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turbine distributes cryptocurrency to contributors of git repos.

Beyond bug bounties

Issue bounties can be counterproductive as they discourage collaboration and often attract minimum-quality solutions.

Instead of rewarding specific contributions like bug bounties, turbine reduces unfriendly competition by rewarding all contributions. Multiple authors can even work on the same issue and all get paid independently.

Award amount scales over time rather than with change complexity

Although a complex change might deserve a larger award than a minor typo fix, turbine doesn't factor the magnitude of changes. Instead, a developer's award amount starts out small and increases over time as they make more contributions.

This incentivizes contributors to stick around and break their changes up into smaller chunks (which is often good for other reasons too).

It's up to the discretion of the person that merges PRs to make sure contributors aren't unfairly boosting their rewards. In the unbelievable event that such an injustice occurs, maintainers can cancel payouts or ban contributors.

What if the turbine owner steals the project's funds?

Since turbine is self-hosted, the crypto wallet is fully under control of the project owner. We have to trust them not to misuse funds deposited in turbine. Just like we also have to trust them not to include a backdoor in the software (for example).

Funding directly impacts development

When you fund a project's turbine, those funds directly support further development of that project. It's entirely up to the maintainer what issues get worked on, unlike the bug bounty model.

Using turbine as a funder

First, you need to find a repository that's hosting a turbine. It's important to use a legitimate instance (see two paragraphs above), so make sure a reference to the turbine URL is found somewhere in the official project.

The turbine homepage has the crypto wallet address that allows you to add funds. When you add funds to a turbine, it goes into the project's pool. As contributions are made to the project's git repo, turbine will automatically disperse funds to committers.

Using turbine as a contributor

All contributor commits must be GPG signed (because otherwise someone could impersonate your name/email in git history).

Generate a GPG keypair

If you don't already have a GPG keypair, generate a new one:

gpg --full-generate-key

Make sure to use the same email address as your git config: git config user.email.

Setup commit signing

Turn on commit signing globally (or on a per-repo basis):

git config --global commit.gpgsign true
git config --global user.signingkey <public key ID>

Send your public key to a keyserver

To allow turbine to find your public key and verify commits, upload it to this keyserver:

gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com --send-keys <public key ID>

Commit your payment address

Register your payment address with a signed commit message so turbine knows who to pay. If you ever update your GPG key or wallet address, this commit can be made multiple times and the last one takes effect.

git commit --allow-empty -m "turbine: XMR <wallet address>"

Start contributing!

Contribute as normal and turbine will pay you automatically.

Running your own turbine

turbine is fully dockerized and requires no persistent state. It reads the entire git history on startup and checks the crypto ledger to determine what commits have already been paid out.

Monero

So far turbine only supports Monero, but other currencies can be supported later.

docker run \
    -p 80:80 \
    -e MONERO_WALLET_ADDRESS=478zp7VkvbFXdFJ7areyaxj5b2AbBrRmGezoJAiQJtT4f5nD1DEYtg7EGVcrnXzTdgci6Q5WdTKRo3veEY3itRnnDDUxmFh \
    -e MONERO_WALLET_SPENDKEY=81cb36d45e311ad4102f77753048e0236f5df7a0ec83e3607a0b534caddc2f0a \
    -e MONERO_WALLET_VIEWKEY=96f6b0d2417000e63ad36987407b3be31434172e8d5fbd0e79aaee3cc0065609 \
    fossable/turbine \
        --stagenet \
        --repo <repo clone URL> \
        --branch master \
        --monero-block-height 565903 \
        --monero-wallet-password 1234