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Music Ranking
Decentralized Streaming Platform
Centralized Streaming Platform
Decentralized Music Ranking
Crowdsourcing
It is the practice of engaging a ‘crowd’ or group for a common goal — often innovation, problem-solving, or efficiency [1].
One of the crowdsourcing techniques is the voting system [2]
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There are various techniques to crowdsource opinion. Below are some of the most popular:
One dollar, one vote [3]: In this voting system, each citizen will have as much voting power as his/her monetized wealth. It means that if a dollar is given to the group, the giver should be given corresponding control over how it is spent. With the absence of money, they lose influence over the market results. The consensus is that economic power plays a huge role in affecting the outcomes.
One person, one vote [4]: It is a system of voting in which every person in a group has the right to cast one vote, and in which each individual's vote is counted and has equal value. Therefore, the second contribution is not possible and costs infinity.
Quadratic voting [5]: Colorado Democratic Party successfully executed this type of voting after a recommendation from the Microsoft economist, E. Glen Weyl. Quadratic voting expresses voter's honest opinions about their choices by attaching a cost to it. A vote pricing rule determines the cost of additional votes, with each vote becoming increasingly more expensive. [11]
The simplified formula on how quadratic voting functions is
cost to the voter = (number of votes)^2.The quadratic nature of the voting suggests that a voter can use their votes more efficiently by spreading them across many issues. For example, a voter with a budget of 16 vote credits can apply 1 vote credit to each of the 16 issues. However, if the individual has a stronger passion or sentiment on an issue, they could allocate 4 votes, at the cost of 16 credits, to the singular issue, effectively using up their entire budget. This mechanism towards voting demonstrates that there is a large incentive to buy and sell votes, or to trade votes.
With the open ecosystem that blockchain presents, resetting the cost of a vote for every user wouldn’t give the best outcome as users can create a new wallet and reset the cost of the vote.
We can solve this issue in 2 ways:
1. KYC to ensure each user is unique.
2. Do not reset the counter and continue the cost.
KYC doesn’t give the best user experience from a privacy standpoint and adds unnecessary friction, hence we have opted for the 2nd option. In the blockchain environment, the only thing that cannot be tampered with is the crypto token. Therefore, we will use $POLM as the yardstick for voting against.
PolkaMusic Decentralized Ranking System
Representative image of PolkaMusic Decentralized Music Ranking Chart
The music industry churns out an extensive amount of music every day. Given that now the music creation process is democratized, anybody can create music in their basement and compete with others easily. Since a song cannot stay at the top of the list forever, PolkaMusic Ranking System will allow users to unvote and claim their $POLM back, allowing the songs to fluctuate in chart positions while also allowing early discoverers of great music to profit from their discovery as the votes are continuous token that rises in value as other people vote.
Continuous token
In the world of blockchain, a new crypto-primitive is quietly emerging, which is the continuous token model through the use of a bonding curve. [7] [8]
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Here’s an example of a bonding curve, where current price = (Token supply)^2
This bonding curve says that price increases as the supply of the votes increases. In the case of an exponential curve such as the one in the graph, the growth rate speeds up as the number of votes minted increases.
Representative image of voting for a single song
When a user has purchased the votes, each subsequent buyer will have to pay a slightly higher price for each vote, generating a potential profit for the early buyers of the votes. As more people find out about the song and buying continues, the value of each vote gradually increases along the bonding curve. Early buyers who find potential songs early buy the curve-bonded vote, and then sell their vote back to earn a profit in the future, effectively unvoting.
With quadratic voting, the reserve ratio is 50%, which leads to a lot of volatility. As per our research within our DeFi control group, a 30% reserve ratio gives the best match of volatility and tradability.
Sortition [9]
It is the action of selecting or determining something by casting a vote to random sets. The sortition method has been experimented with at LaPrimaire for the French presidential election, 2017 [10]. The transparency and reliability of the votes are easily achieved using this sortition method of voting under blockchain technology.
Let’s say we had 100 songs. We cannot expect all users to vote for all 100 or make an informed decision to choose 1 among those 100 songs. Hence, we are encouraging users to create a playlist, which in principle is sortition, where users can arrange their set of songs in descending order by arranging the votes in decreasing quantities. A gamified approach has to be taken which rewards the playlist owners while taking opinions from a wide audience regarding the choice of songs included in the playlists.
References:
[1]
"Wikipedia," [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing#cite_note-safire-1.
[2]
[Online]. Available: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07421222.2020.1759342.
[3]
[Online]. Available: https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/15718/what-does-one-dollar-one-vote-mean.
[4]
[Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote#:~:text=One%20man%2C%20one%20vote%20(or,have%20equal%20representation%20in%20voting.&text=In%20the%20United%20States%2C%20the,of%20related%20civil%20rights%20activities.
[5]
[Online]. Available: https://www.radicalxchange.org/concepts/quadratic-voting/.
[6]
[Online]. Available: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2013/06/06/quadratic-vote-buying-square-root-voting-and-corporate-governance/.
[7]
[Online]. Available: https://yos.io/2018/11/10/bonding-curves/.
[8]
[Online]. Available: https://www.blockchainbeach.com/bonding-curves-continuous-token-models/.
[9]
[Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition.
[10]
[Online]. Available: https://articles.laprimaire.org/r%C3%A9sultats-du-1er-tour-de-laprimaire-org-c8fe612b64cb.
[11]
[Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting
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