August

This month the main blockers were:

we couldn’t visualize the results of our simulation experiments, which meant asking questions about the results wasn’t possible

in the index wallets game experiments, players couldn’t reason about setting their valuations

Simulation Visualization

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Screen Recording 2024-08-25 at 12.38.10 PM.gif

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Here’s the same thing with payment visualizations turned on

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Screen Recording 2024-08-25 at 1.03.11 PM.gif

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Long story short: in this simulation, you can see that wealth stays fairly similar across players (the size of each node), and valuations climb (and climb and climb and climb and climb).

Full code is here:

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index-wallet/IW-cadCADOwner: index-wallet • Star count: 1 • Created: Wed, Jun 19, 2024 github.com

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Index Wallets App Tweaks

Last month I summarized the issues with the game, and the primary thing that emerged from sitting with those issues was that players still aren’t understanding how to set their valuations.

There are two ways to think about this. Either you can think of it as a strong negative result — since one of our questions was, “can humans even understand this in practice?” which the answer seems to be, “no”.

Or make some changes to see if it can be remedied. Since we had an idea of what the issue is, we made some changes and we’ll see if that makes a difference.

Changes should be live end of the first week next month. Broadly, they entail:

Enabling players to set any valuation, however big or small

Enabling players to set their prices

Computing a “network value” for each currency so that players can view prices directly (instead of “discounts”)

Allow players to peek at the prices that other players see

Rename the “valuations” page, e.g. “offers”, to explicitly frame valuations as a sort of marketing tool

The hope is that all of this makes valuations understandable for players.

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