A fascinating idea: "retroactive public goods funding." Rather than focusing on advance fund-raising for public goods (a la Kickstarter, quadratic funding), make a mechanism which rewards projects which create a lot of value, e.g. thru a "results oracle."
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Shallowly read, this is "just prizes." But if you know in advance that there is some results oracle which may plausibly reward you, you could, say, create secondary markets around the future value of that reward, then raise capital by selling some of those shares.
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How is this all that different from social impact bonds?
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I think part of the idea is that many interesting public goods projects are not widely recognized as valuable initially. Social impact bonds work in the circumstance that a gov't has prior will around a problem and a relevant metric; can't reach "disruptive" public goods well.
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I suppose I’m pessimistic that known measurements can reliably capture the benefits of transformative public goods. eg I doubt a prior measure Edison’s initial NYC neighborhood electrification projects is plausible. You don’t understand the impact axes until you try it.
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Seems like that is a problem for the new proposal as well: "An exit determined by how much public good has been created by the project." Nice, but how on earth does anyone determine "how much public good" there is? Measurement and causality aren't trivial issues here . . .
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