djestrada

Thanks for the comment! Which "bullshit ID labels" am I using in this video that you object to?

England's proof of an absolute lower bound on heat production during self-replication is a central text in this discussion: http://www.englandlab.com/uploads/7/8/0/3/7803054/2013jcpsre...

Other resources:

Bechtel (2010): Biological mechanisms: organized to maintain autonomy https://mechanism.ucsd.edu/research/bechtel.biologicalmechan...

Walker et al (2015): The informational architecture of a the cell http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03877

Thanks everyone for a fascinating discussion. I found this thread incredibly productive and encouraging.

If you are interested in developing this idea further, please get in contact on my blog or G+ profile.

http://digitalinterface.blogspot.com/ https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024

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.

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 tried to explain inhibition in another comment in this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7496858

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. =)

Good comment.

1) You are correct that the system is designed so that users can make payments and conduct transactions even in the absence of an account balance, without incurring debt. Strangecoin allows users to act as if they have effectively unlimited wealth in terms of access to coin. Nevertheless, Strangecoin allows users to judge differences in influence on the network, so they might evaluate who they want to engage in transactions with, regardless of the account balance each has. So X might want to trade with Y instead of Z, even though both are able to pay the same number of coin individually, because Y's network amplifies the transaction more than Z's, and the better overall support for Y makes the transaction more attractive.

2) You are right that a fundamental constraint on the system is that TUA has an available balance. As I mention in the document, the most important constraint on all users (including TUA) is that their balance remains stable; users want to engage in transactions that will stabilize their overall impact on the network. TUA can adjust certain parameters to ensure a stable, nonzero balance: the basic income most importantly, but perhaps TUA can also adjust individual account caps and set limits on the allowable parameters of other transactions to ensure it has a constant, nonzero balance.

This is how I was imagining TUA being a universal indicator of economic prosperity of the network. If I see my TUA income go down, for instance, I know that means a drop in the overall available funds in TUA, which means the economy overall is offbalance, with more expenses than income. And I see that global property of the network directly in my account balance, and I can use that to act accordingly. Specifically, I know that if I increase my own income (or even hit the balance cap), I'll be helping the overall economy by contributing to the TUA balance.

3) Inhibition seems to be giving people trouble. Being "too rich" isn't normally a problem for people outside of hiphop, which I think is a source of the confusion. But being too rich in Strangecoin could be a bad thing, so I included the transaction type to provide a mechanism for negative feedback. This would be useful for some situations where users are finding it difficult to maintain an stable account, and where scaling back it's overall influence on the network might help promote stability. If I'm making more Strangecoin than I know what to do with, this could be a bad thing for me financially because of the penalties that might accrue, so I might want to enter into inhibiting relationships to ease the pressure of those penalties.

The way I've written the proposal, the raw quantity of coin doesn't change; all that changes is the rate of exchange across parties. The added value is generated by the network of transactions as an emergent property.

But there's probably other ways to do such a proposal. Again, my main goal is to put an idea like this on the table to see what people do with it.

I'm not sure this is a criticism of the proposal, but nothing I've said implicates an objective arbiter of value.

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.

The low transaction cost of money is partly a result of how deeply embedded it is in our social and institutional practices. I don't think it is an essential feature of money itself; other practices might come to fill similar roles. I would also suggest that the opacity of traditional currencies to certain forms of value also has a crippling effect on our economy. Economics talks about these as "externalities", but they are best understood as values that aren't represented in our trades. I'm not claiming that Strangecoin can capture all externalities, or even that it catches the important ones, but only that it captures some dimension of value that is hidden in traditional currencies.

For what it's worth, that's not me and I'm surprised that someone is already trying to scam on the idea. Lol.

My idea isn't so much to propose a single solution to the worlds economic problems, but instead to ask: what else might digital currencies do?

I don't know of anything else being proposed that works in a nonlinear way, and I don't know if the idea is even on the table as a possibility. I'm hoping that putting it on the table might give other people who can penetrate the complexity ideas for how to make the system work.

That said, I think the transaction types I list are fair intuitive. When I'm going to make a purchase, I have some options: I can pay a lump sum directly, or I can engage in an extended relationship of support, for which I can specify the duration of time, and the amount of support I'm willing to give it. There's different ways that support might work, but that's the gist.

Efficiency isn't some absolute value. Efficiency is always relative to the goals we have.

In the transactions I describe, inhibition is a two-sided transaction, meaning it requires approval from both parties. Presumably parties won't enter into such transactions without good reason for consent.

Thanks! Fixed.

Traditional money makes certain features of the economic system tractable, but it masks other important relationships that constraint its behavior. The question isn't whether or not the the transactions should be shaped by feedback from the network; the question instead is which features of the economic network do we want to make salient to agents in that network.

You might think of Strangecoin as a way of making features of the interdependence of economic relationships salient in each transaction. In the parlance of STDs, I'm not just trading with you, I'm trading with everyone else you are trading with.

I'm not sure I understand your analogy to small homophobic towns, but I suppose you mean that people with less economic support will have less representation in Strangecoin. It's true that Strangecoin will be disposed to preferential attachment, but I'm not sure any economic system wouldn't. It's a feature of the system that it makes these attachment relations explicit, a feature of the existing economy that is completely masked over with traditional money.

Users cannot engage in transactions with themselves. Updated the doc to reflect this.

Jay Gordon defends Chomsky's view more thoroughly against my criticism here: https://plus.google.com/110181959253415840755/posts/7y2s5e9S...

I also leave some responses on that post.

Thanks, I appreciate it!

I left the following comment in a reddit thread:

Hi Thorse! I'm one of the developers for Swarm. You comments are well taken, and deserve a response. Our strategy for collecting and presenting data about collective action abstracts away from individual habits. We're interested in features of collective action (at the 'caste' and 'colony' level), not your personal daily routine. The data we collect will be groomed to remove individual data in such a way that, I hope, would allow people who are as concerned about privacy as you and I both are to confidently use the app.

The other thing to make clear is that not everyone needs to play Swarm in order to build useful models for everyone. Consider Yelp!: maybe you don't want people to know your eating habits, but some people love leaving reviews. That record potentially helps anyone looking for a restaurant, whether or not they contribute their own opinions to the record. Similarly, Swarm trails might be useful to you whether or not you contribute to the trails yourself. I would also (humbly) object to the claim that Swarm! treats your life habits as a game mechanic. Your life is your life. Swarm doesn't intrude on that process to give you 100 points for buying chips at the store, or anything so cheap. The game aspects of Swarm interact with trails at an abstracted level, in order to reveal patterns about collective human behavior; but it won't be possible on a system like ours to watch, mess or interact with, or otherwise represent the activity of individual players directly.

Its not about you, this is about us. For instance, which are the most scenic trails in Inwood Park? A populated Swarm! map instantly tells me how the populations that have traversed these trails before have distributed their walking patterns along the park. From passive players I see their aggregated preferences, and from the active players I may have incentive (both in game and out) to respond to the attractions they’ve built in the course of their travels. From that information I might choose to trust the reliability of the crowd, or contribute to the inspection of a road less traveled, or blaze a new trail altogether. In other words, you can live your life however you want; Swarm! just lets you do it with the ant superpower of instant access to collective memory. As long as enough people have that superpower, we'll all be a little smarter.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1jysa5/our_first_loo...

Ants are a great example of a self-organized complex system. They've figured out sustainable solutions to a lot of common collective action problems that all social organisms have to deal with, including humans: the division of labor, the production and distribution of resources, the management of waste and the raising of the young.

They are proof that you can have an agriculturally mature, technologically sophisticated eusocial self-organized system that will last for 100 million years. In contrast, humans have been a primarily agricultural species for less that 15,000 years, and our methods are demonstrably unsustainable. We could stand to learn a lot from the ants.

The ants solve their problems by tagging their environment with rich information about their own history. Our own technological situation is starting to give us the ability to do the same for human contexts, and we're working to make that augmentation explicit.

If you are interested in ants, Deborah Gordon's TED talk is an endless source of inspiration. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukS4UjCauUs

What will humans do with ant superpowers? I can't wait to find out =)

Our app is based in research we've published, which we've made available here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.6376

We're also actively seeking developers and game designers for the project, and we're accepting donations =)

I'm watching this thread, and I'm happy to talk about anything related to Swarm!

edit: send any inquiries to swarm.over.glass@gmail