Blockchain of Opinions

In the coming weeks, we’ll be launching the world’s first decentralized information curation network.

You could call it “distributed proof-of-stake for information governance, backed by $IMO.” 👀

But we call it the Blockchain of Opinions. To explain…

It has 3 main parts:

Posts are like Tweets — they let you share your thoughts. Posts are Ideamarket-native NFTs designed to become cultural artifacts as influential people rate them (like a baseball signed by many MLB players), and you will be able to sell your posts on OpenSea. Therefore, posts with the most potential for cultural impact are best.

Ratings allow you to rate Posts on a scale of 1-100, on-chain. Ratings create a permanent track record of public opinion. When the next crisis hits, we’ll be able to see who had good judgment in the past, using data science instead of vague memories (Example: “Display all users who rated [COVID is coming to America] above [90] before [February 15, 2020]”). You can edit any rating at any time, but the history of your edits will be on-chain.

Staking allows you to add weight to a user’s ratings by backing their account with $IMO. The more $IMO staked on someone’s account, the more their rating affects a post’s Composite Rating — the big blue number on the homepage. Think of this as a fun way to hodl your $IMO and put intellectual capital behind people at the same time. To load up, buy $IMO on SushiSwap (Arbitrum).

Important: Staking involves no capital losses or gains. Staking just increases the curation power of the users you trust. (Eventually, staking may give stakers shared income from Bounties, also denominated in $IMO.)

The new homepage will show “the most confident opinions, of the most trusted users.”

All together, it looks like this:

There’s a lot more to it, but we’ll let you discover that on launch day. 😉

Launch partners

We’ve onboarded some renegade intellectuals to get things started off right. Here are just a few:

Nick Hinton (117,000 followers) — Inventor of Randonauts, author
Conor White-Sullivan (39,000 followers) — Founder of Roam Research
Braden Lockwood (38,000 followers) — PyramidRealm
DruTang (35,000 followers) — Misinformation researcher
Justin Murphy (25,000 followers) — Founder of IndieThinkers / Otherlife.co
Deep Prasad (18,000 followers) — Quantum computing founder, UFO researcher
MetaNomad (13,000 followers) — Host of the Hermitix podcast, a top-20 philosophy podcast in the UK & Canada
PsyClops (12,000 followers) — Decipherer of occult meme magic

To back one of these guys on launch day, buy $IMO on SushiSwap (Arbitrum).

What about the old version?

We are retiring the existing markets, including URL and Twitter-User markets. You’ll be able to sell your holdings from your Wallet page.

Why?

If you’re in our Discord, you’ll recognize most of this from our March 25th pinned message in #general:

1. The bonding curve, as it is now, is far too advantageous for the first buyer. The first buyer takes practically no risk, and the second buyer takes a huge risk — the risk that the first buyer might dump on them.

2. Therefore, nobody wants to be the second buyer (let alone the 500th) of any listing.

The fundamental economics of Ideamarket need revision. The solution may take months to build and require an extensive audit before deploying. That’s one reason why we’re launching the marketless Blockchain of Opinions experiment in the short-term.

If you staked to get $IMO rewards, it’s extremely likely you will still have net gains. But the awkwardness of this “reset” is a major reason our upcoming experiment does not involve market dynamics. Markets turned out to be harder to get right on the first try than I had thought. Going forward, the entire community will be involved in asset design, including pros like Jan Baeriswyl of Outlier Ventures.

If you feel unfairly affected by this decision, consider this: If we had failed instead, the market would still have shut down, and people would still have sold their holdings. What happened instead: we built something new, and the $IMO you got from the retroactive airdrop, or from URL locking, put you in on the ground floor.

If you still feel unfairly affected, I’ve set up a dedicated #grievances channel in discord where we can talk about it. Listening to painful truths is a core part of Ideamarket’s ethos on a social scale, and I want to practice it on a personal scale too.

URL locking rewards 5/3

The third and final installment of URL locking rewards from the IMO launch will be distributed tomorrow, May 3.

Our vision moving forward

Ideamarket builds experiments in decentralized common knowledge. We launch experiments, not products. We still believe markets will play an important role — we’re just approaching the task of creating a new asset class with more humility.

Onward! 🚀
—Mike

Buy $IMO on SushiSwap (Arbitrum).

Ideamarket.io

🚀 Soon: Blockchain of Opinions (Important…