Public Goods
Resources that are non-excludable and non-rival, meaning no one can be cheaply locked out and one person's use does not diminish another's. They tend to be underfunded because no single backer captures the return on funding them.
Also known as: public good, common goods
A public good in economics has two properties. It is non-excludable, so withholding it from non-payers is hard or impossible, and it is non-rival, so one person consuming it leaves just as much for everyone else. Open-source software, protocol infrastructure, research, clean air and street lighting all qualify in some degree. The trouble is the funding. Because no contributor can capture the full benefit of what they pay for, each has an incentive to wait for others to fund it, and the good ends up underprovided relative to how much everyone would collectively pay if they could coordinate. Economists call this the free-rider problem.
Crypto inherited the problem in a sharp form. Much of what makes a network valuable, such as clients, tooling, documentation and shared libraries, is non-excludable and earns its authors little directly, so it tends to be starved while extractive activity is well rewarded. Several mechanisms exist to correct this. Quadratic funding tops up community contributions by reading the breadth of support as a demand signal. Retroactive public goods funding, used by Optimism, pays builders after the fact for work that proved useful on the principle that judging past impact is easier than predicting it. Both share a premise worth stating plainly: a supporter of a public good is accepting a cost in exchange for an outcome they want to exist, not buying a claim on a direct financial return.