A Very Peculiar Blockchain
GOSH’s one year anniversary is fast approaching. At this occurrence we thought it best to go back to our foundations and talk a bit about the blockchain, and more precisely about how GOSH is a very peculiar blockchain indeed. In many ways, the blockchain we have built has little in common with any other network. And we would like to regale you, dear reader, with the reasons, innovations, and unique applications achieved in this, our laborious year zero; as well as introduce to you for the first time a new feature on GOSH: Paid — a tool allowing open source developers to unlock the value of their code.
Part I: Why We Did It
Ok, so perhaps the title is a bit misleading — if you think of it, GOSH isn’t the peculiar blockchain, rather, many others in the blockchain space have a tendency to complicate, convolute, and offer outright bizarre solutions to problems that don’t apply. The whole principle of a decentralized ledger was to offer trustlessness and transparency. But it’s not a simple technology for most everyday users to understand. And this fact has led to many corners of the crypto space to be so engulfed in shadow, let alone transparent, that bad things happened. At the end of it all, many people just don’t understand what is going on. Perhaps then the most peculiar thing about GOSH is that we break from this status quo, and do our best to offer clear, simple, and transparent solutions to problems faced by open source developers today.
GOSH offers blockchain products which, at their core, work to prevent the monopolization often found in meritocratic systems, software security breaches, and confidence tricks. We have spoken about these at length. But let us now touch on some other innovations we needed to employ as a prerequisite to building a usable, scalable, and universal git on-chain/distributed open source Foundation.
Part II: GOSH’s Blockchain Innovations
The Free Service Area
The first of these prerequisites was to build a blockchain that offers free use. If this sounds unusual, that’s because it is. So far nobody has achieved blockchain use with zero gas payments — nobody until GOSH that is. On GOSH any developer can build their code for free just like on any other git. Only this git is fully on-chain.
We achieve this through the GOSH Free Service Area. Fees on GOSH are not paid to Validators but are instead transferred to the Free Software Giver — these fees are used to replenish the Special User Wallet contracts to automatically pay for gas fees of other contracts in the Free Service Area. These contracts can only transfer tokens between other contracts within the Area and are not transferable outside, meaning they are pure Utility Tokens. These tokens are SHELL coins, here used as a Unit of Account for Payment Gateways. (SHELLs are themselves very peculiar, but more on that later).
So in effect this means any developer can use the GOSH blockchain for free, without paying any gas, and sell their services using Fiat Payment Gateways without a need to KYC/AML. This payment Gateway is built into GOSH.
With this we solve the issue as to why a developer would pay to use one git when others are free. Offering a Freemium Service on the GOSH blockchain is perhaps the central innovation from which all others hail.
Shell Coin
Another reason why GOSH is a very peculiar blockchain is the SHELL coin, the very units of account in the Free Service Area.
SHELL coins are the primary Utility Tokens of the GOSH blockchain, they are used to pay gas and fees. Anybody can buy the SHELL coin using their credit card for (and always for) $1. SHELL doesn’t have reserves, or rather, due to it being bought through credit card payments equalling a dollar in perpetuity, the supply of SHELL is equal to the supply of US Dollars, which, of course, is infinite.
This is a crucial point for repelling the recent attacks by Mr. Gensler, of SEC fame, towards Stable coins, claiming that since they are backed by some fiat currency reserves they are in fact Money Markets. And as such required to be regulated by this very same SEC. Of course.
The principles of SHELL are the following two statements:
We do not promise that buyers will ever redeem this coin for the same value they pay
And the only promise we make is that buyers will never generate revenue by investing in SHELL coins
Indeed, we do not promise that SHELL will even hold value. This is because seeing as buyers will always be able to purchase 1 SHELL for $1 from GOSH, if buyers wish to sell it on the market, the price could be lower, but will not exceed a dollar — an assumption made out of the most basic understanding of the market rationality. (If our assumption is wrong please contact the US Federal Reserve for a comment.)
In the event many people no longer need their SHELL and sell it on the open market, as the price plummets down near zero with the vigor of a skydiver, it is all the same to us. Seeing as few people in this eventuality will consciously choose to buy SHELL for a dollar when they could buy it for a fraction of that, fewer SHELL will be issued and, with the supply being fixed, as a result of market conditions, it will in time return to the price of $1.
The SHELL coin is backed by nothing, just like most fiat currency, and, in many ways, it is a sort of fiat currency on-chain. It provides the same guarantee on-chain as the guarantee provided by any central bank, in full compliance with the central bank, as a direct result of the central bank. As far as we know, this has never been attempted.
One of the guarantees a central bank offers is a unit’s withdrawal for a unit’s deposit. We make the same guarantee. Here’s how:
When GOSH collects a dollar for the purchase of a SHELL coin, these come from a pool (an infinite, or should we say infinity, pool) of SHELLS. When any SHELL holder wants to sell their SHELLS for a dollar, they will be able to post them in our pool and get priority. This means that the next person who wants to buy 1 SHELL for $1 will buy it from that SHELL holder looking to sell, rather than from GOSH.
She sells sea-SHELLS by the seashore, and those SHELLS are free floating currency.
Part III: GOSH For Open Source Developers
We have mentioned earlier that:
GOSH is a blockchain which accepts credit cards without a need for KYC or any kind of business registration. SHELL is a feature of GOSH which functions exclusively as a unit of account. Because there are no reserves, we don't guarantee that it will not fall in price, but we do guarantee that SHELL will always be counted as one dollar. So if you paid $1 from your credit card for SHELL, and you paid inside the system with this coin, then the price of this coin will be regarded as costing $1
As noted previously, your DAO token is convertible to DAO Karma — the voting token of any DAO on GOSH — which, in turn, is not transferable or tradeable
These two points are the very backbone behind GOSH’s latest feature…
GOSH Paid
GOSH Paid membership offers developers a new way to unlock the value of their code while keeping software open. DAOs will now be able to lend Karma as a monthly subscription to those looking to support open source, called Paid Members, through a simple credit card transaction. With GOSH Paid DAOs set up subscription tiers they’d like to offer paid members. In exchange for their contribution, members will receive voting power in a DAO as Karma. DAOs decide how much Karma members will receive when setting up GOSH Paid, and can change GOSH Paid settings at any time. Paid Members will then be able to create and vote for proposals and tasks in that DAO for as long as they are a subscriber. DAOs can offer additional features to Paid members for each subscription tier.
One of the peculiarities of GOSH Paid is that if a member stops paying their subscription, the Karma will expire. It’s ‘ephemeral Karma.’ It is impossible to capitalize on it in any way, meaning it cannot be resold and is in fact a pure utility service and nothing else.
A developer’s Karma, on the other hand, won’t expire — they contributed to this repository and so are permanent members.
Enterprises who use a particular repository (here governed as a DAO) can now, instead of hiring someone to maintain it, become Paid Members. This has a three-sided effect:
It saves them money. A lot of open source development today is wasteful to nobody’s benefit. Instead of paying a part-time salary to a maintainer, enterprises can be sure the software they use is sustainably run, at a set price, without compromising their professional input
Open source developers can tangibly benefit from people using their software. Open source has to stay free-to-use. But without any incentives, maintaining it often becomes a matter of endless forks, code rewritten over and over again, and (as previously mentioned) money dumped into development processes as though they were a void. If enterprises save money in GOSH Paid, then developers enjoy the opposite effect: With GOSH Paid, developers can be sure that from what money is spent in open source, they receive every penny. Software should be free as in free speech, not as in free beer
When enterprises pay, they get a voice. GOSH Paid is no donation service. In GOSH Paid, subscribing to a DAO offers enterprises a voice for decision-making in open source software. As long as they pay they can review, vote for, and participate in the discussion of the work being done by a DAO. On top of this, DAOs also benefit from a wider pool of contributors
We offer GOSH Paid as a new tool that open source developers can use to unlock the value of their code. DAOs on GOSH are a self-governed, scalable solution to perform the functions of open source Foundations in a distributed way — GOSH Paid is a crucial step to realizing this. Why? Because open source, governed through DAOs, can now be financially supported by users and enthusiasts, all while keeping it free to use, and so, open.
Part IV: Conclusion
We could say, in the end, that what makes GOSH such a peculiar blockchain is: all the things that open source developers hate about blockchains are not a part of GOSH. It’s free to use. It solves the problem of funding in open source not by making outlandish promises but through a subscription service in voting tokens which can expire. It runs on floating currency (that has both infinite reserves and no reserves at all).
Indeed, we have designed GOSH to offer possible solutions to a specific set of problems and using the blockchain to that end is equally a question of a user’s convenience as of our hardset beliefs. On GOSH you don’t need to write extensive scripts on top of your code for it to be secure. You can, and we very much encourage developers to do so, but even without this there is an in-built security and censorship-resistance guarantee that comes with building your code on-chain. On GOSH you don’t need to worry about stablecoin reserves, or how long it’ll take a smart contract to execute. And on GOSH, open source developers do not need to rely on bureaucracy and centralized bodies to earn a living. We always knew that to achieve all this, GOSH would need to be a very peculiar blockchain that works differently from all the others.
Now, at last, we can proudly sing of its merits.
We will be talking more about GOSH Paid in the coming weeks so stay tuned.