Too Long; Didn't Read
I discovered the idea of <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11222.html" target="_blank">Radical Markets</a> a few months ago through the brilliant talks of Microsoft Researcher Glen Weyl which are now captured in <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11222.html" target="_blank">the book of the same title</a>. Some of the concepts behind <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11222.html" target="_blank">Radical Markets</a> have permeated into the blockchain world as Vitalik Buterin <a href="https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/04/20/radical_markets.html" target="_blank">embraced the concept in a blog post</a>. Last week, Butterin and Weyl together with Harvard economist Zoë Hitzig <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3243656" target="_blank">published a paper</a> that explores many of the ideas of the Radical Markets theory a bit deeper. Titled, “<a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3243656" target="_blank">Liberal Radicalism: Formal Rules for a Society Neutral among Communities</a>,” the method enables groups to allocate funds for the maintenance of public goods and services without becoming vulnerable to traditional challenges such as the “free-rider” problem. Central to Buterin-Weyl thesis is the idea of Quadratic Voting(QV) as a mechanism to make decisions in societies. While the principles behind QV are mathematically appealing, I found them really hard to implement in the current generation of utility token protocols. However, I found QV incredibly relevant to the nascent space of security tokens.