What areEthereum'sValues?

Consensys is partnering with Intuition Systems to run a social experiment that allows people to propose, discuss, and vote on values they feel are important to Ethereum.

The objective of the experiment is to see how certain mechanisms and forums can be used to encourage honest dialogue and a synthesis of diverse perspectives as a means to establish a community-created values system. While the outcome of the experiment is unforeseen, we are hoping that the community will converge on values that are important to them.

Anyone can propose a value, which includes a name and a description. When you propose a value, you must pay a small fee. This fee goes into a pool for that proposed value, and these fees are shared pro-rata between everyone that votes on the value.

You can vote for or against a value that you propose. The amount you deposit to vote can be as little or as much as you want. Other users can subsequently vote 'for' or 'against' the value you proposed by depositing ETH. You don't need to propose a value to participate, as you can deposit ETH to vote 'for' or 'against' existing values, or simply participate in the discussion on the forum if there is a linked forum thread.

The values that are proposed by the community will be stack-ranked according to the total ETH deposit for, less the total ETH deposited against, for each respective value.

You are free to propose any sort of values that you wish. These can be serious proposals to which you've given thought and consideration, or they can be frivolous. Be aware that frivolous proposals are less likely to see serious engagement and may end up dropping to the bottom of the rank (and therefore wasting your proposed fee and limiting any potential earnings).

When you deposit ETH in a value, voting either "for" or "against", there is a small fee that is paid into the pool for that value. When you withdraw ETH, there is a small withdrawal fee. The fees paid into the pool are shared between participants that have some ETH in the pool at that time.

This means that if you deposit some ETH into the pool for a specific value, you will get a percentage of all deposit and withdrawal fees that are paid by participants that deposit and withdraw after you deposit, and before you withdraw.

There is a static fee to propose a new value, which is 0.0004 ETH and a minimum stake of 0.001 ETH. The purpose of this fee is to discourage spam. The fees are shared between everyone who votes on the proposed value by depositing ETH.

There are also fees for voting on a proposed value. The fee is 0.3% percent of the amount of ETH you deposit or withdraw (i.e. it applies to both deposits and withdrawals). That means that you pay 0.3% percent of the amount of ETH that you deposit, and you also pay 0.3% percent of whatever amount of that ETH you withdraw.

Fees are shared between all users that have previously voted in the same way, e.g. if you are depositing to vote "yes", your deposit fee will be shared between all participants that previously voted yes for that value, relative to their share of the pool (i.e. how much of the total pool their ETH makes up). From that point on, you will also get a portion of any of the ETH that anyone else deposits or withdraws.

Potentially. The mechanism of paying a fee into a value's pool incentivizes participants to keep their ETH in one value pool instead of changing between value pools, as the most profitable strategy is to be one of the first to deposit, and one of the last to withdraw —thereby collecting a portion of everyone else's fees that deposit after you and withdraw before you.

This mechanism encourages people to think carefully about the values they vote on. By voting on values that the community are less likely to engage with, the potential for earning any profit is quite low. Alternatively, by engaging in the conversation and contributing thoughtfully, the potential for earning is higher.

This mechanism also encourages people to think seriously about values they propose, and not to simply follow-the-herd, because the most profitable strategy is to create a value that hasn't already been proposed, that people will be likely to engage with. This can be a contrarian view that conflicts with a value that has already been proposed, but only if it has a compelling argument, as being contrarian for the sake of it is not likely to see much engagement. In theory, this should encourage robust but honest dialogue and debate.

You can't lose more than the fees that you pay into the pool when you deposit and withdraw ETH as part of voting for a value, or the static fee you pay for proposing a value. See the section on fees to learn more.

We aim to run the experiment for a least four weeks from the time of launch, although we may decide to extend this time should there be sufficient demand. Based on community feedback, we may also decide to leave the dapp running indefinitely, but we will only collect and analyze results from the specified period.

Yes, we aim to publish the findings and learnings from the experiment a number of weeks after the initial run. We will publish the findings via Consensys and Intuition channels.

We believe that the community's values are part of the DNA of Ethereum, and are what guides the development of Ethereum. The core values of the Ethereum ecosystem are what makes it so robust and strong, and are why Ethereum is such important infrastructure for the world.

However, these values should come from the ground-up, surfaced as a collective endeavour in dialogue and transparency. We are running this social experiment as a way to understand how we can foster such dialogue and allow the community to align on its values collectively, giving common knowledge to the values that are most important to the community. We will continue to explore this space in the future, iterating and refining ideas with the community to find out what works and what doesn't, and we plan to open source what we build.

Intuition is building the foundational infrastructure for a new information economy via the introduction of non-resolving Information Markets and a novel identity and data interoperability protocol.

Think community notes meets prediction markets meets decentralized identity meets verifiable data. Much like cloud computing revolutionized hardware, Intuition redefines identities, data, and algorithms—freeing them from the constraints of individual platforms and applications to exist in an open, credibly-neutral, decentralized knowledge graph designed for maximum composability. Contributions to this knowledge graph are incentivized via cryptoeconomic mechanics, encouraging users and developers to supply, surface, and curate meaningful information. This approach allows developers to bypass complex data management layers, retain ownership over their contributions, and receive programmatic rewards for valuable data, creating a more sustainable, cooperative, and user-centric digital ecosystem. The vision is to bring better intuition to all of our interactions by providing people and machines with the data they need, when they need it, from the sources they trust.

The Intuition protocol is a decentralized framework designed to enhance trust and data verification within digital ecosystems. It operates by creating a semantic, verifiable social and knowledge graph that allows users to interact with data in a more reliable manner. Intuition is pioneering a novel crowdsourced approach to data verification, allowing users to assess trust levels based on verifiable, user-centric data and analytics.

Intuitions's contracts are open source and have been fully audited. The contracts themselves are upgradeable but are owned with a multisig that has the power to update some parameters, but these are timelocked, giving users the ability to remove funds before any changes take effect.

We think that the mechanism we've designed will incentivize people to participate meaningfully and to give serious consideration to the values they propose and / or vote on. The ability to profit not only incentivizes people to think about what the community will converge on, but will also incentivize people to think outside-the-box and encourage novel and compelling debate on the proposed values.

With the current design, this is definitely a possibility, and it is something that we would like to improve upon. Any future iterations of this experiment will likely use more sophisticated mechanisms such as Quadratic Voting or Connection Oriented Cluster Matching, in order to reduce the impact that whales can have. However, these sophisticated mechanisms require an identity and reputation layer that would introduce too much UX friction for such an early experiment. Therefore, this is something we have chosen to iterate towards over time.

Kialo is an online platform designed to facilitate structured debates and discussions, primarily aimed at enhancing critical thinking and reasoning skills. It operates through a visual format known as argument mapping, where users can explore various perspectives on a central thesis by adding supporting or opposing arguments in a tree-like structure. We want to explore how effective argument mapping can be in a community setting, in terms of allowing people to see an overview of the dialogue around certain proposed values.

This software is provided for use at the user's own risk. ConsenSys Software Inc. and Intuition Systems are not liable for any unforeseen circumstances that may result in the loss of funds. As this is experimental software, users acknowledge the possibility of bugs or unexpected issues. It is strongly recommended that users only deposit amounts they are prepared to lose.

This disclaimer is intended to promote transparency and help users make informed decisions. Users are encouraged to review the documentation and contact our support team with any questions or concerns.

ConsenSys Software Inc. reserves the right to discontinue this program at any time without prior notice. In such cases, all deposited funds will remain accessible for withdrawal. While we strive to deliver innovative solutions, we urge users to engage with the platform responsibly.