I feel like economists will be needed badly as soon as we can launch tokens. The incentive mechanism design space on the IC is literally at 0. The most scalable Blockchain ever created and nobody is even imagining what incentive structures can be built on it. That thought drives me nuts ;).
I’m so excited about it, yet cannot have any proper discussion on the topic.
If someone is out there let me know.
I’m really interested in this topic as well.
It’s not zero. And yes, I’d love to talk about it.
Absolutely, I’d be interested in furthering this subject. I’m especially interested in rewards systems for content creation platforms, something that both incentivizes quality content creation, discovery & surfacing, while at the same time dealing with Sybil & spam attacks. I’d love to hear your thoughts regarding this.
I can start by c/p something from my working doc on a grant proposal, I’d love your thoughts on this.
We are tentatively planning on having more than one token (at least internally in the beginning) used for rewarding, charging and improving the interactions on the platform.
Action Points Token (internal, will be tweaked often) - This is a token that tracks user actions on the platform, and should be the first line of defense for spam / Sybil attacks. Users will #gain action points by logging in and reading, browsing, surfacing content etc. Users will #spend action points when editing content, creating new communities, etc.
Karma Points Token (name is temporary, should be changed) - This is a token that rewards users for contributions that were appreciated by the community. Users will #gain karma points by creating appreciated communities, editing content, etc. Users will #spend karma points in order to vote on content, moderate sections, etc.
It should be apparent that the two tokens act in tandem, by spending one a user gains the other. It is our intention to play with this mechanic to reach some middle ground between fast adoption and quality content on the platform.
You’re right, huge shoutout to everyone building right now. I love so many projects out there. Didn’t mean it that way.
But what I have barely seen are systematic discussions around the topic. Especially not around what sort of organizational structures we could build, that could benefit more than one particular application.
So what should we do? Should I open a discord around the topic? Could we add an econ section to the forum (don’t know who’s in charge of that)? Or would you guys like to have a chat over zoom around the topic?
That sounds very interesting. Sybil & spam are pretty fundamental problems, awesome that you work on it. I’ll have to think more about it. Will the tokens be allowed to have real value (I mean will you try to prevent that)? The first one will probably be minted when the users read, browse, etc. But if there is more demand to create content than to read it at a given time, would they be able to buy it? In the end, charging small amounts for interactions to reduce spam probably makes a lot of sense but it will depend on how frictionless that process can be.
Concerning the tokens working in tandem, if I’d upvote a post, I would lose some of the Karma tokens but would earn back some action tokens, is that how it would work?
More generally, how would you like to discuss things like that? Here in the forum? Would you like to have a call? I’m up to having a chat with everyone over zoom who wants to talk about these things. If enough people are interested, I could organize a regular call or so.
Forum is fine as it has more eyes on it. A call could be nice further into the discussions. There’s a dev discord already set up, there are regular calls every friday evening EU time with pretty broad subjects, and also more specific topics discussed in other days as well. Could try that if there’s a need.
If you wish you could share some of your thoughts here, then discuss a bit and finally setup some calls if there is interest.
Have you checked out http://taggr.top?
Yes! Found them 3 weeks ago and signed-up after learning about them on this forum. It’s a very interesting concept, they also use 2 “tokens” and have a paid subscription model, and way less bots.
I think the magic will be in finding the right amount of hassle and incentives to bring the adoption that you need for your product. Tokenomics is one way, but we have a bunch of examples of web2 services that worked and incentivized their users without any monetary value (reddit, wikipedia, etc).
Thank you. Yeah, I’m trying to join as many dev calls as possible. We can ask tomorrow if people are interested in dedicating some time to that at some point.
My thoughts are a lot about what happens if we scale the properties of a Blockchain. Blockchains do not do much more than to establish trust. I think there are apps that face a lot of problems around trust, everything finance-related for example, but then there is everything related to committing resources together. I’m thinking a lot about what Ethereum allowed us to do in that area and what it could mean to have a vastly more scalable Blockchain. I think tokenization and governance contracts allowed to establish trust between investors and entrepreneurs globally. I think the IC might allow to establish trust in on-chain partnerships.
For example, if you’d build an IC-Uber clone. I think it might be possible to allow entrepreneurs to bootstrap markets locally, for example, in a specific city. That way you could leverage the global creativity of entrepreneurs to work on local use cases. Similar to how token holders expect to get rewarded for their investment, local entrepreneurs should have trust that they will be rewarded for their contributions.
To do so you’d have to believably grant them the right to monetize their local market. I think you could do that relatively easily with a smart contract that does not get modified. The beauty is that when all rides are tracked on-chain, there is no risk for partners to be cheated. In case we want to modify that contract over time, we might have to distribute ownership rights over it among the partners. I’m currently thinking if it’s possible to get around that to some extent.
The nice thing is that the partners could once more use partnerships internally. Maybe they could choose to allow local people to monetize a sub-set of the rides within that city because they might be especially well-positioned to kickstart the network there. For example in a specific district of the city.
However, local does not have to be geographically local but could be a specific topic of an online forum for example. The more diverse the platform is the more interesting this could be. Imagine bootstrapping Reddit by incentivizing a lot of people around the world to simply post what they are already experts in. If you manage to set these incentives globally at the same time, I think it might be enough to get a large platform off the ground.
I wrote an article working out this idea: Article
So what should we do? Should I open a discord around the topic? Could we add an econ section to the forum (don’t know who’s in charge of that)?
I personally really like the idea of adding an Economics or Applications section to this forum. Even the Ethereum Research forum has one.
I absolutely agree, do you know who to reach out to for that?
Maybe @diegop or @alexa.smith could help out with this? 