0x5d802e2f…1f16sent to0x6f3e6272…223d·#22,243,318·view on Etherscan
+1
> the forever problem of governance is that high quality governance is hard and painful (a lot of effort, skill, and brain damage involved) and as a result is in short supply.
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> companies solve this by allowing concentration of ownership and financial outcomes (large shareholders are motivated to elect the right management and go through the brain damage of corporate governance b/c they get the bulk of the financial outcome).
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> this doesn't quite work for nouns b/c culturally we reject the idea of a single person (or a few people) controlling the nouns treasury spending decision unilaterally and their motivation overwhelmingly being driven by personal financial profit.
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> that's reasonable imo. we would reject such a thing for our local city governance as well (nouns is more like a city than a company imo). but for city governance there's a degree of civic duty and lock in. when governance devolves too much (SF recently where I live), living conditions becomes unbearable and while many ppl leave (many tech ppl went to miami etc) at some point ppl like garry tan (who grew up on SF) that are never going to leave b/c it's their home and where their livelihood is built just start taking ownership b/c there's no other choice. city revenue is also raised through taxes. dues are collected from everyone and spent for everyone (though applied progressively) and it's forced.
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> i don't quite know how nouns governance is supposed to work long term. governance is hard and painful. you can't take over enough control of the governance to substantially privatize the financial gain b/c that would nuke the project. ppl aren't locked in and revenue isn't forced. i get why nouns could be a city ppl might love to live in. but would anyone pay to be involved in governance (something that is inherently hard and painful)?
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> i don't know the answer to this question. but what i do know is that any answer involves creating more leverage to ppl providing the scarce good governance. maybe they like nerding out about nouns. maybe they spent enough years and benefitted from nouns in one way or another and feel a sense of civic duty. maybe they are a nouns business and have some aligned financial incentive even if not a controlling amount. we need to take that which is given to us and SOMEHOW leverage that to govern the whole system effectively. prop house (token voting, gardeners, farcaster likes) attempted that but wasn't enough of an answer on its own. AI seems to be the only plausible new frontier to create leverage. if somehow we can determine who's providing the scarce good governance and train AI models to act on those inputs with infinite patience and attention, then maybe we have a chance. this seems to be where vitalik's thinking is going with regards to open source (public goods) funding as well.
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> another frontier is to reintroduce market mechanisms to aid portions of the governance decisions ("futarchy" is a buzz word ppl talk about which allows you to buy and sell each prop / governance decision). TCRs? revnets? to be honest i'm generally a bit more skeptical about this direction b/c i don't know if market mechanisms are really well suited for public funding decisions (so many pitfalls) but i do think it's a genuine additional frontier that we admittedly haven't explored much
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> this ended up being a super long rant but all of this is to say, i don't know the ins and outs of what's going on here but directionally i think it's exploring a super important meta problem of governance for nouns and given there aren't any projects more promising in this realm (and we're lucky to have someone as talented and earnest as rocketman leading it) i just think we need to let him cook