Ethos SolidCoin Experiment Wrap Up

Gitcoin launched an emergent social experiment at Ethereal Summit called Ethos.

Ethos of Ethereal
Gitcoin is launching an emergent social experiment at Ethereal Summit called Ethos

The game was based around a SolidCoin called Ethos. Here’s what they look like.

How it Works

There is a QR Code on the back. When you scan it, you get to view the rules of the game.

Basically the game was ‘hot potato’ on the blockchain.

Wait, but why?

Ethos means “the characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its beliefs and aspirations.”In the spirit of the event, we wanted to incentivize attendees of the event to pay it forward to someone who embodies the ‘Ethos’ of Ethereal Summit.

The end result, would be a social graph of the ethos of the event. Here it is, visualized as an animated gif:

How to interpret this graph:

1. The blue dot in the center is the genesis block.
2. 50 Ethos SolidCoins were then given to @owocki.
3. We then distributed those SolidCoins to the crowd and encouraged them to pay it forward.

Emergent Results

Some interesting, emergent results, from the 50 coin experiment:

1. The longest ‘chain’ was 16 links long! The median ‘chain’ was 2 links long.
2. 31 people just kept the coin and didn’t pay it forward at all.
3. Here is a graph of the ‘edge sizes’, but frequency/occurrence:

1. In addition to the 50 Solid Coins, we distributed over 200 Ethos ERC20tokens to attendees. See them on Etherscan.
2. Some paid their ethos forward to Kim Kardashian, Kanye West or Stormy Daniels. It’s kind of funny to us that some users would ‘cheat’ the system, even when there is no profit motive and especially when the project is called Ethos. Next year, we might have to add a twitter authentication feature to prevent this!
3. I am thrilled to say that prominent attendees such as Mark Beylin, Vlad Zamfir, Andrew Hyde received Ethos.

How should we evolve this experiment for future events? How can we incentivize positive social action at future blockchain community events? Get in touch on twitter or on slack and let us know!

~ Kevin and the Gitcoin Team

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Special thanks to eswarasai, mbeacom, and thelostone-mc for #BUIDLing this project with Gitcoin bounties!

Disclaimer: The Ethos token is a proof of attendance at Ethereal 2018, which has no monetary value.

Thanks to Vivek Singh.