In the digital networked age, people’s attention often overlooks local problems in favour of global ones, which don’t necessarily impact them in their daily lives, or over which they don’t have a say due to the skewed Pareto distribution of power in modern day societies. Puja Ohlhaver, in her recent research paper ‘Community currencies’, proposes a dual-currency model that prices attention and influence in each community, with the ultimate goal of creating a Gaussian distribution of power, either locally, or globally through the dynamic interaction of multiple local communities. This model allows community members to stake their currency to earn non-transferable governance rights, creating a substrate for decentralised societal coordination that favours social innovation.
Topics covered in this episode:
- Puja’s background
- Web3 research
- ‘Community currencies’
- Pareto vs. Gaussian distributions
- Global vs. local power distributions
- The community currencies model
- Meritocracy vs. influence
- Quadratic funding
- Governance, bribery and the crisis of legitimacy
- Experimenting with community currencies
Episode links:
Sponsors:
- Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
- Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one
This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
