Free as in Freedom Cloud Services

[Patrick Anderson]

Could we ever learn to share the hardware needed for a User Cloud?

Notice corporations are also 'sharing', and must also cover costs.

But corporations must charge *more* than costs to collect Profit
because that is what their investors expect as a Return for risk.

But if the investors were the consumers, and if they would accept
Product as their Return, then Price and Cost are identical since
there is no sale, and so Profit is undefined.

Learning to Share Sources (co-own the Means of Production) is one
half of a plan we can use to begin ignoring the Capitalists.

Learning to Swap Skills (barter our specialized labor for the benefit
of others while those others perform labor for our benefit) is the
other half.

When we finally can co-own the infrastructure of all our Production,
including ISP and cloud services, but more importantly, agriculture
and housing and even city infrastructure will be under our control.

And since the Product will not be sold (except during surplus), we
will not need to pass tokens to receive those goods and services
because the user will already own what he would have otherwise
been forced to purchase because of his co-owning the inputs.

When we finally can trade work by committing to achieve future
production in return for others committing to do the same for us,
then we can specialize without passing tokens.

Sincerely,
Patrick Anderson
http://ImputedProduction.BlogSpot.com

[Melvin Carvalho]

I've started to develop a network architecture for the exchange of
tokens between agents, hopefully to be standarized in the W3C Web
Payments group. Codename "Web Credits".

http://webcredits.org/

It assumes money is debt and provides a global web scale architecture
to provide an data architecture for accounting. Arbitrarily many
workflows, apps and UI can be built on top for any platform.

The design goal is to reuse existing technologies as much as possible
and keep the spec under 2 pages.

I like your vision, I think the world is changing so fast we're going
to be close this decade, if not sooner! :)

[Sepp Hasslberger]

On Feb 6, 2012, at 8:15 PM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:

> I've started to develop a network architecture for the exchange of
> tokens between agents, hopefully to be standarized in the W3C Web
> Payments group. Codename "Web Credits".
>
> http://webcredits.org/
>
> It assumes money is debt and provides a global web scale architecture
> to provide an data architecture for accounting. Arbitrarily many
> workflows, apps and UI can be built on top for any platform.
>
> The design goal is to reuse existing technologies as much as possible
> and keep the spec under 2 pages.
>

Melvin, do you have a description of Web Credits in story form, using terms that would be understandable to the people who aren't programmers?

What I am looking for is some page/article that just tells the story of how you imagine web credits to be used, how they would relate to existing currencies, and what advantages people could obtain from the existence and the use of web credits?

Kind regards
Sepp

[Melvin Carvalho]

I must admit we're a little light on story presentations, at present.
Currently focusing on getting some code finished to demo.

The first app will be a distributed IOU system. We've (the unhosted
and opentabs team) joined forces with the mozilla incubted verese
project. Here's the splash pages of the two projects

http://verese.net/
http://opentabs.net/

If you click on verese there's a video explaining the rationale for an
IOU system.

Hopefully we'll have the alpha of the first app ready this month.

Does that help.

>
> Kind regards
> Sepp

[Patrick Anderson]

Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> It assumes money is debt

Hi Melvin.

Do you think it would it be possible to make a fork of WebCredits
where each represents a Type, Quantity and Quality of Product, and is
backed by these two things:

1.) The Sources needed for production
2.) The Skills needed for production

[Melvin Carvalho]

Hi Patrick

The nature of linked data is that is it almost infinitely extensible
(just like the web).

This means that almost any number of data elements and workflows can be added.

The idea is that each data point is a globally unique variable (a URI)
and other URIs can point to and from them as key value pairs. Hence
the term 'web of data'. It's a bit complicated to imagine at first,
but once you can, it's incredibly powerful.

For various reasons (mainly topological), I suggest it's a good idea
not to contaminate the base data model with too many extra fields, but
rather, to point to and from the in supporting data structures. You
could think of this as like having foreign key tables in an SQL
paradigm.

So specifically the unit here (currency) could point to a product with
rich data points in itself, for example using the good relations
vocab:

http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/

Hope that helps!

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 7 February 2012 22:06, Patrick Anderson <agnu...@gmail.com> wrote:

By the way the first app is almost ready for alpha testing ...

http://opentabs.data.fm/

I haven't written a user manual yet, but perhaps it is relatively
intuitive right now...

The easiest way to populate the friends list is to login with
facebook, however you can login with browserid, gmail, yahoo or webid
and enter recipients manually.

[Sepp Hasslberger]

It does help to understand the situation you are in, but not to do what I intended - which was to bring some news about this to a larger circle of people.

I understand that the production of code is important, but on the other hand, public relations work, spreading the word about what is being done, is not exactly *un*important. So whenever there is time to put down the ideas and the rationale for what's being done in generally understandable terms, please do give us a heads-up.

Kind regards
Sepp

[Melvin Carvalho]

No, I think you're absolutely right. I'm not the greatest skilled in
advocacy, but always like to try and improve and learn from others.
Now that we have the first alpha kind of ready, we can concentrate a
bit more on explaining things.

I suppose the paradigm people are most used to is that of online banking.

In online banking just as in web credits you have 3 concepts

1 Line Items
============

When viewing your statement you can see a credit or debit from another party.

A web credit models this almost exactly. Two counterparties, an
amount, a currency, a description and a time

2 Balance
==========

A balance is simply a summation of of your line items

Actually it boils down to an IOU from the bank to you.

3 Transfers
==========

The data structure for transfer is exactly the same as that of a line item.

So you can send it to other wallets just like you do with in online banking.

With these simple concepts it should be build up complex workflows and
integrate existing ecosystems.

>
> Kind regards
> Sepp

[Sepp Hasslberger]

On Feb 8, 2012, at 10:13 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:

> I suppose the paradigm people are most used to is that of online banking.
>
> In online banking just as in web credits you have 3 concepts
>
> 1 Line Items
> ============
>
> When viewing your statement you can see a credit or debit from another party.
>
> A web credit models this almost exactly. Two counterparties, an
> amount, a currency, a description and a time
>
>
> 2 Balance
> ==========
>
> A balance is simply a summation of of your line items
>
> Actually it boils down to an IOU from the bank to you.
>
>
> 3 Transfers
> ==========
>
> The data structure for transfer is exactly the same as that of a line item.
>
> So you can send it to other wallets just like you do with in online banking.
>
>
> With these simple concepts it should be build up complex workflows and
> integrate existing ecosystems.
>

Interesting.

So you are proposing to bypass all the complexities of what money normally is made of, and just deal with credit and debt. That should stimulate growth of perhaps up to now unimaginable ecosystems of "money".

Since credit and debt are kind of value free, or rather are open to any kind of interpretation, web credits will probably develop their own denomination... just thinking aloud here.

You're simply providing a mechanism to keep track of and to allow direct person2person transfer of credits/debts.

In a way, this turns the idea of money on its head. Instead of the "value" being important, as in present money, the important thing becomes keeping track of the movements, the flows and recording relative accumulation or void (for lack of a better word). It's like pressure (accumulation) in one place and void (vacuum) in another.

The description of a line item (transfer) and the value given to it (in whatever denomination will rise to the top as a natural choice) and the fact that it's signed off by two peers is the proof of value. It's imperfect, but sufficient because it's not the value that's important but the flows and the resulting "balance"...

Open money?

Am I catching the idea?

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 8 February 2012 11:01, Sepp Hasslberger <se...@lastrega.com> wrote:
>
> On Feb 8, 2012, at 10:13 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
>> I suppose the paradigm people are most used to is that of online banking.
>>
>> In online banking just as in web credits you have 3 concepts
>>
>> 1 Line Items
>> ============
>>
>> When viewing your statement you can see a credit or debit from another party.
>>
>> A web credit models this almost exactly.  Two counterparties, an
>> amount, a currency, a description and a time
>>
>>
>> 2 Balance
>> ==========
>>
>> A balance is simply a summation of of your line items
>>
>> Actually it boils down to an IOU from the bank to you.
>>
>>
>> 3 Transfers
>> ==========
>>
>> The data structure for transfer is exactly the same as that of a line item.
>>
>> So you can send it to other wallets just like you do with in online banking.
>>
>>
>> With these simple concepts it should be build up complex workflows and
>> integrate existing ecosystems.
>>
>
> Interesting.
>
> So you are proposing to bypass all the complexities of what money normally is made of, and just deal with credit and debt. That should stimulate growth of perhaps up to now unimaginable ecosystems of "money".

Having read David Graeber's 'Debt: the first 5000 years', he seems to
suggest that money and debt are very closely related. In fact debt
predates coin money. So the question of what money 'normally' is, is
a very interesting topic. imho.

>
> Since credit and debt are kind of value free, or rather are open to any kind of interpretation, web credits will probably develop their own denomination... just thinking aloud here.

I could create an own currency if there's demand for it. But we
already have bitcoin, so perhaps bootstrap that?

>
> You're simply providing a mechanism to keep track of and to allow direct person2person transfer of credits/debts.

Exactly! :)

>
> In a way, this turns the idea of money on its head. Instead of the "value" being important, as in present money, the important thing becomes keeping track of the movements, the flows and recording relative accumulation or void (for lack of a better word). It's like pressure (accumulation) in one place and void (vacuum) in another.

Yes this is a very good analogy. In fact in academic terms, the web
credits system is equivalent to a network system. You could think of
water pipes with capacities and water flowing through them. There are
famous logarithms in computer science, engineering and optimization
for this: min flow / max cut, traveling salesman, djikstra's
algorithm that have real world practical uses.

So the economy could be thought of as nodes with activity flowing
through it. Making this relatively frictionless is a win win for all
the participants.

>
> The description of a line item (transfer) and the value given to it (in whatever denomination will rise to the top as a natural choice) and the fact that it's signed off by two peers is the proof of value. It's imperfect, but sufficient because it's not the value that's important but the flows and the resulting "balance"...

Yes it's imperfect. In parallel you would want an web of trust
infrastructure. In finance today you have, insurance and credit
ratings. Decentralization normally leads to better fault tolerance,
better conflict resolution, self healing and, of course, can obviate
"too big to fail".

>
> Open money?

Perhaps I could co-opt the term "free market", through the use of
technology. But maybe open money is a great way to phrase it.

Although there already is an open money system (I've spoken to matt
slater about this one)

http://www.openmoney.org/

What differentiates web credits from the others is the tight
integration with the web. Almost all of the entities described are
web entites and hence are linkable, scalable and extensible.

>
> Am I catching the idea?
>

Yes! :)

>
>
>

[Fabio Barone]

Yes it's imperfect.  In parallel you would want an web of trust
infrastructure. 

Something like
http://www.trustmap.org
could help?

[Melvin Carvalho]

Yes this kind of thing looks excellent. There's a few trust /
reputation sites starting to spring up.

But we need to think big, one silo is going to have a tough job
modeling all the trust on the web. Essentially we need a universal
language to describe things, then allow federation. We need an open
linkable data format.

Facebook open graph protocol doesnt currently do trust. But David
Recordon did once say that facebook they want to get into 'social
verification' so possibly there's a move in that direction.

Bitcoin OTC web of trust has promise, as does GPG but GPG isnt web
based. The first people to get the ball rolling at web scale I think
can potentially add a lot of value.

A great paper on modeling trust is here:

"Computational Models of Trust and Reputation:
Agents, Evolutionary Games, and Social Networks"

http://www.cdm.lcs.mit.edu/ftp/lmui/computational%20models%20of%20trust%20and%20reputation.pdf

Another question I ask is: how goes does trust need to be. I'll
suggest quite good, but not perfect. Look at ratings agencies as a
good example, they do get things wrong, but are accepted. So with
trust maybe we dont need to go from 0 to 100% ... getting from zero to
'quite good' may be enough.

> could help?

[Mark Roest]

Hello Melvin and Sepp and All,

May I add another layer to the model? I am starting at: "Yes it's imperfect.  In parallel you would want an web of trust infrastructure.  In finance today you have, insurance and credit ratings.  Decentralization normally leads to better fault tolerance, better conflict resolution, self healing and, of course, can obviate "too big to fail"."  You had just discussed flows and nodes of people and energy / money.

The system of money nodes and flows represents (payment for) hand-offs of goods and services from one person / company to another. These hand-offs are occurring within a parallel system of creation and distribution of goods and services, which can itself now be modeled (and needs to be). In fact, they occur at some of the very same nodes (taking account of corporate identities as being the interested parties at many nodes today). Internal corporate expense accounting moves digital tokens of value from one process step to another, so the seemingly missing nodes are covered also.

Corporations find ways to significantly reduce the cost of actual raw materials, energy and labor, as well as equipment, buildings and land. They spend large portions of the final price on marketing and organizational infrastructure, as well as on excessive salaries and bonuses for the chiefs (literal for chief ___ officer, or c-level). This obviously leaves inadequate money in the hands of the other stakeholders, given the structure of the economy.

If we organize a shadow economy alongside the dominant one, we can start by finding situations in which we are able and willing to take at least part of a 'price' (within the shadow economy) in a secondary currency or value token system, or even to make the transaction a gift or a personal obligation, lightly or strongly held. As long as we are operating without a full modeling and accounting system for the supply chain, distribution channel, pricing and profits or losses, each participant needs to budget / reserve sufficient primary currency cash flow to keep going as a relatively isolated participant in the primary economy. This is what keeps secondary currencies or time dollars at a relatively small proportion of the total economic flows, except where a community rallies around them as a means of retaining value for its businesses and citizens.

There are two ways in which a community can so rally: by peer encouragement, and by strategic reduction of costs, especially payments to sources outside the community and region.

The second strategy is based on:

1. The difference between top-heavy corporate and bureaucratic process structures in terms of actual efficiency of getting work done, and integrated community processes which are designed for sustainability and resilience on the physical level.

2. The relationship between final parties in transactions. In a healthy community, people calculate, "how much do I need in return for my participation in this process?" in order to determine what to charge each other, because they are working to secure well-being for everyone, and they actually know pretty much how much needs to be left on the table for others to get along as well. In an extractive, colonial system, the ownership and management are sharply separated from the community, and the corporation, or colonial power, has an ideology of  pulling as much profit as possible out of the community and building its competitive strength even further in the process. (I took business classes; it's true.) Some members of the corporate class also have the ideology of a pirate: don't give any oxygen to your competitors; they have some effective means of following this plan, destroying local businesses, and, when they achieve near- or full-monopoly or -oligopoly status, raising their prices to the point of pain. When a community decides to re-unite and create a sustainable economy, it systematically minimizes its dependence on the corporation, or colonial power. This frees up the excess money that was being paid in tribute to the colonial power, so it is available to circulate within the community. It can allow rebuilding of destroyed businesses, on more efficient models, with social commitments to patronize them sufficiently to cover their costs. Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, California is a prime example of this last part. It mobilized sufficient loyalty to achieve its recovery before any effort to make the whole community sustainable, and is now participating in talks with other businesses to find ways to stabilize their ecosystem.

3. Deliberately creating an economic ecosystem that includes creating a supply chain of surrounding farmland and urban gardens for food production, which restores physical and psychological health through a whole foods diet, social interaction and exercise, which cuts way down on medical costs.

4. Converting all possible process and consumption wastes to inputs for value-generating nodes.

5. Creating a part-barter, part-secondary currency, part-primary currency system with other communities in its economic region, and with places which create surpluses of complementary goods and services outside its region and which it does not produce, or produces under a disadvantage.

6. Kicking out the private investor-owned utilities with Municipal Utility Districts, and maximizing strategies of diligent energy conservation (including rehabilitating local housing and business buildings) and distributed renewable energy source-based electricity generation, as well as capturing heat energy for industrial, commercial and residential heating and refrigeration.

7. Restoring public transportation to its status prior to the end of the Second World War: ubiquitous and affordable. Establishing car-sharing and commercial-vehicle-sharing programs to reduce the requirement for vehicle ownership to 'just enough plus a reserve'.

Numbers 3 and 6 together may increase the average currency pool of the community by 30%, solely by reducing health care costs, increasing (or restoring) personal productivity, and greatly reducing the outward flow of money for new vehicles, fuel and lubricants. 

These 7 steps together will in all likelihood revitalize the community, but getting them started is just the first half of the action. This is the point at which the community can come together to develop an economic sustainability and resilience plan, identifying opportunities for dramatic improvement throughout its economic ecosystems. Turning human and material surpluses, as well as wastes, into inputs for highly creative solutions can increase the currency reserves of the community by another 20% to 30%, or even more, if done comprehensively. 

One of these that has the highest value is the one that secondary currency facilitates: dividing up the jobs that generate primary currency flows, and devoting much of the surplus created by doing so to nurturing the community and restoring the natural environment within and surrounding it. Both of these activities are necessary to restore the people in the community to true health, with the ability to realize their full potential, and a few to several times the level of productivity to which they had been reduced. Using secondary currency to reward participants in this 'shadow-economy-in-transition-to-the-light', encourages people to throw themselves into what is needed and wanted, as well as to continuously improve their performance and strategy in their primary currency jobs (someone was estimating them at 21 hours per week). (Farmers and healers may simply keep going, merging the efforts allocated to primary and secondary compensation.)

I have been thinking in terms of modeling the economy first, then transforming it. Today's writing is pointing in another direction: 'just doing' everything discussed up to this point, and then modeling the result. There would be two main purposes for modeling at this point: to identify further opportunities for improving the community economy, and to establish a management system that is far more distributed than the current one, and bottom-up instead of top-down.

If we design or bring in training in personal and business productivity, and make it widely available and effectively free or affordable, and the (probably rapidly-growing) participating portion of the community has come together in collaboration instead of competition, individual psychology is profoundly affected. We all are born to love and contribute; to move from participation in empire to participation in true community releases us from our imposed conditioning to our true identity and nature. It is the social reversal of colonialism and empire, which are zero-sum games: one takes from another to aggrandize himself, and holds the other as an inferior being. One becomes callous to other's pain, the other becomes inured to a battered self-image and systematic deprivation. Both are ill, as in not well or healthy.

Even if a portion of the community is still addicted to roles of aggrandizing themselves, or of providing support to aggrandizers in return for portions of the spoils that are much smaller, but still larger than what the victims are left with, strong community organization and communication, and a well-supported secondary currency system, can manage total money-energy flows so that there are progressively less and less resources available to the colonial-style forces. To the extent that those forces are dependent on capital markets for their power, this is sufficient to drive them out of business entirely, because the signal of declining profits will cause their stocks to be radically devalued.

The revaluing of stocks and bonds can be pursued systematically, through two complementary strategies:

1. Make the transition from colonialism a national meme! Because corporate profits only start when they have paid their basic operating costs (this is called the break-even point), even a small percentage reduction in sales has a disproportionate impact on profits, depending on at what percentage of sales the break-even point is reached. If communities share research results nationwide, to identify which products (goods and / or services) are good, bad or indifferent within multiple categories of evaluation, including social and economic impact of corporate practices, the systematic change in behavior that this can support can create a sea change in which stocks are high and which are low, making it possible, for example, to replace fossil and nuclear fuels entirely within a decade or two. 

This becomes possible because sufficient capital will have been withdrawn from the pirate and incompetent companies' stock portfolios to fund the equivalent of the United States' mobilization for World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Only this time, the population has already moved off the farms and into the cities, where they are already available for jobs building and installing renewable energy generation, transmission, conservation, and transportation system overhauls.

2. Collaborate with other communities to create breakthrough open-source technologies, to go into their production, and to organize distributed yet efficient production nation- or region-wide, with the intention of fairly rapidly reaching the target level for sustainability. Every community has inventors, and people playing both roles, in communities region-wide or nationwide, can collaborate to develop the training and resources needed to turn their discoveries into business - especially cooperative businesses. We can seed the process with hundreds or thousands of existing inventions, highly valuable but kept in the dark until today. I know of many. So do Gunter Pauli, Hunter Lovins, Amory Lovins, and many other researcher-activists.

Eventually people will wake up realizing they have just completed a paradigm shift, and that they have written entirely new rules for the economic game -- and won the game handily. I expect that there are a bunch of steps missing here, but we will have arrived. Then, if not sooner, we will have achieved the state of mind, and the consistency in our economic behavior, that will allow us to feel comfortable resetting all the registers for income to those people need to thrive, and shifting most monetary tracking to simply tracking what is needed and wanted, where it is able to be produced, and what is a fair level of production to be committed to, so that all needs are met. In other words, there will be a limited set of truly relevant roles for money; people will indicate what they need and want, they will share in production of enough of the total set of goods and services that results from aggregating all the real demand. The number of people who require 'hard currency' and have something of compelling value to exchange for it will continue to decline, and they will have long since lost their political dominance over our nation and the world.

Demand will no longer be distorted by inability to pay, by constricting supply to drive up prices, or by grossly exaggerated purchasing and market power in the hands of the few. Supply will no longer be distorted by grossly excessive variations on brands and to a degree, products, simply to create opportunities for capturing part of the money supply. If we share jobs, we don't have to work ourselves to death or ill health, and we create a win-win environment, rather than win-lose. 

The classic example of excessive market segmentation and brand variation is industrial dyes. In Cradle to Cradle, McDonough and Braungart tell the apocryphal tale of research that finally revealed that of 1800 industrial dyes, only 15 were proven safe for the environment, and those 15 in combination can make every color! The other 1785 are most likely to be unnecessary. Society, as an organism or system, is better off if the chemists that work for each of them leave their jobs and apply their skills to working with natural (especially non-petroleum-derived) ingredients for plastics, fuels and other materials, to help complete the industrial paradigm shift that will allow us to recover our planet as much as is still possible. Those factory assets can be used for the new, green products. 

We can go forward using some primary and secondary currencies, but becoming more and more a bottom-up-planned, decentralized gift economy, as more and more people come out of the klieg-light glare of empire psychology, and into the natural sunlight of taking care of business, each other and all our relations.

Ok, enough for now.

Blessings, 

Mark Roest

[Sepp Hasslberger]

Well argued Mark, 

and in a way going in the same direction as an article I just found on the p2pfoundation blog

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/beyond-alternative-currencies-towards-asymmetric-account-systems-for-gift-based-markets/2010/10/13

Perhaps, for that new market, we need "soft currency" instead of the hard one used in today's commercial exchanges. Melvin's project would seem an ideal candidate for that soft (or "fuzzy"?) currency to find its way around from peer to peer and from customer to supplier and vice versa.

I have left a comment there, which I want to copy here.

"Great post and good observation by Eric that the word “gift” is really a link into the old type of rigid market. It’s the only escape out of that market for isolated operations, but it isn’t really a substitute for it, as others here have observed.

Perhaps we should have a new thing – somehow the term “fuzzy market” pushes into my space here.

And let’s say that in parallel to what today is considered the “real” market we build up a fuzzy market to include all those operations and interactions that don’t strictly fit into the normal, transaction-based economy, we would then need a whole new terminology and a denomination for the “fuzzies” (I’m not advocating to call them that).

An initiative that could supply the transfer mechanism for the fuzzies (or whatever they might be called) is underway atwebcredits.org/

This seems pliable enough to be shaped into something usable for that alternative economy that isn’t really like the one we’re used to…"

Sepp

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 8 February 2012 14:56, Fabio Barone <holon...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>

I've looked in a bit more detail at trustmap. It's twitter specific
right now, but if it could be made generic I think it has great
promise.

> could help?

[Sepp Hasslberger]

Hi Mark, Melvin and anyone else listening...

I have put order into my thoughts on this one now. 

The conclusion I arrived at is that we should have "soft" money, rather than (or perhaps in addition to?) hard currency. Why and more or less how is described here:

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-case-for-soft-money/2012/02/22

Sepp

On Feb 9, 2012, at 12:45 AM, Mark Roest wrote:

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 22 February 2012 12:53, Sepp Hasslberger <se...@lastrega.com> wrote:

Hi Mark, Melvin and anyone else listening...

I have put order into my thoughts on this one now. 

The conclusion I arrived at is that we should have "soft" money, rather than (or perhaps in addition to?) hard currency. Why and more or less how is described here:

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-case-for-soft-money/2012/02/22

Sepp, that's a really cool blog post.  I love your writing style.  Thanks for the mention of web credits!  I've had some feedback and am aiming to make the next version more understandable / readable.  Thank you for the additional perspective.

Have you read David Graeber's debt the first 5000 years?  He talks about the 'myth of barter', which may be interesting to you.  There's a few summaries on the web, here's one:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/david-graeber-on-the-invention-of-money-–-notes-on-sex-adventure-monomaniacal-sociopathy-and-the-true-function-of-economics.html

I'm starting to think of money as functions of both debt and TRUST.  100% trust could be thought of as triple A.  0% trust could be thought of as default. 

It's easy to think in terms of black and white, however the world has found out recently that trust is very hard to estimate.  We have not good way to model it, and price discovery is a poor estimate, yet it can determine the fate of nations.

I am starting to think that both debt and trust need to be considered when considering money.  This is also particularly when creating new money (or web credits).  They could be trusted not at all, or trusted quite well. 

In our current world of 'peak debt', Is there such a thing as the 'law of conservation of trust', I wonder?  If i issue new debt, does that reduce the trust (and hence risk of default) in the existing system.  Could this be seen as a transfer of wealth?

How should the options for trust be determined.  Historically it has all to often been achieved through monopolies and force or arms. 

Are we ready for a conversation about freedom to trust, or should we just plough straight ahead with the technology, and let society catch up?
 

[Patrick Anderson]

> I'm starting to think of money as
> functions of both debt and TRUST.

Imagine a money where each note is a
claim over the Sources and Skills
required for production.

Debt as a "promise to pay" means a
worker can promise apply his Skills
in the future for food and shelter today.

TRUST as the land, plants, tools, etc.
needed to host that production.

This currency represents 3 things:

0. A PRODUCT of some predicted type, quantity and quality.

1. Commitments of the SOURCES such as land, mineral/water rights,
buildings, tools, etc. required for production. This co-owned
property must be constrained by legally binding social contract. See
the GNU General Public Law and PropertyLeft for attempts.

2. Commitments of all the SKILLS required for production.

For example:
0. One dozen grade A, medium chicken eggs every week.

1. Co-ownership in land and tools etc. of a chicken farm and to grow their feed.

2. Commitments from all the people required to make it happen.

THIS TITLE IS A PREDICTION OF PERFORMANCE
#0 IS INSURED ONLY IF #1 AND #2 ARE SECURED

[Sepp Hasslberger]

Melvin, thanks for reading and for the acknowledgement. 

Yes, I really do think that web credits is ideally placed to become the infrastructure for a new kind of money such as the credits I envision.

Now for the trust. I have sincerely tried to link trust into this, while discussing it with the developers of a circular barter exchange system. Couldn't make sense of it.

Then I realized that trust, in the current context, only has negative implications. Positive trust does not get you much, except being relatively undisturbed, while negative trust really puts you down in the dumps (punishment). In the barter world, all you can strive for is for sufficient trust to take part in the exchanges, you just want to avoid being downgraded to where people *don't* trust you any more. 

So my conclusion on trust was that, with the kind of money I propose, trust is really implicit. If you even participate, you already demonstrate trust in the system and in the other participants. You are taking the first step and showing trust by supplying something in return for a mere promise. But you are also doing something more important. By giving in return for a credit, a promise, you increase trust in the system, and implicitly in everyone else who participates. You create a circle of trust, and your "performance" in the system is the trust metric. There is no sense in measuring trust in any other way. You either have it or you don't. And it's a positive, not a negative quality in this distributed exchange.

I haven't read David Graeber's book. Found an interview by him just recently and was really fascinated to read that he talks about different times of history where money was yang and others where money was yin (he didn't use that terminology, but the concept is that) and that those cycles are on the order of 500 to 1000 years between each swing. So my thought is: Could it be that we are on the cusp of another such swing from hard currency to soft currency? 

The Graeber interview I found, by the way, is here: 

http://inthearena.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/05/david-graeber-studied-5000-years-of-debt-real-dirty-secret-is-that-if-the-deficit-ever-completely-went-away-it-would-cause-a-major-catastrophe/ 

I have also read the piece you linked of Graeber in nakedcapitalism.com and must say I enjoy his sense of humor and sharp reasoning when it comes to the origins of money. It makes sense that money actually started out as a diffuse and somewhat fuzzy credit system rather than the awkward barter that the economists tell us about. Unimaginative types those economists...

As I said, trust should probably be seen as inherent in the (credits) system. For one, someone who has given and obtained credit(s) from others inspires more trust than someone who is without credit(s). But other factors flow into this as well. We prefer to work with (exchange with, do business with) certain people and certain companies that have little to do with a formal measure of trust. It's a wholistic evaluation of connections and experiences. 

So trust, rather than being formalized, should probably be left up to the individual participant in a credits economy. It naturally evolves from experience, and it naturally flows into economic decisions. But I don't think we need a separate, formal quantification of it. 

Formalized trust is really a part of the yang, "hard currency" economy. Since everything is based on profit and competition, you really need to make sure you can trust the person you are doing business with and especially the person you "trust" with your money. But that's not part of what we're talking about here. 

Kind regards

Sepp

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 22 February 2012 16:18, Patrick Anderson <agnu...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm starting to think of money as
> functions of both debt and TRUST.

Imagine a money where each note is a
claim over the Sources and Skills
required for production.

This is an interesting idea.  By the way web credits can handle any currency imaginable.
 

Debt as a "promise to pay" means a
worker can promise apply his Skills
in the future for food and shelter today.

TRUST as the land, plants, tools, etc.
needed to host that production.

This currency represents 3 things:

0. A PRODUCT of some predicted type, quantity and quality.

1. Commitments of the SOURCES such as land, mineral/water rights,
buildings, tools, etc. required for production.  This co-owned
property must be constrained by legally binding social contract.  See
the GNU General Public Law and PropertyLeft for attempts.

2. Commitments of all the SKILLS required for production.


For example:
0. One dozen grade A, medium chicken eggs every week.

1. Co-ownership in land and tools etc. of a chicken farm and to grow their feed.

2. Commitments from all the people required to make it happen.

THIS TITLE IS A PREDICTION OF PERFORMANCE
#0 IS INSURED ONLY IF #1 AND #2 ARE SECURED

Regarding the issuance of money Im starting to think of things in a more abstract way.

Value of issued money is a function of trust, and trust is a function of reputation.

This perhaps yields a 4 step plan for scaling up social good:

1. decentralize reputation
2. take trust back
3. issue money
4. solve problems

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 23 February 2012 17:43, Sepp Hasslberger <se...@lastrega.com> wrote:

Melvin, thanks for reading and for the acknowledgement. 

Yes, I really do think that web credits is ideally placed to become the infrastructure for a new kind of money such as the credits I envision.

Now for the trust. I have sincerely tried to link trust into this, while discussing it with the developers of a circular barter exchange system. Couldn't make sense of it.

Then I realized that trust, in the current context, only has negative implications. Positive trust does not get you much, except being relatively undisturbed, while negative trust really puts you down in the dumps (punishment). In the barter world, all you can strive for is for sufficient trust to take part in the exchanges, you just want to avoid being downgraded to where people *don't* trust you any more. 

So my conclusion on trust was that, with the kind of money I propose, trust is really implicit. If you even participate, you already demonstrate trust in the system and in the other participants. You are taking the first step and showing trust by supplying something in return for a mere promise. But you are also doing something more important. By giving in return for a credit, a promise, you increase trust in the system, and implicitly in everyone else who participates. You create a circle of trust, and your "performance" in the system is the trust metric. There is no sense in measuring trust in any other way. You either have it or you don't. And it's a positive, not a negative quality in this distributed exchange.

I haven't read David Graeber's book. Found an interview by him just recently and was really fascinated to read that he talks about different times of history where money was yang and others where money was yin (he didn't use that terminology, but the concept is that) and that those cycles are on the order of 500 to 1000 years between each swing. So my thought is: Could it be that we are on the cusp of another such swing from hard currency to soft currency? 

The Graeber interview I found, by the way, is here: 

http://inthearena.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/05/david-graeber-studied-5000-years-of-debt-real-dirty-secret-is-that-if-the-deficit-ever-completely-went-away-it-would-cause-a-major-catastrophe/ 

I have also read the piece you linked of Graeber in nakedcapitalism.com and must say I enjoy his sense of humor and sharp reasoning when it comes to the origins of money. It makes sense that money actually started out as a diffuse and somewhat fuzzy credit system rather than the awkward barter that the economists tell us about. Unimaginative types those economists...

As I said, trust should probably be seen as inherent in the (credits) system. For one, someone who has given and obtained credit(s) from others inspires more trust than someone who is without credit(s). But other factors flow into this as well. We prefer to work with (exchange with, do business with) certain people and certain companies that have little to do with a formal measure of trust. It's a wholistic evaluation of connections and experiences. 

So trust, rather than being formalized, should probably be left up to the individual participant in a credits economy. It naturally evolves from experience, and it naturally flows into economic decisions. But I don't think we need a separate, formal quantification of it. 

Formalized trust is really a part of the yang, "hard currency" economy. Since everything is based on profit and competition, you really need to make sure you can trust the person you are doing business with and especially the person you "trust" with your money. But that's not part of what we're talking about here. 

Quite an interesting video that is very close to the core idea of web credits:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwmM5Nb6hiE

 

[Poor Richard]

Hi Patrick, Sepp, melvin, mark (did I miss anybody?),

I have been arguing for somebody such as the Linux community to do an appliance-like "Peer Box" that provides all the p2p apps needed for social networking, voting, trust/reputation metrics, content collaboration/management, workflow, complementary currency, crowd funding, etc.

This is an extension of the FreedomBox idea, and it could easily be an app package that ran on FBs. FB-equivalent security would be essential, and it should be an independent appliance that acts as a gateway or router for the whole home network. So the FB would be an ideal platform for a Peer Box.

The hard part is picking the "best of breed" p2p apps as I listed above, and integrating them nicely.

I agree with melvin:

> The idea is that each data point is a globally unique variable (a URI)
> and other URIs can point to and from them as key value pairs.  Hence
> the term 'web of data'.  It's a bit complicated to imagine at first,
> but once you can, it's incredibly powerful.

This is an important data structure not just for a credit system but for many other kinds of data/content. This is also probably the best approach for "identiy" and "trust" info, for example. Maybe even for all metadata. That kind of network data structure will also help the web get more semantic.

PR

[Poor Richard]

Oh, I forgot to mention, I'm inclined to let the corporations keep acting as carriers for now while we slowly strip the high-value layers away from them with things like Freedom Box and Peer Box.

Peer Box would have ports/slots for land line, cellular/mobile (standard and p2p), wifi, ethernet, etc. so one would have alternative network flexibility as long the corporations keep giving us the big bandwidth at a price we can't refuse.

The industrial-strength fiber, server cloud, etc. is the last thing I would get around to acquiring.

PR

[Fabio Cecin]

Hi,

(1) Have you guys heard about this concept: "Sovereign Computing" ? :
http://sovcomp.net/

The above is a portal that's not yet launched, according to Klaus (the
guy that came up with the concept). The original manifesto/vision may
be more useful: http://www.advogato.org/article/808.html

And here's his current sovcomp project: http://sneer.me

Sovcomp is essentially a vision of "free-as-in-freedom computing", and
I see it as an alternative to big-corp Cloud Computing.

(2) About the "freedom appliance" idea, I've been carrying it for
about three years now.

But from that I've grown a description of what would it take to
achieve a kind of "global freedom computing". I'm researching and
developing a sketch vision of the following stack that's supposed to
be complete:

(A) -> Network: a free as in freedom (FaiF for short) Internet-like
networking infrastructure, including a FaiF physical infrastructure
(the topic of this list, AFAIK),
(B) -> Higher-level software: a FaiF global computing paradigm (not
simply a free as in freedom software stack that's written under old
assumptions of what software is supposed to look like and work like);
the most useful concept that maps to what I want seems to be Sovereign
Computing; this is the software that runs the network itself, and that
allows for a whole new kind of radically different "applications" to
exist, designed to solve higher human needs that the current
abstractions simply cannot reach, cannot talk about;
(C) -> Software infrastructure: FaiF basic software (we already have
that; lots of people working on a free software infrastructure, e.g.
GNU, Linux) -- this is the stuff that we use to get other stuff done:
device OSes, compilers, drivers, all the basic tools;
(D) -> Devices: FaiF (and also affordable) devices to access the
network (we already have those too; lots of people and resources
already invested here).

I have a model for a (B) (my forte), loose ideas for (A), have done
some (C), and I don't really care about (D).

So that's what I'm working on now: on a B, while imagining the A's
that will be there in time for it to support. It's a complicated
research topic and I'm trying to find a way to dedicate all of my time
to that.

Fabio

[Poor Richard]

Fabio,

I think this proposal has some stuff in common with the sovereign ideas.

PeerPoint

PeerPoint = Peer-to-Peer Everything

[This is a back-of-the-envelope first draft of top-level design specifications.]

PeerPoint is intended to be much more than a user-owned social networking platform. It is imagined as a modular, peer-to-peer (p2p) application suite, developer’s tool kit, and security appliance in one plug-n-play box.

Each PeerPoint is an autonomous node on a p2p network with no centralized corporate  infrastructure. PeerPoints communicate directly with each other over secure, anonymous internet connections. PeerPoint users may still connect to the internet via commercial internet service providers (ISPs), but those ISP’s only act as blind, passive carriers of PeerPoint encrypted data.

The PeerPoint will be connected between the user’s pc, home network, or mobile device and the ISP connection. It will support phone lines, mobile devices, wifi, ethernet, etc. for maximum flexibility. It may be accessed by your remote mobile devices either over commercial cellular networks or p2p wireless mesh networks like those used by Occupy Wall Street.

The PeerPoint is designed to Occupy the Internet.

The need:

Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are proprietary, for-profit platforms that exploit users to create content and value. But they provide value as well, so a “Facebook killer” must provide greater user value (functionality, privacy, etc.) than Facebook. For numerous reasons the services provided by the commercial companies do not adequately meet the creative, social, political, and financial needs of the 99%. They are not up to the tasks that participatory democracy, non-violent social change, and sustainable economic systems will demand of our internet communications and our evolving cooperative methods of creating, working, organizing, negotiating, and decision-making together, in groups large and small, regardless of the geographical distances between us. This new kind of group interaction over distances is what allows self-selected individuals to coalesce into powerful workgroups, forums, and movements. It is also what will enable direct participation in the legislative process to function at a large scale for the first time in human history.

The social tools provided by Facebook, Twitter, etc. have been fun and fairly useful, but if we think about how much serious collaborative work lies ahead of us over the next decade in order to shift an entire civilization onto a more principled, democratic, and sustainable footing, we are going to need better, deeper, more collaborative, more functional work tools. Those tools need to belong to us and they need to meet the needs of of our society and our time, not the needs of a few self-serving billionaires. With the PeerPoint approach, each user will own her own inexpensive internet appliance and all the data and content she creates. Why leave the usefulness of the internet and the custody of our data up to a few companies whose business models depend on pimping us to advertisers, and who can change their terms of service at any time?

I have been hoping for somebody like the Linux community to create an appliance-like p2p node that provides all the apps needed for social networking, voting, trust/reputation metrics, database, content collaboration and management, workflow, complementary currency, crowd funding, etc.  I’m talking about something that comes complete, out of the box, with the apps pre-installed and connects easily to your personal computer, home network, or mobile device.

For developers:

If a FreedomBox were used as a starting platform, the PeerPoint application package would be added on top of the FreedomBox security stack.

The PeerPoint apps don’t yet exist as an integrated package, or even as individual apps that are adequate to replace Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, Google Search, Google Earth, YouTube, Kick-Starter, etc. etc. All this functionality is envisioned for the PeerPoint eventually.

In the beginning it will be necessary to have interfaces/connectors to various proprietary client-server applications like Google until they can be re-engineered in  open source p2p versions.

Initially the project would consist of a first tier of essential apps that must be tightly integrated in their interfaces/connectors, protocols, and data structures. After deploying the first tier, development would continue on a second-tier of applications. Second tier development efforts could be much more distributed and parallel since the final specs for all the basic interfaces, protocols and data structures of the first tier modules would be available to all interested developers.

The common requirements for each PeerPoint app are:

• world class, best-of-breed
• open source
• p2p architecture
• consistent, granular, user-customizable security management and identity protection
• integrated with other apps in the suite via a common distributed database and/or “data bus” architecture.
• consistent, user-customizable large, medium, and small-screen (mobile device) user interfaces
• ability to interface with its corresponding major-market-share service (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• GPS enabled

First tier applications:

1. distributed database
2. social networking  (comparison of distributed social network applications)
3. trust/reputation metrics
4. crowdsourcing: content collaboration & management  (wiki, Google Docs, or better)
5. project management/workflow
6. data visualization (data sets, projects, networks, etc.)
7. user-customizable complementary currency and barter exchange (Community Forge or better)
8. crowd funding (http://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-open-source-crowdfunding-platform)
9. voting (LiquidFeedback or better)
10. universal search across all PeerPoint data/content and world wide web content

Once the PeerPoint is running with these first tier applications we may be able to organize the 99% well enough to begin rapid development of the more complex second-tier applications and to start building or buying alternative network infrastructure.

Poor Richard

[Fabio Cecin]

On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Poor Richard <poor.r...@gmail.com> wrote:

Fabio,

I think this proposal has some stuff in common with the sovereign ideas.

PeerPoint

(...)

Yes, there's a lot in common!

Your PeerPoint / PeerBox idea seems, to me, like "Decentralized Apple Product". The idea is ease of use, integration, and focus on the apps (i.e. search for the killer app that would drive adoption of the well-crafted, complete solution that's underneath). Correct me if I'm wrong.

There's also other decentralized systems/approaches/projects, like Sneer, that are more focused on "the people will code the apps", instead of having one project integrate everything.

I think all these projects are pretty exciting, and I can't wait to use them all.

The approach I'm seeking is a bit different from everything else I've seen. What I want to create is "money for computers". Not digital currency, in the sense of a currency for humans to use and create an alternative economy for themselves, but an economy _for_ computers to negotiate between themselves.

My thesis is that once computers -- connected to a decentralized, distributed "Internet" (the Internet, or a non-commercial, grassroots one, or a crypto overlay over the current one, doesn't matter) -- are free to "sell" resources to each other, including the ability to execute anonymous remote code, not only of storing files or sharing bandwidth, then a lot of very interesting things become possible. Trust, at the basic level, emerges or is an expression of how much resource trading (bandwidth, disk space, computing power, memory and, at a "services", secondary level, provide specific files or content, or provide reliability and availability, etc.) nodes are able to carry out with each other. The same way that commercial ties strengthen and even define our human communities. 

My thesis is that this ability is at the core of everything. Once we create a decentralized programming platform centered on computing resource trading, all else becomes much easier to accomplish. One of the consequences of this system is the need for a "Peer Box", i.e., the system runs better if you have a UNIX server that's essentially an appliance in your home, similar to PeerBox, FreedomBox and others -- this vision that there's a computing appliance at people's homes that's always on seems to be emerging on several projects/discussions.

But I haven't seen this approach -- a global general computing network tied together around free computing resource commerce -- I think. At the most, there's the idea of decentralized currencies, such as BitCoin. The common approach is to search for an anonymous, secure, etc. protocol that, when paired with the right devices and the right user apps, will take off.

And I'm essentially wondering if anyone had the same idea or thinks this could make sense. I don't really want to duplicate what others are already trying to do.

Thanks for sharing,
Fabio

[Poor Richard]

Fabio,

I think the idea of automatic resource sharing is great, I will include it in my PeerPoiint (new name) specifications. I think this is especially appropriate for a peer-collaborative ecosystem. If Linux doesn't build this into their kernel soon, they must be asleep at the wheel.

Do you consider sharing just cpu cycles or also working memory, storage, graphics & sound processors, etc?

PR

[Fabio Cecin]

On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 2:58 PM, Poor Richard <poor.r...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Fabio,
>

> I think the idea of automatic resource sharing is great, I will include it
> in my PeerPoiint (new name) specifications. I think this is especially
> appropriate for a peer-collaborative ecosystem. If Linux doesn't build this
> into their kernel soon, they must be asleep at the wheel.

Haha :-)

Good point, but I'm not sure the Linux concept can receive this. They
could support an hypervisor/virtualization thingy (which I think they
already have done?). Any more than that (maybe also support a new
protocol and reserve a port for it) seems to fall off the scope of a
kernel / device OS.

> Do you consider sharing just cpu cycles or also working memory, storage,
> graphics & sound processors, etc?

I hadn't thought of that! But yes, the idea is to share any and all
resources. The hardest ones to share seem to be bandwidth (sending and
receiving packets on behalf of a remote process) and processing power
(executing preloaded code on behalf of a remote process or, the more
interesting case, accepting arbitrary remote code and running that in
a sandbox -- much more "cloud computy" as it doesn't involve humans
"installing"*** code before it runs on a machine). All others seem to
be easier to support, and the more, the better.

...

I've thought about this problem for years now. I even have designed an
app (a P2P MMOG engine) that would _require_ arbitrary remote code
execution and, hence, machines doing trading with each other, to be
deployable/viable. That app is what started me on this path, actually.
After six (?) years researching P2P MMOG support, I reached a dead
end: the support I need to develop this doesn't exist yet, and trying
to fit it into the "each P2P app comes with its own protocol" paradigm
is trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. And then all the
"fighting" in my head to move from a protocol/socket/Internet-centric
design to an economy-centric design (a subject that, BTW, I have no
technical understanding or experience).

I think that resource-sharing can be modeled as an application as
well. One of the things I see that move resource sharing/trading to
the core is that it's hard to design e.g. a DHT that's secure, or any
decentralized protocol that's secure for that matter. If the protocol
designer _has an economy_ to design his protocol over then solving
spam, poisoning etc. becomes much simpler; in contrast to designing a
secure protocol that _allows_ an economy app or reputation layer to
exist _later_ and that will serve higher-level applications but not
the network fabric itself. An economy is a step further from
proof-of-work, and is the solution to e.g. SPAM. If you could charge
for every email sent, spammers would lose money. That's my idea: to
make computers become capitalists :-) to collaborate asking: "what's
in it for me?" thousands of times per second to each other. But
instead of building an economy of scarcity, we build an economy of
abundance: when there's spare resources and other nodes have no money,
you just simply give credit away, and whether they repay you or not is
irrelevant (I can elaborate why I think this works, and why this
doesn't necessarily becomes a spamfest instead of preventing spam :-)
).

Fabio

PS: *** Installing = visually inspecting and authorizing code to run
on a machine or environment; essentially, babysitting computers and
wasting time.