notes: [Tokenomics] Adaptive Sharing with Arweave's Sam Williams

notes on [Tokenomics] Adaptive Sharing with Arweave's Sam Williams

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arweave is based on bittorrent

arwave as an evergrowing bittorrent swarm w incentives to pay for ppl to seed

profit sharing tokens, profit sharing communities

  • trade proportions of future assets by trading proportions of the tokens

  • what happens to bitcoin if block award no longer rewarded?

    • or reward is less than the fees?

    • becomes unstable, can lose consensus

  • token design — profit sharing tokens

    • many streams of revenue happening

    • web2 economy - creator economy

      • platform has some monetization, like ads or like bandcamp, ppl pay a tip

        • creates a revenue stream

        • but inefficient — not financializable

      • if you’re a farmer, sowing seeds, you don’t just wait for crop to grow and sell

        • you sell a future on that

      • founder, you’re selling a %, use money to grow faster

      • creators — have to create for crops to reach maturity and harvest in order to get value

      • new artist … i’m going to publish an album

        • a few ppl download, but to get enough to get a new studio or synth, takes months and months

        • why? doesn’t have to be the case

    • generalized principle in web3, profit sharing token

      • revenue stream of any kind

      • print a token

      • token dictates future profit , where it goes to

        • an artist — you get a profit sharing token for each album

        • i can be an investor

        • this album is selling well, i’ll buy 20% now

        • artist has money now, can buy synth to make more another album, etc.

    • why isn’t this the case on youtube, apple store, etc.

      • large proportion of web is, creators create something, revenue slowly accrues, platform takes a huge chunk

      • can be more efficient

  • governance

    • notion of profit sharing community

      • you can have a profit sharing token w/o community

    • for an application, can have a dao

      • tokens in dao can be profit sharing tokens

      • decentralized medium … user pays small tip every time you publish a page

        • owners of the profit sharing tokens in community can be distributed reward based own % ownership

  • profit sharing communities

    • contractual constructions, smartweave

      • microdividends

      • capabilities of smartweave?

  • permissionlessly and ownerlessly , permanent

    • app

    • trustlessless — important

      • dao isn’t necessarily that much better than a company

      • don’t have to trust that the service will change the future — a lot of the utility

      • if bitcoin run by dao, we can’t always trust 21 million tokens

        • but we know this will stay true

    • e.g. content moderation

      • smart contracts in js run locally

      • governance mechanism of profit sharing community

    • mechanism design —

      • in normal daos, this is poorly handled, good governance incentives

      • vote weighting — # tokens * the time you’re willing to stake them- -> voting power

        • e.g. small time holder but die hard attached, bigger say than large holder but flip tokens in month

        • interacts w profit sharing elements

      • e.g. if you stake tokens for 4 years,

        • governance decisions directly affect profit accrue in microdividends over 4 years

        • incentivized to perform good governance

      • daos — programmable so quickly iteratable

        • current crop, not super well formulated, direct democracy orgs

        • you can buy a bunch of tokens, vote on issue, immediately sell tokens

        • only use of token is governance

        • dangerous bc not incentivized to govern protocol in a way that is good for protocol, but incentive to extract value from protocol

    • defi protocols — vote to mint more tokens to reward owners for staking a specific token

      • defi summer to winter period, happened a lot

      • buy a lot of shitcoin and governance token, vote to mint new tokens, reward owners of shitcoin for staking

      • now price of shitcoin increases a lot, then dump those tokens + governance tokens , attack over

    • in a community where have vote weight by amount of time ppl are willing to stake

      • (incentive for long termism)

  • what is a community?

    • graeber: ppl slightly in debt to another

    • e.g. indigenous communities, you would never give a gift w exactly same amt

      • continued relationship

    • “karma”

    • how to incentivized prosocial behavior?

  • future, excited? non skeuomorphic of web2

    • archives —

      • e.g. huge archive of artifacts from 2019 hong kong protests

    • ownerlessness

      • decent.land

      • kind of like reddit, each subreddit its own profit sharing community

        • buy and stake tokens to take part of the community

        • mods can be de-elected anytime

        • when you ban someone, you slash their stake

        • incentivized to not have your stake slashed — so don’t troll

      • incentive to make community more desirable for others to be a part of it

        • value goes up if more ppl want to be a part of the community

      • founder — give tokens to ppl who are “useful” in early days

        • desirability rises, tokens rise

        • being a good community is incentivized

        • there’s no “reddit company”, is autonomous