Contributing Useful Code | Rewarding The Forgotten Programmers

Okay. No. I definitely didn't learn Python, and I don't really need that for the my weight loss journey. But we will be talking about some coding and some weights today in this episode, episode eight of the Meer Morpheus podcast. So,

we're gonna be really diving into the coding bucket today. The 24% allocated to that. We're gonna be talking about why people should get rewarded for their contributions and in forgetting the forgotten programmers as, as my friend Juan is saying in the chat here, how to measure their contributions with a waiting system, some examples of the type of contributions you could do if you were to join an open source project,

the current status of people contributing and how I intend to join their ranks. Oh, it's a lot to cover on today. So let's jump into it. Who's gonna carry the technical debt? Who's gonna carry it? Who's gonna carry the code? That's what I'm talking about here.

And how are they going to do that without some sort of reward? Now, if you're like David Goggins, you probably don't need the reward. And your reward is, I don't know what internal punishment for yourself, something like that. But there is a reason why why normal people need to live in the real world and not in the fantasy

constructed by him. And yes, I understand I haven't used technical debt correctly, but it just sounded nice. Sounded like right. So we've talked about the capital and compute, buckets

in the two episodes before this. And it was quite good that I did that. Luckily, I didn't intend to put it this way. But it's a nice segue into this bucket because we can see from two other main open source crypto projects, that the people contributing to that in the compute and the capital buckets very much got rewarded. So if we look at Bitcoin and Ethereum, with Bitcoin, it's pretty much only the compute side of things, I k a the miners who get rewarded and that's with the the block rewards.

Whereas with Ethereum, which came slightly afterwards was where obviously the miners were getting rewarded before they moved to proof of stake, but also the people who provided capital right at the start of the, the founding of the project, if you wanna call it that. So we can see how both of them had compute and capital getting rewards for their effort putting in.

But both of these needed a huge upfront amount of work in terms of the code base, in terms of the actual work by programmers being put in to create a God knows how many lines of code are in Bitcoin Core. And and, I think it's called geth. Goeth is the main client for for the Ethereum contribute, system. And it's a ratch largely thankless task, if you think about it, you know, sure, Satoshi got in on the ground floor and he was mining, you know, what he got up to a million

and something coins. But that was largely thankless. You know, he he he bowed out before he got any of the the praise, the props, and the monetary benefits for sure. And this is happened across time and just seems to be a constant sort of thing that will happen. You know, programmers need to put in the work and will they necessarily get rewarded from that? You know, sometimes they do. And look, I'm not discounting that people do a lot of stuff for non monetary gains.

And so, you know, the status that you can get from things, sometimes they would get rewarded in terms of sponsorships, in terms of donations from other people's generosity, grants, bug bounties, hackathons, external sources of funding. But you really come across this chicken, the egg scenario because the protocol needs to get widely adopted first before it's valuable. But are you going to work on something which you're unsure is valuable and, you know, it needs the kind of flywheel effect to go?

And if you're doing all the coding and you're not getting rewarded as part of that directly from the protocol, then you know what? There's there's a very large time lag between you doing work and you actually being rewarded from that. And, you know, once again, I understand not everyone works for

the monetary benefits of things. But I also understand that, people need to live in the world, real world, pay bills. And, there is a reason and incentive why if you're designing a new system, hey, maybe you should create one where the programmers, the coders, the contributors are actually getting rewarded for this. So this gets to the next section where you're you're just waiting for a mate. And

classic throwback to an Aussie meme here. The the waiting system for for Morpheus and the reason this bucket exists is to be able to reward the contributors of code who are participating in the ground level protocol. So basic high level details, much like the other two buckets, 24% of the total emissions of Morpheus token gets raw,

distributed to the coders. This takes place gradually and decreasingly over sixteen years, with something special happening after that tune into the tokenomics episode in two weeks time. But who gets these and how is, I guess, the one of the main questions. And, well, I mean, who who gets it? Anyone who chooses to contribute. So you can be an anon, you can be sued on, you could be Anton,

little little check there because Anton's contributed a lot or out and proud on, I guess, kind of like, how David Johnston would be. So how these get distributed, the 24%, the Morpheus tokens over this is based on a waiting system that contains several parts. What kind of code are you contributing and how useful is it? Is this going to be done via a bidding process, like you'll do a say what you're going to do upfront, and you get a kind of

tote an allocation of of a waiting of what you will get for what you've done? Or are you just going to do it upfront? And is this useful across time and still being maintained? So essentially, the system goes like this, and I'll get into the details of the waiting systems very shortly. You commit code to the Morpheus ecosystem under the GitHub and

under a Morpheus rep reference implementation. So there's kind of 10 separate categories that make up the protocol of of Morpheus, these being the smart agents, these being the smart contracts, local install, the TCM, aka the the fair launch, the protection fund, the four buckets I've talked about, and also interoperability. And

these at the moment have separate seven different maintainers across these various things. David Johnston plays a part, but also some names that I've talked about before. Eric Voorhees, Ryan Condren, Anton, I believe, is one of the maintainers. Maybe not. And a couple other, pseudonymous people as well. The categories themselves can undergo some changes as this has actually

Indeed. I have scrolled through the discord and, seen why these changes happened and and so, you know, liable to change in the future. How you go about doing it? Well, the smarter and probably preferred way is to put a bid in for something to the maintainer of that repo, and you propose the work that you're going to do and how much weights you'd like for it. So you can say, you know, I'm going to do this this sort of improvement to the smart contracts. There's a vulnerability here.

I'll get into more actual use cases of code and what kind of qualifies and doesn't qualify shortly. And you then just say, like, I think this is deserving of, you know, the equivalent of 50 more per day, something like that. And that will either get processed and and it's it's a fair value. The maintainer thinks that's a fair value or, you know, he's like, no, you're you're asking for like

2,000 a day. That's that's too much. You're gonna have to lower that or not do the work. So there's this kind of, like, negotiation that goes on. I'm not I'm not exactly sure how it works in the in the back end, but there is a a form you can submit for this. Or if you don't like this, you could always just do the work upfront and submit afterwards and hope that you get some sweet sweet weights.

This is probably a bit riskier, and you'd it'd be better to scout the landscape first to see, okay, is what I'm proposing to do actually valuable to people, think this is useful and deserving of of, rewards and weights. If you don't like how this works, unfortunately, you're shit out of luck in terms of,

oh, I have to submit to someone or it's, you know, there's someone who's controlling all of the weights and things like this. Yeah, that's that's kind of how atomic governance works. And we'll be talking about that shortly later on. If you think your system of, let's say let's take Bitcoin, for example. If you think Bitcoin Core is based purely on, meritocracy

and of the code contributed and there's no politics and there's no human element to it, you're shit out of luck with that as well. So in terms of the durability of this, you'll continue to get more rewards for your contributions to code as long as you've

the code you've committed is useful and as long as it's maintained over time. So if it gets made redundant by something, if you've made a smart contract and that is eventually, you know, completely rewritten or updated, your weightings will go from the system and go to that towards that new person. If it falls into disrepair because the protocol has moved on because

changes have been made, it's, you know, there's a fault happened, whatever it is, and you're not there to maintain it as well, then you'll you'll also lose your your waiting. So it's a relatively simple way of getting immediately rewarded for something, and also an incentive to keep it polished and updated over time. So this is why people contribute in code can get that, you know, pay the monthly bill sort of thing. And then also if they've done really good work

and are still maintaining that, they can get rewarded for that over time. So you can kind of think of it like a salary if you want. Whereas but you're, you know, not submitting it to one big boss employer and where you get paid regardless of whether you're doing good or not. It's more based on the merit of your actual code and and how how it's working in. So

how do the weights weigh in? And I kind of like to think of coding weights as the pro rata system for work. So much like the capital bucket is pro rata for monies. So your the how much capital you provided is you get a proportion of that based on how much you've done in comparison to the total bucket. So for the waiting system, just as a whole overview, there's 100,000,000 weights and just think of a weight as like a token for

work, essentially. And, you know, we're gonna confuse things slightly here because we've got the Morpheus token already, but there's a token for getting this token. So in total for the sixteen years, there are 100,000,000 weights. Why not do it on just pure hours worked? You might ask. Well, I think right at the start, they talked about hours

in this is like in late twenty twenty three, early '20 '20 '4 where, you know, it was just getting off the ground. People were writing the smart contracts. There was no token yet per se at all. And, I think it's the reason it moved to waiting because

there are numerical representation of valuable code and it's the valuable part that's the important bit here because you can work on something for a long time. And if you're lazy, if you're distracted, if you haven't built up a base skill set beforehand, you can spend a lot of hours on something. But, you know, you can have something, that's stupid, for example, that you spend a lot of time on and isn't valuable and is not useful.

Should you get rewarded for that? No, probably not. You can have someone who only spends a couple hours on something, but they've got a ridiculously crazy amount of skills and talent in that particular field. And even though they might not spend much time on it, they create something that's super, super valuable. Should they get rewarded for that? Yes. Because they've provided something of utility. And this is trying to get to the heart of meritocracy, for example.

What about if you have people who are like, for example, there's there's a bidding process that goes on with this as well. So you can have people who are willing to, you know, let's just take two equivalent coders. One is in America, One is in India. And they're both saying like, hey, you know, both same skill set, both same amount of hours that they're willing to put to a to a piece of work. And

they're submitting weights and, you know, cost of living in America is much, much higher. And so the American code is saying like, oh, you know, I'll do it for 50,000 weights. And then the one in India is like, oh, you know what? I I'd be still pretty comfortable doing it for 25,000. And so this is where you can get this competitive aspect of of the coding as well where it's

it's not just about providing valuable code, but, you know, you have to do it better than the other person. And if they're willing to do it for cheaper than and produce something of equivalent quality, then obviously it should be going to them. So getting towards the heart of the marketplace as well of

of programing and useful code. So this is why there is a bidding process and the maintainer, if they want to publish a task, for example, and say, hey, this is something valuable that's needed, people could can bid on that. I made the reference to Bitcoin Core contributors earlier, and

this actually plays a little bit part in how the weights are distributed. So if you're looking at the graphs on the on the left here or or your right, my right, the we can see that over time, the weights, decrease very exponentially as, as we get towards the year 16. So in the first year, much like the BTC halves every every year. So we have 50,000,000 weights for the first year, 25,000,000

for year two, twelve and a half year three. You can see how we're going here, you know, 6.25 after that in year four, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, all the way down to 01/1979 and with some extra decimals after that in year 16. Hope you enjoy my quick and dirty graph that I've created in LibreOffice calc. Let's go. Now to be nitpicky, year one and two have kind of been combined to the 75,000,000 because the coding actually began before the start of the capital period or the on,

which was, as we mentioned, in February of twenty twenty four. And so the coding weights were kind of calculated from 09/03/2023 onwards, which was the day after the the white paper was released. So it needs some work and jigging around. And once again, things are open to change. It used to be 50,000 weights at one point.

But because people were basing that and like trying to do rough calcs in the head of like, okay, let's say one weight is equal to point zero zero two five Morpheus tokens or USD value of Morpheus token at the time. Before there was a market price for it, they were submitting too high or too low. And so it was eventually expanded. Yeah. It requires some iteration to get right with these things.

If you are a kind of maxi in the sense of I can understand Bitcoin maximalism in one regard, which is you just want something simple, easy, and it's not going to change. And this is the, you know, ossification of Bitcoin that people talk about a lot. And I think for a global monetary system, that's a really good thing.

And it's funny if you come in nowadays, you just think like, okay, you know, it's only going to be 21,000,000 BTC is only going to, you know, have the halving so X amount of period. Yet the if you were to go back into the messy days of, you know, 02/2013 and probably even beyond that into the block size wards as well,

You can see like Bitcoin was not a fixed standard protocol that's immutable and time and rock solid and things like this. Like, no, people were having tons of outsized impact on it. There was politicking within there, all sorts of stuff going on. So it's it's funny, like hearing of the immaculate conception of Bitcoin that I've heard people talk about before. And it's like, God, that's not true.

But once again, also with the Morpheus, there is a staking system with a power factor. So identical to the the capital bucket, which is been implemented to incentivize long term holding and disincentivize short term dumping. So now coders and capitals could both claim their tokens starting on the same day. So this was May 2024.

As expected, if you see in your little middle section here, there was a lot of work done in that, you know, early twenty twenty four period, And it's tapered off in terms of commits to the GitHub over time, just as the code base, I guess, is a lot more rock solid. And there's now other important things to work on in terms of the compute going live and builders going live, which is happening two days ago, I think.

So we can kind of see like, okay, over time, there was a lot happening right at the start. I think this will probably pick up over time again. And that there's

as more cool agents coming out and more infrastructures needed to be built as the protocol needs to adapt, there's probably going to be more happening over time. The final little note of the waiting system is it's done on a monthly basis in terms of how the bids are accepted, weights published, etcetera, etcetera. You can see that down below.

And then I think there's also like a rough periodic look back at old code to see what's deprecated, what's redundant, what's etcetera, etcetera, over something like a year long period. A lot of this is once again with open source, like you can jump in, you can see the weights, you can see what people have contributed. Is it useful code or not? It's all transparent and out there. Sure. I'm sure there are like

back channels in terms of people talking to one another, but I don't think there exists a perfect system where that happens or not. And so this is one of the fairer ones where I've seen it's it's as open as it can be without it turning into ridiculousness. Much like there is no perfect government, there is only less worse ones or less evil ones. Let's jump into some of the examples of coding. How could how have people contributed? How perhaps you might want to do in the future?

Luckily, there's many ways to do so, ranging from program, extraordinaire to podcaster simpleton, chuck my hand up over here. And, look, obviously, all the smart contracts, things like that are for advanced users. I can't even code. I tried learning Python once I hated it. I didn't enjoy doing it. I'll stick to learning, you know, regular languages.

That's that's much more fun and interesting to me. But there's a list of things that you can do from being the extra to coordinate extraordinary to just the simpleton able to use GitHub and maybe do a commit. And so you can have front end dashboards, aka websites. So you, you know, if you're creating something like more.org, more Lord, the more builders website, the the Git book, all these sorts of things,

that that can be a valuable way of contributing code MRC proposal. So Morpheus request for comment proposals, documentation, cleanup, auditing of smart contracts, uptime reporting of even things like the logos because they were created and then submitted to the GitHub, I think qualify under that. Not exactly sure of that one. And look, there's many ways of contributing to a project without its, qualifying for code as well. So that it's not like a free for all be all.

For example, this very podcast, I don't think this fits into any of the buckets, particularly, in terms of just providing the educational content via video and audio. Yes. There are other ways of where you could perhaps team up for someone. So say you've got a talent in graphical design. You might not be able to, you know, use GitHub, submit things to their of

creating something like that. But if you team up with someone who can do that and you create a front end like more Lord, then that's a valuable way of contributing to the system. And you can, you know, get some weights distributed via that way with a person and have perhaps have have an agreement with them. Once again, this is open to anyone. So you could be the lone individual anonymous coder.

You could be a company that started and, you know, particularly working on open source and take Red Hat, for example, or something like that. There's many different ways of contributing to an open source project, and this is just one where you have a chance of being rewarded for that, for your for your not only, like, upfront work, but work that you have also done in the past. So, yeah, a couple of different ways you can contribute, like that.

Current stats, where are we at? And the how to almost. So as of recording, there are 380 contributors with, I think, 231 of them still being active. I'm not exactly sure what active means. Probably that means like they've used get GitHub in the last month or something like that. Transparency with all of this is super, super important. So there's a couple of places you can go see the weights, who has contributed their wallet addresses and I believe the work that they

requested for that. So there's snapshots of what what they actually have done. So if you go to morelaw.com, there's a section on there or more stats.info. You can also go there and and see like the power factors, for example. So you can see what I think is rather encouraging that many of the contributors

who've, submitted code have also staked their their or staked with the power factor. Their their more weights, a a oh, sorry. Their more rewards, AKA, they have said, I'm not gonna claim these for five years, three years, two years, whatever they chose. And if they don't claim before then, then they get an additional bonus on top of that. So probably the main area to join if you're wanting to be you're interested, you're like, okay, I want to to join into contributing to Morpheus.

More dot software, this is where you can connect your GitHub account and start to submit bids for work or requests for completed work, something like that. It also explains the second system, which I just mentioned previously. And that's probably the easiest way to to jump in and get it. I'd also encourage, you know, just sending a message in the in the GitHub. Once again, it's probably better to scout a little bit and see like, oh, you know, I'm thinking of contributing in this way.

What can I do or what what kind of waiting should I should I get for that rather than just jumping in diving in and creating something that's already been created or that's not even useful at all? So I'm doing my part.

You wanna contribute some code? You know, how do you go about doing that? Well, I think the overall matter of this, the kind of conclusion is just have a crack. So you don't need to ask. You you don't need permission. If you have an idea, just go about it. I actually wanted to try and prove and demonstrate this. Before I created this episode, I ran out of time, unfortunately,

in the last couple of weeks. But, here's some ways that I'm thinking of contributing. And first of all, I need to really learn how to do a pull request and a commit. I think I've done one once before. And I'm not sure I did it right. And that was for the, the podcasting two point o project. But, there's two tasks that I've set for myself over these kind of coming months before I start traveling.

One is, as you saw in the the white paper pill episode that I did, there's a lot of stuff that's just kind of like wonky with the white paper that is on the on the website In terms of not the very original one, but the modified one. I've got a whole list on my phone here of things that need need updating with that from simple spelling mistakes to fundamental like wrong numbers and things like that. So I'm I have,

you know, asked around, is that useful getting that updated? Yes. Was the answer. And I'm just gonna go about doing that when I have some time. The other one is also just documentation because I'm going through so much of the, the GitHub to learn about the particular aspects of the word, the coding, the weights, the capital buckets, how it all kind of works under the scenes.

I've noticed, man, so many broken links, man, there's broken links everywhere. So that's one of the other ones which I think, look, I don't know if either of them really qualify for weights. I intend to do both of them upfront and then ask for it afterwards because I prefer the value for value system. And I like doing it that way where I'll I'll do work, I'll do reward, I'll I'll do things. And if I get rewarded afterwards for that, that's that's very, very nice.

And, yeah, that's that's how I intend to to do my part and contribute to the Morpheus ecosystem. Hopefully, I can report back in a couple of weeks and say that I actually have done that and that I didn't get lazy or run out of time or etcetera, etcetera. So I hope that was a good overview of the coding bucket for you. And this is a value for value podcast. I do all of this upfront,

so it should be available anytime, anywhere for anyone, much like being able to contribute code to the Morpheus ecosystem is. Now with all of this, instead of, getting weights or anything like that, I just ask that for the value that I provide you that you provide some back to me. Many different ways you can do this. If you want to do it by your time, you know, sub to the channel or to the audio podcast that I put out. Share this with a friend.

Word-of-mouth is super important for for podcasts like this of a like, you know, providing feedback, joining me on the live like my friend wanted, here today, which I'm doing 11AM Australian Eastern Standard Time on Mondays, for the next foreseeable future. I've got nine more episodes, nine more episodes max until I start traveling. So

I'll be here for another couple of months. But after that, I'll be traveling for a bit and the podcast will go on hiatus and we'll blend season one. So that is just FYI. You can do this via talent, you know, graphics. If I've got any problems with the audio quality that you've noticed, if you want to contribute memes to the topics that I'm talking about, providing answers to the stuff that I'm asking in Discord of how even the mere models podcast,

website we need to update at some point. It's way overkill for what we need. If you're a website designer, you wanna help us out with that, and, that would be amazing. And getting the mii Morpheus on there, for example, which it isn't, would be super, super valuable. And then finally, a treasure of being able to support financially what I'm doing here.

Look, you can send more to the, address that I've got down in the show notes, which is my, I guess, community donation section. I had to look this last week, didn't get any. That's a shame. You could use me for a staking reference if you're thinking of providing capital and providing that to, I get a little bonus. I think if you do that, there is also

a PayPal link down below. And if you go into a podcasting app like Fountain, you can stream in Satoshi's AKA Bitcoin and and send that to me via lightning, which is very much appreciated. If you're using any of the new podcasting two point o apps and, able to, reward creators, in that way is very, very awesome. There's other podcasting apps like True Fans, Podcast Guru, Podverse, Cast O Matic, which also do similar things. So it's not just trying to feed you into just one,

eco one one little app or one one place. It's a it's a protocol as well. So, yeah, look, just a reminder, the podcast goes away. If I don't get any value back from this, I'll certainly finish season one. But, you know, if I over the over the time period, especially while traveling, see that people aren't interested in this, that

the information, the value that I'm providing you here is is useless. And, you know, I'm not hearing from anyone about it. The podcast goes away and I don't start season two. So there's just a reminder, you know, I'm a I'm a person just like all of you at home and talking into a black box of not hearing from the people who are consuming the content and,

them letting me know it is valued and that you enjoy it. Look. If if that's the case, that's fine. I'll obviously just say this wasn't valuable enough and it's not worth my time to continue it. So if you want to reward me for that, I don't have any waiting system over here. My waiting system is the value for value method. So hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are, the world. Ciao for now. Cara now. Bye.