I think I might have been the second largest purchaser of the certificates. My experience was that we didn’t attract the really high quality projects I’d want, and those we did see had very high reservation prices from the sellers, perhaps due to the endowment effect. I suspect sellers might say that they didn’t see enough buyers. Possibly we just had a chicken-and-egg problem, combined with everyone involved being kind of busy.
My impression is that nobody has made it their job (and spent at least a month and preferably a year or two) to make Certificates of Impact work. i.e. money is real because humans have agreed to believe it’s real, and because there’s a lot of good infrastructure that helps it work. If Certificates of Impact (or Prizes) are to be real someone needs to actually build a thing and hype it continuously. So far it doesn’t feel like it’s been tried.
Honestly, the technical infrastructure for Certificates of Impact would be very similar to that for Impact Prizes as I discuss them above. I think both would be really interesting to test at larger scales.
Impact Prizes may need less hype though, but may be more difficult to scale.
Hmm, I think they need about the same amount of hype. I do think Impact Prizes aren’t any harder to scale – Certificates of Impact already depend on something like Impact Prizes eventually existing.
Actually, I think of Impact Prizes as “a precise formulation of how one might scale the hype and money necessary for Certificates to work.”
That makes sense to me. When I said “harder to scale”, I mean harder to “put a bunch on top of each other”. In some ways it’s not as elegant.
Agreed that Impact Prizes are one ways that Certificates of Impact could work long-term. Like, one group places $100k of Impact Prizes for 2030, where it will only be used to purchase Certificates of Impact.
Is there a postmortem somewhere on Certificates of Impact & challenges they faced when implementing?
I think I might have been the second largest purchaser of the certificates. My experience was that we didn’t attract the really high quality projects I’d want, and those we did see had very high reservation prices from the sellers, perhaps due to the endowment effect. I suspect sellers might say that they didn’t see enough buyers. Possibly we just had a chicken-and-egg problem, combined with everyone involved being kind of busy.
Not that I know of. Paul has a lot of stuff going on, for one thing. :)
I think some people are still excited about Certificates of Impact though.
My impression is that nobody has made it their job (and spent at least a month and preferably a year or two) to make Certificates of Impact work. i.e. money is real because humans have agreed to believe it’s real, and because there’s a lot of good infrastructure that helps it work. If Certificates of Impact (or Prizes) are to be real someone needs to actually build a thing and hype it continuously. So far it doesn’t feel like it’s been tried.
I’d generally agree with that.
Honestly, the technical infrastructure for Certificates of Impact would be very similar to that for Impact Prizes as I discuss them above. I think both would be really interesting to test at larger scales.
Impact Prizes may need less hype though, but may be more difficult to scale.
Hmm, I think they need about the same amount of hype. I do think Impact Prizes aren’t any harder to scale – Certificates of Impact already depend on something like Impact Prizes eventually existing.
Actually, I think of Impact Prizes as “a precise formulation of how one might scale the hype and money necessary for Certificates to work.”
That makes sense to me. When I said “harder to scale”, I mean harder to “put a bunch on top of each other”. In some ways it’s not as elegant.
Agreed that Impact Prizes are one ways that Certificates of Impact could work long-term. Like, one group places $100k of Impact Prizes for 2030, where it will only be used to purchase Certificates of Impact.