There are people willing to take financial risks for profits.
then if you do offer to do the project using a dominant assurance contract, then either the project doesn’t get funded and you get screwed, or the project does get funded and (some of) the funders get screwed.
The way I think of it is that there is a co-ordination problem. People want public goods, some people want to provide it, but they have difficulty coordinating. So either the project gets funded: yay people get the public good they wanted. Or it does not and people didn’t really want that public good anyway (and you pay the cost for poorly predicting peoples preferences and sucking up their attention). So to me it’s more of a win-win.
So initially I wanted to price at $829 but https://manifold.markets/moyamo/how-much-money-will-my-metacrowdfun only gave me like 30% chance of succeeding. So I changed the price to $629 which gave me 45% chance of succeeding.
There are people willing to take financial risks for profits.
The way I think of it is that there is a co-ordination problem. People want public goods, some people want to provide it, but they have difficulty coordinating. So either the project gets funded: yay people get the public good they wanted. Or it does not and people didn’t really want that public good anyway (and you pay the cost for poorly predicting peoples preferences and sucking up their attention). So to me it’s more of a win-win.