FLOSH Network

The free-libre open source hardware network and marketplace.

The Challenge

Open source hardware for profit is one of the remaining challenges in the open source ecosystem.

Why is open source hardware... hard?

Innovators exert tremendous effort iterating to develop a product, yet it takes minimal effort for others "copy cats" to instantiate instances from the sources original innovators forged in blood, sweat, and tears... thereby undercutting original innovator's market opportunity.

We want these artifacts to be produced as trivially as possible by those most fit to do so, but not at the expense of starving out the original innovators, and corrupting the quality and integrity of the product. In the current paradigm the most extractive producer wins.

The de-facto "circumstance" of our current paradigm is tightly held trade secrets. Innovators guard their hard earned profits. We don't blame them. But we are missing out on tremendous wealth potential of globally interdependent networked hardware innovation.

Our Solution

For Inventors, Designers & Engineers

FLOSH Network presents an incentive mechanism to promote attribution to the original designers of hardware source files by any supplier who is instantiating and selling hardware artifacts.

For Manufacturers & Builders

Any entity capable of producing artifacts in service of the needs of their nation(s) is maximally enabled to do so.

For Validators

Entities capable of validating the functional fidelity of manifested artifacts indexed by the network are rewarded for their diligence because they have propped up the integrity of promises guaranteed by the network.

For Consumers

Consumers of hardware have better guarantees with regards to fidelity of the provenance of their tools, devices, equipment, and products.

How It Works

Artifact producers (who may or may not be the originator of the sources) uniquely sign (non fungible) hardware artifacts with their private key which are subsequently verified by one or more counterparties (usually the end user) when the artifact signature is exposed to the FLOSH Network to verify integrity of the artifact.

FLOSH Token Minting

When this process has completed FLOSH token is minted as follows:

FLOSH minted = (equivalent value of artifact in BTC) * (network decentralization factor 0.0 - 1.0)

The network decentralization factor is a 0.0-1.0 coefficient of diversity of geographic region or social-graph connectivity/dispersion of buyers and sellers. Such that artifacts cannot be artificially bought and sold by insider buyers to inflate FLOSH.

The Result

A marketplace where users can browse and purchase (privately) artifacts via any supported cryptocurrency producing:

And where users are guaranteed sources of any artifact purchased.