Dean Pierce 👨💻🌎🌍
@deanpierce.eth
Walking back to my hotel after Devcon through some of the darker Bangkok alleyways, I saw a lot of amazing things that I spent the night thinking about. I saw a couple just casually chopping cabbage in the alleyway. It made me wonder a lot about who is paying them to do that (they definitely were operating with "not for personal use" quantities). How did that little micro economy get started, and what sort of personal relationship do the participants have? I feel like there must be street vendors somewhere with open orders for filling bags of chopped cabbage, and income from filling those orders is enough for that couple to get by in this city. This feels like the opposite of Amazon, those giant logistics networks in the sky that dehumanize global markets at an unimaginable scale. It makes me wonder how projects like bountycaster and poidh (cc @linda @kenny) can facilitate the creation and growth of these micro needs-based economies, and bring real human connection back to markets. Lots to think about.
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kenny 🎩
@kenny
love these insights! when I introduce people to poidh I like to describe the use case of leaving bounties for small acts of community improvement to be done all around a city "clean up a pile of trash here", "trim back some bushes there", etc. as far as I know poidh is the ONLY way you could possibly do bounties like this, confirm that they got done indirectly, and pay the person who did the job without knowing anything about them (since the app gathers their address for you) I think that's pretty powerful...if you make paying people to do stuff completely seamless and there's no need to actually "know" the person who did the job, it just gets done
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Dan Finlay 🦊
@danfinlay
In the Chiang Mai outskirts where it got more industrial, I saw tons of these micro shops that have a single specialty. A ball bearing shop. An plate heater shop (clearly serving the hot pot industry). I had a similar thought about how this economy reflected smaller micro niches, and was left curious what forces have kept this dominant in the face of internet aggregation.
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