The internet gave everyone a voice. The blockchain gives everyone the economic incentive to use them.
Tenderfeud is a project built for the Crypto 4 Your Thoughts in SF. For more details on our submission, see here.
Tenderfeud was built out of our fascination with the blockchain's ability to empower voices with economic incentives.
It's a poll system with token-incentivized voting
The application consists of a vue.js/node.js frontend living in frontend/
and a lotionjs/tendermint
blockchain app (runs a single validator node) living in lotion_app
.
The project is currently configured expecting the frontend and the validator node to live on the same machine, but it's pretty straightforward to extend to a cluster of tendermint validators creating the blockchain and a webserver that interacts with any of them via TCP.
Genesis block distributes tokens among some number of people.
From that point, users can either create a poll, view existing polls, or submit a vote for an existing poll. Creating a poll is expensive and the tokens spent on that poll are lost.
Rather than picking the best answer, users are incentivized to pick the answer they think others picked. This (should) result in a Keynesian beauty contest among poll answers.
This is done by rewarding only those voters who voted on the answer with the most votes. The reward is set by the poll creator and deducted from the creator's balance. If multiple answers are tied for votes, the poll is invalidated and the creator gets his/her tokens back.
To avoid the problem of degenerate 'bandwagoning', the poll payout is distributed on an exponential based on vote order (i.e. early votes get more).
To avoid the degenerate case of only one answer, we can set polls up to have a minimum number of answers. If this minimum isn't met by the time the poll ends, the poll creator is refunded their payment.
To run locally,
cd lotion_app
npm i
node index.js
cd ..
cd frontend
npm i
npm run dev
Open a browser to localhost:3000