Hacking the current economic system
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Big Idea, Mobile App device that allows any user to award themselves their own “points” based on good deeds they done each day, Deeds get publicly listed on users profile. Merchant/other Users accept these “points” for products/services; By essentially giving everyone an possible printing press (and purposely not implementing a check-stop against abuse), we are allowing them to determine for themselves their point “needs” in life, as well as eliminate the “time value” of assets (due to inflation in points as well as an the removal of the incentive of storage for under or un-utilized assets). This will create an decentralized safety net that allows people to do what they most would like to do and hopefully stop the increasing need for the search of privatization and yield in debt-based capitalism
To address some of the real questions I had in my previous thread, I decided to comply an list of possible questions that I believe most people have on their minds on why such an system will not work.
If I may, I would like to understand that your questions are this,
Does an item has to be both desirable and scarce in order for it to retain value?
I believe not, for much of history human credit was extended, many people in villages and local communities still do, for example in India and even rural America; shop-keepers will keep an ledger or an tab, (extending credit to locals and regulars).
This is simply the individuals trust or credit in another, and this is infinite in quantity and desirable and in my opinion, has great value.
My question to you is as follows,
Do you believe that humans, are inherently self-serving? Do you believe that given the chance, humans have an infinite appetite for consuming?
According to modern economic thought, because every individual seeks to gain advantage for his personal benefit, the market is the fairest way to distribute the scarce resources.
If I think of anything more I’ll edit this post, till otherwise peaceIs this what you are on about:http://www.worldkarmaproject.com/about/karma-bank/Or is it something else with a similar name?
no this is an meta-physyical karma-bank, I am talking about an digital de-centralized currency system that is inherently inflationary
Is not labour time vouchers.More like a print your own monopoly money scheme.Anyone can do this now. The problem is getting it accepted..
i honestly think that is it not really different from bitcoin (albet they are inherently deflationary) or the fiat currency scheme going on today(drone strikes keeps people honest). The key issue is reaching critical mass, it is quite easy for things that have artifical scarcity today (digital goods) but also at an more tangible level I think the key issue is that the majority of the populace lives in fear of scarcity which propels them to hoard, if such an psychological fear was removed it would free up a ton of resources. the problem with past socialism was that it was implemented from the top-down rather then the bottom up
contactkarmabank wrote:The key issue is reaching critical mass, it is quite easy for things that have artifical scarcity today (digital goods) but also at an more tangible level I think the key issue is that the majority of the populace lives in fear of scarcity which propels them to hoard, if such an psychological fear was removed it would free up a ton of resources.Agreed that a key issue is that people are still thinking in terms of resources being scarce when they aren't or needn't be. This has a psychological effect, as you say and as George Jackson put it in one of his prison letters in Soledad Brother:
Quote:Consider the people's store, after full automation, the implementation of the theory of economic advantage. You dig, no waste makers, nor harnesses on production. There is no intermediary, no money. The store, it stocks everything that the body or home could possibly use. Why won't the people hoard, how is an operation like that possible, how could the storing place keep its stores if its stock (merchandise) is free?Men hoard against want, need, don't they? Aren't they taught that tomorrow holds terror, pile up a surplus against this terror, be greedy and possessive if you want to succeed n this insecure world? Nuts hidden away for tomorrow's Winter.Change the environment, educate the man, he'll change. The people's store will work as long as people know that it will be there, and have in abundance the things they need and want (really want); when they are positive that the common effort has and will always produce an abundance, they won't bother to take home more than they need.Water is free, do people drink more than they need?He realised that the answer wasn't to fiddle about with real or virtual currencies, but to get rid of money altogether, or, as we would put it, to make money redundant by bringing about the common ownership of resources.
contactkarmabank wrote:the problem with past socialism was that it was implemented from the top-down rather then the bottom upI think you are talking about state capitalism, as in the old USSR and under some leftwing governments in the West. That wasn't socialism as it retained classes and class privileges as well as money and production for sale. Real socialism — the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, production directly for use not profit, and distribution in accordance with the principle "from each their ability, to each their need" — has never been tried yet.
Amazing that i don't recall reading the Jackson quote although i have often been recommended to read Soledad Brother.Anymore appropriate apt quotes from it?
I have an immediat need for a digital currency based on civic engagement and I have some means to get it into general use. I'm working on civic hack project to promote civic activism to attend public hearings and otherwise create political momentum for advocacy of housing construction in San Francisco. we need a currency to measure and promote civic engagement on housing construction advocacy issues. A "SanFrancisco-housing-construction-advocacy-coin" would help us organize our efforts, track our efforts and incentivize advocacy.I'm imagining we distribute coins for comments or upvotes on articles that influence the public. We mostly are focused on getting people to attend public hearings to approve building construction. The problem we face is that the only people willing to invest their time in attending public hearing are local self interested parties who don't want the noise of construction in their back yard. But the overwhelming majority of the people want housing built and are disperesed and silent due to the low individual reward for their time. We have business partners in the construction companies who want to build the housing and can pay USA dollars for people to attend public hearings and speek in suport of public housing, but the public hearing is basically just arguing in front of the building development council so saying "you should build this 400 unit low income residential appartment complex because the developer paid me to doesn't cary much weight", What would carry weight is to sayin front of the building development council "You should build this 400 unit low income residential apparment complex because 400 people upvoted it as a good idea and here's some of their commets on how much it would help. So in our advocacy promotion research I came across the notion of a coupon or currency or tally system to incentivize advocacy and I'm thinking about how best to do this for our cause. There's a number of things we want to do with our SF-housing-construction-advocacy-coin. 1) We want to sell control of parts of our website in SF-housing-construction-advocacy-coin. we're making a map of housing construction proposals and when you click on a housing construction project on the map a popup apears that shows things like the number of residences this will support, the contact info for renting. links to email the planning board to approve of the housing construction. One thing we want to do is open up the controll of what information is shown on the map to the highest bidder in SF-housing-construction-advocacy-coin. there's a lot of housing construction advocacy groups in the region and They'd all like their link to be highest on the list and they'd all like to use this resources differently. For example there's a group of Labor union advocates that perversely act to prevent and stall public housing construction that doesn't use unionized labor. This is an example of a union which is nominally socialism in sympathy putting their unioin goals ahead of the public need for more housing construction which is also a socialism sympathetic goal. We envision that if we just give access to this map to the union to let them decide what will be on the popup for vairous construction projects they'll also put their union interests ahead of the general housing interests. What we want to do is charge them a price in SF-housing-construciton-advocacy-coin for renting the decision power of what to put on the poppup. So if they use SF-Housing-Construction-Advocacy-coin the right to pick the wording for the popop on a particular construction site, then it benefits us in two ways. First they can make additional Housing-Construction-Acvocacy-coin from owning the popup and the would get credit for every facebook like or email or other pro housing construction advocacy action that comes from it. Second, if they fill the popup with negative information because they bought the construciton site that didn't use union labor, then they have to get their SF-Housing-Construction-Advocacy-Coin from some other method to pay the rent on ownership of the popup. So we're kind of ok with that and willing to let the labor union buy for 200 SF-housing-construction-advocacy-coins the right to use our popup to say something like "don't support this housing construction project because it doesn't use union labor". We're ok with that arrangement because they don't do much or any housing construction advocacy currently and we want them too and they could do that easily. So we think they might advocate support for housing construction in order to earn the SFHCAC coin they need to get access to our website popup and rent the popup to advance their non-housing construction advocacy causes and interests. 2) We want a visible and measurable way of identifying who is rich in SF-Housing-Construction-Advocacy-coin (SFHCAC) so we can focus our attention on them and have them speak on public hearings as a paid speaker. We could tally upvotes or use a spreadsheet or word of mouth, but making a currency for it adds credibility and verifiability to the process. It seems harder to currupt if all the initial coin creation is identifiable and the SFHCAC coin is trackable so we can see who contributed how SFHCAC in a vote or delegation or payment and for what purpose. Using a coin system lets us compare cumulative value in housing construction advocacy that come from payments from our central SFHCAC bank for documentation on word of mouth vs upvotes vs attending a pubic hearing and speaking in support of construction. So we want to use the SFHCAC currnency as a complex measurement and accounting system. 3)
I suggest the problem with capitalism isn't money, it's the that money so far has been exclusively using a base unit of capital and used to manage captial and is easily converted only to capital. Here's some reading on the topic form the book. . .Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy By Melanie Swanhttps://books.google.com/books?id=RHJmBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq=multi-currency+society&source=bl&ots=XPsJD0-Sc0&sig=pgpoceXJ-FAqb8if-Y-AHglfQbU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=7DsyVaO-I4SxogSS_oHYAQ&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=multi-currency%20society&f=falseWith blockchain digital currencies you can create a currency based on upvotes or voting for example that might be valuable for socialism. Call it a Vote-coin and it would allow you to split your vote so you might vote all your daily allotment of vote-coins that you've saved for over a year at one time for a decision that's of most importance to you. Or you might split your available vote-coins into two major issues you want to vote on equally. Or you might spend your vote on spontaneous matters such as the need for snow plow labor after a big storm. in any case the votes-coin currency could be configured to change value over time or in different locations or be transferable. So a vote for more snow plow labor after a storm might add the votecoins in the local snow plow services sector of the economy and the act of voting might be considered converting from a vote-coin to a resource-requirement-coin. Alternatively you could create a currency based on an hour-of-labor-coin and require that everyones hour of labor was valued equally as a currency sepecfic law.
Steve, i read a few pages that were available online of your book link. My question for you is a simple one. Why do you think it necessary to create such an elaborate construct for what is a fairly basic problem.I am always for the premise that simpler is better. In the history of humankind the prevailing society was based upon a very simple model…we worked producing what we needed cooperatively for no personal reward other than the respect and esteem of our peers and we shared what we produced for no gain. This was the way we lived for tens of thousands of years. The principle "from each according to ability to each according to need" was practiced in daily life among communities around the globe. It was for everybody's mutual survival and it worked. The development of agriculture and private property gradually ended that style of living (but even then it took centuries and still has not totally made The Commons disappear.)Socialists seek to re-establish this voluntarist association of producers, albeit understanding the numbers involved have grown incredibly but so has the technology developed immensely. There is nothing complicated really about making socialism practical and feasible…and it needn't be founded on scarcity or austerity…Even taking into account the environmental impact and the requirement to minimise affecting the eco-systems and maintaining their sustainability, we can produce abundance for everybody in the world. That is a scientific fact…not political opinion. All it needs for all this to come about is for people to have the confidence and trust in themselves that they can share and live in solidarity with one another. Socialists believe people can and cite history and anthropology and other social sciences to say it is possible. This maybe where you can justifiably charge that ours is mere opinion and differ with us but it is also incumbent upon you to try and prove your counter-claim. So you see, Steve, our position is that we cannot see the need or purpose for any artificial medium such as being proposed by a conflated multi-currency system to run a socialist society. This is what i think you will have to spell out for us in easy understood terms. Why is Bitcoin or similar required? What's it purpose? What is it a substitute for? To sum up, just why do we need it?
@ alanjjohnstone Why a digital currency? it reduces the economic transaction costs and allows scale and transferance of upvotes. With an digital currency you could collect a thousand upvotes from people who upvoted you're idea or opinons and use them all at once to make a decision on a topic of regional or national importance. So think if a digital currency as allowing vote delegation and as an alternate decision making system for allocation of resources. In a socialist economy, the big problem (for capitalist) is the loss of individual incentives and a free rider problem inherent in the system. On a second point the problem of how do you decide how many toasters need to be produced without a market mechanism to signal demand and a reliance on central planning. the central planning problem and distribution of resources question can be solved by committees, but should each commitee member have an equal vote and how do you choose commitee members? A digital currency that is based on an upvote works not as a measure of capital but as a measure of popular support. It couild be used to signal information about what people need up to the commitee in a way that's otherwise done with surveys or master planning guess about how many toasters to make. p.s. if your still around, this idea for an Upvote coin has been demoted. Private Vested interests have captured the business leaders and they're no longer interested in anything this radical. But good news. I've come up with a better idea that I'd like your comment on . . . http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/need-critique-implications-viral-business-model-converts-world-economic-sys
Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:how do you decide how many toasters need to be produced without a market mechanism to signal demand and a reliance on central planning.If , as you seem to be proposing, this is signalled by the total number people buy using money, digital or not, why not judge this from how many people choose to take under conditions of free access , i.e why can't what people take be the signal of demand and so of what should be produced? That avoids both the market and central planning. It' would just be a question of stock control, and it is not as if enough toasters to supply everybody's need for them couldn't be produced.
ALB wrote:if , as you seem to be proposing, this is signalled by the total number people buy using money, digital or not, why not judge this from how many people choose to take under conditions of free access , i.e why can't what people take be the signal of demand and so of what should be produced? That avoids both the market and central planning. It' would just be a question of stock control, and it is not as if enough toasters to supply everybody's need for them couldn't be produced.becasue stock management,1) doesn't address hording behavior2) Doesn't signal the amount of demand. One person might really really want a toaster they'll use everyday and another person might just think a toaster looks nice and they'll use it once a year. I think this problem must have been brought up by someone already and answered by someone already.
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