Monetizing Your Attention: Introducing Persona Attention Bonds
At the end of 2013, I penned down a post, stating that I think in the future everyone will have their own digital currency. I’ve been working with tokenization on Ethereum for the past year and a half and constantly think about how we can bring such a future to fruition in a meaningful way. There’s this feeling that we will somehow manage to build a system where networks of value will be newly capitalised. They won’t fit into a normal design of an organisation, or a normal design of shares/equity (not necessarily). I’ve been inspired by projects like Mike Merril’s personal IPO. I do also believe that in order to unlock *new* value in a new world where the idea of jobs and “earning a living” will disappear due to automation, we need to think differently about what we unlock. Simply doing shares in a person + allowing said shareholders to receive dividend from personal income seems like solving the problem with old-school thinking.
Recently, I’ve been thinking of ways to collect some different form of value, besides money or just another token. One of the more interesting ideas is that in age of abundance, our time and thus attention is the most valuable asset. Maciej Olpinksi has written about the attention economy in relation to blockchain tech and similarly inspired me to think about ways to monetize that.
From Maciej:
I believe that we’re heading towards the future where financial graph and the attention graph (web link graph, social graph etc) will be embedded into the same blockchain based system.
By attaching the graphs closer together we can more directly eke out novelty in abundance. My master’s research was on information overload and thus this idea is also interesting in terms of optimising the signal/noise ratio.
Thus, I want to introduce something new that aims to solve some of these problems we face:
- Monetizing one’s personal influence & network.
- Optimizing signal/noise ratio in the age of abundance.
The solution manifests as a Persona Attention Bond.
A persona (a person, a pseudonym, a collective, a company, etc) can issue Persona Attention Bonds (PABs) in exchange for funds.
In return for buying these PABs, the holders accrue interest in the form of voting coupons, used to vote for the attention of the PAB issuer. Instead of receiving interest in money, the bondholders receive interest in attention.
Voting coupons, once earned, can be spent voting on a list of content, implying that the voter wishes this persona to see this content. Voters can vote on any content, new or old. To submit and vote on the content, one needs the voting coupons, minted from holding the specific persona’s attention bonds.
The persona then comes in (whenever they can), leave feedback/comments on the content, and marks them as done (as having been seen).
PABs accrue in value if:
1) the attention of the persona is valuable.
2) the persona gives good feedback on the content its bondholders want it to see.
3) the persona would sometimes use their extended social network to distribute some of the content (reposting content on Twitter or Facebook).
Over time, the persona can issue different kinds of PABs. For example:
- PABs with higher coupon rate accrual (more votes per dormancy)
- PABs related to specific content (not generic attention)
- Economies of scale: Locking more PABs together yields higher voting coupons.
- Perpetual issuance PABs (automatically new bonds up for auction every week).
An implementation of a sample generic PAB:
If one buys 1 PAB and provably hold it dormant for a week, one accrues 1 voting coupon.
10 PABs for 1 week and one accrues 10 voting coupons.
Each collection of PABs need to be locked in its own state. If one acquires new PABs whilst others are minting voting coupons, one has to unlock them, and relock them together.
The voting coupons can also be traded. Once spent, they are destroyed.
The bonds, coupons and markets will all be built on Ethereum: a world computer powered through blockchain technology. It will be an open, and open source platform for monetizing the attention of the networks around us.
Good idea? Bad idea? Keen to discuss? Email us at [email protected]
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I’m the Engineer of Societies at ConsenSys. We are building out the future of decentralized applications.