Abundance

The meta right now on social media (including Farcaster) is that users create content, art, or ship products, and then have to create distribution channels for their work by driving engagement to it. This creates a perverse incentive to create things that drive engagement instead of things that are actually valuable to people. With Impact Alpha creators and builders can focus on making the most impactful work for the Farcaster community, while curators are incentivized to proactively look for...

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Farcaster: the Platform Disruptor

Farcaster is not just a social media platform - that's just one thing you can do on this protocol. At its core, Farcaster is a decentralized*, censorship-resistant identity layer. And because of that it's a platform disruptor! Instead of Airbnb storing your data and getting 15% of owner/guest fees, Farcaster can be the trustless layer where owner/guest reputation is stored (and done in a way that's much harder to manipulate). The Farcaster-based platform can then provide the same service (con...

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How Coordination Structures Work

Every year, tens of trillions of dollars in value evaporate from our economy. Trillions more are foregone. This happens because an entire class of goods in the economy — public goods — has no way to capture value; no way for producers to get a return on the value provided to others. Without value capture there is little incentive to produce public goods in the economy. The result is that we are all significantly less prosperous for it, while our economy bleeds trillions of dollars in value ea...

How Public Goods can Capture Value

How do we scale public goods funding in crypto to a level where it actually makes a dent in the world — going from millions to billions and trillions of dollars in funding? The truth is that it may never happen unless we dispel an entrenched myth that is holding us back. That’s because exponentially growing public goods funding will require a different approach from what we’re doing today; these goods will need to capture value. The difference between goods that capture value and goods that d...

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It's Time to Put the User in the Center

Legacy social media platforms have full control of your online experience. They dictate what you see, who you can interact with, what you can say, and how much money you can make from your own content. If they don't like what you say they can censor or ban you. They can do this because their economic engine is based on monetizing your attention. They don't work for you. They don't care about you, and they have no interest in your well-being or success. But it doesn't have to be that way. We n...

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How to Escape our Economic Dark Age

If there is one event that clearly demarcates the shift from the Dark Ages to the Age of Enlightenment, it is the adoption of the heliocentric model of the cosmos. But while the actual Dark Ages are over, we still very much live in the Economic Dark Ages. Can the advent of blockchain technology be the “Galileo moment” that finally leads us to the dawn of a new economic age of mass prosperity? The adoption of the heliocentric model was not merely an advancement in astronomy; it was a fundament...

The vision for /Impact Fund

A common misconception about Impact Alpha is that our goal is solely to drive more funding toward impactful content on Farcaster. While it’s true that we want to achieve that, there’s much more to it. Impact Alpha is built on the thesis that if you create incentives within a network to encourage impactful actions, you can establish a positive feedback loop between the impact created and the currency used to incentivize it. In other words, the goal isn’t simply to distribute 10M (or 100M) $deg...

The meta right now on social media (including Farcaster) is that users create content, art, or ship products, and then have to create distribution channels for their work by driving engagement to it. This creates a perverse incentive to create things that drive engagement instead of things that are actually valuable to people. With Impact Alpha creators and builders can focus on making the most impactful work for the Farcaster community, while curators are incentivized to proactively look for...

Imagine you were made king for a day and had the power to decide how money is distributed in the economy. How would you do it? Maybe you'd distribute all the money equitably: every man, woman and child gets the same share. What would that look like? Well, maybe everyone has the same amount but not everyone knows how to use their money equally. Some people are gonna save it, some will gamble it away, and some will offers people an option to handle their money for a fee (thus making billions in...

The Secret Impact Alpha Master Plan

TL;DR: Impact Alpha starts as a small project that rewards quality content on Farcaster, but it has plans to operate at the scale of network economies, and allow people to prosper based on the impact they create in the world. This article outlines how it can be done. For more in-depth discussion check out the Abundance Protocol Whitepaper or The Abundance Economy book.Impact Alpha is the very humble beginnings of something much greater. So let me explain what it is. The two biggest issues we ...

Why we need a new economic meta

We rarely think about what it means to participate in an economy where the meta is profit-maximization based on scarcity. Because what it means, at a basic level, is that the relations between people are adversarial; you can think about media, pharma, the food industry, and so on – can you trust that companies in any industry have your interests in mind? Can you trust that the news you’re reading or watching are meant to inform you, and not to keep you glued to the screen to sell you ads? Can...

Why decentralized networks need a social layer

How do decentralized networks surface value? There is an interesting dynamic in blockchains that anything that is built directly onchain is always open sourced. Obviously it's possible to build private businesses around that model, but the more public infrastructure is built on a blockchain the more use it is likely to get and the more demand there will be for the cryptocurrency. With this logic in mind it benefits L1s and L2s to incentivize builders and creators to develop the infra and tool...

Why UBI won't work

I’m a big believer in the concept that serious problems require serious solutions. For that reason, whenever I hear people say that Universal Basic Income (UBI) can solve the problem of job automation, I tend to be skeptical. Maybe UBI is a solution that could work for a couple of years, but it’s definitely not a long-term solution. Those who believe it is a solution are missing one key element: politics. The naive view may be that since automation would lead to mass unemployment, there would...

Discover card cover image

Farcaster: the Platform Disruptor

Farcaster is not just a social media platform - that's just one thing you can do on this protocol. At its core, Farcaster is a decentralized*, censorship-resistant identity layer. And because of that it's a platform disruptor! Instead of Airbnb storing your data and getting 15% of owner/guest fees, Farcaster can be the trustless layer where owner/guest reputation is stored (and done in a way that's much harder to manipulate). The Farcaster-based platform can then provide the same service (con...

Discover card cover image

How Coordination Structures Work

Every year, tens of trillions of dollars in value evaporate from our economy. Trillions more are foregone. This happens because an entire class of goods in the economy — public goods — has no way to capture value; no way for producers to get a return on the value provided to others. Without value capture there is little incentive to produce public goods in the economy. The result is that we are all significantly less prosperous for it, while our economy bleeds trillions of dollars in value ea...

How Public Goods can Capture Value

How do we scale public goods funding in crypto to a level where it actually makes a dent in the world — going from millions to billions and trillions of dollars in funding? The truth is that it may never happen unless we dispel an entrenched myth that is holding us back. That’s because exponentially growing public goods funding will require a different approach from what we’re doing today; these goods will need to capture value. The difference between goods that capture value and goods that d...

Discover card cover image

It's Time to Put the User in the Center

Legacy social media platforms have full control of your online experience. They dictate what you see, who you can interact with, what you can say, and how much money you can make from your own content. If they don't like what you say they can censor or ban you. They can do this because their economic engine is based on monetizing your attention. They don't work for you. They don't care about you, and they have no interest in your well-being or success. But it doesn't have to be that way. We n...

Discover card cover image

How to Escape our Economic Dark Age

If there is one event that clearly demarcates the shift from the Dark Ages to the Age of Enlightenment, it is the adoption of the heliocentric model of the cosmos. But while the actual Dark Ages are over, we still very much live in the Economic Dark Ages. Can the advent of blockchain technology be the “Galileo moment” that finally leads us to the dawn of a new economic age of mass prosperity? The adoption of the heliocentric model was not merely an advancement in astronomy; it was a fundament...

The vision for /Impact Fund

A common misconception about Impact Alpha is that our goal is solely to drive more funding toward impactful content on Farcaster. While it’s true that we want to achieve that, there’s much more to it. Impact Alpha is built on the thesis that if you create incentives within a network to encourage impactful actions, you can establish a positive feedback loop between the impact created and the currency used to incentivize it. In other words, the goal isn’t simply to distribute 10M (or 100M) $deg...

The meta right now on social media (including Farcaster) is that users create content, art, or ship products, and then have to create distribution channels for their work by driving engagement to it. This creates a perverse incentive to create things that drive engagement instead of things that are actually valuable to people. With Impact Alpha creators and builders can focus on making the most impactful work for the Farcaster community, while curators are incentivized to proactively look for...

Imagine you were made king for a day and had the power to decide how money is distributed in the economy. How would you do it? Maybe you'd distribute all the money equitably: every man, woman and child gets the same share. What would that look like? Well, maybe everyone has the same amount but not everyone knows how to use their money equally. Some people are gonna save it, some will gamble it away, and some will offers people an option to handle their money for a fee (thus making billions in...

The Secret Impact Alpha Master Plan

TL;DR: Impact Alpha starts as a small project that rewards quality content on Farcaster, but it has plans to operate at the scale of network economies, and allow people to prosper based on the impact they create in the world. This article outlines how it can be done. For more in-depth discussion check out the Abundance Protocol Whitepaper or The Abundance Economy book.Impact Alpha is the very humble beginnings of something much greater. So let me explain what it is. The two biggest issues we ...

Why we need a new economic meta

We rarely think about what it means to participate in an economy where the meta is profit-maximization based on scarcity. Because what it means, at a basic level, is that the relations between people are adversarial; you can think about media, pharma, the food industry, and so on – can you trust that companies in any industry have your interests in mind? Can you trust that the news you’re reading or watching are meant to inform you, and not to keep you glued to the screen to sell you ads? Can...

Why decentralized networks need a social layer

How do decentralized networks surface value? There is an interesting dynamic in blockchains that anything that is built directly onchain is always open sourced. Obviously it's possible to build private businesses around that model, but the more public infrastructure is built on a blockchain the more use it is likely to get and the more demand there will be for the cryptocurrency. With this logic in mind it benefits L1s and L2s to incentivize builders and creators to develop the infra and tool...

Why UBI won't work

I’m a big believer in the concept that serious problems require serious solutions. For that reason, whenever I hear people say that Universal Basic Income (UBI) can solve the problem of job automation, I tend to be skeptical. Maybe UBI is a solution that could work for a couple of years, but it’s definitely not a long-term solution. Those who believe it is a solution are missing one key element: politics. The naive view may be that since automation would lead to mass unemployment, there would...

Abundance

Abundance

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Building the global superalignment layer

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