Weekly Updates

The Geo Web’s Long Game: Weekly Update #48

https://www.geoweb.network/post/weekly-update-48

The Geo Web is attempting to break the mold of existing private property rights with eyes on the bigger picture. Plus updates from the last week on the Geo Web project (10/14/21 - 10/20/21).

The Geo Web’s Long Game

One of the biggest challenges the Geo Web faces is the knee-jerk reaction that we are encroaching on people’s existing property rights

Under a narrow lens, we are. The counterpoint that we must successfully make is that we’re doing this with a broader perspective on fairness, legitimacy, and positive-sum coordination.

The original idea behind the Geo Web was to figure out a way to allocate digital land property rights for AR faithfully to the physical land property owners. That seemed “fair,” but in practice isn’t feasible (land rights records globally are fragmented at best + good luck coordinating a global network top-down too) nor is it really that fair (Did any person create the land that they own? + Property is Only Another Name for Monopoly). 

Private property rights are a social construct. We, humans, made them, and we can choose to remake them. That is our goal.

The Geo Web is undoubtedly offering up a property rights system that breaks the mold. We will attempt to appeal to landowners’ most enlightened selves early on. But to succeed in the long game, the partial common ownership model and subsequent emphasis on funding public goods need to make the Geo Web a positive sum game.

We must create a world where the “selfish” landowner chooses to coordinate (i.e., adopt the Geo Web) because it’s more valuable to them than clinging to legacy private property rights. Geo Web landowners must see their outgoing network fees (aka public goods contributions) as a positive ROI investment. 

It sounds crazy and of course, it could be. But as optimists, as coordination maximalists, we’re confident that this world is possible. We hope you’ll join us in making it a reality.

Technical

  • The architecture of the Geo Web’s core contracts to be more modular/extensible is on! Issues are live and being worked on here.
  • We did a long-overdue push from our Cadastre staging environment to production. Location search, an updated faucet, pinning infra, and more. There’s some outstanding triage that we need to do with Media Gallery pinning...but testnet :)

Community

  • Shout out to @WhiteRabbit_w3 for his thoughtful exploration of virtual land property rights. It’s fun to connect with and see others exploring this space! 
  • I was on a Twitter break at the beginning of the month so I somehow missed Optimism’s announcement of their first round of retroactive public goods funding. 24 community members will allocate $1M to public goods projects/contributors with no strings attached. The awards are all based on past contributions. We’ve been excited about the idea since it was first announced. Optimism is doing this voluntarily—happily—because they believe in the positive-sum effects of public goods. Very on-theme this week.
  • The always great research team at Paradigm put out a great guide for launching an NFT project. Many of the principles here apply to the Geo Web’s fair launch (which is top of mind for us lately), but due to the nature of our digital land market, we’ll be using different mechanisms to help drive toward fairness. One thought as we move to NFTs on ETH L2s: I’d expect the design tradeoff of gas efficiency vs more “complete” fairness mechanisms to tilt more toward the latter (a good thing!).

On Deck

Geo Web Newsletter

Get our blog posts delivered to your inbox.

Almost there... Check your inbox (or possibly your spam) and confirm your subscription!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Scroll to top