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CommitPool, Hold Yourself Accountable. Started at KERNEL Genesis Block. CommitPool helps you stay on track by aligning your short-term and long term interests. Commit to a goal, and stake some money on your ability to complete it. If you succeed, you get your money back, but if not, you lose your stake. We’re building CommitPool because we think a first-party enforcement tool is the best way to help people (including ourselves!) stick to their personal goals. Third-party enforcers for self-commitments, in the form of web2 services, sound great — and sometimes can even work quite well — but ultimately fall short because they rely on faulty incentive structures. A third-party enforcer gets paid if you fail to meet your self-commitment, and they have control over both the assessment of whether you fail and the decision to penalize you. The mere possibility that they can cheat you means that eventually they will be mighty tempted to cheat you. They can prevent themselves from cheating — and give you more reason to trust them — by allowing you to refute their assessment and/or enforcement decision, but all that does is give Charlie-later the means to avoid penalization, and we know how untrustworthy Charlie-later is. This is why CommitPool uses decentralized web3 technologies to assess whether you fulfilled your commitment, and smart contracts to enforce the penalty conditional on that assessment. We are extremely sensitive to the fact that CommitPool is only as a credibly neutral tool as its most centralized component. Soon, we’ll have a post up exploring the trust assumptions within the CommitPool protocol and outlining our plans for progressive decentralization.

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