{"hash":"0xe41873a71ea1138a08de1677f163aa21cec86175d32936060701ce7862fea224","cid":"bafkrwihedbz2ohvbcofarxqwo7ywhkrbz3egc5otfe3ambybzz4gf7vceq","title":"the marketplace of ideas needs a marketplace for outcomes","body":"![Cover image](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQhBPBbb0AE5VfW.jpg)\n\n[originally published on X](https://x.com/kennyistyping/status/2094790751595167822)\n\nWhen social media first emerged, we were optimistic. It was rethinking communication. It was open, democratic, and censorship-free. It was the ideal marketplace of ideas.\n\nPerspectives have changed over the last decade.\n\n> Embedded post by Mike Solana (@micsolana):\n>\n> periodic reminder that in the early 2000s we talked about the internet as prometheus bringing fire to civilization, as the education of every child alive with literally all human knowledge — liberated. and today we're mostly shitposting in a swamp of commie pods and onlyfans.\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/micsolana/status/1988962461417140395\n\n> Embedded post by Jonathan Keeperman (@L0m3z):\n>\n> The conventional wisdom circa 2010: \"The open, disintermediated internet will finally bring about the purest expression of democracy the world has ever known!\"\n>\n> >monkey paw curls\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/L0m3z/status/1998885588469166472\n\nAnd yet, we keep posting.\n\nThe ever-present pull of open, global discussion isn't going away.\n\nAnd, while I'm not going to sit here and try to convince you that social media has no negative effects, from a white-pill perspective, I think there's more positive energy out there than we've convinced ourselves of late.\n\nMost of us can sense it, despite persistent doomerism from our peers.\n\n> Embedded post by maja 🔭🍒 (@majamediaco):\n>\n> decided im gonna keep yapping about my dreams here until they come true\n>\n> the universe is always listening. you never know who’s reading, who’s watching, who’s ready to help it unfold\n>\n> twitter is a magical place\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/majamediaco/status/1952567756534300992\n\n> Embedded post by Nikita Bier (@nikitabier):\n>\n> The value of an X account can be measured by what doors it opens for you in real life.\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2053182435710693493\n\n> Embedded post by maia arson crimew 🐈 (@awawawhoami):\n>\n> i have a new theory called alive internet theory where i propose that the internet is full of real people and you can befriend some of them even and maybe actually kiss them and more\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/awawawhoami/status/1908668793443746237\n\nWe have evidence to back up this optimistic perspective on the modern internet. Consider the most-liked social media posts of all time.\n\n![Image](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HREzQ-XbAAAXN0N.png)\n\n![Image](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HREzQ-Za8AAZZnM.png)\n\nIs the debate more complex than this evidence? Sure, but we don't need to litigate it all here.\n\nFor now, I think it's at least safe to say there's a compelling case that wholesome energy > negative energy online.\n\nBut if there's clearly a great deal of positivity online, why is the modern narrative focused on negative real-world impacts?\n\n**It's a problem of social physics and economics.**\n\nIt's both cheaper and less socially complex for negative energy online to translate to negative outcomes IRL.\n\nAnd, on the flip side, it's expensive and socially complex for positive energy online to translate to positive outcomes IRL.\n\nIt takes an online community of people time, mental energy, and financial coordination to accomplish significant achievements IRL.  It only takes one chaotic person to tear it all down.\n\nThis leaves us with a world where we can _see_ the potential for a better world hypothesized online, [but the ability to manifest the outcomes we care about feels out of reach](https://x.com/kennyistyping/status/2092014033545441606).\n\nHow do we balance this equation?\n\nLet's consider social media's potential for positivity and how two tools, one currently hyped, one currently disregarded, can unlock its potential.\n\n## the promise of the marketplace of ideas\n\nThe early 2010s promise of social media is easy to forget. There was no shortage of inspirational takes about instant, global communication improving society. \n \nIt was the era of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. The \"text-messaging generation\" was [bringing down presidents](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265407978_The_Political_Power_of_Social_Media_Technology_the_Public_Sphere_and_Political_Change). Ron Paul was campaigning for president with a grassroots, online-focused campaign.\n\nWe had the internet, we could connect seamlessly with our friends, and we were going to change the world.\n\nBut that idealism ran into the friction of translating online energy to IRL action. Disconnects emerged between the ability to hype outcomes on social media and the ability to make them happen.\n\nTwitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, etc. became excellent at measuring attention and how much the hivemind cared about things in the moment. Where they failed was when it came time to translate that attention into action.\n\nWe had more information than we were capable of dealing with.\n\n> Embedded post by Naval (@naval):\n>\n> The human brain isn’t designed to process all of the world’s breaking emergencies in realtime.\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/naval/status/2029783943457939849\n\n> Embedded post by Adrian Dittmann (@AdrianDittmann):\n>\n> The feeling of information overload is interesting in that the lack of organization makes it seem as if you have no information at all.\"\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/AdrianDittmann/status/1838356025080152505\n\n> Embedded post by Khitty (@TheRealKhitty):\n>\n> @theanswrisno \"Man was not made to montior so many situations\" I honestly believe certain things should be left to professional and handled by region. We have limited capacity. It's literally impossible to keep track of everything going on in the world. Social media was a mistake.\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/TheRealKhitty/status/2082922028395356578\n\nBlack pill? Khitty is right, social media has cooked society, and we might as well give up.\n\nWhite pill? [It's not information overload. It's filter failure.](https://mascontext.com/issues/information/its-not-information-overload-its-filter-failure)\n\nAnd, thankfully, we've invented the intelligence machine.\n\n## the potential of AI\n\n> Embedded post by Jameson Lopp (@lopp):\n>\n> Going forward, sifting signal from slop will become a superpower. Curating the content you consume will become more important than ever.\n>\n> Expect a divergence:\n>\n> * Those who wield AI agents to shield them from noise.\n> * Those who are slaves to someone else's algorithm.\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/lopp/status/2018676880996458715\n\nIf we think about the formula for coordinating positive-sum behavior amongst humans, two of the most important inputs are:\n\n- information\n- intelligence\n\nYou need information to make a decision, but that decision needs to be guided by an understanding of its surrounding context.\n\nAnd the AI tools that have emerged in the last 5 years are perfect for doing just that.\n\nAll the information was out there for years on the internet regarding how to build a website. But your parents couldn't do it.\n\nNow? They can use a free subscription and a prompt to generate a website in a few minutes.\n\nYour coworker just made a custom app that saves everyone hours of work each week. Your fantasy football leaguemate is coding their own player analysis tools. Your kid is building a Pokémon card classification tool with built-in computer vision.\n\nIt's faster and easier than ever to research, code, design, analyze, monitor, plan, or iterate. It's the most interesting time in human history to be a builder.\n\nClear skies ahead for societal coordination and efficiency then, yes?\n\nNot quite. AI runs into an execution problem when it hits the offline world.\n\n> Embedded post by Fireside Alpha (@firesidealpha):\n>\n> Sam Altman admits he was wrong on AI's timeline and says society and the economy will adapt more slowly\n>\n> \"I thought when we got to GPT-4, which was back in 2023, that very quickly after that there was going to be much more disruption, software businesses up for grabs right away, than it turned out to be.\"\n>\n> \"I think I was wrong about a few things, but one in terms of the speed: the economy just has so much inertia.\"\n>\n> \"People keep doing the same things, buying from the same company, wanting to use their tools the same way. I think this is actually a positive in many ways, and it's going to make this big transition go smoother and slower. I'm grateful for it.\"\n>\n> \"But it means we've all been too ambitious on timelines. Even with this incredible technology, society and the economy will adapt more slowly.\"\n>\n> [Video](https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2091506907295125504/vid/avc1/1920x1080/lsr5lkDLcBOOHs1W.mp4?tag=29)\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/firesidealpha/status/2091506987137896560\n\nThis is explained further by Tyler Cowen's commentary on the slow take-off of AI adoption (credit to @orphcorp for [pointing this out](https://x.com/orphcorp/status/2091628754519171244)).\n\n![Image](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQs2t5pbUAAAAY1.png)\n\nTL;DR the sectors of the economy that matter most to people, their businesses, local communities, and national communities are all controlled by legacy organizations that weren't built to move at the speed of AI.\n\nPeople who live online 24/7 are blown away by what AI can do because it interacts directly with the world they care about.\n\nPeople who mainly work and live offline? They're wondering what the fuss is about because the tech gets throttled before it reaches them.\n\nSo here we sit.\n\nWe have instant communication channels with our peers around the world and machines that give us unlimited intelligence at our fingertips.\n\nBut we're still stuck when it comes to moving the world around us because the traditional organizational structures humans have used for thousands of years to coordinate real-world actions aren't made for unlimited intelligence and frictionless communication.\n\nHow can we make IRL more reflexive to this new paradigm?\n\nMoney.\n\n## the economics of coordination\n\n_\"The main reason why it is profitable to establish a firm would seem to be that there is a cost of using the price mechanism. The most obvious cost of 'organising' production through the price mechanism is that of discovering what the relevant prices are... The costs of negotiating and concluding a separate contract for each exchange transaction which takes place on a market must also be taken into account... a firm will tend to expand until the costs of organising an extra transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying out the same transaction by means of an exchange on the open market or the costs of organising in another firm.\"_\n\n[R.H. Coase, 1937](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x)\n\nCoordination is expensive.\n\nThat was the big takeaway from Ronald Coase's landmark 1937 paper, _The Nature of the Firm_.\n\nSpecifically, it's expensive because finding prices is hard. We think of prices as something that the market produces automatically, but in reality it takes many individuals with access to good information communicating with each other to produce them.\n\nSounds like a job for AI, right? Economists agree. They've started hypothesizing that we're on our way to a \"Coasean Singularity\".\n\n> Embedded post by Carlos E. Perez (@IntuitMachine):\n>\n> 1/16\n>\n> I just fell down a rabbit hole reading a new paper from economists at MIT & Harvard.\n>\n> Their prediction is wild: We're on the verge of a \"Coasean Singularity\"—a future where AI agents make markets so efficient that the very idea of a 'company' starts to crumble. 🤯\n>\n> A thread 👇\n>\n> ![Image attached to post](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G4ETd3bXcAAIFJd.png?name=orig)\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/IntuitMachine/status/1981887967514792075\n\nBut we've already covered a bit of the problem this thesis runs into. Most of the economy is still run by legacy organizations that are slow to adopt AI.\n\nAnd individuals? They've proven [far less open to letting AI agents manage their money](https://x.com/kennyistyping/status/2090826052205789670) than many researchers originally hypothesized.\n\nNonetheless, the idea seems obvious. If all the costs of driving coordinated economic activity are starting to collapse, what new types of behaviors will pop up that were originally limited by the need to form organizations?\n\nThe internet has attacked the cost of information.\n\nAI has attacked the cost of intelligence in processing that information.\n\nBut we still need a solution that attacks the friction of coordinating with money.\n\nAnd that's where crypto comes in.\n\n## how do you price an outcome?\n\nWe create organizations because we want specific outcomes.\n\nRemember what Coase said:\n\n_The most obvious cost of 'organising' production through the price mechanism is that of discovering what the relevant prices are._\n\nThe point of organization is to **produce something specific**. An outcome.\n\nThere's no shortage of hypothetical outcomes being proposed on the internet every day. Social media is awash in them. But generally, they are missing price information.\n\n> Embedded post by kenny (@kennyistyping):\n>\n> every sentence on the internet that starts:\n>\n> \"someone should...\"\n> \"I wish someone would...\"\n> \"why doesn't anyone...\"\n> \"it would be cool if...\"\n>\n> is essentially unpriced collective demand (beyond the social signals of likes/reposts/etc)\n>\n> figuring out how to price it would be huge\n>\n> Quoted post by kenny (@kennyistyping):\n> \"we are paralysed by this information overload, sedated by the illusion that Things are Happening, when in fact, They are Not. In the end, we see a landscape teeming with activity, but entirely devoid of soul.\"\n>\n> social media needs a tool that translates its energy into outcomes\n>\n> [View quoted post](https://x.com/kennyistyping/status/2085831386238472547)\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/kennyistyping/status/2086108912185700704\n\nWhat keeps us from putting prices on them?\n\nOur preconceived notions about the costs of organization.\n\nNobody wants to be the person who arranges money to get something done. Even if you've never read Coase's arguments about the science of the firm, you know from human experience. Managing people's money and expectations is a headache.\n\nBut what if there was a cleaner solution:\n\n- you propose the exact outcome you want to see happen\n- anyone can add money if they also want to see that specific outcome happen (but, importantly, you don't have to manage their money)\n- if the outcome happens, the money gets paid out to whoever made it happen\n- if the outcome doesn't happen, everyone gets their money back without lifting a finger\n\nWith fiat, this gets messy fast. One person would need to hold everyone's money (and likely do so via a centralized bank or payment provider who acts as custodian). They'd need to take on legal risk in doing so. They'd then need to physically track down whoever in the world wants to complete the outcome. They'd then need to track the work and relay everything to the funders.\n\nIt's a hassle.\n\nBut with crypto and smart contracts? It just works. And it's what we've built with @poidhxyz.\n\n> Embedded post by 0xSero (@0xSero):\n>\n> In less than 24 hours, 2500$ inspired many vibers to contribute, the best of the plugins has a 75% detection rate, and runs with minimal latency. \n>\n> What problems would you put up a bounty to solve? \n>\n> I have a few ideas in mind for the next one, just need more people to back the experimentation.\n>\n> Quoted post by kenny (@kennyistyping):\n> gm\n>\n> currently reviewing the submissions on this bounty so far, aiming to have shareable public results later tonight\n>\n> local AI is cool\n>\n> [View quoted post](https://x.com/kennyistyping/status/2088285026316394552)\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/0xSero/status/2088285573165236533\n\n> Embedded post by ross.wei (@z0r0zzz):\n>\n> check out this bounty on @poidhxyz 📸\n>\n> https://poidh.xyz/mainnet/bounty/24?t=1788018000\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/z0r0zzz/status/2093725425868632178\n\n> Embedded post by Loring Harkness (@LoringHarkness):\n>\n> Imagine if anyone could add funds to the bounty pool and help decide the winner - a la @poidhxyz. It would get huge!\n>\n> Quoted post by Polymarket (@Polymarket):\n> BREAKING: OpenAI launches a $50,000 bounty for anyone who can universally jailbreak GPT-5.6’s biosafety protections.\n>\n> [View quoted post](https://x.com/Polymarket/status/2075650511001522356)\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/LoringHarkness/status/2075680305768210477\n\nNow, poidh is still small. The contracts have only processed ~$90k in bounty volume all-time. Getting people to wrap their head around a permissionless way to price outcomes while convincing them that they can trust it with their money is hard.\n\nIt also takes a shift in the way we've been trained to think. For hundreds of years, people have assumed that if you want to get a big goal done, you _need_ an organization. Getting them to adopt a mindset of \"you can just incentivize things\" is an uphill battle.\n\nAnd hey, maybe we have the wrong recipe as well. We could be close to the solution but not quite there.\n\nNonetheless, I feel confident stating that, if we are going to discover a breakthrough application of crypto tech that changes the way humans live, work, and collaborate together, it will be in this vein.\n\n> Embedded post by ross.wei (@z0r0zzz):\n>\n> crypto matters A LOT MORE now. Obviously it is a big deal to let people be their own bank with just an internet connection. But that was just the beginning. Finance is the stepping stone to the final boss: Governance.\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/z0r0zzz/status/2074794660594409627\n\nAlmost 100 years ago, Coase made it clear that economic activity involving organizations was driven by the costs associated with coordination.\n\n- information/search costs\n- intelligence/execution costs\n- settlement/escrow costs\n\nWe now have the technology to attack all 3.\n\n- internet ↓ information/search costs\n- AI ↓ intelligence/execution costs\n- crypto ↓ settlement/escrow costs\n\nLet's dream big about what that can accomplish.\n\n> Embedded post by kenny (@kennyistyping):\n>\n> say there was a public bounty for the city of San Francisco to get yearly accidental drug overdoses to <100\n>\n> anyone could add money to the bounty, and the city could only claim it after hitting the target\n>\n> what would be the free market price of that outcome?\n>\n> ![Image attached to post](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQdFZBobEAE6Xl3.jpg?name=orig)\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/kennyistyping/status/2091716850820505637\n\n## amazing things, funded together\n\nIf your interest is piqued regarding poidh as a coordination protocol, I recommend checking out my blog here.\n\n> Embedded post by kenny (@kennyistyping):\n>\n> http://x.com/i/article/2069573615507611648\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/kennyistyping/status/2077044881776955793\n\nLooking to explore how it all works from the ground up? Check out docs.poidh.xyz\n\nWant to start making bounties, helping to fund them, or earning by accomplishing outcomes? Get started now via poidh.xyz\n\nNote, if you run into any bugs with the site, we appreciate your patience. We're experiencing growing pains at the moment.\n\n> Embedded post by kenny (@kennyistyping):\n>\n> society if @poidhxyz doesn't crash every time the site has >10 people browsing it at once\n>\n> ![Image attached to post](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQ0rGdEb0AAs2be.jpg?name=orig)\n>\n> Source: https://x.com/kennyistyping/status/2093376799296335909\n\nIf you'd like to help us tackle these growing pains, feel free to reach out. We are currently fundraising so I can go full-time, hire a dev team, and scale the protocol. If you're interested, my DMs are open, or you can reach me on TG via the same handle (@ kennyistyping).\n\nCrypto is coordination tech. If you want to help it fulfill its potential, let's talk.","time":1793227067,"authorizations":[{"token":"0xcc0d5c287e1f0ea7578a9183307a41ee9afd769cf1a77b6fd7dc491cc5a93f15","name":"kenny.gwei","author":"0x0e7f38ee61156d57b2b8ab4baa1648b0daa40217","blob":"0x01f62bedba2799ea910cbaef0a338212db86d6783d0304a19d11efa2080d002a","publisher":"0x244c707fa9fbb1907dc394075633babd2351f18d","fee":"16395000000000","tx":"0x2f16c194abb9b537a9f11b903ea8e3cfba4b13553d27edc04ab2243ca5cdfcac","block":26294265,"time":1793227019}],"onchain":{"blob":"0x01f62bedba2799ea910cbaef0a338212db86d6783d0304a19d11efa2080d002a","tx":"0xbed06a2726a8c7af4eafc59e733662903eb2729c091a0dde29b467f351cb1bdd","block":26294269,"time":1793227067,"publisher":"0x244c707fa9fbb1907dc394075633babd2351f18d","cid":"bafkreig5t6gul3x4hv2tmfsp25hexp7hywo7dxbwk32k7w2x5ag67qghwq"}}