I think I agree with this take. Thanks!

Thanks! I notice that 1, 4, and 5 are examples where in some sense it's clear what you need to do, and the difficulty is just actually doing it. IIRC Julia says somewhere in the book (perhaps in discussing the rock climbing example?) that this where the soldier mindset performs relatively well.  I think I tentatively agree with this take, meaning that I agree with you that in some cases soldier is better probably.  

Thats a succinct way of putting it, nice!

 I am currently very much on the fence about whether to agree with you or not. I'm very keen to hear your views on situations in which soldier mindset is better than scout mindset--can you elaborate?

Once it's established that you will be giving $100M a year to buy impact certificates, that will motivate lots of people already doing good to mint impact certificates, and probably also motivate lots of people to do good (so that they can mint the certificate and later get money for it)

By buying the certificate rather than paying the person who did the good, you enable flexibility -- the person who did the good can sell the certificate to speculators and get money immediately rather than waiting for your judgment. Then the speculators can sell it back and forth to each other as new evidence comes in about the impact of the original act, and the conversations the speculators have about your predicted evaluation can then help you actually make the evaluation, thanks to e.g. facts and evidence the speculators uncover. So it saves you effort as well.

Is this something we could purchase for a few hundred million in a few years?

Yes.

This is my impression based on (a) talking to a bunch of people and hearing things like "Yeah our security is unacceptably weak" and "I don't think we are in danger yet, we probably aren't on anyone's radar" and "Yeah we are taking it very seriously, we are looking to hire someone. It's just really hard to find a good security person." These are basically the ONLY three things I hear when I raise security concerns, and they are collectively NOT reassuring. I haven't talked to every org and every person so maybe my experience is misleading. also (b) on priors, it seems that people in general don't take security seriously until there's actually a breach.  (c) I've talked to some people who are also worried about this, and they told me there basically isn't any professional security person in the EA community willing to work full time on this.

 

Think of it like a grants program, except that instead of evaluating someone's pitch for what they intend to do, you are evaluating what they actually did, with the benefit of hindsight. Presumably your evaluations will be significantly more accurate this way. (Also, the fact that it's NFT-based means that you can recruit the "wisdom of the efficient market" to help you  in various ways, e.g. lots of non-EAs will be buying and selling these NFTs trying to predict what you will think of them, and thus producing lots of research you can use.)

I don't think it should replace our regular grants programs. But it might be a nice complement to them.

I don't see what you mean by centralization here, or how it's a problem. As for reliable guarantees the money will be used cost effectively, hell no, the whole point of impact certificates is that the evaluation happens after the event, not before. People can do whatever they want with the money, because they've already done the thing for which they are getting paid.