quote:

Strangecoin: the nonlinear currency

In this post I sketch a proposal for a digital currency that works unlike other *coins that have recently become available. I'm calling it Strangecoin, both to highlight its uniqueness as a currency and as a reference to the strange attractor, a special kind of nonlinear system.

What's unique about Strangecoin?

• Strangecoin transactions can be nonzero sum. A Strangecoin transaction might result in both parties having more Strangecoin.
  
• Strangecoin transactions can be one-sided and can be conducted entirely by only one party to the transaction.
  
• The rate of change of one's Strangecoin balance is a more important indicator of economic influence than the balance itself.
  
• Optimal investment strategy in Strangecoin aims to stabilize one's balance of Strangecoin.
  
• A universal account provides all users a basic Strangecoin income, effectively unlimited wealth, and direct feedback on the overall prosperity of the network.

I've only started thinking through the idea, and implementing it would take more technical expertise than I have alone. For instance, I'm not sure if Strangecoin can be implemented as an extension of the bitcoin protocol, or if some fundamentally new technology is required. If you know something about the technical details, I'd love to hear your thoughts. If you might know how to implement something like this, I'd love to help you try.

But since I don't know of anything else that works like this, this proposal is mostly intended simply to put the idea out there, in the hopes of encouraging others to think in these directions.


Background and Motivation

If I give you a dollar for a burger, then I've lost a dollar and gained a burger, and you've gained a dollar and lost a burger. Assuming this was a fair trade (that dollars and burgers are of approximately equal value), then as a result of the transaction we've simply rearranged who has which good, and no additional value was created in the process. What I've lost you've gained and vice versa, so that the total value between us has not changed after the exchange is over.

In game theory, an exchange that results in all credits and debits balancing out across all players is called a zero sum game. Recording debits and credits works this way with every existing currency, including Dollars and Euros and all the traditional currencies, but also Bitcoin and other kinds of digital cyptocurrencies. If you want a currency to behave nonlinearly you need additional financial tools like debt and interest, or stocks and dividends, to describe how that money grows or shrinks over time as the result of our economic transactions.

Of course, when I give you a dollar for a burger that's not really a zero sum transaction, because otherwise we wouldn't be motivated to enter into the transaction in the first place. I give you a dollar because I want the burger more than I want the dollar, and if you accept the trade it's because you want the dollar more than you want the burger, so in a fair exchange we both feel like we've come out ahead. In other words, there is some additional value in our fair exchange that is not accounted for in the burgers and the dollars alone. But if our bookkeeping method only counts burgers and dollars, then it's not accounting for the value that accrues in our transactions.

In the proposal below, I'll describe Strangecoin as an method for keeping track of a nonzero sum game, where parties can enter into financial transactions that accrue value just by engaging in that transaction. In this way, Strangecoin is a model of the value that our complex economic relationships generate. The trick is to amplify the exchanged value of Strangecoin transactions relative to the interest of other parties who are not themselves involved in the transaction. If this seems counter-intuitive, a nonfinancial example might help: it's not unusual for two minor celebrities to achieve greater celebrity status upon entering into a romantic relationship. Although strictly speaking the romantic relationship is between the two celebrities, the general public interest in the celebrities results in more overall popularity in their union than either had on their own prior to the relationship.

As the example suggests, the dynamics of Strangecoin might be usefully thought of in terms of a "reputation system" rather than a strictly financial tool, even though the basic mechanics involve the regular method of exchanging currency for goods perceived by both parties to be of equal value. Because of the nonlinear relationships among Strangecoin users, each user effectively draws on a network of support in each economic transaction, coupling its activity to the successes (and failures) of the that network of activity. The result is a model of the complex interdependencies within a community of economic agents, and the dynamics by which those networks develop and decay. For this reason, Strangecoin might have implications for quantifying the role of individual choices and responsibility in the context of corporate action, and for resolving other difficult issues in the management and ethics of collective economic action.

I will say more about implications and consequences of Strangecoin at the end of the document. I turn now to a more detailed discussion of the Strangecoin protocol.

The Strangecoin network

The Strangecoin network is a directed graph with users as nodes and some time-dependent transactions as edges between them. Transactions describes how Strangecoin trade between users at each time step. Let S be our unit of Strangecoin, and let t be our basic unit of time.

A Strangecoin user is:

• An account balance B in S
  
• Income I in S/t, the sum of all incoming transactions.
  
• Expenses E in S/t, the sum of all outgoing transactions.
  
• So dB/dt = I - E
  
• An account balance cap C in S that represents the upper limit of Strangecoins in a user's balance.
  

Balance Penalties:

If B = C, then the user receives a penalty where income is forfeit until expenses reduce the balance below C. Income might gradually decay as B approaches C to postpone hitting the limit. Similarly, if B = 0, then the user receives a penalty where expenses are forfeit until income brings the balance above 0. Expenses might gradually decay as B approaches 0 to postpone hitting the limit. To avoid penalties, users must keep their balance 0 < B < C. In other words, users have an incentive to keep dB/dt near zero, so that total income balances with total expenses.

Transactions:

A transaction indicates some trade in Strangecoin over some duration of time between two Strangecoin users with distinct accounts. Transactions come in five types described below. User X can initiate a transaction with user Y by specifying a transaction type and a duration of time, and then fixing the specific parameters of that transaction. If X can initiate the transaction without the approval of Y, the transaction is one-sided. If the transaction type requires Y's approval for initiation, it is a two-sided transaction. Users cannot engage in transactions with themselves.

Payment is a two-sided transaction in unit time, or an immediate transfer of S from one balance to another in a single time step. Payment works exactly as you'd expect it to work from other currencies, and in this sense is the simplest of the five transaction types. If X pays Y a quantity p of S, then X subtracts p from their balance and deposits p in Y's balance. Payments are two-sided and requires approval from both sides, so initiate the transaction X specifies Y and p, and Y must approve.

Support is a one-sided transaction over some duration t. If X supports Y over t, then X contributes additional S to Y's income from X's balance, expressed as a proportion s of Y's income over t. X's support effectively amplifies Y's income. To initiate this transaction, X specifies Y, t, and the proportion s of Y's income that X will contribute as support. Since support is a one-sided transaction, Y does not need to approve of the support to receive the additional income.

Endorsement is a one-sided transaction over some duration t. If X endorses Y over t, then X contributes additional S to Y's outgoing expenses, expressed as a proportion e of Y's expenses over t. X's endorsement effectively amplifies the payouts of Y's expenses. To initiate the transaction, X specifies Y, t, and the proportion e of Y's expenses that X will contribute as endorsements. Since support is a one-sided transaction, Y does not need to approve of the endorsement or the additional expense, which is drawn entirely from X's account.

Coupling is a two-sided transaction over some duration t. If X and Y couple over t, then changes in the income and expenses of X over t (apart from this coupling) result in proportional changes to the income and expenses of Y, and vice versa. Coupling "binds the fate" of X and Y over t, so that any change in one results in change for both. To initiate the transaction, both X and Y must agree on a duration t, and may specify distinct proportions cx and cy for coupling which must be approved by the other. With approval, coupling can involve both positive and negative correlations between income and expenses of two users. If X and Y are positively coupled, then increases in X's income and expenses results in some proportional increase in Y's income and expenses. This additional income or expense are drawn from or deposited to The Universal Account, as described below.

Inhibition is a two-sided transaction over some duration t. If X inhibits Y over t, then X reduces the income or expenses of Y over t by some proportion i. By inhibiting Y, X effectively reduces the impact that Y has on the Strangecoin network by i over t by forfeiting that proportion of income and expense. To initiate the transaction, X specifies Y, t, and i, which must be approved by Y.

The Universal Account (TUA):

Although individual transactions may be nonzero sum as described above, the overall Strangecoin network is zerosum, and uses The Universal Account to balance the network. TUA is a universal account that is positively coupled with all other users. TUA approves of transactions only in the scenarios described below. All newly mined Strangecoins are deposited directly into TUA, with a coupling bonus to the miner. All users are positively coupled with TUA with cy = 0 so that all users effectively receive a basic income from TUA in proportion to TUA's balance. Users cannot support, endorse, or inhibit TUA.

X can make a payment to TUA at t only in the following situations:

• The have hit their account cap. All forfeit income is automatically deposited into TUA.
  
• X is coupled to Y at t, whose expenses have changed. Additional expenses from X (in proportion c_x to Y's expense change) are automatically deposited into TUA.
  
• X is inhibited at t. All forfeit income at t due to inhibition is automatically deposited into TUA.
  

TUA can make a payment only in the following situations:

• X receives income from coupling with TUA.
  
• X's account balance = 0 at t. Any additional transactions outgoing from X at t are drawn from TUA.
  
• X is coupled at t to Y whose income has changed. Additional income to X at t (in proportion cx to Y's income change) is drawn from TUA.
  
• X has income from an inhibited source Y whose balance is empty. The remaining balance of the transaction is drawn from TUA.

All transactions with TUA are bare in the sense that they are stripped of any of the modifiers that might normally amplify transactions with X. Basic income paid from TUA to all other users is in proportion to the total users on the network, and TUA's balance. In this way, the basic user income is also a measure of the general health of the overall network.

Discussion

The set of transactions described in the Strangecoin protocol motivate an incentive structure that is quite different from that of traditional currencies. I'll discuss some of these incentives and their impact below.

Most immediately, Strangecoin transactions are amplified by the network of economic relations employed by each party to the transaction. For this reason, the impact of a transaction isn't simply a matter of what is being traded and for how much. It also matters who you are trading with and their ongoing economic relations, which may have an important impact on the value of the transaction. This is the case even though Strangecoin are entirely fungible and Strangecoin transactions can be conducted pseudonymously.

Strangecoin is "backwards compatible" with traditional currencies, in that it supports the normal method of exchanging goods and services for some discrete quantity of coin in the form of a one-time payment. However, the other transaction types allow for much deeper forms of economic dependencies over time, and explicit representations of one's contribution to one's economic community. These provide incentives to engage in transactions other than payment, for instance by some duration of support or coupling. Securing large payments in a single time step may have very little impact on one's overall income over time, and therefore may be less desirable to users than securing time-extended transactions of other types. Large payments also threaten to bring users close to their balance penalties, providing more incentive to manage economic relationship through other types of transaction.

The most important incentive in the network is the incentive to balance one's account, so that dB/dt is close to 0, and overall income matches overall expenses. If dB/dt is far from zero, then balance penalties start to become an issue. If X is at the account maximum, any additional income over that balance is forfeit to TUA. In this case, user Y has no incentive to give additional support to X, since that additional support is simply forfeit to TUA. Similarly, if X is at the account minimum, any additional expenses are drawn from TUA free of any modifiers. In this situation, user Y has no incentive to endorse X, since that endorsement is again forfeit. In these cases, the transfer of Strangecoin is below its potential, so users are less likely to engage in these transactions; in other words, balance penalties shrink the amplification of one's support network. Users nearing a penalty cannot acquire or dump their balance through TUA, so must arrange transactions with other users to manage their account. There may be income penalties on large balance transfers to prevent users authorizing large payments in order to avoid balance penalties.

Because of these balance constraints, the optimal strategy for all users (including TUA) is to keep income and expenses near a 1:1 ratio. This might be handled in the traditional ways, through careful budgeting and account management. But this can also be handled by managing one's economic support network through transactions other than payment that will keep one's account balanced. If X has sufficiently large income, they must take on equally sizable expenses to avoid balance penalties. These expenses can come in the form of support and endorsements for other members of the network X wishes to support and endorse, effectively growing the network on the basis of their prosperity. The converse holds for users with large expenses. For this reason, prosperity in Strangecoin is measured by a user's throughput of Strangecoins over time, and not their raw quantity at any given time. Users with large throughput also occupy central hubs in the network, and their role and influence in the economic activity of the network is given quantifiable significance with Strangecoin, which can be used for making high-level policy decisions concerning the management and ethics of collective economic action.

Finally, balancing one's account requires, among other things, a consistent regular income from TUA. This gives all users an interest in the general health of TUA and of each user to maintain a relatively balanced account. In general, Strangecoin users seek out semi-persistent networks of support and coupling-- similar in some ways to investment, but investment in people-- and the overall stability of these networks account for the economic well-being of both users and the network as a whole. The incentive towards cooperative, stable, interdependent economic relationships takes place through an interface that bears an intuitive relation to traditional currencies, especially as it pertains to marketplaces of competition.

There's more work required to put flesh on the bones of this idea. There are many conversations to have about the dynamics of the network and the particular constraints it should operate within, both as a matter of practical operation and as a matter of sensible public policy.

I'd like to have those conversations with you.

R. Mute posted:

Why?

Enjoy posted:

That doesn't seem like a good idea. Attention and exchange in themselves aren't coterminous with utility.

quote:

While it's not necessarily true that our exchanges need to account for value in this nonlinear way, I think it's an interesting thought experiment to discuss ways in which our currency can express different aspects of the value of our transactions. I'm not claiming that Strangecoin represents the "true value" of our transactions; I'm simply saying that it's another way to model our economic relations, and looking at the network in this way might reveal salient aspects of the network that are hidden from view with other currencies. So I think Strangecoin really is describing some aspect of our economic relations, and it's a perspective that money often doesn't give you. If you trade me money, I don't know where it came from or what ties it has to the rest of the economy. But if you trade me Strangecoin, the trade itself gives me a picture of your importance and influence on the rest of the economy, and I can use that information to judge the value of the trade we're engaged in.

StarMagician posted:

You already lose, right here.

If I trade my dollar for your burger, the only possible reason I would do that is because that burger is, for whatever reason, of more value to me than a dollar. Likewise, the only reason you would trade your burger for my dollar is because you feel that my dollar is, for whatever reason, of more value to you than your burger.

Both of us come into the trade with certain assets, and we walk away with assets that are, to us, more valuable than what we came in with. Otherwise it makes no sense for us to trade. This is why we want people to trade as much as possible.

icantfindaname posted:

Eripsa why don't you actually respond to the question of 'why is this necessary or beneficial in any way' instead of using rhetorical tricks to dodge it?

And as general advice you should probably answer that question to yourself every time you come up with a hare-brained techno-fetishist utopian pipe dream.

Popular Thug Drink posted:

You might as well close the thread then.

Obdicut posted:

Again, the problems with your nutso plan is:

Attention doesn't measure anything useful: People pay attention to distracting but unimportant things.
Attention doesn't imply solutions. People might pay a lot of attention to a downed electrical wire. To interpret that attention would still take a human intelligence.
Attention is fakeable: We can fake paying attention to stuff easily.
Attention is buyable: You can offer people money to pay attention to stuff.

There is hardly a worse idea of how to structure our economy than attention. If you were trying to make a horrible system, you couldn't do better than attention.

Zachack posted:

I read that thing and I don't understand why I'd want to use marblecoins. It seems like a huge amount of my time and energy as a regular dude for no other seeming benefit besides having a maximum income policy in place.

quote:

We're talking about values, but I think these are ultimately empirical questions about which system performs better under certain constraints. I think these empirical questions can be resolved prior to implementation, by modeling the incentive structure of employees operating under traditional payment schemes, and employees operating under coupling transactions under Strangecoin, and then running simulations of the two models. I suspect traditional currencies will perform well under certain assumptions, but also that Strangecoin will perform well under similar assumptions, and may even outperform traditional currencies. In particular, I suspect that an employee with a coupled Scoin transaction with a business will have a closer relationship with that business, partly because the transaction has direct consequences on every other transaction the user engages in, and (by extension) has a closer association with that employee's identity than another business offering only a weekly paycheck. Businesses spend lots of money cultivating employee cultures so that they identify with the business, and these aspects of the culture can be more influential on employee motivation and job satisfaction than financial compensation. Strangecoin builds these relationships directly into the transaction, so we might expect it to have similar consequences.

But as I said, I think these are empirical questions that can only be solved from the armchair if that armchair is in front of a computer model simulation.

quote:

Other comments suggest that this can be implemented with existing tools, which I take as a virtue of the proposal.
In any case, John von Neumann proved a long time ago that any nonzero sum game with n players can be modeled as a zero sum game with n+1 players, where the n+1 player represents the global state. TUA is simply an implementation of this proof.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game#Extensions

I give an an analogy in the proposal of the popularity of a celebrity couple being a nonlinear relationship to the popularity of each celebrity individually. I think our intuitive understanding of our social relationships is nonlinear in this way generally, and I think Strangecoin can model those nonlinear relationships well.

So, for instance, I'm imagining a family, spouses, close friends, and so on entering into extended coupling transactions, so that as a community their prosperity rises and falls together. I might also enter into such transactions with certain business with whom I want to couple my activities, and these coupling transactions might serve in lieu of direct billing or payment. A coupling relationship with a business is effectively a contract, but with traditional currency you need the whole legal framework of contracts to support the transaction, and with Strangecoin the transaction is built directly into the currency, and the interface looks almost exactly like a point-of-sale cash transaction.

And I can enter into less serious relationships of varying degrees with other parties. The effect is a way of managing not just financial transactions, but also reputation, investment, and other dynamics social constraints on the economy via the currency itself. Money is memory (http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr218.pdf), but our existing currencies only represent some aspects of our economic activity, and therefore put limits on the memory stored in the economy. A nonlinear coin like Strangecoin can embed that social knowledge in the currency itself, providing a more robust memory framework on which we can conduct our economic transactions.

I only hint at this in the proposal, but I suspect a system like this is required to resolve the twisted legal artifice the corporate veil, because it quantifies explicitly the role individuals have in collective economic activity, and thereby gives a method for explicitly holding persons proportionally responsible (in both credit and blame) for their contributions to that activity.

But I think that's a much more radical proposal than the one I've offered for Strangecoin, and I should probably only be defending that here. =)

Popular Thug Drink posted:

Yeah, when Eripsa was listing the different features of strangecoin it occurred to me that all of these transaction types already exist in one form or another, they're just not baked into the protocol of currency and exist as add-on functions of banking. The question there is why these things need to be packaged with currency in the first place unless you start with the idea that monetary systems work much better from a computer science perspective than an economic perspective.

So basically OP unless you can demonstrate why treating money as packets instead of dollars and tracking transaction metadata intrinsically is a good thing you won't get much traction outside of cryptonerd circles.

SedanChair posted:

Eripsa "presentation" is not what makes something insane or not.

Popular Thug Drink posted:

Why? Why model high granularity individual transactions when these things are easily abstractible?

It feels like you're trying to shoehorn social networking into currency to solve problems that don't exist.

I'm highly suspicious of such things because web 2.0 nonsense is a playground for hucksters and scammers.

Good Citizen posted:

I like how he uses the words accounting and bookkeeping several times while bemoaning his perception that no one is recording the value added in these transactions. He's got a point. It's not like there are any major intellectual disciplines or multi billion dollar industries designed to accurately measure and time the value of those transactions from every angle.

So yeah, he does address it but doesn't know a drat thing about what he's trying to address

Concerned Citizen posted:

Even if this particular example isn't workable, I'd like to see people smarter than me play around with variants of the broader concept.

MoaM posted:

Reality Apologist/Eripsa, please answer this poster's questions with brevity and clarity:

quote:

T-1000 posted:
1. Why is it desirable for income to equal expenses rather than exceed it?
2. Why is it desirable to have a balance cap?
3. What stops evasion of the balance cap by increasing spending, or trading to subsidiaries?

Contra Duck posted:

On the last page I posted a completely trivial method for anyone to generate unlimited money for themselves using your stupid 'coupling' transaction but feel free to keep ignoring it buddy.

Ratoslov posted:

Why the hell would anyone want any of these features in a currency? Why would anyone want to couple their currency to an analysis of the social relationships within the world of finance?

quote:

Why would anyone want accounts with balance caps?

quote:

Why would you want any of these transaction types to even vaguely be possible except for 'payment'?

quote:

Why do you want a currency with infinite currency-producing loops (and infinite currency-destroying loops) in a world where geography and scarcity exist?

quote:

Use dollars instead of a currency where the amount of currency in circulation can fluctuate by multiple orders of magnitude on a day-to-day basis?

Contra Duck posted:

You're kidding right? You posted this garbage idea where people can make up money out of thin air without considering even for 5 seconds how this could be abused and you have the gall to call me the lazy one? How about rather than posting yet another rambling techno-fetishist essay you try posting an idea that doesn't involve everyone having infinite money at all times.

Contra Duck posted:

It never changes but new coins are being made. Seems reasonable.

DayReaver posted:

OP, the bad news is that your idea may be/probably is poo poo, but on the plus side you made Hacker News which is probably the most impressive accomplishment anyone in this thread will ever make in their lives. So congrats or whatever.

T-1000 posted:

Multiple accounts.

Obdicut posted:

All of your ideas are wildly terrible, your presentation of them is awful, you don't ever actually try to learn from the criticisms and improve the old idea, but instead just drop it (like your horrifically stupid attention economy poo poo) and come up with a new random word salad. You will never improve unless you actually start being self-critical rather than so desperately, pathetically, painfully self-congratulatory.

PrBacterio posted:

I guess I just don't understand what problem you're trying to fix. The solutions to our basic economic problems seem to me to be rather well understood, it's just that opposition from powerful, wealthy interests stands in the way of their implementation.

quote:

The methodology of the present study is based on three principles:
l. Agent-based modeling. Mechanisms of change are specified for local actors, and then the consequences of these mechanisms are examined to discover the emergent properties of the system when many actors interact? Computer simulation is especially helpful for this bottom-up approach, but its use predates the availability of personal computers (e.g., Schelling 1978).
2. No central authority. Consistent with the agent-based approach is the lack of any central coordinating agent in the model. lt is certainly true that important aspects of cultures sometimes come to be standardized, canonized, and disseminated by powerful authorities such as church fathers, Webster, and Napoleon. The present model, however, deals with the process of social influence before (or alongside of) the actions of such authorities. It seeks to understand just how much of cultural emergence and stability can be explained without resorting to the coordinating influence of centralized authority.
3. Adaptive rather than rational agents. The individuals are assumed to follow simple rules about giving and receiving influence, These rules are not necessarily derivable from any principles of rational calculation based on co sts and benefits or forward­looking strategic analysis typical of game theory. Instead, the agents simply adapt to their environment.

Peel posted:

Eripsa I will be real for a moment

Obdicut posted:

In your deluded world, who will you be giving this proposal to?

Slanderer posted:

So, we are presented with a dilemma--the same dilemma, in fact, that was present in the Attention Economy thread(s): We can't criticize the technical aspects, because they are not sufficiently well-defined to make informed critiques. If someone decides to make a bunch of wild suppositions and say "Well, I guess if we assume A, B, and C then maybe you could squint your eyes and assume that D is plausible", Eripsa will latch on and declare that someone finally "gets it". He will do this multiple times, with multiple sets of irreconcilable assumptions. The only conclusion is that he is a technical evangelist who is incapable of technical work, and is desperate for others to fill in the blanks of his idea. The same dilemma affects the "why?" side of this---the question is irrelevant to him, because his idea is Good and it is Smart. He is looking for us to tell him why is idea is good instead of calling it poo poo-stupid.

Fried Chicken posted:

So let me assure you, you are 100% completely full of poo poo.

Obdicut posted:

"In the architectonic sense" is a useless, stupid, pretentious phrase to throw in. It adds nothing: the concept of 'big idea' is one that people get, it doesn't need to be qualified, and your qualification doesn't even make sense.

quote:

No, your framework of your attention economy is not analogous to either of those. It's a rather small idea, actually, not a big one, and that's part of why it really sucks. You hand-wave in all sorts of explanations for how, once attention is achieved, something will actually be done with it.

quote:

You really love that dumb word. No, a political system that develops from social networks doesn't have historical significance. It's a dumb libertarian dudebro idea with obvious massive flaws that would simply reify existince structural problems; you just ignore all this, and pretend everyone is or is going to be using social networks or using them in the same way.

Slanderer posted:

Have you done that math?

quote:

Let's go with one example--balance limits. You can't just say that income/expenses disappear to avoid hitting a limit, without acknowledging what's happening to them. If I hit the upper limit, is my income being redirected to UniBank1? Or the ether? If it's 0, who is paying the people I owe? If the digital Fed is paying, then this means free currency creation! It's trivially obvious to see how this could be manipulated for directed inflation/deflation.

quote:

Or maybe we can consider the technical details of a transaction. Let's say, for instance, that I have 4 users: A, B, C, and D. A couples with B, B couples with C, C couples with A. All coupling is 100%. D transfers to any one of them, and it is reflected in the other two...and then to the ones they are coupled to...and it keeps going. Now you have an infinitely expanding number of transactions created that create an infinite amount of money. If you say that the coupling is capped at a certain proportion, then it may or may not converge on a value (i don't want to do the math on that), but in any case, then A, B, C decouple, transfer some amount back to D, couple, and start again.

Dogstoyevsky posted:

I really do believe that in science at least, an inability to deliver clear information to your target audience is a fault of your own and not the fault of your audience.

CheesyDog posted:

Good Citizen posted:

Corporations.

Who What Now posted:

No, you have absolutely overestimated your own knowledge and ability, and you have absolutely dismissed actual PhDs (thats #1).

You also claim that your theories have "changed these forums" (that's #2)

When actual PhD's post at you, you ignore them entirely (that's #3)

And you won't shut the gently caress up (that's #4)

Obdicut posted:

The main purpose of a corporation is legal liability shield for the owners.

Adventure Pigeon posted:

I'm really confused and kinda annoyed by the idea of a spontaneous corporate structure to meet a need.

Do you realize how long, even now, it takes to set up a structure to meet even a simple need? To meet complex tasks, such as designing and building a supercomputer or a rocket or a nuclear reactor or design a plane, it can take years to set up a proper organization. There's intense pruning and organizing and training. Even finding people that meet some of the requirements for a given task, whether that's intellectual expertise or leadership or a sufficient understanding of "the big picture" in a particular field that they can take on a leadership role, can be an incredible pain in the rear end. When you do find these people, they will take time to be trained in additional tasks necessary to their position or even to fully integrate into their role in the organization. Further, you need lawyers and HR and every other bit of infrastructure to facilitate communication and ensure legal protection for the people in the organization.

Transactions require both a need and an organization that can meet that need, and the organizations often remain long after a need disappears or is replaced because their expertise and value transcends that need.

SedanChair posted:

Economists have told you you don't know anything about economics. Neuroscientists have told you that the parallels you draw between Twitter and the brain are stoner nonsense. Philosophy PhDs have told you that you don't have sufficient grounding in the discipline you purport to represent.

Who What Now posted:

I literally linked you to a post where you ignored the most thought out and pressing problems with your ideas that were in that post. That's not blindness, that's willful ignorance.

quote:

It's a rather small idea, actually, not a big one, and that's part of why it really sucks.

SedanChair posted:

You seem to think saying "I'm sympathetic to your criticism" means that you get to just keep typing. Does your sympathy mean "never mind"? Somehow it doesn't, it means that even though your ideas have no value HAVE SOME MORE OF THEM! *backs up dump truck full of marbles*

Yes, you are blind. Cranks are blind.

Obdicut posted:

Forget about me, dude. The idea that you think you actually dealt with the criticisms from the accountant dude and the neuro guy is baffling. You didn't. You just handwaved them aside, like you do with everything, because you can't actually come up with a solution to save your life. Any time you do make up something on the spur of the moment, like "Oh corporations will be formed organically through transactions BTW" you just make poo poo worse for yourself.

quote:

And I can enter into less serious relationships of varying degrees with other parties. The effect is a way of managing not just financial transactions, but also reputation, investment, and other dynamics social constraints on the economy via the currency itself. Money is memory (http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr218.pdf), but our existing currencies only represent some aspects of our economic activity, and therefore put limits on the memory stored in the economy. A nonlinear coin like Strangecoin can embed that social knowledge in the currency itself, providing a more robust memory framework on which we can conduct our economic transactions.

I only hint at this in the proposal, but I suspect a system like this is required to resolve the twisted legal artifice the corporate veil, because it quantifies explicitly the role individuals have in collective economic activity, and thereby gives a method for explicitly holding persons proportionally responsible (in both credit and blame) for their contributions to that activity.

But I think that's a much more radical proposal than the one I've offered for Strangecoin, and I should probably only be defending that here. =)

Xelkelvos posted:

without getting offended.

quote:

No, your framework of your attention economy is not analogous to either of those....You hand-wave in all sorts of explanations for how, once attention is achieved, something will actually be done with it.

quote:

A badge is any reward offered as an incentive for acting in a particular way. Badges are a familiar form of gamification found on websites like Coursera and StackOverflow, but the same model might apply to military badges, tenure, and other socially recognized achievements. Badges can produce complex and interesting behavior, and although they are becoming more common, the use of badges for motivating users is not well understood.

The graph below represents a simple badge scenario, where there are two possible actions the user might perform, and two possible badges the user might achieve. The model assumes that each badge has a fixed value. The resulting shape represents the full space of actions that might be elicited from users in this situation.

Each action is represented as one axis in this graph. The red bits on the left of the graph represent the use of both badges to motivate action A2, and the blue bits on the right are when both badges award actions of type A1. As you'd expect, these situations see relatively little actions of the other type. The large gold area in the center represent all the actions that could be motivated by using one badge for each type of action. The darker the graph, the more possible ways to motivate that particular action profile.

So, for instance, (40%, 40%) is right where the two lobes of the heart meet, and is particularly opaque. That means there are lots of ways you can place badges that will generate 40% of each action type. On the other hand, there are relatively fewer ways of generating (30%, 15%) actions, at the pale center of the left lobe.

The interesting result of this graph is that there are some action profiles that can't be motivated no matter where you place the badges. For instance, there's a large concavity around (15%, 55%). Although you can motivate (10%, 60%) and (20%, 50%), you can't motivate the midpoint between the two.

Put simply, badges (of this sort) wont always work to get the behaviors you want. This seems like a really important result for understanding the ways in which work is motivated.

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No, a political system that develops from social networks doesn't have historical significance. It's [an]...idea with obvious massive flaws that would simply reify existince structural problems; you just ignore all this, and pretend everyone is or is going to be using social networks or using them in the same way.