Shower thought idea: a Dominant Assurance Contract for developing immortality.

That's basically kickstarter for a cure for aging, except with an added incentive: if the kickstarter fails, everyone who contributed gets a small bonus paid to them!

cc @DonyChristie, @LauraDeming

The problem with DACs for things like this is uncertainty.

Uncertainty is bad for DACs. If we could just know for certain that aging would cost exactly $10 trillion to cure, then I think a DAC would work and we'd be done.

So uncertainty in the amount of effort it takes to solve collective problems is a huge deal.

Plus there is still a principal-agent problem here.

Maybe a DAC for a prize for life extension work would be better?

There's no uncertainty about a prize existing.

The uncertainty here is about whether the criteria for awarding the prize are correct and will be implemented correctly. But the contributors can just vote.

I think what you really need is a whole research council implemented on blockchain. A structure that systematically turns money into progress on life extension, with mechanisms to guard against all the obvious failures and fraud problems.

Or maybe the DAC simply pays out to organizations which bring proof of a certain amount of progress that they have contributed to.

Like an organization publishes a paper detailing how a certain biological system works and then it gets paid out $1,000,000 from the DAC.

The requirement here is a good way of measuring progress that's resistant to tampering/fraud.

Which brings us back to uncertainty.

If we had 100 intermediate points, each of which cost $100,000,000 to achieve, then I think we could just solve the aging thing with DACs. But we have to KNOW what the path is. And most science doesn't work like that.

Also cc here:

@aubreydegrey