I am a lawyer. As soon as I discovered Bitcoin, I started thinking about how it would change our judicial system, the rule of law, and the way society resolves disputes. This was the subject of Bitcoin Magazine’s first article, and it ended with these words:
(W)hile Bitcoin will have a destabilizing impact on the civil justice system in the near term as it continues to decouple the financial core of the system. Bitcoin can be leveraged to replace this system with an improved conflict resolution paradigm. Bitcoin could be a catalyst for better methods of enforcing accountability, but this is not inevitable. Bitcoin doesn’t just solve this problem. Devising and implementing alternative systems will require a collaborative effort from lawyers, developers, entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders.
At the time, I couldn’t yet think of a way to leverage Bitcoin’s disintermediation power to create an alternative justice system.
Then I discovered the open source protocols Nostr and Fedimint. It is a core communication protocol for organizing social interactions and empowering communities as well as individuals. The rule of law is essentially a social construct. So, I realized that we need these Bitcoin-adjacent protocols to build an alternative judicial system that is completely separate from the state, like Bitcoin.
Like existing state-run fiat systems, state-run courts have created problems for individuals and communities around the world. State-run courts are failing to provide justice to more than 4 billion people who are not protected by the law and have no access to justice.OneAnd 54% of the population lives under some form of authoritarian rule.2. And the lack of access to justice is well-documented not only in developing and authoritarian countries, but also in the justice gap between low-income and high-income earners in the United States.three. A personal, accessible and affordable alternative is needed.
However, since the emergence of nation-states, private alternative dispute resolution (ADR) has largely existed in the shadow of state-run courts. Arbitration awards are not automatically enforced. If a party to a dispute refuses to do so, the other party must petition the court to enforce the judgment and once again request the coercive power of the state.4. Traditional online dispute resolution (ODR) systems (those that use software and the Internet) are no different.
However, using traditional ADR and ODR designs, Deployed on open source protocols Like Bitcoin, Nostr and Fedimint, the connection to state-run courts could be completely lost. result open source definition.
Open source justice empowers sovereign communities to resolve their own disputes peacefully and voluntarily using open source tools. Open source justice embodies the belief that fairness and transparency are fundamental rights in dispute resolution. We advocate for a community-driven approach that leverages open source technologies to create equitable, accessible, and decentralized solutions for resolving disputes.
And open source definitions are the topic on which the Resolvr project is built. After pitching a few initial designs and recruiting like-minded contributors, I discovered some “lawyers, developers, entrepreneurs” and cypherpunks dedicated to advancing justice beyond the state. Together we created a Nostr and Bitcoin based dispute resolution tool.
Our pilot product is designed for the FOSS (free and open source software) ecosystem, a community close to home. We have built a peer-to-peer bounty marketplace.
Resolvr’s pilot product: Bounty Marketplace
“The fundamental problem with traditional money is all the trust it requires to work.”
-Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi may have been describing an existing bounty market that is damaged by inherent trust issues.
- Fraud and Bankruptcy Closing;
- Delayed and onerous payments that hinder developers’ profits;
- Censorship and discretion to limit access to projects.
This year, centralized marketplace BountySource (which had 5,445 bounties worth $406,425 listed in 2019) stopped paying bounties to developers. The community of freelance developers using the marketplace suspected that the owner had embezzled escrowed bounty funds.
However, eliminating centralized escrow does not eliminate trust in the bounty economy; it simply shifts it to bounty providers, who have enormous asymmetric power due to their unlimited discretion over whether to authenticate payments. They are judge and jury. Additionally, reward criteria can be changed even after the developer has already performed work that met the original reward criteria.
A notable example of this is the Human Rights Foundation’s (HRF) recent decision to pay only half the bounty to develop an encrypted group chat at Nostr. After being presented with a solution that met the original bounty description (which was very short and lacking in detail), HRF changed the criteria to include a requirement that the solution be a fully merged Nostr Improvement Proposal (NIP).
Centralized markets currently lack transparent dispute resolution to resolve such disagreements and ensure fairness in bounty relationships. In case of disagreement, users usually send support emails to unknown decision-makers employed by the platform.
Simply put, the current freelance bounty economy is highly inefficient and unfair.
Start defining open source with Resolvr. Resolvr’s P2P bounty marketplace:
- Limit bounty granter discretion through reputation stakes.
- Resolve disputes through crowdsourced community review of bounty solutions.
- We use Nostr for interoperable, censorship-resistant bounty discovery.
- Use Lighting zaps for instant bounty payouts.
Resolvr creates reputation stakes by linking a user’s Nostr account (a set of private and public keys) to their GitHub account. And Nostr’s unique transparency means that all bounty events, including payouts and crowdsourced community decisions, are public. The community can see who is incompetent and a slacker, and choose not to cooperate with them.
Resolvr uses the Nostr zap poll (NIP-69) for crowdsourcing decisions on bounty disputes. This new use case for Zap Polls represents the first Nostr native dispute resolution tool.
To facilitate bounty interoperability for Nostr, the Resolvr team proposed NIP-43. By standardizing how bounty events and data are handled by relays and clients, clients other than Resolvr can contribute to bounty discovery and fulfillment, strengthening the bounty economy.
And by integrating with the Bitcoin Lightning Network via Nostr zaps, Resolvr can facilitate peer-to-peer (P2P) and enable near-instant bounty payouts, drastically reducing third-party management risk.
A combination of these features:
- Guarantees payment for bounty resolutions to developers.
- Decentralize and grow FOSS funding sources.
- Provides access to a global talent pool,
- We provide a seamless on-ramp for freelancers to earn Bitcoin (₿).
What are your future plans?
The next dispute resolution tool on Resolvr’s bounties market roadmap is a true game-changer: non-custodial Bitcoin-based escrow. This non-custodial escrow system is powered by on-chain discreet log contracts 🔮. If a dispute arises, the Resolvr oracle certifies the results of a crowdsourced Zap poll and funds the winning party.
In the future, Resolvr plans to expand the list of available dispute resolution oracles (e.g. foundations, hackerspaces, bitdev meetup groups) by inviting the community to act as “review societies” that earn Bitcoin for resolving bounty disputes.
Beyond the bounty…
The Resolvr project is building an open source judicial system for Bitcoin and adjacent protocols. This means we don’t stop at the bounty. Resolvr provides a secure, open-source, customizable, decentralized, and fundamentally cost-effective mechanism for a variety of use cases (e.g., mining disputes for energy contracts and hosting, real-time microtransaction disputes for GPU computing) across the globe. It will revolutionize dispute resolution. For AI agents, disputes within the FediMint community, cross-border disputes, insurance settlements between companies, general freelance work, etc.).
Dispute resolution is a huge opportunity and necessity for the coming Bitcoin-based society.
Help Resolvr build open source definitions! Visit resolvr.io to post and claim your bounty! Contribute to the project and provide feedback on GitHub and Discord. Follow the Nostr account. And check out our weekly team calls streamed live from Nostr via Zap.Stream.
Let’s create an open source definition together.
Quotation
Onesee www.oecd.org/gov/delivering-access-to-justice-for-all.pdf, last visited January 31, 2023. Another study of 179 states found that in 123 countries, men had no access to justice and women had no access to justice. 127 cannot be tried. see https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/access-to-justice-women-row; https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/access-to-justice-men-row, Last visited on January 31, 2023.
2 see EIU Democracy Index (https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2021/) was last visited on January 31, 2023. By another measure, more than 70% of the world’s population lives in some form of illegal activity. Of dictatorship. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/people-living-in-democracies-autocracies?stackMode=relative&country=~OWID_WRL, last visited: January 31, 2023.
threehttps://iaals.du.edu/sites/default/files/documents/publications/justice-needs-and-satisfaction-us.pdf; https://justicegap.lsc.gov/the-report/
4 see Riikka Koulu, Law, Technology and Dispute Resolution: Privatization of Coercion 71 (2019) (“ADR decisions face difficulties in accessing enforcement when decisions are not voluntarily followed. Traditionally, ADR decisions have had to resort to enforcement by the state This means that it was subject to prior control of due process before execution”); System design at 408-09 (describing enforcement mechanisms for arbitration awards).
This is a guest post by Aaron Daniel. The opinions expressed are solely personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.