[HN Gopher] Retroactive Public Goods Funding
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Retroactive Public Goods Funding
Author : abecedarius
Score : 31 points
Date : 2021-07-20 16:07 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (optimismpbc.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (optimismpbc.medium.com)
| arberx wrote:
| This is the hidden layer/feature behind blockchains it seems most
| people don't realize. They are amazing instruments for
| transparent social coordination and funding. The things happening
| with DAOs now and multisigns are incredibly socially positive and
| inclusive.
|
| I highly recommend reading a bit about DAOs.
|
| https://ethereum.org/en/dao/
| nanis wrote:
| The funding problem exists only for public goods in the sense
| they are defined in economics: This definition requires that the
| thing being produced to be nonrival and nonexcludable. The post
| conveniently avoids discussing what projects they will consider
| to be "public goods". Non-economists tend to think simply of
| either goods/services produced by the government sector (a whole
| lot of which are actually quite rival and excludable) or people
| making stuff no one wants to pay for ... Neither category
| requires a special funding mechanism.
|
| Voluntary contributions mechanism (VCM) with a provision point is
| well known (this paper[1], for example, provides a decent summary
| as well as identification of a problem). This seems to be a
| contorted effort to take VCM-PP and retrofit it into some kind of
| blockchain/crypto-currency framework.
|
| [1]:
| http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/faculty/vesterlund/paper/overpr...
| Sargos wrote:
| >Neither category requires a special funding mechanism
|
| Can you elaborate on this? What effective ways are they funded
| today? Public goods are chronically underfunded even in the
| western world so alternate ways of funding these projects seem
| beneficial to everyone.
|
| One major problem is that the internet is global and most
| public goods funding happens at the nation state level which
| leaves a giant hole where too little funding exists for
| species-wide public goods such as climate change, medical
| research, and anything related to the internet which is all of
| the public goods like open source libraries, cryptography, and
| Ethereum projects like clients, base layer contracts, and other
| open source infrastructure.
|
| Having a public goods funding mechanism at a global scale seems
| necessary for our increasingly interconnected world.
| nanis wrote:
| > Public goods are chronically underfunded
|
| What are public goods you consider to be underfunded?
| dalbasal wrote:
| He said them: medical research, and anything related to the
| internet which is all of the public goods like open source
| libraries, cryptography, and Ethereum projects like
| clients, base layer contracts, and other open source
| infrastructure.
| narush wrote:
| I'm a bit confused by the first paragraph. Are you saying that
| public good funding problems don't exist (or are solved b/c
| they are either funded by the government or aren't worth
| funding)?
|
| If so, I strongly disagree. The OSS that makes up the backbone
| of all-the-computation-that-occurs-anywhere is certainly a
| public good; it's also way underfunded!
| nanis wrote:
| > Are you saying that public good funding problems don't
| exist
|
| No.I am saying people tend to call a lot of things "public
| goods" when they are not.
|
| If something is rival or excludable, it is not a public good
| in the precise sense in which economics defines them.
|
| If something is rival and excludable, then the socially
| optimal level of funding is not achievable through markets
| (note that the socially optimal level of funding may indeed
| be zero).
|
| Software is not rival (me linking with a library does not
| prevent you from being able to use it). However, it is
| excludable: A legal structure exists whereby people can be
| prevented from using the software.
|
| Now, assuming something like the MIT license, you now have a
| nonrival/nonexcludable thing. That does fit the definition of
| a public good.
| dalbasal wrote:
| >> That does fit the definition of a public good?
|
| If you're sticking to the Paul Samuelson definition, it
| does. Its also the main case the author is arguing for
|
| That said, what's the purpose of sticking to the
| definition? I mean, the whole concept basically exists to
| determine a class of things that should be publicly funded.
| Since then, many of the goods that were public goods were
| changed by technology into something else.
|
| A classic example was free-to-air radio and TV. Public good
| theories were used to justify TV licences. Since then, we
| found both ways of excluding (cable) and ways of making
| money that aren't related to exclusion (advertising). Did
| free-to-air TV stop being a public good once the ad
| business got lucrative enough. Maybe it stopped being a
| good altogether.
|
| The definition of a public good was never precise, but it's
| downright squishy these days. Quite a lot of goods these
| days, both capital and consumer are nonrivalrous (could
| also be described as non subtractable, abundant..).
|
| Anyway, the author's usage is pretty clear. FOSS like the
| worldwideweb _is_ a public good for the purposes that he 's
| using the term.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Who said anybody was using the niche academic economist
| definition of ,,public good"?
|
| Words have different meanings depending on contexts.
|
| Compare ,,string" in computer science vs astrophysics.
| sanderjd wrote:
| So far, I've seen "public goods" used in the blockchain world
| to mostly mean open source software projects concretely, but
| something broader aspirationally. For instance, I believe the
| large and well-known Gitcoin project pretty much follows this
| pattern. I'm not sure how well it lines up with that economics
| definition. Thanks for the link to that very interesting paper!
| dalbasal wrote:
| The economic definition could use an update, or at least some
| asterixis. Lin Ostrom's work is worth looking up, if the topic
| interests you.
|
| Both rivalrousness and excludability can get gray, changing as
| technology or legality changes. As intangible goods become a
| bigger part of the economy, this matters more.
|
| Take HN. Is it rivalrous? If I comment on HN, does this
| diminish others' ability to comment on HN? There isn't a
| totally black and white answer to this. Usually, no. Other
| people commenting is actually required for a forum to have
| value. OTOH, the premise of brigading (was once a reddit thing)
| is that a bunch of people flooding into a forum _can_ diminish
| people 's enjoyment of it. I suppose you could call that
| vandalism, but there are plenty of cases featuring various
| shades of grey. If your mom joins instagram, maybe you can no
| longer enjoy commenting on salacious pics.
|
| Ostrom advocated for degrees of, rather than binary
| definitions.
|
| Excludability... Also debatable and shifting. Digital music
| wasn't excludable for a while, then it was. Anonymous social
| networks (like HN) are less excludable than real name networks
| (like FB), but it's mostly a technology problem. It's also a
| legal question. The idea of making FB and such "common
| carriers" was floated around, which would make is legally
| nonexcludable.
|
| Patents are the opposite. The exist to make nonrivalrous, non
| excludable goods excludable. So does DRM, copyrights. A GPL
| license turns an excludable good into a nonexcludable, arguably
| public good.
|
| IMO, a better starting point is scarcity vs abundance.
|
| Anyway, considering the importance of public science, software
| like linux & the www... I think it's worth thinking about how
| important the commons/public domain/classification of your
| choice is.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Is the centralization of an oracle actually useful?
|
| I wonder if people curated lists of "public goods donation
| addresses" and then hosted something like a leaderboard of people
| who donated most to any/all public goods addresses, so people or
| companies could be recognized with social clout (if they want)
| for giving back. Automatically make a page for me that shows who
| I've donated to a when. Would that accomplish the same goals as
| much or better?
|
| (I wonder if there is an opportunity for a tax exempt NGO
| middleman org(s) to validate 'public good" status and make
| donations that flow through deductible?)
|
| Like, if I could read an article about someone who did something
| societally beneficial that probably wont 'pay off' and it was
| easy to donate $20 to them, I might do it sometimes. Sending $20
| to an oracle fund trusting they'll allocate it wisely feels weird
| to me - I'd need to see a long record of smart allocations to
| trust them.
| Twisell wrote:
| TL; DR;
|
| The article start with a very pertinent question about how to
| offer some exit mechanism for FOSS project similar to what a for
| profit startup can count on.
|
| It then try to convince you that blockchain is the way to solve
| this question.
|
| Therefore it end up being yet another article focused on defining
| a problem for the blockchain to solve.
| skybrian wrote:
| This sounds like a distributed way to award prizes, but it's
| entirely abstract. What prizes do they plan to award this way,
| and using what criteria? It's not going to help any projects if
| they can't anticipate what they might win.
| narush wrote:
| > Funding by setting a price floor [on a project token]
|
| Aka, the reward is the certainty that you'll be able to trade
| your tokens in for some minimum price. For the end user, at the
| end of the day, the prize is $$$.
| skybrian wrote:
| That's still abstract. Which projects are doing this?
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