'Your biggest gift to the world is eBay itself' — a market for trust, said to his face at a Santa Fe Institute trustees' dinner
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Founder of eBay. He enters this record through the Santa Fe Institute: when he joined its Board of Trustees he gave a talk at a trustees' dinner about the foundation he was setting up and its plan for long-term, five-year grants. Jonathan Hare — a $50,000 donor who attended those dinners — stood up and said that the biggest gift Omidyar had already given the world was eBay: a demonstration that a market for trust could let people who did not know each other work together, and that the thing to do was to generalize that model and extend it.
That is the whole of the recorded exchange, and it is here because the sentence is one of the earliest statements of what this record later calls the coordination architecture. No further relationship is claimed.
Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
Omidyar announced the foundation and its five-year grants. Hare's reply, as he recalls it: the gift was eBay itself — a market for trust between strangers — and the work was to generalize it. The date of the dinner is not in the account.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
Public contributions earn Publicity Premium; bringing others who were there earns Cascade Premium. Everything is valued retrospectively as outcomes verify, so nothing has to be priced up front.
Correct this entry → Add a story, photo or link → Browse the graph →