Yes, it was a deliberate decision not to include negative reputation in QP. There are several reasons for that:
Negative reputation can be used as weapon against people you don’t like. A negative reputation option in QP would make it attractive to start smear campaigns against people who aren’t exactly straightforward, like minorities, or transhumanists, or visionaries, …
Taking back positive reputation usually suffices as form of negative feedback, if someone actually does something that was anti-social.
Negative reputation would be used against those who hold differing political, religious, and cultural views. It would drown out the signals of positive reputation under a torrent of cultural clashes and shitstorms.
Yes, I think people should be rewarded for doing good things, even if others think those were bad. It’s all subjective. If you have your supporters who give you positive reputation, you would be shielded from negative reputation of the rest of the world, but only if negative reputation cannot destroy the effectiveness of positive reputation.
So, there is no need to have negative reputation in QP proper. It would suffice to have complementary negative reputation systems, which don’t interact with QP directly.
What? The only creator of GeoFlux? GeoFlux is created in a decentralised way as basic income and as reputation income. There is no way I could be the only creator of GeoFlux, unless I was also the only user of GeoFlux.
No, but I don’t have much choice at the moment. A lot of people are like that.
From a self preservation point of view it wouldn’t bother me because I’m not lazy and worthless.
I don’t think anyone is 100% lazy or completely worthless. So even the people who would be at the bottom of my ‘favourite people list’ would make enough GeoFlux to eat. (and in the very distant future when we’re post-scarcity, they won’t need any money to be able to live comfortably. (Neal Stephenson’s book ‘The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer’ has some great ideas about this) )
If it turns out that there are people that are so lazy and worthless that they can’t get enough GeoFlux to be able to eat. I wouldn’t like it.
I wouldn’t like it if people were dying because they were poor, but I don’t think that will happen, because I believe that in the not too distant future, we will live in a world where altruists can give all the worlds poorest people a decent standard of living.
The reason it doesn’t happen today, but will happen in the future is because we will have better technology then so the cost of giving someone a decent standard of living will keep getting cheaper. (Also there will be more altruists and slightly less bad/greedy people)
I’m thinking people should have a score for how much they’re loved (prestige), and a score for how much they’re hated (contempt). They are completely independent. GeoFlux income can be tied to how much you’re loved/esteemed (prestige). The contempt score would have no effect on anything, it would just be a number that anyone could look up. Many people might choose to ignore the contempt score all together by not awarding any contempt points and not even looking at the scores. Probably most of the smart people wouldn’t make any decisions based on it, and would only look at it out of amusement or curiosity. So why bother with it? I think just to see what happens, just for fun. If there did come a time when people cared about their contempt score I would be very surprised.
The only reason I can see not to have it is in case they encourage people like me to behave badly towards some people so that I could increase my contempt score. Not for any particular reason. Just as a game.
Yes, it says something that the first reaction many people had to horseless carriages, when seeing it in action was “Why? Everyone already has horses.”
It could hurt the prospect of the system as a reputation network if the focus ends up being on the currency. And trust me, the focus will be in the currency, sooner or later, if people see pumping the currency as a potential way to get richer. People in general are very suspicious of that sort of claim and if they lose interest at that point, it’ll be exceedingly difficult to get them to even consider the reputation network part of the system.
To avoid that, you’d need a solid reputation for the system as an useful reputation network before any kind of pumping of the system’s currency begins. One way to do that could be to start with a low enough demurrage limit that it’s easy to shoot down the get rich crowd.
Ok, this reminds me. One key feature in Bitcoin, that seriously sets it apart from a regular currency. It’s not just a value transfer system. It’s actually a system for making digital contracts. Owning bitcoins is actually a digital contract that specifies a way to identify the entity who can assign them to another contract.
Why is this important? Because, the contracts are pretty flexible in what you can do with them. For example, you could have a contract that specifies that the bitcoins locked in that contract can be reassigned to another contract if 8 out of 10 entities accept the reassignment. Those 10 entities could be people, they could be companies, they could be things with some degree of intelligence. Anything from a simple deterministic system to a full blown AI.
Do you think GeoFlex should support this sort thing? If it does, how would you apply the demurrage to jointly owned funds like that? If you don’t apply it, then this becomes a loophole to effectively own limitless amounts of GeoFlux. If you do … well, that’s a whole fracking can of worms to get right. Yet, if you don’t support this kind of thing at all, then GeoFlux has no hope at all of ever replacing Bitcoin.
The value proposition for Gold tends to be that it’s a low maintenance store of value. Very close to buy&forget until needed.
I just realized this means that the system is designed such that someone has to take the demurrage loss. The constant creation of new GeoFlux through reputation income and basic income means that eventually everyone will have the maximum amount of GeoFlux they can hold without demurrage. Once this point is reached, the demurrage is no longer conditional, but affects everyone.
In effect the demurrage becomes a tax that’s used to fund reputation income and basic income. Not a bad thing as such, but the number of novelty points I’ve awarded the system just took a nosedive.
I used to think progress is too slow and I’m still often irritated when things have to be done in a clumsy old fashioned way when I know they could be done so much more smoothly these days. However, I’m starting to think that there are good reasons for the slowness. If everything progressed as fast as visionaries would want it to, nobody, not even the visionaries themselves could keep up with all the change.
Yep, that’s pretty much it.
Umm, I think it makes sense to point out that a great many people are willing to put their name on a petition to help starving people in africa. That’s not much different from awarding them some reputation. I can easily see how systems would be built to track people with less reputation than is needed for basic survival and people helping the systems to award them enough reputation to sustain themselves. It’d be like charity, without actually having to part with anything to help them.
Trust me, it’d happen. So, in that sense, the basic income built into the system as a built-in feature is kind of superfluous.
Ok, then what about “Waffles” as name for the reputation index? How does that compare to “Prestige” and “Whuffie”? Or just pick some of the following:
Cookies
Pretzels
Cakes
Badges
Medals
Fuzzies
Lovelies
Kills (probably a very bad idea)
Bombs (probably an even worse idea)
Nukes (ok, this is getting ridiculous)
Flowers
Kisses
Hearts
Shinies
Goodies
Splashes
Bubbles
Trackers
Hacks
Fives (“gimme Five” )
Melodies
Anyway, I won’t rename QP to anything else soon. A descriptive name has its advantages. Though, QP has already been interpreted to mean “Quantum Prestige”. At least they got the “Prestige” part right. And hey, why not Quantum instead of “Quantified”?
I doubt that “get rich quick” guys would even be discouraged by a demurrage of 5% per annum. If they are only holding the currency for a few months that’s almost nothing. If you really want to discourage attention on the currency, it would suffice to reset all GeoFlux to 0 every year, until the system is mature, both from a technological as well as a social perspective. That way, people still can play with GeoFlux, but the focus will be on the reputation system. Who would want to buy a currency that will be worth nothing in a year? Except perhaps those who want to participate in crazy pyramid schemes.
Really good questions. Enabling jointly owned accounts and managing them with smart contracts is certainly a feature that would make a lot of sense. How would those work together with the demurrage system? Well, the demurrage threshold lies by default at 5 yearly reputation incomes of GeoFlux. If we invent a property of a GeoFlux account called “shielding”, then the default shielding of a personal GeoFlux account are 5 reputation income years. The amount of shielding you can give an account always depends on your momentary Prestige. But you could give shared accounts some shielding, if you really want to. That would make you lose some shielding of your personal account(s), but if you mostly use the shared accounts, that’s ok.
Ah, I’m glad you realized that. You are focusing on the end game here. That’s very clever. So, if in the end, everyone will max out on the GeoFlux they can hold without demurrage, what do we have then? Universal acceptance of GeoFlux, and a saturation of prosperity! Everyone would be wealthy. If someone was poor, they would use that person as bank for dumping their excess GeoFlux. So, is a not-exactly conditional demurrage a bad thing, if it requires the end of poverty to work?
Anyway, at that saturation point, some people might still be able to increase their Prestige so much that they increase their demurrage threshold so much, that they can escape it. Of course, that means that some people will then have to lose some Prestige and have to pay some more demurrage. Anyway, saying that the demurrage becomes actually “unconditional” is wrong, because there’s always a chance to escape it, even if that chance is low. It’s actually an additional incentive for pushing one’s Prestige score!
Perhaps you should also think about what happens in the intermediary phase, when some, but not all people are subject to the demurrage.
Hmm, just before you were talking about a situation in which everyone is wealthy, and everyone pays “voluntary taxes” (well, they could decide to opt out of GeoFlux) to make that system stable. And now that’s not novel enough? You have some pretty dramatic standards!
i have the same feelings about that. maybe you are not in the minority or we both are.
yes, the whole part about digital abundance is well written.
there is really a strange stubborn, persistent mem: a correlation between lazy and poor. statistics show completely the opposite: throughout history of humanity, the lazy and worthless ( or worse: destructive) are always to find among the extremely rich and those who shorten their lifetime with work for others are poor. if GeoFlux manages to create the correlation between poor and lazy for the first time in human history, it would be a revolution.
After a discussion on facebook I was asked to post some feedback here in these forums. If I’m posting in the wrong place, please let me know; my critique is general of all forms of monetary/currency and “economics” and as such might be better posted elsewhere?
My critique: Thinking and discussion relating to money/currency and “economics” is by definition abstract from the real world, because it’s ultimately all about numbers, the inevitable result is that physical wellbeing intrinsically gets treated as an externality…
How does this, or any, currency, guarantee that the primary incentive will be to improve wellbeing of the planet (environment, other forms of life) and humans (particularly freedom from being forced to work in meaningless or harmful “jobs”, and prevention of indentured servitude)?
How does this, or any currency, guarantee that the secondary incentive will be to improve liberty and stability of human population (both on a macroscopic and individual basis)? In particular, how will it prevent a need for “economic growth” (infinite growth on finite planet)?
How does this, or any, currency, guarantee that the tertiary incentive will be to open source ideas and technologies (ie. penalise knowledge hoarding, encourage open collaboration for the greatest good of all)?
Note: Basic Income Guarantee does not really deal with any of these issues; it merely deals with poverty (which itself is just structural violence inherent in any “economy”).
I’ve never really seen discussion of any socioeconomic system that puts the 3 things mentioned above as mandatory directives. Without those 3 things being covered, whatever is being discussed is little more than a new flavour of sado-capitalism.
Does GeoFlux have to be a cryptocurrency? Is there a way to make it work without using cryptocurrency?
What does cryptocurrency mean?
Do all cryptocurrencies use a computer calculation race to make it hard for any one party from taking over the system? Is there a better way to establish consensus between parties that don’t trust each other?
It’s kind of ugly if we have to waste all that energy and CPU cycles just because we can’t trust each other.
Before, I was thinking that making it impossible for people to have all their wealth stored in GeoFlux was a problem, but now I can see that there is a reason for your system being like this. And it doesn’t matter if people still invest in rare matter/materials, or whatever.
Which statistics? Evolution usually kills lazy animals/players. I think people can only get away with being lazy if they’re smart, or if they receive charity.
only the rich receive charity. all others are kept alive more or less to high costs for them.
if it satisfies the human longing to justify brutal violence we compare ourselves to wild animals calling it evolution. why do we have such a bad opinion about other lifeforms? if it satisfies our need to justify the annexation and transformation of our environment to the costs of all other living beings we are transhumanists and our striving for progress and exceeding our human nature is only part of nature.
a convenient double standard. now what? are we just puppets of evolution or are we creators ourselves? are we just wild animals or do we have the competence to transcend ?
it is not so easy to grasp human nature while excluding psychology and systems. maybe this is nearly impossible. humans created a worldwide collective and network unlike usual wild animals. humans created a distributionsystem of resources and a division of labour system that allows something we call progress, unlike usual wild animals. within this system it only depends on what you already have and you can be both lazy and imbecile and be nevertheless rich and let others work for you. you refer to the great movie “inside job” here ( thank you for the recommendation.) what conclusions do you have drawn from it?
What’s the basis for setting the improvement of wellbeing as primary goal of the economy?
But to answer your question: I think it’s the natural end result of any technology-improving economic activity to lead up to a state of easy optimization of wellbeing. The more and better technologies we have, the better our possibilities to improve our wellbeing by using those technologies become. The faster we develop the technologies we need, the earlier do we arrive at a stage where wellbeing is pretty much trivially obtainable.
So, the key is to optimize the economy for technological progress, because that’s a pretty good proxy for wellbeing. Humans are bad at trying to optimize wellbeing directly, so it’s generally a better strategy to try something else. I think that maximization of technological and social progress is the way to go.
How GeoFlux contributes to that is explained further below when it comes to your third question.
Liberty and Stability
Liberty and stability are supported by an economy that creates a lot of wealth and distributes that wealth relatively equally. As for why GeoFlux should accelerate wealth creation, see my answer to your third question. Now, let’s talk about an equitable distribution of that wealth: This is why there’s a substantial basic income component in GeoFlux. It lets everyone become a shareholder of the GeoFlux economy. So, if things work out fine for the GeoFlux community, everyone profits. This creates an incentive to do your best for the GeoFlux economy, even if that incentive may be relatively small, because it operates on the macro scale, and not so much on the micro scale. A basic income limits the extent of inequality that is possible in that system. It would allow everyone to be relatively free without being subject to political or economic pressures.
Also, the reputation aspect of GeoFlux creates an anti-incentive to do harm to others (at least in a visible way). Anti-social activities may be better punished by a reduction of Prestige (enforced by the public directly), rather than by laws, and a legal and bureaucratic apparatus. This should contribute a lot to stability. I’m not saying that QP and GeoFlux could easily replace the legal system, but that it would make the need for use of the legal system less frequent.
About the need for “economic growth”: Such a need is created by any kind of inflationary money system. Inflation makes it harder to get the same number of goods for a fixed amount of effort. The demurrage system of GeoFlux prevents inflation of the monetary base by eliminating money out of the system, so that the relative scarcity of money is maintained.
Still, I am wary of critiques of “economic growth”, because they usually don’t make a difference between economic growth from expansion, and economic growth from efficiency gains (usually from using better technology). While the first kind of economic growth puts our economic base (our planetary ecosystem) at peril, the latter is nearly universally beneficial.
Open source
The free flow of ideas and innovations encourages the mixing of ideas, so that they generate even better ideas. The more open ideas are spread, the faster the speed of technological (and probably societal) progress. Better technology enables more possibilities to increase our wellbeing, and do that so efficiently that our negative impact on the environment will be minimized, or even becomes negative (for example by doing reforestation via drone swarms).
So, open source ideas and technologies are really the central cornerstone that enable us to reach a better future in a shorter time. How can GeoFlux contribute to that?
Currently, creators of open source ideas and technologies do not have very great ways of generating money with their ideas and technologies, if they should stay open. In a reputation economy, those creators can spread their ideas and technologies out into the world, and get reputation in return. This reputation will generate GeoFlux for them. This enables the creation of for-reputation organisations which can focus only on creating open source stuff (spreading the world about that stuff might still be a necessity, though). The incentives to keep useful knowledge and technology hidden, or unused, will be greatly diminished, because the incentives for doing the opposite will be relatively high. If you release knowledge and technology openly, this will be seen as act very worthy of high reputation.
It will probably take very many years for the reputation economy to scale to all areas of economic activity, but eventually it should be able to get there. The result would be digital abundance. That kind of abundance will accelerate technological and societal progress, which will improve our abilities to do what we really want.
My working definition of cryptocurrency is: An electronic currency that operates from a decentralized ledger.
The alternative of GeoFlux being a cryptocurrency would be the following: It would have to be a centralized currency, maintained by a single entity. In other words: The would be a global central bank for GeoFlux, if it was not a cryptocurrency. That central bank would have the power to set the rules of the currency. And it would in principle be able to manipulate the currency at will. This might create too much of a trust problem, especially if it’s relatively easy to set up GeoFlux as cryptocurrency.
Of course, the same arguments could be applied to fiat currencies versus bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. If cryptocurrencies appeared to be more trustworthy and reliable, they could easily become dominant. There are still some technological and social issues around cryptocurrencies that need to be fixed. Anyway, in the long run, I don’t see a reason why cryptocurrencies shouldn’t become the dominant form of money.
No. Yes. Cryptocurrencies who use the “computer calculation race” type for establishment of consensus usually use what is referred to as “Proof of Work”. There are other systems that don’t necessarily use that kind of wasteful approach. One of the first alternative methods was “Proof of Stake”. I think there have been many more alternative approaches which bring down the energy requirements, but I haven’t been following them lately.
Yeah, perhaps a “Proof of Prestige” mechanism might work sufficiently well.
At the heart of the protocol lay two dovetailed evaluation and
compensation systems: A reputation score and a virtual currency a.k.a.
token system, which operate independently and which are relative to
specific networks in the system (will get to the network thingy later).
So, they basically rediscovered (or found) the Quantified Prestige model of separating reputation scores from currencies. I see that as validation of the general QP approach.
It is important to understand that a user’s reputation arises out of the
total sum of their value-producing interactions with other users in the
system.
This distinguishes the Backfeed system from QP. In QP reputation does not need to be attached to specific actions. That gives QP a higher level of flexibility. In Backfeed, actions need to be captured in the formal system, first, which creates a bit of an overhead. On the other hand, it creates a useful history of the actions of each participant, along with a public reputational evaluation of that history. Anyway, it’s not like it wasn’t possible in QP to do the same, and also allocate reputation to actions or events. It would just be an additional optional layer to the free base system. To sum it up: QP is the more versatile system.
This evaluation process has a certain responsibility mechanism designed
into it: If you’re off the charts relatively to your peers in evaluating
the actions of others, your reputation will suffer; if you’re good in
setting trends regarding the contributions of others, you’ll be
rewarded.
This may be the most characteristic idea of Backfeed: The feedback on feedback. Obviously, this increases the complexity of the system, but why have they included that mechanism? My suspicion is that this is supposed to prevent reputation inflation: If people get punished for inflating the reputation of a person, such inflation becomes less likely. However, it fails to prevent the inflation of a person who is reputationally backed by a majority of the users of a network. This looks pretty much like a failure mode that should occur frequently. Also, this mechanism seems to encourage group-think, rather than swarm intelligence.
QP on the other hand solves the problem of reputation inflation by making reputation points scarce. That’s a much simpler mechanism, but much more effective for solving the inflation problem.
Perhaps there is another reason why Backfeed uses this kind of system, but if there is one, it’s not obvious to me from either the video or the magazine article. Possibly the intention behind it was to rate the rating ability of raters. But why should that be measured by conformity with the network? Shouldn’t exceptionally good raters naturally deviate from the general opinion of the network? This system feels like it would rather encourage mediocrity in rating.
Tokens are issued automatically whenever a contribution is recognized as
valuable by the majority of reputation in a network, and collected as a
fee whenever an action is performed that requires the attention or
evaluation of other users.
Ok, so they didn’t actually rediscover flux currencies, but use an alternative approach which may possibly be better adapted to the blockchain idea.
The idea to use tokens as fee for performing actions or interacting with the attention of users is interesting. It definitely has an Ethereum-ish flavour.
This actually gives me an idea for modifying flux currencies: Instead (or in addition to) conditional demurrage, there could be the possibility to “burn” money, in order to achieve specific results. Perhaps something like auctioning for the top spot in a network magazine / forum / platform. The auctioned money would then disappear from the system, which would make the remaining money more valuable by increasing its scarcity. I’m not sure whether that would be actually better than conditional reputation-dependent demurrage, but it’s quite worth considering.
)
) what conclusions do you have drawn from it?
