Hello from 2000. Barterdex!?
From: “Todd Boyle” <tboyle@r…>
Date: Mon Jul 31, 2000 10:29 pm
Subject: Freenet, smart chips and bartergod
To: AICPA’s XBRL mailing list, GNUE list, dbs list
Cal said Friday, July 21, on Digital Bearer Settlement List
> What is serving for money today already has no permanent store of value.
> The money of tomorrow will serve as a bearer of information with most
> likely (my guess) a negative carrying charge….
> In short, what I am saying is look for a permanent divorce of the
> store of value function from the list of attributes of money.
Hi Cal, WAP/SMS summary message:
MONEY IS INFORMATION:
AMOUNT DIVORCED FROM THE
LIST OF ATTRIBUTES
BARTERGOD RULEZ
At least 3 differnt possibilities for this.
1. REA system of accounting has emerged with decentralized solutions for
large scale production, that span enterprises; now the internet really
enables it for the first time.
2. SCM people are are talking about a smart chip attached to every unit of
production, even on every can of chickpeas in the supermarket. The cost of
chips are getting down around 1 cent.
3. Freenet-style distributed file systems offer glimpses of a magical
transaction fabric. You may be able to participate in exchanges, send and
receive payments, and even maintain your accounting system, with all your
bits encrypted and scattered among numerous peers on the network. The
intent of Freenet is there would be no server to regulate, censor, or shut
down. Read Sean Dugan last week in Infoworld. This idea hit the mailing
lists months ago. The portal mavens are rotating on this P2P thing, they’re
in a tizzy. Nasdaq in a dive. Can’t figure out how to collect rents from
peer-2-peer commerce.
Think about the smart-chip proposition (item 2) — What seems to emerge is a
whole new network-based architecture where there is very little persistent
storage or logic anyplace other than on the smart chips, and there is an
encrypted token for every resource. Money, raw material, finished product.
Account receivable or payable. Whatever.
These tokens will have a beginning and an end. In eastern religion we had
brahma, vishnu and shiva. The product chip would accompany the product to
final owner and then the landfill.
Anyways, these tokens are like “titles” to an automobiles. They represent
the product. They might be bolted onto the product or they might travel the
net. In REA-like systems they might be passed up and down the network along
with the necessary XML document to explain the content (or perhaps, the XML
is within the token). Chickpeas might not have brands. They might have
reputations derived from the producers’ reputations. Chickpeas might not
have owners other than their producers. Every can of chickpeas is an LLC.
Let’s bust up those corporations. (grin)
Workers might burn their charges into the chip when they bolt parts on the
automobile, and get paid when the car is sold. You might have pennies or
dollars invested in fifty thousand of these little buggers, and you will
index them in your tokens directory, to maintain a sort of receivables
control.
And with no surrender of privacy, no big-brotherish system. The more you
think of it, the weirder it gets. What does GAAP look like when there’s no
GL, and everything is humming along nicely with permissions and statuses
stored on the labels of chickpeas?
Note that there is NO intrinsic reason that everything in the economy has to
be quantified in money anyways. Like so many other things, perhaps, money
is a lesson we must unlearn. It has certain disadvantages lets face it.
Perhaps the DNA will organize itself around a more efficient system of
production.
What is still lacking as far as I can see, are software algorithms for
unconstrained multi-party bartering. What would really break the logjam
would be a website where you would login and tell this godlike website what
you need (from housing, utilities, food, transportation, thru entertainment
etc. etc.) BarterGod would read your capabilities and performance history
from the database and print out a list of places to go, and tasks for you to
do. BarterGod would figure out what is possible, what the schedule is, how
far away you’re located, and calculate scenarios and proposals to members,
to organize the labor. There is nothing but labor in the universe. There
is no capital, entrepreneur, or adam smith.
If you don’t want to do the work, you could scratch some stuff off your
wish-list and BarterGod will give you a shorter tasks list. If you don’t do
your task, some other member will be mad when they don’t get their stuff,
and you will be busted and you won’t get any stuff either. Bartergod would
figure out you owe the tribe some tasks, and would get on your case. Maybe
there would be multidimensional tribes.
Szabo’s smart contracts. XML schemas. MapQuest. GPS/GIS. It’s all
coming together.
This will happen any day now. This year maybe. bwaha ha! That’s why we
should all work hard to keep our income below $20,000 per year. It will be
terrific evidence of fair market value. Nobody should be allowed to join
BarterGod.com if their income in any of the past 3 years was above the
poverty level.
Governments will say “You valued your groceries income for 2002 at $3,000
but we know that groceries in the supermarket cost $52,000 for a family of
4.” Members will argue “Look, here’s a CDROM of every hour of every bum who
said they worked on those damned groceries. Some of them didn’t even show up.
Besides, I never received all these groceries.” Economists will argue,
“Those supermarket groceries cost $52,000 because they came from a
completely different system of production that’s less efficient” And they
would be right.
Had fun with this ;-)
Saaaay — — how are you “suits” coming along, with that GL schema?
