Generosity-dApp idea: A Commons Well

[federico]

Hi everyone, here’s a more structured recap of what i proposed in the telegram chat.

I’ve been thinking about a “Commons Well”: a small-scale system that rewards generosity and circulation rather than accumulation.

Full disclosure: my initial thoughts have been re-elaborated with the help of AI since i’m an illustrator that has NO techno-financial skills whatsoever, but fully support Ergo’s ethics and mission. I’ll mark in italic the AI-suggested stuff for the community to double-check if it’s going insane.

The basic idea is that everyone receives a small monthly allowance of generosity-tokens. If you donate all or part of them to someone who needs help, you receive a slightly higher allowance the next month (or next “cycle”, or next X). A small percentage of every transfer goes back into the Well so that circulation is maintained. In principle this could be something people keep on a smartphone, without becoming a marketplace, a ranking contest, or a charity platform. Those who give slowly become more capable of giving and those who need help are not excluded. Those who stop giving for a while simply see their generosity level reset, without being punished or removed.

After discussing this in the main chat (thank you Grayman), it became clear that these tokens should not be a currency at all. They shouldn’t be tradable, hoardable, or redeemable. They could behave more like permissions than money (decay if unused, cannot accumulate beyond a cap, and exist only to regulate access to the Well).

It could be the Well itself, that contains real value if it is meant to provide actual financial assistance. What fills the Well should be collectively decided: a merge-mined sidechain asset (thank you TMR.ΣRG), ERG, a stablecoin reserve, staking rewards, voluntary contributions, or a combination of these. Whatever the source, the distinction is that generosity flows through the tokens, while economic value flows through the Well’s assets. When someone needs help, they spend a certain amount of drops and the Well sends out a small amount of real value. Drops disappear when used.

This structure also addresses the concerns raised about Sybil attacks and collusion. Access to the system requires some form of proof-of-personhood, whether via BrightID, attestations, or another community-driven method. The generosity multiplier increases only through unique interactions and decays naturally, so closed loops don’t benefit from gaming the system. Since generosity-tokens are not money, there is no incentive to hoard them or trade them, and the decay mechanism prevents passive accumulation.

The entire intention is to design a mutual aid mechanism where flow matters more than possession, and where access to help is not tied to speculation or market dynamics. The generosity-tokens coordinate behavior and the Well provides the economic output.

This “the token doesn’t have value, the well does” is an evolution that appeared through AI brainstorming and crisscrossing it with the questions i received in chat. Originally, i thought it more straightforward as in: the tokens have a value that decades if not used, thus one is incentivized to keep them in motion. How and by whom this value is set, should have been decided by the community itself. Again, due to my limited knowledge, i thought this version to be more straightforward but i do understand the concerns raised by the community about it.

I’d be happy to share these ideas with whomever has the skills, time and energy to brainstorm them further (and, in my happy imaginary world, build; if anything, i can provide it’s look).

Thanks for your time!

[Grayman]

It’s hard to wrestle with tihs idea because it is non-monetary, in fact it is counter-monetary in a variety of ways - like this concept of decay or dissipation, which reminds me of negative interest rates.

I think that in limited circumstances, where reputation is more important than monetary accumulation (probably Dunbar’s number), that such a system could be useful (assuming general acceptance (on par with resident dominant currency).

My country has a long history of utopian societies emphasis on the history. I do not want to be excessively negative, but I do think that the burden is on you to argue how this functions, and in what (social/political) circumstances. Money is dirty. When people are saying politics is dirty, they mostly mean money.

How do we employ your idea, within a small to medium community, in order to make a producive change?

[federico]

I agree with you: this is not meant to behave like money. In fact, it deliberately avoids the properties that make money dirty such as speculation, hoarding, and power asymmetry. Those generosity-tokens, by regulating access to the Well, avoid a collapse into passive consumption and/or one-sided charity while decay and capping should prevent a drift into the usual shit.

The way i see it, the system should not be an alternative currency but a coordination layer for communities. Something like a protocol that helps sustain continuous mutual aid.

And yes, Dunbars number is quite close to the intended scale. To this point, i see the whole system as multiple islands of self contained (or open, i’m still not sure) coordination, rather than a global solution to make everyone happy.

As to where this proposal might work, i think about DAOs, collectives, mutual-aid networks, activist groups… globally distributed and somewhat precarious realities that already share common values but relay on irregular and ad-hoc solutions to sustain themselves.

To answer directly to your questions: i hope this system(s) would create a more predictable and steady mutual aid rather than sporadic donations, by avoiding speculative dynamics by design. The communities themselves should decide what fills the well and at what scale. It’s meant for those communities (future or existing) that already care about their members but lack a mechanism that keeps support flowing without turning it into a marketplace.

If this framing makes sense, i’d be happy to refine it further with whomever wants to stress test its social logic.

[kushti]

I think this is a perfect idea for mutual help in small communities, and a demo can be done within reasonable timeframe, on top of Basis with no ERG reserves needed in most cases I guess. Some questions about details:

• If you donate all or part of them to someone who needs help - who decides who needs help. some DAO voting?

• • A small percentage of every transfer goes back into the Well so that circulation is maintained - is the fee time-base, i.e. demurrage ?

[bob]

The help wouldn’t have to be monetary. Once a month, every participant could offer something of roughly equal value: One could mow your lawn, one could offer financial advice, repair a bike or build a workout plan. And anyone in need of one of these offers can call the issuer up on it. One token per person, but also donatable, if you don’t use yours. Reputation could be tracked, by how many offers a member has been taken up on, maybe rewarded with early picks. Of course such a system is exploitable and would rely on trust - like other ideas, it works best in tight knit communities.

Also some interesting games could be built on trust as a counter concept to trustlessness in crypto. But I doubt a real economy with more than a few dozen members could run on generosity. The incentive structure seems off. Anything monetary seems to drift towards a big insurance pool everyone pays into, with some DAO to decide who needs help.

(This video on human evolution of giving and economies might give some inspiration: https://youtu.be/DIB7RKnrLes?si=iQJYeO_V-xnuX1XP)

[federico]

Thanks for your questions on the “details”: in order to properly answer it became a bit more philosophical and deeper than i thought.

The problem i encountered is about judgement and control of the people vs judgement and control of the flow.
I guess help in itself is very much a personal concept as we could have someone needing 100€ to repair her bike and someone needing 100€ to pay his cat’s vet-bills (random examples, i know - but then, again, help probably wouldn’t be THAT differently seen in the same small community that shares values and, most importantly, reason to exist in the first place).
I’m afraid that a DAO voting would automatically imply judgement of merit and moral power (“why he got help and i didn’t? I find it unfair because…”) or some sort of vertical assistance / control on people.

What if instead of deciding “who” needs help, the system could just regulate how much the well holds and how often it can be accessed, thus shifting the control on the flow in a more ecological way? I think this scenario would treat everyone more equally and preserve every member’s dignity.
Then of course there will be the one who “needs” to access the well more often than others, but if i see it as a forest (apologies for the cheesy metaphor but the idea stemmed from something like this more or less), then it’s really about deciding together how much it rains instead of which living being can drink. And here comes another thought: how can we prevent over-extraction / drying up the well more than its re-fill capacity?
My basic answer was that the generosity tokens (i call them Drops just because) are used as “valves” to regulate the extraction. Thus they decay if unused and evaporate when somebody uses them to access the well. The phrase “A small percentage of every transfer goes back into the Well so that circulation is maintained” was my AI being irrational i’m afraid :’)

Here the system decides only how much flow is sustainable at any given time. In this framing everyone can decide whether to let the Drops circulate or let them evaporate.

I’m totally open to discuss this point btw. Some days is crystal clear, others i feel like i’m in the dark.

[federico]

I really liked the video, thanks!
I agree with you but my point slightly diverges though: it’s about what kind of scarcity we are trying to coordinate. What you mentioned reminded me of time banks (they work beautifully when people can actually meet and share skills face to face). I’m afraid that in a digitally scattered community, that kind of reciprocity becomes harder to sustain.

That’s why I keep coming back to the idea of the Well not as “an economy of generosity”, but as a coordination layer for mutual aid in contexts where physical proximity is missing. In that sense, the Well doesn’t have to be filled with money necessarily: it could indeed be time, access to shared tools, etc… (and here i still think that every community should decide what fills the well, how often it can be accessed and so forth… What i’m proposing is something like a customizable Mutual-Aid sandbox) but whatever it contains needs to be fungible enough to travel across a network.

I fully agree with you that once things become monetary, they tend to drift toward an insurance-pool logic with governance deciding who deserves help and that drift is exactly what i’m trying to resist. The distinction i’m exploring is that generosity itself is never converted into value or reputation. It only increases one’s capacity to keep the system flowing. The Well provides support, but the drops don’t measure merit, or generosity-status.