We are proposing a decentralized question-and-answer platform built on the Ethereum Blockchain.

This platform would allow users to post individual questions or problems with a "bounty" attached. The bounty would be an amount of ether a user would be willing to pay for the question to be answered. Then another individual would provide an answer and receive the bounty.

In traditional applications (Chegg, CourseHero), users usually must subscribe to a monthly fee in order to access the answers to problem sets and textbooks. This platform would allow individuals to set a price they are willing to pay for a specific question to be answered and offer an incentive for others to answer the question. Additionally, as this platform would be decentralized, all the personal data of the user would not be 'owned' by a third-party, rather it would be stored on the Ethereum Blockchain.

We believe this platform would be popular among college students. In our experience, it is extremely common for students to seek out and pay for resources such as textbook solutions, answers to problem sets, or even specific problems from their courses. we think specifically, this platform could aid in time-sensitive situation; for instance "I have one last really hard Calc problem that we can't figure out due tomorrow morning, I'm literally willing to pay someone $20 for the answer." Then they post the question on the platform with a 12-hour expiration period and hope that someone will answer it.

From an end-user's perspective, he will enter this website after he has connected to the Ethereum network. The main page will display the most time-sensitive/highest bounty questions. Or he can choose specific categories/sub-categories: Finance, Science, Math.... --> Calculus, Discrete Mathematics, Algebra..., where he can browse posted questions in each category. Once he chooses a question, he can submit an answer and if his answer is Accepted by the poster, he will receive the bounty, where the amount will be sent directly to his synced Ethereum wallet.

As a user posting questions, he can create a new post, select the category, then post text/pdf/picture of his question and attach a bounty and a time-limit to his question. He will be notified if he receives an answer, and he may either Accept or Reject it. And once accepted, the bounty will be released to the answerer.

At first, the team was assigned to work on an Ethereum-based decentralized marketplace. The team then decided that the Q/A platform would be a fun project to work on as it is very similar to the marketplace but has not really been done by other organizations (the marketplace is in development in many cryptocurrencies, i.e. PIRL). Professor Bloomberg has also expressed he likes the idea behind the QA platform more than the marketplace platform.

• As suggested by Professor Bloomberg.
• If you would like to contribute to the project, please see CONTRIBUTING.md.

• https://github.com/nyu-software-engineering/ethereum-marketplacer/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
• https://github.com/nyu-software-engineering/ethereum-marketplacer/blob/master/REQUIREMENTS.md

This project is being visualized and built by four New York University students for the course Software Engineering taught by Professor Amos Bloomberg. Thus the project is closed to outside contributors... for now.