Shutting down an impact market, if successful, functionally means burning all the certificates that are owned by the market participants, who may have already spent a lot of resources and time in the hope to profit from selling their certificates in the future.
It could be done a bit more smoothly by (1) accepting no new issues, (2) completing all running prize rounds, and (3) declaring the impact certificates not burned and allowing people some time to export their data. (I don’t think it would be credible for the marketplace to declare the certs burned since it doesn’t own them.)
Also, my understanding is that there was (and perhaps still is) an intention to launch a decentralized impact market (i.e. Web3 based), which can be impossible to shut down.
My original idea from summer 2021 was to use blockchain technology simply for technical ease of implementation (I wouldn’t have had to write any code). That would’ve made the certs random tokens among millions of others on the blockchain. But then to set up a centralized, curated marketplace for them with a smart and EA curation team.
We’ve moved away from that idea. Our current market is fully web2 with no bit of blockchain anywhere. Safety was a core reason for the update. (But the ease-of-implementation reasons to prefer blockchain also didn’t apply so much anymore. We have a doc somewhere with all the pros and cons.)
For our favored auction mechanisms, it would be handy to be able to split transactions easily, so we have thought about (maybe, at some point) allowing users to connect a wallet to improve the user experience, but that would be only for sending and receiving payments. The certs would still be rows in a Postgres database in this hypothetical model. Sort of like how Rethink Priorities accepts crypto donations or a bit like a centralized crypto exchange (but that sounds a bit pompous).
But what do you think about the original idea? I don’t think it’s so different from a fully centralized solution where you allow people to export their data or at least not prevent them from copy-pasting their certs and ledgers to back them up.
My greatest worries about crypto stem less from the technology itself (which, for all I know, could be made safe) but from the general spirit in the community that decentralization, democratization, ungatedness, etc. are highly desirable values to strive for. I don’t want to have to fight against the dominant paradigms, so that doing it on my server was more convenient. But then again big players in the Ethereum space have implemented very much expert-run systems with no permissionless governance tokens and such. So I hope (and think) that there are groups that can be convinced that an impact market should be gated and curated by trusted experts only.
But even so, a solution that is crypto-based beyond making payments easier is something that I consider more in the context of joining existing efforts to make them safer rather than actions that would influence their existence.
(3) declaring the impact certificates not burned and allowing people some time to export their data.
That could make it easier for another team to create a new impact market that will seamlessly replace the impact market that is being shut down.
My original idea from summer 2021 was to use blockchain technology simply for technical ease of implementation (I wouldn’t have had to write any code). That would’ve made the certs random tokens among millions of others on the blockchain. But then to set up a centralized, curated marketplace for them with a smart and EA curation team.
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But what do you think about the original idea? I don’t think it’s so different from a fully centralized solution where you allow people to export their data or at least not prevent them from copy-pasting their certs and ledgers to back them up.
If a decentralized impact market gains a lot of traction, I don’t see how the certificates being “tokens among millions of others” helps. A particular curated gallery can end up being ignored by some/most market participants (and perhaps be outcompeted by another, less scrupulous curated gallery).
Allowing people to make backups: You’d rather make it as hard as possible to make backups, e.g., by using anti-screenscraping tools and maybe hiding some information about the ledger in the first place so people can’t easily back it up.
Web3: Seems about as bad as any web2 solution that allows people to easily back up their data.
Web3: Seems about as bad as any web2 solution that allows people to easily back up their data.
I think that a decentralized impact market that can’t be controlled or shut down seems worse. Also, a Web3 platform will make it less effortful for someone to launch a competing platform (either with or without the certificates from the original platform).
It could be done a bit more smoothly by (1) accepting no new issues, (2) completing all running prize rounds, and (3) declaring the impact certificates not burned and allowing people some time to export their data. (I don’t think it would be credible for the marketplace to declare the certs burned since it doesn’t own them.)
My original idea from summer 2021 was to use blockchain technology simply for technical ease of implementation (I wouldn’t have had to write any code). That would’ve made the certs random tokens among millions of others on the blockchain. But then to set up a centralized, curated marketplace for them with a smart and EA curation team.
We’ve moved away from that idea. Our current market is fully web2 with no bit of blockchain anywhere. Safety was a core reason for the update. (But the ease-of-implementation reasons to prefer blockchain also didn’t apply so much anymore. We have a doc somewhere with all the pros and cons.)
For our favored auction mechanisms, it would be handy to be able to split transactions easily, so we have thought about (maybe, at some point) allowing users to connect a wallet to improve the user experience, but that would be only for sending and receiving payments. The certs would still be rows in a Postgres database in this hypothetical model. Sort of like how Rethink Priorities accepts crypto donations or a bit like a centralized crypto exchange (but that sounds a bit pompous).
But what do you think about the original idea? I don’t think it’s so different from a fully centralized solution where you allow people to export their data or at least not prevent them from copy-pasting their certs and ledgers to back them up.
My greatest worries about crypto stem less from the technology itself (which, for all I know, could be made safe) but from the general spirit in the community that decentralization, democratization, ungatedness, etc. are highly desirable values to strive for. I don’t want to have to fight against the dominant paradigms, so that doing it on my server was more convenient. But then again big players in the Ethereum space have implemented very much expert-run systems with no permissionless governance tokens and such. So I hope (and think) that there are groups that can be convinced that an impact market should be gated and curated by trusted experts only.
But even so, a solution that is crypto-based beyond making payments easier is something that I consider more in the context of joining existing efforts to make them safer rather than actions that would influence their existence.
That could make it easier for another team to create a new impact market that will seamlessly replace the impact market that is being shut down.
If a decentralized impact market gains a lot of traction, I don’t see how the certificates being “tokens among millions of others” helps. A particular curated gallery can end up being ignored by some/most market participants (and perhaps be outcompeted by another, less scrupulous curated gallery).
Okay, but to keep the two points separate:
Allowing people to make backups: You’d rather make it as hard as possible to make backups, e.g., by using anti-screenscraping tools and maybe hiding some information about the ledger in the first place so people can’t easily back it up.
Web3: Seems about as bad as any web2 solution that allows people to easily back up their data.
Is that about right?
I think that a decentralized impact market that can’t be controlled or shut down seems worse. Also, a Web3 platform will make it less effortful for someone to launch a competing platform (either with or without the certificates from the original platform).