I used to work for a Bitcoin wallet startup. We had a ritual where, every couple weeks, the whole team would get together to discuss what feature we should work on next. It was always fascinating to hear my coworkers opinions about what would make our users happy, what would bring in new users, what would be good for Bitcoin.

This little ritual was our CEO’s idea. It was always implicit that he would make the final call, but he wanted the team’s input and discussion before making the decision. We’d even cast votes on the different features that people had championed, presumably to give our leader a little more signal about the team’s thoughts.

It was a wonderful time, made the team feel ownership over the work, stimulated lots of ideas and debates, and I’m sure we benefited from aggregating the intelligence and insight of a motivated group of Bitcoiners. At the time was very aware of how special this was. We were at the perfect size to make discussion a plausible way of combining our thoughts, a few more members and the discussion would have devolved into the usual group politics: people talking just to show off that they’re smart, people supporting ideas not because they believe they’re good but to bolster some alliance with their champion, certain charismatic people have undeserved impact on the final decision etc. Not only that but we were all ideologically motivated, on a mission to make Bitcoin succeed, so our incentives were aligned.

For a long time I thought about how I could bring this experience to larger, and less ideological, teams and I think the solution is prediction markets. Rather than trying to have a discussion between 30 people, you give them money to make bets about which feature would do what you want. One person might bet that adding nostr support would bring in new users. They would bet in proportion to their confidence. The rest of the team could bet against or for this proposition, again in proportion to their confidence. No talking just to talk, no political alliance dynamics. Over time, team members with more foresight would end up with higher balances, their opinions would be weighed more accordingly. The CEO could still make the final decision but he would be making it informed by his teams aggregated experience.

That’s the goal of futarchyhub.com You pick your own questions and oracle(s), use ious or nwc to custody the bets, then invite your team and let them play.