Prize-based public goods funding as a potential distribution allocation mechanism

[apriori]

Is this similar to a bounty system?

@cwgoes

Committing tokens to a prize ahead of time creates an incentive for various agents in the broader ecosystem/market to develop solutions aimed at the prize objective, without the governance mechanism needing to know up front how precisely these solutions will be developed.

This is a hard problem. Does any of the Schelling test thinking overlap here, using attestations for determining “who contributed to what”?

@cwgoes

Evaluation methodologies could become quite intricate, and determining “who contributed what” to a major research or product advance is a very non-trivial problem.

Is this thinking in line, or am I off base here:

• It seems you would need to be able to keep the identities private of institutions and individuals who receive funding to make this work. Otherwise, you run into the problem of funding a prize where there are only a fixed set of individuals / orgs who can credibly complete the objective. This would mean you know in advance (within reason) who you are funding. ZPrize would be an example.
• However, in an environment where identities are only cryptographic keys, then there is reasonable doubt that the agent who wins the prize is not even in the perceived set of qualified individuals.