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How much do you value your economic freedom?
If your answer is “a lot,” here’s the good news: a new economic paradigm is emerging — one that allows people to prosper on their own terms, without dependence on extractive companies that don’t have their best interests at heart.
At its core, this paradigm rests on a simple idea: open and permissionless collaboration.
Here’s how it works: networks fund projects that strengthen their own growth and prosperity. Funding happens retroactively, making the process self-sustaining.
Within these networks, everyone has free access to non-scarce resources. People can build openly on each other’s work — and get compensated for it.
This model creates a new mode of production where individuals have the freedom to work entirely on their own terms, plug directly into Value Creation Chains, and get rewarded for their contributions
Imagine journalism under this new system.
The network signals its need for unbiased reporting on current events related to it — posting both the request and the payout. Contributors step forward: some do research, others conduct fieldwork, others fact-check, and still others publish reports in multiple formats. These contributors don’t compete with each other for attention or clicks, instead they all contribute to sensemaking in the network.
The network reviews the outputs and releases funding accordingly.
But here’s the challenge: if decentralized journalism is truly permissionless, who decides the value of each individual contribution?
A top-down approach, where the network has to review contributions is not practical — no more than consumers can do the same for any good they buy.
Can you imagine if, whenever you bought a product, you had to figure out how much the designer, the factory worker, and the shipper should each be paid? Now what if there are 100 people contributing to this process? 10,000? Such an approach just wouldn't scale.
Moreover, the more removed the assessor is from the contribution the less context they have on who contributed what.
Instead, what we need is a bottom-up, localized assessment system; for each output, a contributor can fairly evaluate the inputs — whether sources, collaborators, or tools — and post the weighted distribution alongside the final work. With AI tools, much of this process can be streamlined.
Of course, self-assessment raises the risk of abuse. What stops contributors from inflating their own share and minimizing that of others?
For that we need an incentive mechanism backed by staking and arbitration.
Here’s how this could work:
Anyone can dispute a contribution claim by staking the payout amount in question.
The contributor being challenged must stake the same amount.
Until resolution, payout on the disputed amount is frozen.
A decentralized arbitration system then settles the dispute; the rightful party gets their stake back, plus a portion of the other party’s stake. The remainder goes to the network (that can then compensate arbitrators).
This system creates powerful incentives:
If you overvalue yourself, you risk costly arbitration.
If you make frivolous claims, you risk losing your stake.
As a result, most disputes can get resolved amicably before ever reaching arbitration.
Why do both parties need to stake an amount equivalent to the payout?
Because if the amount was smaller, the contributor would have an incentive to overvalue their contribution, even a bit, as statistically they would have a chance to get away with it and be profitable.
One caveat: individuals without capital to stake could be excluded. This can be solved by allowing investors to fund stakes in exchange for a share of successful claims — ensuring that even less-capitalized contributors still have access to fair compensation.
With this mechanism in place, Value Creation Chains become both open and fair.
Journalists can focus on truthful reporting instead of chasing clicks.
Developers can publish open-source code without fear of exploitation, knowing they’ll be compensated whenever their work is used (and can make a claim on others if they don’t)
The result is a sustainable system where individual freedom aligns with collective prosperity.
You get the freedom to work on your own terms — and the community gains growth, resilience, and goods our current system could simply never produce.
A win-win for everyone.
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This is the forward-thinking that brought me to crypto. This tech has the potential to catapult society in such a meaningful way and I'm rooting for projects and innovation like this.
Very nice Idea. Put it on https://updraft.fund and I'll support it. Question: Does the top-level funder decide how much to fund a top-level result before or after all the top-level contributors make their claims? This is important since from what I can tell, this is where the money comes from. Maybe an equivalent question would be: if anyone can make a top-level claim to funds, how are these claims finalized? If they survive for some time without a dispute then they get paid?
good question! There needs to be a challenge/review period where the funding amount is known but before funding is released to projects.Without knowing the expected payout users can't really stake an amount on a claim (though they can mutually resolve the dispute without arbitration, which is the preferable outcome anyway). With that said, I didn't really go into the process of posting a proposal to the network in this article - that's a different "building block" in this economic model, but essentially that step would require a stake proportionate to the expected value of the project - this can help prevent fraudulent projects from being proposed and help the network allocate resources to reviewing the impact of projects on the network (I cover this in the Abundance whitepaper, btw - whitepaper.abundance.id)
Let’s imagine a new way to build together. Not quite like the DAOs of the last cycle, and not exactly like open-source software projects. Something different. Enabling different sorts of projects. I would love to explore these ideas with anyone who is interested. How can we make it easy for people to start building together? What can encourage sharing ideas?
FYI, you can quote-cast my above cast 👆with your response, to join the @looti campaign https://looti.club/campaigns/bq0EY4q4TFrGkiXwHVuz
I feel like a FC incubator could work? Not sure if that’s close to what you’re asking about
Yeah, could be incubating ideas within Farcaster, and also potentially for use in Farcaster. What do you think is the best way we could get people involved in one and sharing ideas?
I have no experience in building a program like that, but if I were to try: - I’d get mentors in each domain (design/eng/marketing) - I’d find people interested in building - I’d find people open to seed investing - create a standard agreement that parties involved would use for receiving tokens for their participation in the project - host private workshops and facilitate 1:1s Idk
Encouraging ideas and then helping them build it.
poidh open bounties are designed to be micro DAOs pool money to get something done, confirm it got done via decentralized onchain voting with weighting based on contribution amounts, move on to the next task you might dig this explainer about why it matters: https://paragraph.com/@poidh/poidh-v2
Thanks for replying! I think I checked out poidh for like 5 seconds once, decided I wasn’t into it, and have been ignoring it ever since. Thanks for prompting me to give it another look! How could you see a community using poidh to pursue one larger overarching mission with many different bounties? Is that what albums are for? Just wondering if you could point me to some interesting uses people have done like this, or potential ones for the future?
we still small and albums were only launched about a month ago, so yet to see a group lean into using poidh albums consistently (other than me using themed bounties to market the app) but the point isn't so much that we help people go after broad overarching missions, more that we enable you to raise money to do something in a way that's totally impossible otherwise take the $35k kickflip bounty we're running right now https://poidh.xyz/degen/bounty/1167 Jacek and Purp (on behalf of Degen DAO) have added $35k, but they maintain total control over their funds (they can withdraw them from the bounty at any time) and anyone else in the world can come through and add more funds if they like the goal of the project so poidh bounties are liquid, they're an incentivization market, where people can direct their funds in a focused manner to stuff they really care about how does this help a community? well imagine you live in a neighborhood where things are maintained by an HOA the traditional option is everyone pays all their money into a big bucket and hopes that the HOA directs those funds efficiently to the things that matter the poidh option is different, community action tasks can be made by anyone, and only the individual tasks people really care about receive support because individuals are able to pick and choose the specific tasks they really care about getting accomplished try to think through doing the poidh option in any other manner and you'll see why it matters... there's no other way to seamlessly allow anyone to chip in funds + anyone to claim the funds without heavily relying on a single centralized person (or group of people) to manage the funds which causes friction and makes people less likely to contribute the hypothesis here is that by making it easier for people to direct money towards specific actions they really care about, we get a higher level of community action and funding from individuals vs the current model where they have to give up a chunk of money and pray that whoever is running the organization uses it to fund things they care about
big believer in this concept. my take is that we need to create a new mode of production in crypto for open (even permissionless) collaboration. wrote about it recently and would be happy to join any convo :) https://paragraph.com/@abundance/economic-building-blocks
We build crypto projects together by starting with open on-chain idea sharing, forming small focused pods around the best proposals, funding their work through bounties and payment streams, rewarding real impact with retroactive funding, and then linking successful pods into a flexible network that grows organically instead of relying on one large, slow-moving DAO.
Best idea 👍
Love it
How much do you value your economic freedom? We have a choice between moving toward a decentralized economic paradigm where we can prosper on our own terms, or a techno-feudalist future where the platforms and corporations rule our lives. IF we want the decentralized future we'll need to build it. Here's is one of those building blocks:
Powerful perspective! 🔑 Building freedom, one step at a time.