#8: Blockchain-Based Attention Economy—Scaffolding Information and Coordinating Work

6 min readAug 9, 2017

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In podcast episode #8 of Creating a Humanist Blockchain Future (Youtube, Soundcloud, iTunes), we focus on The Attention Economy by diving into how we can scaffold information and coordinate work.

Show notes below. Also, there is a big section at the end of this article which aggregates a bunch of top blockchain sources.

Blockchain and Crypto Culture

Decentralization has Two Varieties (1:00)

Cypher punks, cryptoanarchism, distrust in centralized institutions.
Decreasing income inequality by decreasing centralization of wealth. See Balaji’s recent post on quantifying decentralization using the GINI coefficient.

Increasing Income Decentralization → New Metrics (2:00)

Not just money for self. Money for self is centralization, which is anti-decentralization.
This is especially true in a post-capital world with more abundance.
More focus on outcomes instead, not just money.

Shared Outcome Metric → Collaboration + Cooperation (5:00)

Zooko on why he’s advising Tez0s, even if they compete with Zcash: “The network is bigger than any particular cryptocurrency — the network is all cryptocurrencies. In fact, the network is much bigger than that — the network is all of the scientific and economic activity of all of this planet’s people.”

Technology and Society are a Reinforcing Feedback Loop (6:00)

“We need to turn ourselves into a system that can be easily leveraged by blockchain.”

(8:00)

Scaffolding Consumption

Start with the End in Mind. Matrix-style Learning is the Optimal Outcome (8:00)

A scaffolded flow slate of learning using techniques like progressive disclosure.
One Metric That Matters: Valuable information/time. See Information Theory.

Other Signal-to-Noise Parallels (9:00)

Music has lots of noise. 10 hours of music is uploaded every minute to Soundcloud and Youtube. 5000 albums are uploaded every week to Spotify.
How to determine signal? An input-output system with EveryNoiseAtOnce: 2D genre map with 1500 genres.
VC deal flow is another great example. How to get high quality deal flow at the right rate?

Information Layer (10:00)

Frameworks/lenses through which we view life. Explicitly define our self-authoring/self-transforming mind.
Example: Why, How, What.
Example: LEAN Canvas
Example: #LEANCanvas.Problem-AutomationCreativeDestructionExternality.Solution-UBI

UX Layer (13:00)

“There’s no GitHub for designers.”
“What are the ways that we can leverage the crowd to create UX experiences?”
Possible Early Adopters: 2D visuals—Max Roser, Nicky Case, Matt Daniels
Possible Early Adopters: Difference tables. See Linda Xie’s Beginner’s Guide to X and Nick Tomaino’s tables.

Incentivizing the Scaffold (17:00)

Problem: Beginners are not great early adopters in that they have less Importance, are further up the AARRR funnel, and therefore have less money/time to spend. This means they get targeted less.
Solve 1: Incentivize. When beginners consume, the creators of the scaffold (information or UX) get a “future” on that beginner’s future value. This aligns creator+consumer and allows for non-in-time value exchange.
Solve 2: Force microinteractions. Recaptcha digitizes books and trains ML image data while proving humanity (Duolingo does this for language). Stimergy — leave a trail behind you that helps the rest of your species, like ants do.
There’s no Khan Academy or Lynda for blockchain yet. No clear scaffold. “We can create a decentralized Khan Academy through stimergy as a decentralized mesh.”
An example of leaving a trail behind for future learners:

https://medium.com/@harrymclaverty/reverse-icos-the-soundcloud-exit-strategy-almost-no-one-is-talking-about-651f4ef1f88e

Coordinating Work

Duplicated Work and Transparency (22:00)

Lots of duplicated ICO aggregation work. Only public meta location is William Mougayar’s spreadsheet.
No right answer, i.e. it’s a gradient. Want to share more in outcomes, but don’t want a) To create value without getting money for it. b) For someone to get money without creating value. Let’s co-evolve!
“We have the ability to more accurately define complementary economic relationships.”

SharedOutcomeCoin Existing Examples (26:00)

Pre-token space: Platforms. Apps on the App Store are complements of each other. An app developer could buy Apple stock as an indicator of the complementary nature of apps.
LTBNetwork, Inside.com, Pledge 1%, self-imposed income-caps through Patreon (Scott Santens, Rhys Lindmark).
ETH and ConsenSys (as a psuedo Platform Co-op) building on the Ethereum protocol. See Julian Moncada’s article on VC’s JTBD.

Options for How Outcome-Based Coins Enter the Market (29:00)

We have lots of infrastructure for tracking money. Not as much infrastructure for tracking outcomes (RCT, A/B tests, etc.)—AliceSI from Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition.
Good outcome increases price of coin—Social Impact Coins. Like a Curation Market for Outcomes.
Good outcome rewards the “do-er” with coin—SolarCoin.

How Can We Fund “Coordinator” Jobs (33:00)

Beneficiaries. See Curation Clubs.
VAT. See CryptoUBI project Resilience.
“BitCoin is a SharedOutcomeCoin for the crypto space generally.”
SmartContractPlatformCoin for Ethereum, tezos, EOS.
“A SharedOutcomeCoin diminishes the impact of creative destruction externalities.”

What Would the Coordinator Job do with PodcastCoin? (36:00)

So many types of person-to-person content: Podcasts, mastermind/working groups (like POS working group with Vitalik+Vlad), meetups, remote talks, in-person conferences, and online conferences/webinars like 100xInvestors. A 2x3 of [1:1, 1:n, n:n]x[meatspace, cyberspace].
“If we have a coordinator job for the PodcastSharedOutcomeCoin, we can use the Gale-Shapley stable-matching algorithm to match podcasters to podcastees based on preference.”
We can start to get closer to a “continuous conference”.

Large “Overview” List Below. Here’s it in Google Doc form.

ICOs/Tokens

Reading Lists

For Beginners/Main News Outlets:

Overviews:

Emerging Stacks

Podcasts

Newsletters:

Wiki

Really weak currently. (See Simon de la Rouviere’s Tokenizing Wikipedia.)
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki
https://theethereum.wiki/w/index.php/Main_Page. Only 21 pages!

News Outlets:

Other

MOOC

Twitter Lists

Pretty bad, all things considered.
https://twitter.com/weratebitcoiner
http://jaypalter.ca/2016/04/top-blockchain-influencers/
https://twitter.com/simondlr/lists/blockchain

Reddit Lists

Slack Communities

https://blog.standuply.com/1000-slack-communities-part-5-7-d1987c647d14

Books

Developer-facing

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.