Vitalik Buterin pfp
Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Markets gud, price mechanisms gud. Congestion pricing in NYC continues to be winning, just as it has been winning for years in Stockholm, Singapore and elsewhere. When demand > supply, there is always an auction. Either you pay with money, or you pay by waiting in line, with often grievous costs to mental health ( https://nytimes.com/2019/01/21/upshot/stuck-and-stressed-the-health-costs-of-traffic.html ) and to no one's benefit. Blockchain transaction fees are similar: in the dark ages we used to wait some random number of 5-60 minutes for a transaction to get included into a block, and made excuses about how this is a virtuous act of expressing "low time preference". Today, transactions reliably get included in 1-2 slots, and the more efficient fee market design in https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1559 is a major reason why. Tomorrow, transactions will be included even faster.
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timbeiko.eth pfp
timbeiko.eth
@tim
Curious if you think some "auctions" are actually best paid with time/mental costs, and, if so, which? IOW, do you see any externalities to making financial costs more legible / "hyperfinancialization"?
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Vitalik Buterin pfp
Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
To me a big category is designing filters when you have a goal of creating a community with a certain type of person. Universities are one obvious example. I would also argue immigration policy: auctions are good and underused, but you also want some finer-grained mechanisms for selecting who goes in. Burning Man having an inconvenience filter plausibly improves it for a similar reason.
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Quintus pfp
Quintus
@quintus
There’s a book related to this! https://scholar.harvard.edu/sandel/publications/what-money-cant-buy-moral-limits-markets
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