🔥
Austin's Notes
☄️

People Stock

‣
Possible taglines
  • Invest in people, not corps.
  • Directly invest in creators!
  • Who's the next Elon Musk?
  • Fantasy football without the football
  • Issue upside anywhere (1-2-3 upside)

TLDR

A stock exchange where you can invest in individual people.

Inspirations & prior art

‣
CityCoins: https://www.citycoins.co/citycoins-faq
  • Also sourced from Vitalik
  • Stacking vs Staking:
    • Both are ways to lock/invest your coins to gain more in the future
    • Staking ETH earns you ETH
    • Stacking STX earns BTC; stacking MIA earns STX
‣
Harberger Tax: Assess value of item that you have, and pay a tax; anyone can bid out and then you have to sell
‣
Incentive Share Agreements
  • https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/life-capital
    • ‣
    Quote: Not enough supply (because accredited investors?)

    Fintech company Upstart initially launched with a model of “crowdfunding for education”. However, they eventually pivoted to offering traditional loans when they realized that their initial model was simply not viable.

    Why? Not enough supply.

    The fact that only accredited investors (over $1m in net worth) could invest severely limited the total potential funders on the site. And yet, while Upstart never got enough traction (they pivoted successfully), they paved the way for a platform like it to eventually be built.

    • Though: dubious, it's possible other causes of failure were not included.
    • Warning: pivoted back to traditional loans
  • Back to Matt Levine's Junior & Senior claims:
    • Senior claims on an individual look like loans
    • Junior claims on an individual: ...? ISA!
      • Right now, all upside in an individual is owned by the individual
      • People who wouldn't be interested in providing loans might be interested in buying equity
    • Does income share include capital gains?
      • If not: can bypass by investing earnings into capital and not taking a profit
    • Components of an individual:
      • current net worth (cash on hand)
      • Salary (revenue)
      • Expenses
      • Future earning potential?
    • Default risk? Scam risk?
🎯
BitClout Research

Questions

  • What are the valuations of the stock tied to?
  • How are the people compensated for being represented by the stock?
  • What happens if the person wants to issue more stock? I.e. dilution
  • Mechanically, how do people claim the ownership of a stock?
    • Ethereum Name Service?
    • Crypto Wallet Address? That people link to on Twitter/Youtube/Twitch pages?
    • Is there a central authority doing validation? Could it be automatic?
      • Automatic: Scan twitter's about page for a person.eth link

‣
Research question: what does the crypto space look like for investors? E.g. how do VCs put their money into DAOs?
  • What's the playbook for a crypto & investment startup already?
‣
Research question: who's the target user?
  • Professional investors with a lot of money and time?
  • Bored players sitting on the internet wanting to make a quick dime?
    • r/WSB?
    • c.f. Matt Levine "boredom markets hypothesis"
  • GenZ-ers without money looking to turn their insight into hard cash?
  • People who get excited about prediction markets? e.g. Zvi, LessWrong
  • Current cryptokitties/etc speculators?
‣
Research question: How do existing exchanges work?

Do I need to build an exchange?

Schwab: Dollars are the local store of value. Gives access to complex financial option things though.

Coinbase: Just buy/sell on dollars as well. Allow you to send your crypto to others

FTX: Exchange through markets with a swap (aka BTC / USD)

  • Who owns the coins? Do you plug in your wallet, or does the exchange manage it?
  • Coinbase manages a wallet for me, I think...

Learnings

  • Oracle: a thing that a contract can ask for prices. Nothing to do with the "future", but rather the "truth" or the "real world".
  • "Decentralized Autonomous Organization" = Anarchist company
  • Lots of interesting financial models:
    • Cryptokids auction: deprecating price over the course of a day

Extensions

  • Basket of stock (ETF)
    • And then the ability to buy into other people's basket of stock
  • Public listing of who you and your respected people follow (traverse the twitter graph)
  • Stock buyback?

Names

  • Flock
  • Maker Stock
  • Creator Stock
  • Stock for Everyone
  • Viral Market
  • View Market
  • Stock View
  • Mememarket
  • Popularity Contest
  • Beaukey Contest

Hackathon ideas

  • Real blockchain vs simulated blockchain
    • If real: Solana vs Eth
  • Bootstrapping on an existing network?
    • Twitter? Youtube? TikTok?
    • Bet on which videos are going to go viral??
      • Bet on which URLs?
        • This seems pretty good and straightforward!
    • Can have bots daily adding supply and buying, in the beginning
    • URLs = wide; but instead could be a narrow market
  • Initial gold rush: trying to capture the underpriced things with views
    • How to resolve the cold start problem? Aka who mints the first NFT?
      • Maybe everything just has a base buy-in rate, shrug
      • What about users signing on?
        • Can initially grant people X dollars, maybe you'd get bandwagoning but shrug who cares
  • Gamifying "recent purchases"
    • Ape robinhood?
  • Maybe URLs is v0, and then people issuing on-platform are v1
  • Prediction market for virality
  • Free tier & crypto tier

Notes

🚡
Crypto Dev Notes
🏜️
People Stock v0
🎛️
Solana dev notes

User Research

April 2024
Today
Sun
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
31
Apr 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
May 1
2
3
4

Want 1-2 partners at most

Also:

  • Legal/regulatory/financial background...?
  • VisD sense?
  • Meme sense?

Criticisms

  • Most people don't spend that much time or thought on their personal investment profiles. Pretty math-nerdy thing to do
  • Internet activity tends to be "free" or "expensive" — micropayments may not make sense because "free" translates to implied attention or favor costs. See behavioral economics research on "watch over my cat" vs "watch over my cat, and I'll pay you 40 cents"
    • So micropayments on eg email sending could be really weird
    • Note: Most referral programs are like "give $10 and get $10", but in practice they turn out to be "word of mouth. oh now that you're convinced, how about use my link, save a bit"
      • So may not counterfactually move too many users...?