First of all, what we’ve summarized as “curation” so far could really be distinguished as follows:
Making access for issuers invite-only, maybe keeping the whole marketplace secret (in combination with #2) until we find someone who produces cool papers/articles and who we trust and then invite them.
Making access for investors/retro funders invite-only, maybe keeping the whole marketplace secret (in combination with #1) until we find an impact investor or a retro funder who we trust and then invite them.
Read every certificate either before or shortly after it is published. (In combination with exposé certificates in case we make a mistake.)
Let’s say #3 is a given. Do you think the marketplace would fulfill your safety requirements if only #1, only #2, or both were added to it?
An impact market with invite-only access for issuers and investors seems safer than otherwise. But will that be a temporary phase after which our civilization ends up with a decentralized impact market that nobody can control or shut down, and people are incentivized to recruit as many new retro funders as they can? In the Toward Impact Markets post (March 2022) you wrote:
We are fairly convinced that the blockchain-based solution is going to be the culmination of our efforts one day, but we’re ambivalent over which MVP will allow us to test the market more quickly and productively.
That came after the sentence “A web2 solution like that would have a few advantages too:”, after which you listed three advantages that have nothing to do with safety.
But if you enact some security measures to keep them out, you quickly reach the point where the bazaar is less attractive than the alternatives. At that point you already have no effect anymore on how much theft there is going on in the world in aggregate.
I don’t think the analogy works. Right now, there seems to be no large-scale retroactive funding mechanisms for anthropogenic x-risk interventions. Launching an impact market can change that. An issuer/investor/funder who will use your impact market would probably not use Twitter or anything else to deal with retroactive funding if you did not launch your impact market. The distribution mismatch problem applies to those people. (In your analogy there’s a dichotomy of good people vs. thieves, which has no clear counterpart in the domain of retroactive funding.) Also, if your success inspires others to launch/join competing impact markets, you can end up increasing the number of people who use the other markets.
An impact market with invite-only access for issuers and investors seems safer than otherwise. But will that be a temporary phase after which our civilization ends up with a decentralized impact market that nobody can control or shut down, and people are incentivized to recruit as many new retro funders as they can? In the Toward Impact Markets post (March 2022) you wrote:
That came after the sentence “A web2 solution like that would have a few advantages too:”, after which you listed three advantages that have nothing to do with safety.
I don’t think the analogy works. Right now, there seems to be no large-scale retroactive funding mechanisms for anthropogenic x-risk interventions. Launching an impact market can change that. An issuer/investor/funder who will use your impact market would probably not use Twitter or anything else to deal with retroactive funding if you did not launch your impact market. The distribution mismatch problem applies to those people. (In your analogy there’s a dichotomy of good people vs. thieves, which has no clear counterpart in the domain of retroactive funding.) Also, if your success inspires others to launch/join competing impact markets, you can end up increasing the number of people who use the other markets.