thoughtcrimeboss on Nostr: Check out my essay on the decentralized bounty marketplace known as #poidh and how it ...

Check out my essay on the decentralized bounty marketplace known as #poidh and how it enables progress without any need for centralized authority. Also discussed is the OG cypherpunks prediction of such marketplaces in a future that has now arrived.

(Note for Nostr readers, even though Poidh lives on Ethereum, bounties are on all kinds of things, even bitcoin lightning development as can be seen in this bounty for a #lightning field test for AI agent payments using L402:
https://poidh.xyz/base/bounty/1509

Poidh has no token, no VCs, just a founder and a dev trying to make a tool for decentralized, permissionless, uncensorable bounties.)

The True Potential of Poidh as Freedom Tech
By ThoughtCrimeBoss
originally published as @bitcoinrenegade on X on Oct 23, 2026

POIDH is Freedom Tech

Some people look at poidh.xyz (pics or it didn't happen) and think it's a fun little app. Other people look at poidh and think it must be a scam because it involves crypto.
Few people look at it and can understand its true potential. This is foundational freedom tech with the potential to change the entire world. It enables coordination without gatekeepers, without states, without centralized authority. It enables humans to organize and get shit done without any need for a coercive state enforcing contracts. Code enforces the contracts and code can't take bribes, code doesn't get drunk on power, code doesn't give its cousin preferential treatment. Smart contracts are still a relatively new invention, and their full potential has not even begun to be realized. Poidh is the beginning of that realization.

How do you stop the violent criminal organization known as the state? By offering people a better alternative, like poidh. Paying 30% of your income to a bunch of thugs who proceed to waste and steal most of it is less attractive if people know they could just put that money into poidh and actually GET SHIT DONE.

The formula is simple. If you need something done, you post a bounty. If anyone else also wants that thing done, they can add to your bounty permissionlessly. Claimants submit proof of work. The bounty creator picks the claim they think satisfies the bounty and puts it to a vote, and the contributors have 48 hours to confirm it or veto it. If they confirm it, the money pays out automatically. If they veto it, the money stays put until the creator finds a better claim or cancels the bounty and everyone gets refunded.

Smart contracts enforce the rules. No central authority has any power over these contracts. Not poidh, not anyone. The only power is held by the bounty creator (they can nominate a claim for a vote or cancel the bounty), the contributors (they can vote on the nominated claim, or pull their own money out if they lose faith in the creator), and nobody else.

The before-poidh era sucked

Before poidh and the crypto tech it uses, you had a whole lot of scattered individuals all over who WANT something and WISH they could do something about XYZ. But coordinating with each other has always been very hard.
So maybe a few of them form a nonprofit and spend most of their time and energy on logistics and fundraising. Converting the original desire for change into actual on-the-ground results is a PAIN IN THE ASS. A lot of the money and energy gets wasted along the way. And many of the scattered individuals who desire the same thing as the few who formed the organization will never contribute to it or even know it exists.

Kenny, the creator of poidh once said, "every sentence on the internet that starts with "someone should..." or "I wish someone would..." or "why doesn't anyone..." is unpriced collective demand."
We've had a marketplace of ideas for twenty years. We've never had a marketplace for outcomes. Now we do.

Donate to the outcome itself

We can now focus on actual outcomes. Instead of donating to a nonprofit and just hoping your money makes an actual impact on what you desire, you donate to the outcome itself. AND if it doesn't happen, you get your money back.
(Not that there's anything wrong with donating to a nonprofit. It's just probably outdated tech in a post-mass-poidh-adoption world.)

This gives all those scattered individuals an easy and rational way to coordinate towards their shared desire. Almost anything you could want has a price at which it can happen. You risk nothing by contributing: either you get what you want or you get refunded. Once people start to realize this, problems are going to start getting solved, rapidly.
All those people sitting on their couch thinking "someone needs to fix that" can now just pick up their phone and make a bounty for it with just a few dollars to get the ball rolling. It could be anything, potholes, lowering overdose deaths, protecting the environment, changing a bad law, or building a new tool. No matter what the desired outcome, if other people want it too then the capital will flow in, a dollar or two or twenty at a time.

This isn't theoretical anymore. Someone broke the world record for the most kickflips in one minute with a poidh bounty that started with $100 and grew to tens of thousands of dollars. Someone else built an entirely new kind of hardware wallet that confirms you are human through your blood before it will send a transaction. Imagine what could happen when more people actually realize poidh exists.

This has the potential to start a Cambrian explosion of problem solving through decentralized, permissionless coordination.

The cypherpunks called it

Some very smart and based individuals like the authors of the cypherpunk and cryptoanarchist manifestos predicted the rise of something like poidh decades ago.

Tim May, 1988:
"These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation."

May again in 1994: "Think of anonymous escrow services which hold the digital money until the deed is done."

That's poidh.

Wei Dai, b-money, 1998:
"A community is defined by the cooperation of its participants, and efficient cooperation requires a medium of exchange (money) and a way to enforce contracts."

Before the invention of Turing-complete smart contracts on Ethereum, decentralized permissionless reputation-based bounty marketplaces were only a cool idea. There was no way to do them without at least some trust in a central authority. Not anymore.
Contracts without the state
One of the main justifications for the existence of the state, with its monopoly on violence, is that the state is needed to enforce CONTRACTS. And contract enforcement is important. Contracts are the foundation of civilized life.

So what if you had a different way to enforce contracts entirely? Instead of relying on the state, you rely on the code of a smart contract. Before smart contracts, disputes got decided by high priests in robes with fancy degrees who might arbitrarily decide against you because they haven't had their lunch yet, or they're in a bad mood that day, or they just don't like the way you look.

Now you can put $1000 up in a smart contract, ask for an outcome, and if the outcome doesn't resolve to your satisfaction, you can get your money back without any need to go to court. Code is law.

But what if you make a bounty for an outcome, someone does it, and you try to prevent them from getting paid? You could cancel the bounty. If the outcome has already happened, you get what you wanted and they get nothing for it. That is a possibility, but that's where the reputation aspect comes in.

When you create and complete bounties on POIDH you are building a reputation as an honest actor, a reputation that is immutable and lives onchain forever. This reputation system is an essential piece, nobody is going to put big effort into a bounty from a person with a bad reputation.
Nick Szabo nailed why this works back in 1997:

"it is impossible to commit an act of physical violence over the Net. That includes not only all physical crimes of coercion, but also arrest, incarceration, and other traditional methods of law enforcement."

"Reputation costs may be the only practical source of penalties in many cases."

There is no legal system on a blockchain other than code and reputation. So reputation isn't a supplement to enforcement. It IS the enforcement. And Szabo's "existence proof" is the whole thesis in one sentence:
"any contract which can be negotiated through a trusted third party (such as an auction or exchange) can be negotiated directly."

This isn't even new. Bruce Benson documented in The Enterprise of Law how the medieval Law Merchant ran international trade for centuries with no state behind it:

"The Law Merchant was based on reciprocity and reputation, and it evolved through a process of natural selection, adapting common customs to new circumstances."

Reputation-based enforcement isn't a crypto fantasy. It's how commerce worked before the state came in. Smart contracts just give it back to us at internet scale. No lawyers, no custodians, no courts, no police, and yet we still have order born from code and reputation.

Your skills finally matter more than degrees and who you know
Poidh eliminates the roadblocks that keep skilled people from being rewarded for those skills.
Before poidh, your skills didn't matter. What you could do didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was what credentials you had acquired, who you had acquired them from, and your social circle. You could be an incredibly smart, talented and capable individual, but without those credentials, nobody would ever care. In the pre-crypto world, reputation was determined by the degrees you held and how much money you had spent to acquire them.

Tim May saw the alternative coming in 1988:

"Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today."

And Szabo gave it the cleanest definition I've seen: "Reputation can be viewed as the amount of trust an agent has created for himself."

This gives you freedom because you can just DO THINGS without anyone's permission and get rewarded for it in money and rep. Any sovereign individual can start from absolute zero, complete tasks, and get rewarded for it. You don't have to go into debt. You don't have to go to the best college. You can just teach yourself how to do things and prove to the world that you can do those things by completing onchain bounties. Every completed bounty is an immutable record of your abilities and accomplishments that nobody can take away from you.

There is a lot of unused talent lying dormant out there in overqualified fast food workers who taught themselves to code, to weld, to edit video, to fix things, and never got a chance to prove it because they didn't have the right piece of paper. poidh gives them a way to prove it. It gives them the freedom to make their lives better. I've met some very poor people with incredible skills, but who lacked the resources and the social network to convert those skills into money and uplift themselves. Now all they need is access to the internet.

A Story Of Two Towns

In the current system, if something's fucked up in your town and you want it fixed, you have to essentially beg those in power to fix it. Perhaps a politician will promise to fix the problem if you vote for him, but there's no guarantee. You could vote for him, donate to his campaign, and if he never fixes the problem, there are no repercussions. There is no enforcement mechanism. You're just left with the problem still not fixed.

In a poidh society you can skip the bureaucracy entirely and allocate capital to the outcome itself.
Let me give an example.

Tradville

Tradville has a homeless problem. Tents are everywhere, crime is increasing, and businesses are leaving. It's bad. So some activists get together and launch a year-long campaign to get a measure on the ballot that would allocate ten million dollars to "the homeless problem."

They have to hire a lawyer to write the measure, hire canvassers to gather signatures, and run around town fundraising to run a year-long campaign costing more than $500,000.

They get the measure passed. Now they have to commission a $500k study just to figure out how to best spend the $10 million. They've now spent a million dollars before a single dollar has gone to actually housing a homeless person.

Contractors with connections to city officials get the contracts to build tiny homes instead of cheaper contractors. By the time the first tiny home is built, millions have been spent and it cost about ten times what it should have. By the time all ten million is gone, three years have passed and they've housed maybe ten percent of the city's homeless population.

The activists consider another ballot measure, but the citizens are so pissed about the last one they vote it down. The homeless problem continues. More businesses leave.

Poidhville

Meanwhile, in Poidhville, the citizens take a bottom-up approach using smart contracts.
Each homeless person or family gets an individual bounty. Any contractor can complete the bounty, regardless of political connections. They only get paid once the person is actually in a tiny home and off the street.

Some of the homeless people, seeing an opportunity for paid labor, simply build their own tiny home and collect the bounty themselves. Now they've earned income AND gotten off the street.

A flurry of activity breaks out all over town as groups and individuals start housing as many people as they can to collect the bounties. No waste, no corruption. Just smart-contract-enforced payments based on actual proof of outcome.

Citizens see the tents disappearing, realize it's working, and start contributing to the bounties. New contributions make the work go even faster.

In the time it would have taken just to gather signatures in Tradville, Poidhville has housed 90% of its homeless population for a fraction of what Tradville spent. Tradville citizens watched ten million dollars of their hard-earned money go down the toilet. Poidhville citizens got to watch their streets get cleaned up, and anyone whose bounty didn't get claimed got their money back.

That's the difference between inefficient top-down coercive coordination that wastes resources and bottom-up voluntary coordination that scales.

Why I care

Poidh is one of those projects that reminds me why I love crypto in the first place. I sincerely believe Poidh has the potential to be a foundational piece of a better, more free future, one where we live together harmoniously without the state controlling every aspect of our lives. Its simple but elegant formula demonstrates how people can coordinate and make amazing things happen without any need for a state or central authority at all.
It empowers people, individuals and groups, to accomplish great things, big and small. It enables anyone to instantly put their capital to work based on outcomes and only outcomes. It lets skilled people get paid for being skilled. And it does all of this without anyone ever needing to trust anyone else with their money.

Wei Dai wrote that in a crypto-anarchy "the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary." When we build tools like Poidh that work better than the current system, we are providing a viable alternative to a broken and violent system. If there are no proven alternatives, people will never leave the system they know.

It's in the best interest of everyone for you to share Poidh with someone you know. Spread the word and watch the magic happen. Personally, I wonder how big of an outcome is possible with a single bounty. Kenny posted a cast asking what the free market price would be on a public bounty for San Francisco to get yearly accidental overdoses under 100, where anyone could add money and the city could only claim it after hitting the target. That question made my brain tingle, and I still don't know the answer. I'd like to find out.

This is the future. This is freedom tech. This is getting shit done without the state.
Take life into your own hands and post a bounty or complete one on poidh dot xyz.