Editing Quadratic Funding (section)

====== Baseline ======
The first variant in the paper assumes all individuals ignore impact on total spending aside from their own contributions. This is, of course, a flawed assumption. All further variants are analyzed in terms of their deviation from this result, because it achieves the "most optimal way of funding" - what is meant by this is that, under these assumptions, if each individual selfishly optimizes their own utility, that actually results in the total utility of all individuals being optimized as well. No individual would receive more than one cent of value from donating one more cent, and allocating one more cent of funding to any project would not increase the total utility to everyone by more than one cent. (In math terms: the derivative of utility wrt cost is 1 in both perspectives, or, the derivative of utility - cost wrt cost is 0). Total utility could not be improved by taking funds from one project and giving it to another, but this is evident already because utility could not be improved by increasing funding to any project.

So, it serves as a decent baseline to measure more realistic implementations against, to see in what ways that "most optimal" solution is changed.

The baseline calculation is - for each project, square root each individual's donation, sum those together, and square the result, and that is how much that project receives in funding. As you can see, it has no budget, and can grow endlessly.