Viewpoints | Thought Experiments on "Aggressive Market" and the Battle of the Epidemic

At 10:00 on January 26th, the 45th BlockMania AMA broadcast continued. BlockMania is committed to bringing the deepest awareness and thinking of the blockchain industry to the industry and the public. Welcome other communities to cooperate with us to create a connection of ideas. And amplifier.

The theme of this issue is "Aggressive Markets and Public Health" . The guests are Kojima, CEO of Andromeda Technology, and Hu Yuqing, translator of "Aggressive Markets".

The starting point for writing Aggressive Market is a series of new challenges in today's world. Although the global economy has grown in recent decades, and the gap between countries has narrowed, inequality within countries has increased, and society Divergences and divisions with politics are also getting worse-the liberal market economy that once pride the Western world, especially the United States, is facing an unprecedented crisis. The authors are young economist Glen Weyl and jurist Eric A. Posner.

The book is divided into five chapters, each of which proposes a "radical" approach in a different field.

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The first chapter proves that private property is monopolistic in nature, and proposes a common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) to break the monopoly control of private property by owners and overcome the inefficiency of public ownership. So as to achieve the complete allocation efficiency of resources.

The second chapter puts forward quadratic voting (QV), which overcomes the problems of "most people's tyranny" under "one person, one vote". QV allows minorities to express their aspirations in a more influential way. In addition, the author also showed the application prospects of QV in other fields, such as combining with cryptocurrency to improve the rating system in business.

Chapter III proposes a VIP new immigration policy, which advocates that citizens of any host country can guarantee immigration at any time and get economic benefits from it, thereby politically alleviating the resistance to immigration.

Chapter 4 proposes that the law can limit the diversification of investment institutions within the industry, but can encourage diversification between industries. Such an approach would free the market's freedom and competitiveness from the control of investment institutions.

Chapter 5 advocates treating these data as a kind of labor achievement, treating the data generation process as a work with dignity, and giving users corresponding compensation. In this way, people will be fortunate to be the data providers that drive the operation of the digital economy, so that they can build a more fair and equal society, and stimulate technological progress and economic growth.

The following is a review of the guest's AMA content:

The topics I share today consist of three main areas: the first part will briefly review the main content of the book of the radical market; the second part introduces the recent epidemic situation to introduce how the aggressive market can suppress the spread of false news; the third part will introduce the current There are specific practices in the methodology mentioned in the radical market book.

When referring to "radical markets", the first thing to explain is the word "radical". From the perspective of etymology, the meaning of the word "Radical" is the root of tracing things. "Aggressive market" means: to trace the root cause of the market to improve economic efficiency, and to reform the market with a more radical concept.

The first chapter is one of the most subversive ideas in the book-the market for goods and services: self-assessment tax on public ownership; also known as the Hubble tax, which some readers also call the “broken off” promotion tax. It means to deny the private property rights of individuals by definition, and let everyone value the property they own, and pay taxes regularly based on their own pricing. Through this mechanism, the means of production can be better circulated in the market.

From Chapter One we can see the meaning of "radical market". Private property is sacred and inviolable, which was originally a basic prerequisite for a market economy. In this book, Glen disputes this axiom. Therefore, the radical market is using the "right" approach of economics to achieve the "left" goal, that is, the so-called right in and left out.

The second chapter is the square voting method, which is also the most widely used mechanism design in the field. Whether it is the US state government's voting on public policy, the score of the hackathon, or the crowdfunding quota on Gitcoin, this method is used. .

Some time ago, the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik also published an article in his blog to summarize the latest applications in this field, namely Quadratic Funding. Those interested can read this: https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html

Chapter 3 introduces the labor market, which is a personally sponsored visa program. We know that after 9/11, US visa policy has been tightened. It happened before at the RSA conference that the visa of the named scientist was checked and there was no way to attend the academic conference. This is even more common for multinational IT companies. As a digression, one of the main reasons why I left my job at Google and invested in the blockchain startup is that I have been unable to obtain a work visa for the United States.

In this book, Glen Weyl proposes that the market can decide on the issuance of visas. Visas are issued by foreign workers who are guaranteed by individual citizens (not companies). Citizens earn between the value created by foreign workers and the wages paid to them. The difference, and citizens must also bear possible losses. Through the adjustment of the market mechanism, the process of visa issuance is made more efficient.

The fourth chapter introduces the capital market-diversified investment 1% share limit, and introduces how to decompose large companies and giants through mechanism design, so as to suppress the occurrence of monopoly. Large-scale funds actually control multiple companies in the same industry may lead to collusion among companies. If funds diversify their investments in the same industry, they must not hold more than 1% of their shares. The fund is still allowed to hold a large number of shares of only one company in a certain industry, or to make diversified investments across industries.

Chapter 5 introduces the data market, the right to ask for data for a fee. This chapter is also the most important chapter in the whole book, and I have read it many times. The basic idea is that the inequality of the Internet today is because Internet giants are getting low-quality data from users for free and dumping their products back to users through these data, while ordinary users are acting as free Data labor. The aggressive market believes that they should open up their interfaces to ask users for data in order to improve data quality. Let all participants benefit from the market.

To sum up, the nature of the radical market is that there are various frictions in the market, which include: market power, externalities, information asymmetry, distorted incentives, uncertainty and risk, budget constraints, and so on. The goal of the radical market is to creatively design the mechanism to achieve the best results in a suboptimal situation. For this we need to leave the "comfort zone" of ethics and law and let technology play a role in it. That's why Vitalik and Glen Wyle hit it off.

Let's talk about the epidemic in the next section. A very important reason for the epidemic to spread from the city to the surrounding provinces from the very beginning was negligence in the early stage caused by fake news and panic in the later stage. In a recent article, Fang Kecheng mentioned: To fight the pneumonia epidemic, we need not only masks but also high-quality information ( https://www.matataki.io/p/1981 ). But fake news is naturally easier to spread, and panic causes some patients who are not originally infected to get together and go to the hospital, which causes cross infection and intensifies the spread of the epidemic to a certain extent.

So how can we design a mechanism to more effectively suppress the spread of fake news?

Some time ago, Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, made a request on Twitter:

Vitalik proposes to use "quadruple voting" to screen out articles that are accurate and worth reading a year ago, as well as a matching prediction market to predict the results of this vote one year later. Among them, the second-party voting is the content of Radical Democracy, the second chapter of the radical market, and the latter has a longer history and applications.

The last chapter of the 2006 book Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, published by Cass R. Sunstein, described why prediction markets are more effective than traditional mechanisms. Including the Hubble tax mentioned in the radical market, it can also be regarded as a prediction market in a broad sense. The combination of these two is a mechanism design, in line with what we mentioned earlier about the definition of a radical market: creatively designing mechanisms to achieve optimal results in suboptimal situations.

Whether it is quadratic voting or predicting the market, smart contracts can play an important role in it. For details, see the prediction market on Augur.

In addition to the design of the mechanism, blockchain and aggressive markets can also play a role from another perspective. This is not to say that one should be issued, a news coin, or a disaster relief coin (this is highly useless). A Slogan of the blockchain says: Don't trust, always verify. This is not only the algorithm of miners when processing blocks, but also our way of life. When we receive the information, pictures and videos from the circle of friends, we should also do Don't trust and verify. For example, at this year's Taiwan elections, there were websites where netizens made a fact check to examine the evidence one by one. Each sentence of the candidate was correct, which was wrong, and which was not accurate enough. The dissemination of news should also have a mechanism that allows us to find its source and verify it. Unfortunately, most of today's traffic occurs on WeChat and Weibo. The design of these products is to weaken and resist the early traditional hyperlinks on the Internet. And let all pictures and videos spread in groups without context. Even real videos will be enlarged in the end and distorted into false news that people want to believe, which intensified the spread of panic to a certain extent.

How can the aggressive market help us to achieve this final Verify? In fact, the answer is exactly in Chapter 5. We need to provide not only the right to ask for paid data, but also the right to pay for verifying data. Through the design of the mechanism, the producers of data are motivated, so as to produce higher-quality, contextual first-hand data. By doing this, we can better help the spread of the news and eliminate the truth. Each of us is not only a producer of data, but also a reporter, thus ensuring that the public has an equal right to information and participation.

Finally, let's take a look at the contents of these five chapters, and what specific examples are there.

First of all, for the first chapter, it is the ideal and the most difficult place to use the tax break promotion because it is difficult to practically deny the property rights of individuals, and the value of the same entity to different individuals may not be the same, especially For public goods. For example, if it is a domain name, a hacker can take the domain name and design a phishing website to attack. Therefore, the current tax break promotion tax is still being tested in a very small range, such as some online artworks; and Internet billboards, which is also a very suitable scene. Defi.wtf, which we held at the Ethereum Developers Conference in Osaka before, used this mechanism to sell billboards to sponsors ( https://www.defi.wtf/ ).

QV in Chapter 2 is where most discussions and applications have been made, and Vitalik's article has made a very good summary.

The third citizen sponsored visa has not yet been applied by any country. It may be applied in places such as Rojava (Northern Syria), but Rojava has also proven to have failed. There is a book called "Stern Moon" which is an undergraduate fantasy novel. It is about the moon where a group of criminals are exiled to establish their own utopia. Perhaps the citizen guarantee visa is most likely to be realized on the moon first. Nonsense).

Group of friends: The theory of tax break promotion is based on the assumption that any property has an efficient market and can be traded. This assumption is totally unreasonable in practice, so the tax itself is an empty talk

Kojima: Yes, most of them are still in thought experiments.

Four, as far as I know, there is no specific application.

The progress of the five is more. First, the emergence of privacy projects such as Maskbook to protect individuals from encrypting data. The purpose is to guide data workers to strike, thereby establishing unions and negotiating with big giants. They use the path of the "Left"; Who Roll, and projects like Matataki that we are working on, are trying to realize the data market by letting individuals price their data and using the "right" approach. The current progress of the overseas community is relatively active. For details, please read my summary article .

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