# The power of knowledge graphs

**URL:** <https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/the-power-of-knowledge-graphs/286>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [October 12, 2019, 4:43am UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/the-power-of-knowledge-graphs/286 "2019-10-12T04:43:53Z")\
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**Author:** ![burrrata](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/user_avatar/discourse.sourcecred.io/burrrata/32/135_2.png) [@burrrata](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/u/burrrata)\
**Post date:** [October 12, 2019, 4:43am UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/the-power-of-knowledge-graphs/286/1 "2019-10-12T04:43:53Z")

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It’s Friday night so I’m diving into the rabbit hole of weird/cool technology. Started by exploring [Tools for Thought](https://numinous.productions/ttft/), then realized that I’m behind on my [Anki](https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#introduction) and note reviews, started diving into that and reviewed several economic ideas such as:

- If you cannot count what is important, you make what you count important.
- There’s a discrepancy between the set of all possible transactions and the transactions that are realized; this is defined by the infrastructure (physical, legal, etc…) that enables efficient markets.
- If we do not measure something, it is undervalued.
- The basic rule, out here in normal finance, is that if a future event (1) will predictably happen and (2) will predictably increase the price of an asset, then the price of the asset should have already increased, so that when the event actually happens the effect on the price will be unpredictable.
- Money is at the core of every society. It is how we transact. It is how we measure the value of something. It is how we understand the power and potential of our resources. Simply, money is the most interesting topic in the world.

> note: these are quotes from interesting papers/articles I read, not universal laws

This made me think of SourceCred, and particularly how it allows you to measure a graph of contributions in a network. The more connections and references, the higher the value of the data. This means that someone can create data, then receive ongoing rewards for that data over time as it’s used and/or connected to. This creates a “market” for data and contributions that otherwise might be too granular of nebulous to measure. SourceCred acts as a market maker because it prices every data point on the graph. The participants in that graph (people posting/creating/commenting on stuff) then affect that price by interacting with data, raising or lowing it’s “price” (value).

Anyways, the more I think about it the more novel, groundbreaking, and essential this technology seems. In an interconnected and increasingly complicated world, being able to measure and graph the connections between things, not just the things, is essential. It solve so many problems, not just in open source, but also in social apps and potentially finance too.

- For social apps, it could help reward contributors and give them a say in governance vs just the platform owners.
- For finance you could tell which financial applications were providing value for others downstream (like in DeFi on Ethereum where dApps are “money legos”), which could help investors more accurately price protocols and/or asses risk.

Is there already a thread started to brainstorm all the potential use cases for SourceCred?

> brainstorming for fun, not to change the roadmap and distract from the deep\>wide focus of the project on first trying to serve open source communities

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