Introducing Resolvr: Open Source Justice on Bitcoin and Nostr
8633 sats \ 25k boost \ 20 comments \ @Resolvr 11 Dec 2023 bitcoin

Introduction
Resolvr is building Open Source Justice by empowering sovereign communities to peacefully and voluntarily resolve their own disputes with open-source tools.
Our first product is designed for a community close to home: the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development ecosystem. We've built a peer-to-peer bounty marketplace that:
  • gives developers assurances of payment for solving bounties,
  • decentralizes and grows FOSS funding sources,
  • unlocks access to the global talent pool,
  • provides a frictionless on-ramp to earn Bitcoin (₿).
Resolvr does this by:
  • limiting discretion of bounty grantors through reputational stakes and a Bitcoin (₿) escrow powered by Discreet Log Contracts🔮,
  • resolving disputes through crowdsourced review of bounty solutions,
  • using nostr🦩 for interoperable and censorship-resistant bounty discovery,
  • using Lighting⚡ zaps for instant bounty payouts.
The alpha webclient is now live at resolvr.io.

The Problem
The root problem with conventional bounty marketplaces is all the trust that's required to make them work.
Satoshi Nakamoto (probably)

1. Centralized Custodians are Security Holes 🕳️
❌ Centralized bounty marketplaces that hold bounty funds can exit scam or go bankrupt.
  • This year, BountySource (5,445 listed bounties worth $406,425 in 2019) stopped paying out bounties to developers.
❌ Existing bounty marketplaces, like Replit, don't have instant or free payouts:
  • Devs are rewarded in Replit's 💩-coin and must request USD conversion by email.
  • Replit charges a 25% withdrawal fee and requires a minimum withdrawal of $350.
❌ Knowledge workers in developing countries, many of whom rely on mobile wallets, have lost their funds via bank and telco attack vectors ($3M USD via 2,000 SIM cards, lost).
❌ Centralized bounty sites can censor posts for projects the site-owners disagree with or find unsavory.

2. Bounty Grantors are Judge 👩‍⚖️ and Jury 🏛️
❌ Bounty grantors have unlimited discretion over whether a solution meets their bounty criteria. And they can change the criteria after the dev has satisfied the original bounty.
❌ The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) recently changed its criteria on a nostr bounty after a dev provided a solution to the originally posted bounty. HRF decided to pay the dev only half the bounty.
❌ This is inherently unfair and inefficient!

Resolvr's Solution ✔️
  1. 📡 Distributed, interoperable, censorship-resistant communication protocol for bounty posting and discovery,
  2. (₿) Peer-to-peer lightning payouts and non-custodial escrow system,
  3. ⚖️ Decentralized Dispute Resolution

How it Works
Check out the Walkthrough here.

Zap Payouts and Crowdsourced Dispute Resolution
  1. Login to resolvr.io with your existing nostr keys (or let resolvr.io generate keys for you - remember to back them up!)
  2. Set up your profile by
  • Linking your GitHub identity to your nostr profile (through resolvr.io or Amethyst on android) following NIP-39 instructions
  • Getting a lighting address for zap payments (getalby.com)
  1. Maker (entrepreneur, foundation, FOSS project) - post a bounty with a detailed criteria and amount.
  2. Taker (freelance developer) - find a bounty to solve, apply to the bounty.
  3. Maker - assign a Taker to solve your bounty.
Ideal Path
  1. Taker - solve the assigned bounty and provide a link to the work product in the comments (e.g., github repo or PR)
  2. Maker - click "pay" to zap bounty reward
Happy Path
  1. If either party disputes the bounty: Taker or Maker clicks "poll" to initiate a nostr zap poll,
  2. Community members (other Makers/Takers) review bounty/solution and vote to resolve the dispute,
  3. Maker - if community votes in favor of Taker, zap payout.
Sad Path
  1. Maker does not comply with community decision, burns reputation and cannot find developers for future projects.

Innovations
Resolvr's success is aligned with the success of nostr🦩 and bitcoin. We're advancing the tech with novel applications:
  • Authored NIP-43: bounties over nostr
  • Discovered new use-case for NIP-69 zap polls: dispute resolution
  • First p2p bounty marketplace with instant payouts over lightning
  • First p2p bounty marketplace with integrated dispute resolution
  • New frictionless onramp to earn bitcoin, grow circular economy

What's Next for the Resolvr Bounty Marketplace?
The next dispute resolution feature on the roadmap for the Resolvr bounty marketplace is on-chain DLC🔮 escrow. We're putting DLCs🔮 on nostr🦩 and building a desktop client to do it!
The desktop client will allow Makers and Takers to post, apply and assign bounties just like the web client. But it will also create and broadcast DLC🔮 escrow contracts. In the event of a dispute, the Resolvr oracle will attest to the results of the crowdsourced zap poll to release the funds to the winning party.
In the future, Resolvr will allow Makers and Takers to select their own oracles, and communities can be listed as "review association" oracles, earning bitcoin for resolving disputes over bounties (think: foundations, hackerspaces, bitdev meetup groups).
For more details about our DLCs🔮 on nostr, check out the Resolvr's escrow repo on GitHub!
In addition to DLCs🔮, Resolvr's roadmap includes:
  • Decentralizing the default Resolvr oracle through FediMint🔅 protocol and FROST🥶.
  • Scaling escrow through Lighting⚡ DLCs🔮
  • Bounty review and code testing with AI🤖 (DVMs)

Beyond Bounties...
The Resolvr Project is building an open-source dispute resolution system on bitcoin and adjacent protocols.
Resolvr will revolutionize dispute resolution on a global scale, offering secure, open-source, customizable, decentralized, and radically cost-efficient mechanisms for infinite use cases.
Dispute Resolution is a big opportunity, with increasing demand driven by AI services and microtransactions.
Thanks for joining us on this journey to make FOSS funding more fair and efficient, expand access to Bitcoin, and provide communities with the tools to peacefully resolve their own disputes!
Visit resolvr.io to post and claim bounties today!

The Team
  • Dave Schwab (🦩 | 𝕏): Chief Product Officer for a legal tech SaaS.
  • Aaron Daniel (🦩 | 𝕏): Appellate attorney and dispute systems designer. Author of the Bitcoin Brief newsletter and regular contributing author to Bitcoin Magazine.
  • Chris@Machine (🦩 | 𝕏): Nostr developer and creator of Blogstack.io, a longform nostr platform. Streaming nostr programming workshops on Zap.Stream and Youtube.
  • Utibe Essien (🦩): Product designer and web adventurer.
  • Ras (𝕏): Bitcoin hacker. Founder of Bitcoin Grove, a community accelerator and physical hacker space in Miami.
  • Brian: Front end web developer and crypto enthusiast.
  • Tommy (🦩): Google Software Engineer who enjoys making the State obsolete in his free time
  • Randy (𝕏): Full-stack developer currently working on Greenlight at Blockstream
  • Derek Hinkle: Backend Developer for a legal tech SaaS; machine learning and AI powered automation.
  • Justin Moeller (🦩 | 𝕏): Spiral and HRF grantee working on Fedimint.

Connect with Resolvr!
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946 sats \ 1 reply \ @benthecarman 12 Dec 2023
You say you're using DLCs and payouts of Lightning. I don't see how you're doing that. The app has no wallet or anything. It seems like a normal custodial lightning app reliant on the website to dictate who gets the money
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3 sats \ 0 replies \ @Resolvr OP 12 Dec 2023
Resolvr.io is a nostr client that supports NIP-57 lightning zaps. Users who have specified a lightning address in their profile settings (previously on another nostr client or on resolvr.io) can use a browser extension like alby to send and receive zap payouts for bounties. Resolvr.io doesn't hold bitcoin at any point.
As for DLCs, that's on the roadmap and is heavy WIP. DLCs require a desktop app to manage and negotiate the on-chain contract, and to send and receive associated bitcoin. So, the manager app will feature a non-custodial wallet.
The Resolvr Project exists to create tools for sovereign individuals and communities. At no point will we ever make users custody funds with us.
Thanks!
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362 sats \ 2 replies \ @nullcount 11 Dec 2023
Is there any proof of work to create account? I imagine anyone could create enough bots to always win a dispute.
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26 sats \ 1 reply \ @Resolvr OP 12 Dec 2023
See #348621.
Zap-to-post bounties is also on the roadmap to increase quality of bounty posts and deter spam.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cyberpunk02 12 Dec 2023
Woop woop!!
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326 sats \ 0 replies \ @notgeld 11 Dec 2023
No, Nostr isn't that magical thing that solves Oracle problem.
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301 sats \ 2 replies \ @02cfd5f452 11 Dec 2023
What prevents sybil attacks ? (Eg maker creating thousands of fake takers to vote in their favor)
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472 sats \ 1 reply \ @Resolvr OP 12 Dec 2023
We're constantly thinking about sybil attacks. For the alpha, to vote in a poll, users need to pay a decent sized zap to vote. For smaller value bounties, the sats to vote in a poll can quickly outstrip the bounty itself, and so it's simply easier to just pay out.
Additionally, users have the option to link their github accounts using NIP-39. This imports reputation and increases likelihood of getting good bounties, or having your bounties fulfilled. If a poll looks suspicious (i.e. many accounts voting with no history of activity and no github profiles), it can be disregarded without reputational risk. Zap dispute polls are currently advisory, not binding, and simply create a record of what the community thinks, which can be checked against zap receipts to see if the decision was or wasn't followed. So, a zap poll that looks fishy won't really effect a user's reputation.
Future dispute resolution tools on the roadmap involve the ability to choose an association or group of reviewers to vote, which can provide assurances of a vote's validity.
If anyone has further ideas on sybil resistance or anything else, please let us know! Discord | GitHub
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 12 Dec 2023
Interesting answer, I'll be watching you guys, I predict you might do something I will steal for my prediction market prototype, lol
Or is it just hope? :)
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198 sats \ 0 replies \ @legxxi 11 Dec 2023
Sounds great 👏
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158 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheWildHustle 11 Dec 2023
We're so early
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127 sats \ 0 replies \ @Zepasta 11 Dec 2023
deleted by author
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129 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT 11 Dec 2023
I wonder if robosats or hodlhodl would be better off outsourcing disputes to something like this....
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22 sats \ 0 replies \ @Zepasta 11 Dec 2023
deleted by author
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137 sats \ 0 replies \ @brave 12 Dec 2023
This will be so great for the open source community
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120 sats \ 0 replies \ @phatom 12 Dec 2023
I like when protocols come together to solve a particular challenge
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111 sats \ 0 replies \ @ladyluck 12 Dec 2023
Another service to kick centralisation to the curbs
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101 sats \ 1 reply \ @JoJo 12 Dec 2023
where's the incentive for community members to vote by poll as you would have to zap?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Resolvr OP 12 Dec 2023
Crowdsourced dispute resolution can be effective to resolve a limited set of dispute types, even without direct financial incentive schemes, when the decision-makers and disputants are part of a community with shared norms, customs, and goals.
For example, the eBay india community court, which adjudicated negative reviews, never compensated sellers and buyers who served as jurors, yet always had a steady stream of willing participants. The designers of that system attributed this to ebay's active community and extremely engaged users. Those sellers serving as jurors knew they could find themselves facing unwarranted negative feedback in the future, and would need a robust system to resolve the dispute. They were incentivized to help their community, because it would help them, too. Incentives were aligned, although not in a directly financial way.
Similarly on resolvr.io, users will predominantly be other bounty makers and bounty takers, who may end up in a dispute over a bounty at some point. Building and maintaining a robust jury system benefits these users, although not in a direct and immediately financial way.
There may be some optimal mount of sats required to vote in a poll that deters sybil attacks and spam but is not so costly as to disincentivize participation. That amount may scale with the size of the bounty and is something we are exploring!
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SaToSHiWoMaN 12 Feb outlawed
stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.