The Zen of Crystal

Being told your idea is trash is never fun. When I first started Crystal, I was told that same thing over and over, and over again.

What I came to realize was that it’s not my idea that was trash. It was my ability to explain the idea succinctly in a way that people GOT it.

After explaining it over and over, I got to the point where people stopped saying “That’s Trash!” and started saying “How can I help?”

Finally, I came to the following description:

Crystal is a blockchain platform that facilitates automated community building and perfect content curation for online communities. Our aim is to connect every community on the internet through our reputation and community governance solutions. This will create a worldwide community of experts that individuals, companies, and governments can hire to solve their toughest challenges.

In order to make that a reality, there are four basic building blocks: Identity Based Reputation, Output Based Reputation, Intercommunity Governance and Intracommunity governance.

Crystal will build both a base level API to integrate these four features (explained below), as well as toolkit which includes state of the art algorithms utilizing each of the four APIs.

Identity Based Reputation

The first building block we need is what I’ll call Identity-Based Reputation. An example of Identity-Based Reputation would be the five star rating you give to an eBay seller after you interact with them. eBay actually splits this down further depending on how well the product was shipped, how promptly it was shipped, if questions were answered, etc.

Identity-Based Reputation is about the traits of the person you’re interacting with, and how those manifest in your interactions with them. Identity-Based Reputation is core to sorting the cream of crop in the community from the bad apples. Crystal’s lightest weight form will include an API that can plug in any sort of rating system, whether that be a five star rating, a credit score, or any other marker that the community wants to utilize, and allow you to use that reputation in any other piece of the system.

Output Based Reputation

The second foundation of Crystal is Output-Based Reputation. In Identity Reputation, there’s no actual connection to what you’re creating or any relation to what other people’s reputation is. Output-Based Reputation means you’re actually getting ranked on the things you’re doing within the community and you’re competing against others to get that reputation. That’s a big difference between Identity-Based Reputation and Output-Based Reputation. Output-Based Reputation is always a competition to be the best within or between other communities.

An example of this would be Reddit Karma. Theoretically, Reddit Karma is based purely on how good your posts are. It has nothing to do with who you are as a person, except if that ends up affecting the quality of your post. In Crystal, Output-Based Reputation is actually based on crptographic tokens. What you have is an API for people to allow any sorts of different rules they want for redistributing these tokens based on their own algorithms. That’s the base layer of Crystal.

Governance

Intra-Community Governance

The third core thing that needs to be solved when looking at the issues online communities have are the governance rules within the community. How do you choose to add new members? How do you choose to kick members out? How do you choose to censor things? How do you choose the fees that the community gets paid? The Crystal API allows all sorts of different community-based governance rules to interact.

Inter-Community Governance

Finally, the last thing is community interaction rules. If a person wants to move from one community to another, how does their reputation transfer over? If a new community needs to be created, how does that happen? In this case, this is not a base API. This is actually something for which Crystal builds the rules explicitly into the platform. The reason it is built in and unchangeable is that all communities need have a single set of rules for interaction, otherwise we’d see people with high reputation in one area receiving benefits from that reputation in another community where they have no relevant experience.

The base layer for Crystal is composed of a set of game-theoretically and mathematically sound rules for how communities interact, as well as rules for how new communities are created. On top of that platform, the first three Crystal APIs (the Identity-Based Reputation API, the Output-Based Reputation API, and the community governance rules API) are going to provide core components that are theoretically sound and solve most of the problems that we see.

Conclusion

We don’t think that we have the final answer. While the toolkit we’ve created will serve as a great base, what we want to see is are communities using these APIs to build on what we’ve started and create something new with them.

Thanks so much for reading, everyone! Catch you next time.

Click here for more info on Crystal

by @matt-goldenberg