Tag: API

Occupy BitCoin

On December 14, 2013

Occupy Wall Street had the effect of “measuring into existence” the 99% of people who subsidize the economic liberty of the top 1%. Now, with the BitCoin Protocol, the financial information gap between the 99% and the 1% is about to disappear. This is a fleeting moment in history and an opportunity that we must take for all it’s worth.

BitCoin, used as a currency, is a sideshow in comparison to the possibilities in the Block Chain Protocol (BCP) for frictionless transfer of ALL forms of value. The best description that I’ve heard is that BitCoin is a “protocol for the synchronization of information”. This feature alone – not the digital currency itself – is what will eventually doom brokers to a life of actually producing something of value for society.

The Block Chain Protocol can eliminate trillions of dollars in unnecessary friction from ANY transfer of value – not just money. But most importantly, the BCP provides a way to “measure into existence” human value attributes such as knowledge, innovation, and wisdom in a digital format and public repository. Speculators are clearly not counting on 7 billion virtual currencies representing each individual contributor in an economy.

People are Corporations

A well know politician once said “Corporations are people, my friend”. What he failed to realize, is that people could also be corporations. The BCP allows everyone to equally access the right to become their own economic entity responding to real supply and demand for useful goods and services; raising money in a public stock market; holding individual IPOs; combining knowledge assets with others of their choosing; affixing contracts; time stamping tranactions; and issuing “BitShares” against future productivity as currency – all without any financial friction or corporate barriers whatsoever.

The post-Dollar economy

Anyone with basic understanding of high-school mathematics can demonstrate how 50 Trillion Dollars in global debt, at compounding interest, can never be paid back. This is an economic reality. The question becomes, what kind of world do we want after the expiration of fiat currencies? Will BitCoin, as a storage of value, amount to a convenient placeholder while the old financial system reboots anew in digital form, or is there a greater opportunity for humanity in mining BitShares?

When a currency enters hyperinflation, the results are characterized by the rapid and chaotic transfer of government (public) property to private holders – or vice versa. However, things could be very different with a third option that could actually advance civilization to a higher order.

In its nascent state, we describe this third option with terms like; The Commons, Open Source, Crowd Source, Crowd Fund, Social Capital, P2P, etc. There are hundreds of thousands of start-ups and co-operatives (formal and informal) separately aiming down this path. They need tools that help them integrate so that the output of one application becomes the input of the next application. The longer that they can operate outside of the fiat system (without reconversion to dollars), the greater they will fortify the next economic paradigm against unsecured currencies.

The End Game

Politicians have demonstrated their willingness and ability to bring the economy, and everyone’s associated assets, to the brink of collapse. This game survives only because the extractive 1% cannot build walls high enough to protect them against a complete financial meltdown. They still need food, clean water, electricity, medical care, education, civil services, transportation, and renewable energy … all the stuff produced by the 99%!

Suppose that the world were given the choice between a BitCoin, backed by nothing, and a BitShare backed by community productivity of all useful things? The choice would be obvious thus creating the mother of all hedge funds resulting in the decentralization of value and power to the “The Commons” regulated by the open source technology of the Block Chain Protocol.

Call to Action

We have a great opportunity ahead of us and only a few years to accomplish it before the BCP is compromised by decentralize money without also decentralizing all factors of production. We simply can’t afford to let this go unanswered.

We need to build the interfaces, the structures, application, and governance that will allow human “Intangibles” to become digital “tangibles”. Only this will enable human flourishing over human extinguishing. We need to turn our collective intelligence and computational horsepower to the epic task of mining BitShares, not necessarily BitCoins.

References:

How The Bitcoin Protocol Actually Works

Bitcoin Wiki – Contracts

True Value of Bitcoin – Stefan Molyneux

The God App

By Admin

On December 3, 2012

In General Information

David Chacko’s newest mystery novel, The God App, is a story about a detective tracking down the killer of the professor who invented a computer program that anticipates major moves in the financial markets. Whoever holds The God App is far above the law as the people who rule the world come calling for their guaranteed returns. It would seem that the only problem with The God App is for those who don’t have one…sound familiar?

***

If everyone had The God App then no one would have a God App. Today we are at a point where the only way to beat the disease is to lose the patient. As long we are competing with each other, we’ll never figure out how to predict the future, let alone fix it.

First, we seriously need to reorganize ourselves:

Instead of ranking, rating, and organizing each other as winners and losers of things, we need to organize ourselves as students and teachers of things. This would allow us to exchange value with each other in a pre-dollar proto-economy without necessarily competing with each other. Teachers would represent supply and students represent demand in a collaboration market. Here is what the teacher/student scale may look like:

Second, we need to create an inventory

In order to build anything useful or meaningful, we need to have an large inventory of parts that can be easily combined, assembled, exchanged, and inter related.

Today, Wikipedia has grown to become the most comprehensive collection of definitive information about the world around us. Everyone should rewrite their résumé as a set of Wikipedia URLs that most closely represent their talents, interests, experiences, skills, and abilities. People will locate their selves on a knowledge graph.

A Wikipedia Cluster Ball –courtesy of Chris Harrison (click to enlarge)

The dimensional résumé:

When we combine Wikipedia Tag with the teacher/student scale, it forms a 2-dimensional array. This new form of résumé/CV allows communities to store and exchange value among each other. The CV array may look something like this (etc):

The Personal API

In this 2-dimensional form, everyone would own and control a string of code that represents their willingness and ability to build and collaborate economically in their community.

[tag1](-3), [tag2](+2), [tag3](1), [tag4](-2), [tag5](3),….,etc.

This string can be processed computationally more like an API than a résumé. Most importantly, anonymity can be preserved until the point when a transaction will actually take place.

Additionally, people can represent themselves by partial strings to create separate personas. Individual APIs can be combined among many people, and their personas, to create productive teams, communities, and corporations.

Adding dimensions to your API: Attributes such as location, schedule, context, and equipment can be attached in real time or travel dynamically wherever the persona is traveling.

The API Economy

With anonymous source data; everyone can conduct surveys of communities that would likely resemble the proverbial “Bell Curve” or, a normal distribution. This is important because it would allow everyone the same ability to predict the likelihood that a collection of knowledge assets can execute a particular business plan. People could see exactly what they need to do next in order to achieve a reliable probability of success in an economy.

Sounds Like Big Brother?

If this scares you, then consider this: The God App is already here. Everything you do is captured electronically in a very similar form in order to create a predictive profile of you; what you will buy, who you will associate with, who you will vote for, etc.

Political campaigns, advertising agencies, Facebook, Google, Linkedin, corporations, government, Wall Street, and even organized crime (not to be redundant) use big data to gerrymander their way into your productivity potential. The difference is that 99% are excluded from the predictive process, shackled behind the curtain, detached from their hopes, dreams, and intensions…mindlessly posting résumés, guessing, reacting, etc.

And the Good Lord said unto thee….

Hey dumb ass, wake up. You can cut them all off at the nub with a simple app that a bunch of hackers could probably code-up during detention hall. Get this sucker viral and build the better FB already. The only way THEY can cut you down would be to cut themselves down.

Now THAT’s a God App.

***

(The implications of this app are vast – everything changes without changing anything. Follow-on articles will discuss these various nuances. Any builders out there?)

A Better Way To Occupy Wall Street

By Admin

On October 10, 2011

In General Information

What if I told you that we could occupy Wall Street without actually camping out there? In case you have not noticed, Wall Street occupies your house without you ever seeing any suits milling around your driveway. So what’s the plan?

In the Age of The Internet, redistribution of wealth should not be a very difficult thing to do, yet the approach is surprisingly low-tech. Just look at the pictures; if this is going to be our approach, then we’re in deep trouble.

Here’s the trick. Wall Street is built on a foundation where the factors of production are land, labor, and capital. All we need to do is shift the factors of production to something else. We don’t actually need to shift Wall Street, we need to shift ourselves.

The reality is that the today’s economy is built on social, creative, and intellectual factors of production – these are the factors of production of that so-called 99% of the value of our economy. It’s a knowledge economy, remember?

Now, notice how land and labor are constrained by geography, property laws, political districts, and “national borders”. Also notice that the accounting system (capital) is as anonymous as possible, if not shrouded in secrecy. Do you remember how Steve Jobs told us that it’s OK to copy good ideas?

First, we need to build a knowledge inventory of all the useful stuff in our brains and integrated by geographic proximity so we all can find each other. This is how we’ll mimic land and labor. Next, the knowledge inventory must be anonymous until the point of transaction – this is not for privacy concerns, rather, we need to do this to create scarcity (nothing personal, Zuck). This is how we mimic “capital”.

At the end of the day, your knowledge inventory is your personal API – you create your own value and integrate with others or withhold it as you wish…just like Wall Street. Of course, everyone would then need to become a corporation so that we can pay our fair share of taxes (but not a penny more). That’s code for “too big to fail”.

Have you forgotten about Wall Street yet? If so, it’s not too early to coin the term APIcracy.

The Next Economic Paradigm