Coming in late to this thread, but happy to find it. This is a very interesting concept and something which we are investigating at my blockchain startup.
We are developing a system for conditional resource allocation, and effective altruism is one of our early focuses.
It is possible to mint fungible "conditional tokens" representing funds with value contingent on the outcomes of arbitrary conditions. Those outcomes are reported by some (sufficiently trusted or decentralized) oracle. These tokens are then distributed to preordained parties. In a simple binary case, the "success" tokens are given to the charity and the "failure" tokens are given back to the donators. "Success" may be that certain milestones or commitments are met by the charity, that a threshold of funding has been reached, or that certain global events occur etc.
For example, it would be possible to set up a proposal to donate $1m to the World Wildlife Fund contingent on them publishing and following an amicable plan for spending the money. As milestones in this plan are met, further chunks of funding can be redeemed. The "oracle" reports can be an aggregate from an on-chain consensus vote by the donators.
An advantage of this system is that the charity receives the conditional tokens upfront. So long as they abide by the terms of the donations, they will continue to be able to redeem them. Another advantage, in a world where this technology becomes more normalized, is that the charity could pay for work being done with the conditional tokens themselves.
If anybody is interested in discussing this further, I would welcome any messages to [email protected]
Coming in late to this thread, but happy to find it. This is a very interesting concept and something which we are investigating at my blockchain startup.
We are developing a system for conditional resource allocation, and effective altruism is one of our early focuses.
It is possible to mint fungible "conditional tokens" representing funds with value contingent on the outcomes of arbitrary conditions. Those outcomes are reported by some (sufficiently trusted or decentralized) oracle. These tokens are then distributed to preordained parties. In a simple binary case, the "success" tokens are given to the charity and the "failure" tokens are given back to the donators. "Success" may be that certain milestones or commitments are met by the charity, that a threshold of funding has been reached, or that certain global events occur etc.
For example, it would be possible to set up a proposal to donate $1m to the World Wildlife Fund contingent on them publishing and following an amicable plan for spending the money. As milestones in this plan are met, further chunks of funding can be redeemed. The "oracle" reports can be an aggregate from an on-chain consensus vote by the donators.
An advantage of this system is that the charity receives the conditional tokens upfront. So long as they abide by the terms of the donations, they will continue to be able to redeem them. Another advantage, in a world where this technology becomes more normalized, is that the charity could pay for work being done with the conditional tokens themselves.
If anybody is interested in discussing this further, I would welcome any messages to [email protected]