B: Credit For Funding The Project—Funding a project retroactively should not be considered morally different from funding it in any other way, creating a novel kind of moral accounting seems overcomplicating things and hard to get actual consensus / common knowledge on.
A: Yes as this provides good incentives, but again with Awesome Auto Auction presenting a somewhat cleaner way than the default, as the founders would not liquidate their shares and drop the price / eat a chunk of donor money, but instead receive trickle income if their project kept climbing in value.
Custom: People who are basically just okay with donating the money, like me, but don’t have infinite runway so would be happy to be topped up by major funders who like the bets we pick. I really want impact markets to exist for my own use case.
I really hate all these options, and I’m posting this partly to see if other people have better ideas.
You bet I have an idea! And I bet you can guess what it is! Awesome Auto Auction solves this neatly, the founder gets funding which scales with the value of the cert, but not in a form they can sell so there is no risk of them losing the credit for their project.
Happy to go into far more detail on any of these if requested.
Quick opinions on the choice branches:
1: What Is The Basic Format Of The Market?
Custom: Awesome Auto Auction, but closest to D: Fractionalized Impact Shares With Assurance Contract.
2: What Is Being Sold?
B: Credit For Funding The Project—Funding a project retroactively should not be considered morally different from funding it in any other way, creating a novel kind of moral accounting seems overcomplicating things and hard to get actual consensus / common knowledge on.
3: How Should The Market Handle Projects With Variable Funding Needs?
Custom: Awesome Auto Auction solves this elegantly, by letting the project absorb some fraction of the value of the cert if it continues to grow.
4: Should Founders Be Getting Rich Off Impact Certificates?
A: Yes as this provides good incentives, but again with Awesome Auto Auction presenting a somewhat cleaner way than the default, as the founders would not liquidate their shares and drop the price / eat a chunk of donor money, but instead receive trickle income if their project kept climbing in value.
5: How Do We Kickstart The Existence Of An Impact Market?
B: Committed Pot Of Money (aka The Original ACX Grants Plan) plus common knowledge that other funders can easily join later and will do so if they like what’s happening
6: Should The Market Use Cryptocurrency?
The best of both world proposal you mention seems clearly the best.
7: How Should The Market Price IPOs?
Custom: Awesome Auto Auction. Combines most of the advantages of both, I think?
8: How Should The Oracular Funder Buy Successful Projects?
A. By Buying A Certain Number Of Shares, with Awesome Auto Auction I think removing the main concern of Monopsony? But either way, B does not fit the structure.
9: What Should The Final Oracular Funder’s Decision Process Be?
A: Fund Based On Regular Charitable Decision-Making Procedure seems like a reasonable default, but letting the oracular decide seems correct.
10: Who Are We Expecting To Have As Investors?
Custom: People who are basically just okay with donating the money, like me, but don’t have infinite runway so would be happy to be topped up by major funders who like the bets we pick. I really want impact markets to exist for my own use case.
11: Conclusion: What Kind Of Impact Market Should We Have?
You bet I have an idea! And I bet you can guess what it is! Awesome Auto Auction solves this neatly, the founder gets funding which scales with the value of the cert, but not in a form they can sell so there is no risk of them losing the credit for their project.
Happy to go into far more detail on any of these if requested.