ideamarket.io: decentralize trust and attention for the world

Hello, this is the Library of Creations, where we simply share creations of the mind.

This article is about ideamarket.io

If you prefer the video version, here is the link for that.

If you do a bit of research, you’ll see several different definitions for Ideamarket. For example:

You may be thinking this sounds similar to BitClout. Well, the CEO disagrees, here’s a link to a twitter thread he made about that.

So, all these definitions give you a taste of what idea market is, but there’s so many pieces to this puzzle that it can be a little confusing, especially if you’re missing a piece. Sometimes concepts can’t be explained easily with one sentence.

The plan is to use the rest of this article to explain everything going on with this idea in a clear manner.

Again, What is ideamarket.io, what does it do?

Well, there’s 3 simple avenues of thought:

1. The perspective of a creator
2. The perspective of an investor
3. The ideology behind the project

Perspective of a Creator

I’ll start from a functionality perspective. You, the person looking at this screen, what can you do on Ideamarket?

Well, you can create your own market by listing yourself. You can kind of think of this like you’re turning yourself into a crypto token.

Then, anyone can buy your token. Anytime someone buys your token, the money is locked in a smart contract at compound.finance, a decentralized lending service.

That deposit earns interest and gets paid to the owner of the token. So, if you have people investing in you, then you also have a passive income.

The more value you offer the world, the more people will invest in the fact that you are valuable.

No corrupt centralized power decides who is trusted or who gets attention, the people of Earth collectively decide. It is a risk for them to invest money into a person or idea, so they are incentivized to only invest in people or ideas that are truly valuable.

It’s also important to mention that not just people can be listed and invested in. Organizations, ideas, and DAOs can all be listed and invested in too, each coming with their own complexities of course.

Paywalls will be a thing of the past. Creators don’t need to charge $5 per month for people to unlock their content. They can offer their content free and then if it is valuable, they will earn income from their listing on Ideamarket.

Perspective of an Investor

Now, what about if you’re an investor?

Well, an important term for both creators and investors is the micro-cap effect. This is when speculators are looking for big return on investment. They look for risky, small, undervalued tokens to buy.

In the long-run, hype is not really a good thing, but on Ideamarket this incentivizes people to give early-stage creators an income to see if they got what it takes to offer value to the world.

Imagine some musician that is super talented posting YouTube videos every week, but just can’t get any views. The micro-cap effect could get them seen and start them towards a future where they can do what they love for a living. Meanwhile, the people that invested early-on into that creator’s market will hodl and watch as the gains come in.

So, Ideamarket gives investors a way to:

1. Potentially make money
2. Support people or ideas

Investing into a listing on Ideamarket is just like any other investment. Get in and out at the right time and you make money, get in and out at the wrong time and you lose money

Maybe it’s deeper than just money for some investors. Buying the token of a listing is a great way to support that idea or person. It can also be a good way to give further proof that some idea or person is worthy of attention or trust.

For example, imagine you have strong philosophical beliefs that love is very important in society. Then, it may be a good idea to buy tokens of the podcaster Lex Fridman since he is a strong proponent of love and the value it brings to pretty much everything.

Ideology Behind the Project

Now that you understand Ideamarket and how it works functionally, let’s get a bit more philosophical.

The basic idea behind Ideamarket is to decentralize trust and attention. Centralized powers currently monopolize these two scarce resources.

For example: Facebook, news outlets, and government are all powerful centralized entities that have massive power over trust and attention, oftentimes without people even knowing it.

On the trust side, they have their own fact checking that they force onto people. If you question these “facts”, then there are potential negative consequences for you, typically in the social domain.

On the attention side, all these powerful groups have algorithms or other methods that control everything you see.

Not to say these are inherently bad, but the centralized power inevitably leads to corruption and abuse. Sometimes it creates situations where it’s Group A’s facts vs Group B’s facts. Sometimes it just leads to people wasting all their time pointlessly lost in the algorithm.

With Ideamarket, trust and attention-worthiness is decided by the market. You can think of the market as a ton of people who trust something so much that they are willing to risk their money that this thing or person is trustworthy and attention-worthy.

This is exactly why Ideamarket will make fake news expensive. Ideamarket has a browser extension that displays community-backed credibility for all to see. Download this extension and an icon will appear on Twitter posts showing the price of that entity’s token and their ranking out of all the markets.

Groups that spread fake news will inevitably start losing attention based on the collective. This will incentivize good, valuable news and other forms of content.

Some side notes that are also important

• Anyone can list anything on Ideamarket. Once the idea is listed, any invested money will automatically start accruing interest based on the amount invested. However, to claim a listing requires verification. But wouldn’t that be cool to be listed by someone and then you discover Ideamarket and randomly just have all this passive income you didn’t even know about.
• The first 1,000 tokens for each listing cost $0.10 each. Token price automatically increases by $0.01 for each 100 tokens bought afterward, managed by a bonding curve algorithm.

Possible Future Scenarios

It is important to note that many of the ideas discussed are an overview. It’s possible that this concept of an Ideamarket will sprout many more concepts on top of it.

One thing I’d really like to see, is some sort of option where a claimed account can easily decide between several options for how the funding of their market works. Specifically, I’d love to see an option that allows the token owner to provide the token holders with dividends. So, the token owner accrues interest based on how much is invested and maybe they can optionally give a percent of that back to the holders, incentivizing investment and a sustainable economy.

I can definitely see that and several other future scenarios happening. For example, since anything can be listed as a market, I could see ideas as simple as love being listed. Maybe there will be a system created that decentralizes the claimer of this idea, so no one person owns it. And similar to the idea earlier, anyone that invests into it can hold to earn dividends. This could be a way of showing what ideologies are most valued in the world. Maybe this is a bit farfetched, but maybe not.

Ideamarket could disrupt the startup world. Organizations could get their initial investment from listing themselves on Ideamarket and if they continue to add real value to the world, the market will continue providing them liquidity. I imagine that would be a much better funding model for organizations like Wikipedia, instead of the annoying in-your-face “please give us donations” that they always do.

Summary

To summarize, Ideamarket is going to provide a platform:

1. For creators or other entities to make a living off of while sharing their value
2. For investors to make money and support people or ideas
3. For decentralizing trust and attention and all the complexities that come with it

If you’d like to learn about more creations of the mind, feel free to follow us here on Medium or over on YouTube and we’ll see you next time!