Puja Ohlhaver: Why Community Currencies Are Crucial for Governance in DeSoc

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In the digital networked age, people’s attention often overlooks local problems in favour of global ones, which don’t necessarily impact them in their daily lives, or over which they don’t have a say due to the skewed Pareto distribution of power in modern day societies. Puja Ohlhaver, in her recent research paper ‘Community currencies’, proposes a dual-currency model that prices attention and influence in each community, with the ultimate goal of creating a Gaussian distribution of power, either locally, or globally through the dynamic interaction of multiple local communities. This model allows community members to stake their currency to earn non-transferable governance rights, creating a substrate for decentralised societal coordination that favours social innovation.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Puja’s background
• Web3 research
• ‘Community currencies’
• Pareto vs. Gaussian distributions
• Global vs. local power distributions
• The community currencies model
• Meritocracy vs. influence
• Quadratic funding
• Governance, bribery and the crisis of legitimacy
• Experimenting with community currencies

Episode links:

• Puja Ohlhaver on X
• 'Community Currencies' Research Paper
• 'Decentralized Society' Research Paper

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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.