Cover photo

Why decline VC?

Recently, Volky and I made the fairly difficult choice not to accept the 1.2m funding offer that BlueYard made. What I hope to very briefly do is to communicate why VC isn't the funding path we'll be pursuing. Long story short, we feel that because of the particular thing we’re building, there are options for how to fund ourselves and make us sustainable that are better incentive aligned and more true to our values.What are we building?With the Network Goods Institute, Volky and I are interes...

Cover photo

A Lightning Introduction to Proper Scoring Rules

Perhaps in the last election you watched Polymarket.com as a source of information about who was likely to win the US Presidency. This election, prediction markets proved to be an accurate source of up-to-date information about who was likely to win. Much more accurate than the polls.2024 US Presidential Election Market on Polymarket.comSince these markets are so important, perhaps you wondered how they work. How do they decide how many shares to give for every dollar someone bets? How do the...

Cover photo

Solving the value problem in futarchy

This post presents the idea of index wallets, a mechanism which could help determine what societal objectives to pursue. This pairs up well with futarchy, a mechanism to determine how to realize governance objectives. Together, those mechanisms might help usher in 21st century governance.

Cover photo

Why we're building on crypto

Depending on your information environment, crypto is either an unethical series of Ponzis or the obvious underpinning of the future economic system. And depending on which of those views you take you likely have a radically different opinion regarding our choice to build on top of it. Those of you who already denominate much of your wealth in tokens and cryptocurrencies (whether you came to embrace the space through reasoning or its motivated cousin) will have little interest in the rationale...

Cover photo

Negation Game: An Info Market for the Overton Window

InfoFi is on the rise. Crypto has been on a decades-long journey to find its killer application. It's been found, and now it's being acknowledged by the wider society: Prediction Markets The power comes from creating markets where the self-interested objectives of searching for upside produce positive externalities in the form of reliable information. If you make those markets competitive enough, you can trust the bottom-line to reasonably correlate with reality Prediction Markets work great ...

Cover photo

The Age of Inference

Around 1800, a man by the name of Henry Maudslay was experimenting with ways to manufacture screws that would have smooth and consistent threads. But Maudslay had a problem

Why I Want You to Steal My Work

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. ― William Gibson I live in the future. It’s beautiful here, can’t wait til you arrive. Hey could I ask you a huge favor? Could you steal my intellectual property? I know that might sound weird given the world that you live in. I’m sure you do a whole bunch of tiptoeing about to avoid stealing other people’s intellectual property. You worry about copyright strikes when you film movie reviews. When you want to reimagine a popular so...