Bodhi: An experiment to solve the problems of content incentives and public goods fundraising

The content industry has never been a big industry.

If you look at the Fortune 500, how many of them produce content? There are only 4 of them.

It's weird.

Humans are a spirit animal. We don't just live in the physical world, we live in the spiritual world created for each other: stories, music, movies, and games. It is with these works that we have been able to get through difficult times.

The content industry was supposed to be the most important industry for humanity, but it didn't. Because there are some important issues that need to be addressed, the two main ones are: distribution and incentives.

"Distribution" refers to how the content reaches its audience. Web2 companies, such as Facebook and TikTok, have done a great job of solving distribution problems, whether through social networks or through AI recommendations, and are constantly improving their algorithms.

However, "incentives" remain an unresolved issue. Bodhi was created for this purpose.

issue

Motivation is about creating something of value and getting something back from it. This reward can be social (views and likes) or economic (making money).

People have figured out many ways to make money with content, such as adding sponsors to content or selling merchandise.

But these methods have their thresholds, because it requires you to be not only a creator, but also a businessman.

And what about ads, or pay-to-watch, aren't they good enough?

Take the adult industry, for example, because adult content has universal and easily measurable value. If we can't even make money on adult content, then our current system is fundamentally problematic.

Before the advent of Onlyfans, creators on Pornhub earned only $0.6 per 1000 plays.

Why is it so low? Because advertisers are reluctant to advertise on adult sites. This is also one of the problems with the advertising model: advertisers will pick the content and the audience. Content that viewers find valuable is not necessarily valuable to advertisers.

When subscription-based Onlyfans appeared, creators' earnings increased significantly.

However, Onlyfans isn't the perfect scheme either. Understanding the limitations of Onlyfans is key to understanding the issue of content incentives.

The problem with Onlyfans is this: it reduces the value that content creates for the world.

• On Pornhub, your content can be consumed by 100,000 people, creating a lot of value but giving you little in return.
• On Onlyfans, you may have 100 subscribers who each pay you $9.9 per month, which increases your income. But the problem is that the whole "cake" has shrunk – only 100 people see your content, which drastically reduces the value it creates for the world.

Getting a bigger piece of a smaller pie is never the best solution. The ideal solution should be to make the cake bigger and get a reasonable part of it.

Dig into the problem

Behind this question, there is a deeper problem:

The cost of replicating information is zero, but our economic system is not designed for goods with zero marginal cost.

Take, for example, buying and selling apples: when you buy one of my apples for a dollar, you lose a dollar and get an apple, and I lose an apple and get a dollar. This is exactly what our economic system was designed to do – to exchange physical goods.

However, things change when trading information (e.g., articles, music, videos). Information can be copied indefinitely. In such an exchange, finite resources (money) are used in exchange for something that can be replicated infinitely at zero cost.

This creates a fundamental conflict that is at the root of many problems: piracy, the difficulty of motivating creators, and the aforementioned "shrinking pie" dilemma.

New avenues

With the advent of crypto, the space for solving the incentive problem has been expanded. We can design a different transaction model from "buying" to solve problems that cannot be solved by traditional economic systems.

By building such a model at a very basic level (in the protocol), upper-layer applications and users can focus on their respective work without worrying about incentives.

Let's get back to the problem we started with: incentivizing valuable content.

This problem can be split into two sub-questions:

1. How to identify the value of content
2. How to provide incentives

How to identify the value of content

One thing is for sure: we can't measure the value of the content itself. The value of content is determined by its consumers.

The same article may be meaningless to one reader, but invaluable inspiration to another, and a video tutorial may be inconsequential to one viewer but a great help to another.

It's the same as search engines. The value of a web page is not in how often the keyword appears, but in how many other pages refer to it.

Therefore, we can conclude that:

The protocol does not need to know what the content is. It measures the value of content through consumer behavior.

How to provide incentives

First of all, we need to understand which methods do not work in the crypto protocol:

Any paid viewing is not feasible.

Why?

When you're building a permanent economy on a blockchain, you need to think about where to store its content.

If the content is stored on a centralized server, it means that it can disappear or become inaccessible at any time, making the economic mechanism meaningless. It's like investing in a company's stock, but the company and its products will disappear from the face of the earth at any moment. This is clearly unreasonable.

That is, the content needs to be stored in a permanently accessible place, such as on a blockchain. Storage-private blockchains like Arweave do the job well.

However, the content on the blockchain is necessarily public.

If you want to set up pay-to-view for something that is public, you have to encrypt it. But where does the decryption process take place? If a centralized server is responsible for decryption, then the failure of the server means the failure of the content, which is no different from hosting the content directly on a centralized server. If decrypted on-chain by a blockchain mechanism, then it remains public in nature.

As a result, paying to watch is not only economically inefficient, but also technically unfeasible.

By the way, when we look at the content on the blockchain, we see that it has two characteristics: anyone can access it (non-exclusivity), and your access does not affect the access of others (non-competition).

This is precisely the definition of a public good. That's why content incentives are so difficult, because it's essentially a public goods fundraising problem, a puzzle that humans can't solve for thousands of years.

Bodhi as an experiment

Bodhi is an experiment to solve the problem of content motivation.

Bodhi doesn't rely on ads or pay-to-watch, but turns whatever content you create into an asset, like a mini-company.

People can buy and sell their shares through Bodhi. When people buy, the stock price automatically goes up, and when they sell, the stock price goes down.

As a creator, you own an initial stake in that content and make a profit as its price grows.

In addition, whenever someone trades a stake in your content, you receive a portion of the transaction amount as a fee for you.

From a technical point of view, Bodhi stores content on Arweave and turns each Arweave ID into a ERC1155 asset. As users buy, more tokens are minted, and their price follows a quadratic curve of supply.

From a financial perspective, Bodhi provides liquidity for long-tail assets. Since the counterparty to the transaction is the protocol, there will be sufficient liquidity for an asset even if only one person is trading.

The Origin of Bodhi

The idea of Bodhi has been brewing for years, but my faith in it comes from a sudden realization:

For the toughest questions, the answer may not be in the entity, but in the void (in our minds).

Those things that exist only in our minds are often the most powerful and alive. That's the greatness of Bitcoin, but it's not easy to notice.

Also, people often think that Meme and Ponzi are indecent gadgets or even evil. But the two have one thing in common: they only exist in our heads, and they are very motivating. My gut tells me that Meme and Ponzi are underrated, and that they could be the key to solving the problem of public goods fundraising.

These realizations eventually converged on Bodhi.

The future of Bodhi

As an experiment, even if Bodhi doesn't work as expected, it will still provide valuable inspiration for future protocols.

But if it does, we'll unlock a lot of interesting stuff.

Since Bodhi has no protocol fees, this means that anyone can build any type of protocol on top of it and charge you if you want.

Here are some protocols that might be built on Bodhi:

• A quasi-Youtube/TikTok platform
• A book publishing and distribution agreement
• A game publishing agreement similar to Steam
• A protocol version of Twitter / Medium with built-in incentives
• A community crowdfunding tool
• An academic paper distribution and fundraising agreement
• A voting agreement on Bodhi (sounds a bit funny, because of the built-in bribery function)
• A protocol version of Github where open source projects can be hosted and financially incentivized ......

Now that you have a general understanding of Bodhi, in order for you to experience it better, this article itself is the first asset of Bodhi.