Project summary
New definition of value.
Accounting for externalities, cobenefits, impact.
Full end-2-end accounting for cost of goods, products, services.
Universal evaluation engine.
What are this project's goals and how will you achieve them?
GOAL: Infrastructure towards post-capitalism.
Capitalism works but it works too well, obesity sickness addiction as a business model.
Fact: 17% of GDP in the US is healthcare (or rather "sickcare")
Fact: opioid epidemics, Purdue Pharma, Sackler family, 0.5m deaths
When we account for externalities it will become obvious that 0.5m deaths is definitely not OK.
Capitalism is here to stay, I cannot imagine those in power (with abundant resources) suddenly going away, relinquishing their position. I believe in the market forces and providing a new metric for value can meaningfully improve our chances of survival in the age of metacrisis, polycrisis, everything crisis.
Illustrative example, published by IMF (International Monetary Fund):
"If we then take the total value of the service provided by African forest elephants and divide it by their current population, we find that each elephant is responsible for service worth more than $1.75 million "
(I see a massive mismatch here)
How will you achieve it?
Check our beta: https://beta.basex.com
This is beta. Blockchain UI / UX could be better and we are still working on fixes to make the onboarding smoother.
FYI: Flow of operations:
Step 1️⃣ Create organization (one off)
Step 2️⃣ Create impact report
Step 3️⃣ Create evaluation of your report
We rely on Kleros (and their community of jurors) to fact check the reports.
FYI: Concrete use cases:
1️⃣ Farmer in India doing regenerative practices, improving soil quality, capturing CO2 from the atmosphere: that adds value but it's not appreciated in the current economic system, that farmer is too small to participate in the current carbon markets. Now they can report their impact to BaseX and be rewarded.
2️⃣ Shell doing fracking, injecting some stuff underground to extract oil. But that pollutes ground water, local people cannot drink water from the well. That is clearly a negative value, but it's legal and profitable. Someone can submit report and Shell will receive "negative value".
How will this funding be used?
Primary: Cover personal cost of living.
Secondary: If large enough: new hire for outreach, partnerships, biz dev, onboarding, community
Until now: completely self-funded, out of my pocket, bootstrapping, working towards developing demo / proof-of-concept / beta.
My personal financial situation is not ideal, slowly running out of funds, rather than looking for a job in the middle of a recession (downsizing, rightsizing, layoffs, very few organizations hiring), I genuinely believe that a much better ROI on my time is to look for grants / impact investment.
Hashtag: “burn the boats” 🔥🔥🔥
Who is on your team and what's your track record on similar projects?
Currently it is me + part time developer from Romania.
Myself: 10+ years career in IT, some startup experience
TOP 3% on Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/users/775359/mars-robertson
Greg from Romania: https://github.com/GregTrifan
We have experience with coding and building products. I’m currently actively participating in YC Co-founder matching platform: https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching mostly to boost our ability with go-to-market, partnerships, and scaling.
What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)
1. Me running out of personal funds, quitting in order to join some corporate wageslave job - hopefully you'll not allow me to do it.
2. Difficulty in explaining the product, blockchain, incentives, flow of operations. On the upside - people in the climate space understand the problem instantly, I do not need to do any explaining.
What other funding are you or your project getting?
No other funding.
Applied here: https://github.com/filecoin-project/devgrants/issues/1642
(awaiting feedback / decision)
Why Forecasting and EA community as categories?
They are the closest, the most aligned with what we do.
Forecasting
Not strictly BUT…
Measuring. Evaluating. Related-ish.
EA community
Not strictly BUT…
EA is all about measuring and data: "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis"
We provide tooling for EA to be more effective in evaluating impact.
•••••
Despite not fitting into any of the categories perfectly, we genuinely believe that the BaseX deserves a place on the Manifund.
Why do incentives matter?
We shape the tools, then the tools shape us.
We shape the laws, then the laws shape us.
We shape the incentives, then the incentives shape us.
Examples of bad incentives:
One cannot have health in a system that profits from sickness.
One cannot have peace in a system that profits from war.
One cannot have enlightenment in a system that profits from ignorance.
One cannot have educated, well-informed voters in a system that profits from fake news.
Incentives are the main driving force of humankind.
We are wired for survival, our instincts allow individual organisms to survive.
In order for humanity to survive, we need to change the incentives, change the system.
BaseX is one of the best chances for humanity to survive (maybe we should apply for “Global catastrophic risks” category as well) because it can evaluate for value, impact, externalities, cobenefits in a genuine, honest, transparent way.
Do you have anything else to add?
Please check our video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SAiiMqyTT0 (6m37s)
Google Slides
Contact
And of course I will be responsive in the comments in case you have any questions 🌱