How do you build a fair marketplace for expertise? One in which true experts get paid for sharing their expertise, while frauds and scammers are strongly disincentivized from participating? And one in which the individuals benefiting from the expertise receive the maximal value?
What does a fair marketplace for expertise even look like? Are there material incentives to be gained from buying expertise of true experts? What are some reasonable ways to align the payout to a true expert with the material gains from purchasing their expertise?
Why should you care about fair marketplaces for expertise? Will you be empowered to profit from studying them here? Is there a broad area of applicability for you to apply the material learned from this article?
You should care because the recent fraud surrounding crypto-assets is neither new, nor is it over. Investment markets have been plagued by pump and dump scams, FUD, shilling, and malicious disinformation long before crypto. All of this fraud has been perpetrated by individuals who declared themselves market experts.
Experts who were often paid through bounty programs and rarely had any true expertise cost individuals and businesses literal billions of dollars in the recent convulsions of the crypto-markets. You should care because a fair marketplace for expertise is the only way to guarantee that true experts are providing actionable, and profitable expertise to you.
Such a fair marketplace must have clear penalties for scam experts and dishonest market forecasts. It must also ensure that new experts have just as much of a chance to succeed, and to stand out, as experts who have traded their expertise on the marketplace for a long time.
Such a fair marketplace must protect the expertise acquired by buyers such that only the highest bidder has access to the expertise, at least until that expertise is readily accessible public knowledge. And it must provide the buyers with the tools to verify the assumptions behind the acquired expertise, and to verify the legitimacy and track record of success of the experts who provided the expertise.
These verification tools are essential for protecting buyers from wrong or malicious expertise. By verifying the track record of success of an expert, the buyer gains confidence in the received expertise. But it is still possible the expert made a mistake or was misinformed on this particular subject. That is why the buyer must additionally have tools with which to verify the assumptions behind every acquired expertise.
The benefit to be gained from such a marketplace is two-fold. True experts have a platform which empowers them to stand out above the noise - to showcase their expertise without competing for followers with celebrity experts. This can lead top performing experts to be selected for paid speaking engagements or paid publications. Buyers of the expertise benefit from the security in the received expertise to make the most profitable decisions for themselves. Such as making investments which rely on expertise that was genuinely written to their benefit, instead of being controversial for gaining popularity among third party search results.
This fair marketplace of expertise essentially needs to solve the human trust problem. The same problem which led to politically divisive and highly targeted social media ads in the 2016 USA elections. How do you know that a person introduced as an expert is (a) truly an expert, and (b) sharing their expertise for your benefit rather than to manipulate or disinform?
The only way to solve the human trust problem is with economic market theory. The payout for an expert sharing their expertise must be financially aligned with the material gains from the use of that expertise by its recipients. The more money a recipient makes by leveraging the expertise, the more money the expert makes. The more money the expert makes by sharing their expertise, the more money made by the recipient who leverages that expertise.
Sounds too good to be true? Be prepared to be delightfully surprised. This fair marketplace for expertise is exactly what has been built by the Amulet Platform. Our team consists of SF Bay Area entrepreneurs who have completed degrees from UC Berkeley and from Stanford University, and of an extensive list of advisors who serve as university professors and senior executives at large American corporations. We strongly encourage you to study our executive summary, and for the more technically inclined to dissect the Amulet whitepaper.