#10: Doing Good Together — Coordinating the Effective Altruist Community with Blockchain

3 min readAug 11, 2017

In podcast episode #10 of Creating a Humanist Blockchain Future (Youtube, Soundcloud, iTunes), we focus on Effective Altruism + Blockchain by diving into how we can coordinate the EA community with blockchain. This podcast was recorded in San Francisco right before EAGlobal! If you’re there, reach out (rhyslindmark@gmail.com) and say hi!

This video is a response to William Macaskill’s post on the “key idea of EA Global”, Doing Good Together. I think that blockchain could be a great way to achieve Will’s ends. See his two snippets below and the rest of the show notes after that. Feedback is always welcome — thanks!

Quick show notes below:

First Principle Alignment to Cross the Chasm (1:00)

First Principle Alignment #1 — Acknowledge the Local-Global Gradient

An argument for the EA community to embrace locally-adjusted quality-adjusted life-years (la-QALYs) as a way to align “do good” actors.

First Principle Alignment #2 — New, Non-Fiat Ways to Measure Value

An argument for the EA community to work with other “have good outcome” communities to measure/replace nationstate fiat as the primary way to measure value. See #PayForSuccess, #ImpactInvesting, #SocialEntrepreneurship, B Corporations, Social Impact Bonds, etc.

Coordinating the Effective Altruist Community Through Blockchain (8:00)

Crowd <> Core Coordination: Machine, Platform, Crowd
Vitalik’s mathematical analysis of Metcalfe’s law of network effects.

Tokens are a Digitally Scarce Item with 2 Kinds of Value:

Memetic/Scarce Value: Dogecoin, RarePepe, r/MemeEconomy
Utility Value: ETH spent to run smart contracts

3-Stage Token Lifecycle + Benefits:

1) To get tokens, people need to earn them with a given incentivize system.
1a) You can incentivize people to spend their scarce capital ($$). e.g. If you give to an EA organization, you get EACoin in return.
1b) You can incentivize people to spend their scarce time to create a given outcome. e.g. If you get another person to take the Giving What We Can Pledge, you get an EACoin. See SolarCoin and Social Impact Coins.
2) Once people have tokens, they create skin in the game and tribal membership, simply by holding them.
3) Tokens can be spent for their utility value. e.g. You could spend an EACoin to vote on where the EAFund DAO should allocate charity funds. See Charity DAOs.

EACoin as a Subset and Superset of Other Outcomes/Causes

EACoin as superset of EACommunityCoin or AIAlignmentCoin.
Expect lots of sub and super communities. Internet : decreaseCost(Information) :: Blockchain : decreaseCost(Coordination). See SimonDLR’s piece.

See my other content on blockchain for social good:

Thanks to Keith Klundt, John Desmond, Colin Wielga, Harry Lindmark, John Lindmark, Veronica Stamats, Jacob Zax, Katie Powell, Jonathan Isaac, Ryan X Charles, Chris Edmonds, Ramsay Devereux, Ned Mills, Kenji Williams, David Long, Scott Levi, Peter Rodgers, Kenzie Jacobs, Jon Frechin, Nathan Schneider, and Kash Dhanda for supporting me on Patreon!

About Me: My name is Rhys Lindmark and I’m a social entrepreneur. I’m creating a humanist blockchain future by writing, speaking, and advising at the intersection of Effective Altruism, UBI, the Attention Economy, and Blockchain. I lead the Colorado chapters of Effective Altruism and the Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition. I’m an alumnus of Techstars Boulder 2015 (Edify). Please reach out if you’d like to connect or have feedback! I’m curious about what you’re working on. You can support me on Patreon, follow me on Twitter, or connect on LinkedIn.

Disclaimer: I own less than $100 of any given cryptocurrency, so my monetary incentive is not directly aligned with Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.