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When the great way prevails, the world community is shared by all. — Confucius
Although blockchain and smart contracts let us create and own digital assets in exciting new ways, only the minority have created wealth from trading cryptocurrencies and NFT pixel art.
If digital assets are privatized, we are destined to repeat the inequality of the physical world. This is a pity because there is a great opportunity to create digital spaces that are inclusive, fair, and truly public.
First introduced and popularized by Glen Weyl and Eric Posner in Radical Markets, Partial Common Ownership (PCO) is a type of ownership that could be fairer and more efficient than both private ownership in capitalism and common ownership in communism. Unlike fractional NFTs, where different owners share an asset, PCO is based on radical market principles.
PCO requires assets to be in a state of continuous auction (every owned item is always on sale) which differs radically from our daily lived experience. If a property is always on sale, this introduces psychological resistance in the real world. Up to now, there has not been a large-scale experiment on PCO.
In The Space, we created a blockchain-based pixel canvas where each pixel is a non-fungible token traded under Harberger Tax, one of the most discussed designs of PCO.
We then use the Universal Basic Income(UBI) concept to distribute the majority of the tax collected. Because everyone gets a basic income, the game is more equal and sustainable. The result is a permanent public space that is constantly evolving, governed by the market, in the form of a collaborative pixel graffiti wall.
The pixel graffiti wall is the ideal medium for radical market principles: each pixel is trivial enough to be continuously auctioned, while the wall as a whole is by nature commonly owned. This pixel graffiti wall is a miniature attention economy, the dynamic of which is indicative of how market designs such as PCO can be used as the foundation for a new attention economy in Web3.
<aside> ⭐ The Space: an everlasting co-creation blockchain graffiti wall shared and governed by all participants through radical market principles
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The Space is inspired by r/place, the phenomenal co-creation pixel map launched by Reddit in 2017 and 2022. In r/place, millions of players drop pixels together on the canvas, creating impressive patterns and visual memes. All those works evolve in a bottom-up and democratic way and every creator “votes” for how the whole pixel map looks by adding their pixels every 5 minutes. The emergence of patterns is full of novelty, reflecting the cyberculture of our age.
We love r/place and are willing to build a Web3 version of r/place, a cultural hub where all ideas can manifest visually. The Space brings blockchain technologies, Radical Markets theories, co-creation pixel map, and DAO together, to extend their common fundamental ideas: decentralized common sense.
By introducing a property market to stimulate profit-driven behaviors, Harberger Tax to ensure efficient pixel trading, UBI to redistribute capital, and SpaceDAO to encourage democracy, we designed the creation dynamics in The Space to be self-sustainable and able to be revived again and again to endure the erosion of time.
In the game, each pixel is minted as an ERC-721 token when it is traded the first time. Different from a market ruled by private property law, pixel NFTs in The Space are traded under Partial Common Ownership (PCO), a.k.a. Harberger Tax.