tying funding to achieving short term milestones is not that easy to realize in practice. That’s why most funding agencies that offer support for basic research typically offer contracts that run for 3+ years. Of course these agencies ask for detailed work package description etc., but they will not stop funding if certain milestones after 1 year are not achieved.

[kladkogex]

A problem with proposals to solve a particular problem is that you never know whether your solve a problem before solving it ))) A proposals-based solution will facilitate solving easy-to-medium problems but not hard ones …

[Triple-Blind-Reprodu]

If I understood correctly this could be generally used as a way to fund & incentivize research if cast into contract or law:

1. technology comes to market (using a specific scientific piece of work that is either piblished by patent or by paper.)
2. Tech company makes profit with this technology,
3. Lets say 3% of the annual profit is given back to “the scientific work” that came from academia, with an ICO that is in fact in this scenario similar to a stock. So there will be designated coinholders.
4. “coinholders” get the coins by the following key (for example): 40% towards the researchers 40% for the institution 20% for cited papers.

Now here os an idea how to solve the decision making effort:

1. to help institutions/researchers decide which citations are the most important there could be a generally agreed on distribution of the 20% that stay for the citations:
2. 20% for (the sum of all) competing research papers that helped narrow down the path to the solution.
3. 40% for (the sum of all) research papers that built the scientific foundation directly linked to the scientific finding that builds the tech.
4. 40% for (the sum of all) the scientific principles that indirectly built the foundations of the research that was done.
5. this trickles down scientific generations: to reduce this effort at the beginning one simpley draws a line between the youngest cited and the oldest cited research papers ad distributes the ICO’s 50/50. 1999 - 1875 -> papers up until the year 1937 get 50% of the tokens.

[IAbda]

“to help institutions/researchers decide which citations are the most important there could be a generally agreed on distribution of the 20% that stay for the citations:”

All right, what about the citations in those citations? recursive…

[Triple-Blind-Reprodu]

Thats exactly the benefit of it: basic research will finally get the apreciation it actually should get, while techcompanies don’t feel it. Since they will give them very indirectly a recursiveely smaller share of their profit. But in masses this will be respectable.

The limit will be the coin-dividability.

[kladkogex]

I think most researchers are good people, the model of them voluntarily referencing will work )