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Strangecoin: a proposal for a nonlinear currency

113 points by djestrada 13y ago

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- deleted 13y ago
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iancarroll 13y ago
Strangecoin transactions can be nonzero sum. A Strangecoin transaction might result in both parties having more Strangecoin. Strangecoin transactions can be one-sided and can be conducted entirely by only one party to the transaction. If I'm reading that correctly, could I give myself infinite StrangeCoin?
- djestrada 13y ago
  Users cannot engage in transactions with themselves. Updated the doc to reflect this.
  - TheLoneWolfling 13y ago
    How would one enforce this? (Answer, you cannot. So this is not a valid solution to this problem.)
  - iancarroll 13y ago
    What would you do if I created another address?
    - eximius 13y ago
      This was immediately what I thought of. It would take a very short amount of time for a client to show up which automatically manages and balances your accounts.
    - djestrada 13y ago
      From my G+ reshare, in the context of a question about account caps: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm > I suppose one way around the cap would be for users to maintain multiple accounts. I have no objection to this in principle, although it has an impact on the networks they can develop on any one account. If I have 20 Strangecoin accounts all coupled to and supporting each other, but are only receiving income through one account connected to the external network, then my subnet isn't going to grow larger as a whole than the one node connected externally. So I can't use multiple accounts to inflate just my identity. If I'm using multiple accounts, it's because I want to maintain multiple identities. Again I have no objection to this, or at least the protocol I've described doesn't rule it out.
    - deleted 13y ago
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    - whyenot 13y ago
      author: don't use a url shortener or HN will kill your post. For those who don't have showdead turned on, here was his response: From my G+ reshare, in the context of a question about account caps: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm > I suppose one way around the cap would be for users to maintain multiple accounts. I have no objection to this in principle, although it has an impact on the networks they can develop on any one account. If I have 20 Strangecoin accounts all coupled to and supporting each other, but are only receiving income through one account connected to the external network, then my subnet isn't going to grow larger as a whole than the one node connected externally. So I can't use multiple accounts to inflate just my identity. If I'm using multiple accounts, it's because I want to maintain multiple identities. Again I have no objection to this, or at least the protocol I've described doesn't rule it out.
      - infogulch 13y ago
        @author: Define the "external network". What keeps a single entity from simulating a network just as large as everyone else combined? At that point, how does one determine which network is the "correct" one, though both are the same size with the exact same connectedness stats?
      - djestrada 13y ago
        Thanks! Fixed.
  - hibikir 13y ago
    I don't even have to engage in transactions with myself, but create a small cartel that really love each others' transactions. Think of the good old link farm sites from the early days of Google. You pay, and a bunch of positive feedback is provided between sites. In your case, you could even do the opposite: Pay me and my friends, or we will dislike every transaction you will ever make. Built-in racketeering
- kanzure 13y ago
  > If I'm reading that correctly, could I give myself infinite StrangeCoin? I don't think it will work with just a single strangecoin, but instead have one strangecoin per user (or more, but at least one strangecoin asset type per user on the network). Then when you issue new shares you're only inflating the supply or your reputation, which might cause a market reaction. Mind you that I am not saying the reaction would be a good or bad thing.
A1kmm 13y ago
'Basic income' which is not coupled to any expenditure (e.g. by mining) will have a tragedy of the commons problem in a pseudonymous system. In a pseudonymous system, I can make as many addresses / accounts as I like (since a pseudonym is, by definition, not tied to any real identity). Therefore, to maximise income, someone can create duplicate addresses, causing the basic income to be distributed according to the number of addresses a person has.
- djestrada 13y ago
  Answered to another question below, from my G+ reshare, in the context of a question about account caps: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm > I suppose one way around the cap would be for users to maintain multiple accounts. I have no objection to this in principle, although it has an impact on the networks they can develop on any one account. If I have 20 Strangecoin accounts all coupled to and supporting each other, but are only receiving income through one account connected to the external network, then my subnet isn't going to grow larger as a whole than the one node connected externally. So I can't use multiple accounts to inflate just my identity. If I'm using multiple accounts, it's because I want to maintain multiple identities. Again I have no objection to this, or at least the protocol I've described doesn't rule it out.
- witten 13y ago
  While this is a valid objection to the design as stated, there are solutions. For instance, the insight behind Bitcoin is that instead of the one-IP-one-vote policies of previous distributed protocols and the sock-puppeting that ensues, proof of work means that it's one-CPU-one-vote. And schemes like proof of stake go even further so it's one-coin-one-vote.
  - vbuterin 13y ago
    Bitcoin already has a basic income distributed via one-CPU-one-vote: it's called a mining reward. And if you distribute a basic income via one-coin-one-vote it's called an interest rate. The whole point of BI is to be per-person.
hibikir 13y ago
What is the motivation for this? The big advantage of money is as a communication mechanism: An increase of demand of pencils, though price chnges, can increase the demand for burgers in a town where the wood for said pencils is made, even though the purchasers have absolutely no idea, and no control, over the results of their actions. Sending positive and negative feedback to transactions has the opposite effect: It avoids the information hiding that is the key to making the economy tractable, and makes what are simple decisions much more complicated, but I suddenly have to care about what people think about the suppliers of my suppliers. I suspect a economy running on this strangecoin would be less effective than one running on a regular currency, just like it's much harder to be gay in a tiny homophobic town than in a large, relatively anonymous big city.
- djestrada 13y ago
  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.
  - jchrisa 13y ago
    I think Strangecoin is super interesting. I think his analogy was that with a coin where relationships matter, you have to care how a person is connected, when you deal with them. I think it could be a feature, not a bug, even if it makes things less efficient.
maxk42 13y ago
That's numberwang!
tonypace 13y ago
I was always dispirited by how conservative in sentiment Bitcoin and most altcoins were. It always felt to me that Bitcoin was mostly redundant to gold, neglecting the inherent advantages of ecurrency. Something more ambitious deserves to be implemented. That endorsement aside, the inhibition transaction does disturb me. It would seem to encourage mob-like behavior in the culture of early adopters, as heretics of whatever sort were forcibly ejected from the system. I don't trust the dynamics of groups enough to think this will be a good form of self government.
- olalonde 13y ago
  > I was always dispirited by how conservative in sentiment Bitcoin and most altcoins were. It always felt to me that Bitcoin was mostly redundant to gold, neglecting the inherent advantages of ecurrency. Something more ambitious deserves to be implemented. There is a good reason Bitcoin is conservative: it has to be, by design. It's also what makes it attractive. Also, you are completely wrong if you think that lack of ambition is the reason we don't have a cryptocurrency that doesn't neglect "the inherent advantages of ecurrency" by now. Lots of smart people, including esteemed computer scientists, have been thinking really hard about the subject for years and I find your comment a bit insulting towards them (I'll pass it off as ignorance on your part). I too really hope we can eventually come up with a better cryptocurrency but please don't assume people are not trying.
- yale 13y ago
  Inhibition is a two-sided transaction, requiring the consent of both sides.
- djestrada 13y ago
  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.
  - mst 13y ago
    Given the number of people confused by it, I think perhaps it needs a different name ... my mind is blank when I attempt to come up with a better one, though.
aaron987 13y ago
This is an interesting economics thought experiment, but I don't see this working simply because it is too complicated. Virtual currency already has a learning curve that most people haven't gotten used to. Adding strange attractors into the mix certainly isn't going to help.
- djestrada 13y ago
  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.
  - evv 13y ago
    I agree that truly different crypto-currencies is a very exciting frontier. The distributed block-chain technology has implications far wider than a basic ledger. For example, I'm quite excited by namecoin, a distributed DNS. I share your enthusiasm about extending bitcoin's technology to create a distributed, general-purpose trust network. However, I am quite confused about strangecoin. Maybe the whole thread is going over my head and I'm lacking an Explain-Like-I'm-Five description of your idea. I'd love to be a supporter, but I don't see how you can build a trust network around something as complicated as this. Could you explain how, even in a vague sense, strangecoin could act as a reputation system? It seems like bitcoin itself works as a pretty great trust network. Just look at the mess surrounding MtGox: everybody seems to have a clear understanding that MtGox is totally culpable, despite the claims of transaction malleability attacks. Because the block-chain is entirely available for analysis, the financial activity of all organizations can be traced, which can reliably verify trust.
- 13y ago
rdl 13y ago
This seems incredibly complex and described in an even more complex way, but I think you could accomplish most of the good from this proposal by having an infinity of potential instruments, issued by individuals, with the market sorting out the meaning -- e.g. PG General Liability IOUs trade independently of rdl general liability ious which trade differently from rdl newproject equity.
eatitraw 13y ago
> If I give you a dollar for a burger, then I've lost a dollar and gained a burger, and you've gained a dollar and lost a burger. Assuming this was a fair trade (that dollars and burgers are of approximately equal value), then as a result of the transaction we've simply rearranged who has which good, and no additional value was created in the process. This is incorrect. I sell a burger because I value it less than your dollar, and you buy a burger because you value it more than one dollar. Win-win. It is a positive sum game, not a zero sum one.
- aninhumer 13y ago
  And the article goes on to say that two paragraphs after that line.
- phaemon 13y ago
  If that were true, then surely no-one would ever feel cheated in a transaction, and there would be no such word as "profiteering".
deleted 13y ago
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sharemywin 13y ago
Anyway you could lay out what your talking about with a bunch of examples. Maybe add a section here's the problems with the current systems.
gus_massa 13y ago
There are many problems. I’ll try to explain two: > The Universal Account (TUA): > [...] > TUA can make a payment only in the following situations: > [...] > X's account balance = 0 at t. Any additional transactions outgoing from X at t are drawn from TUA. When your wallet is empty, you can continue to make payments! Perhaps you can’t make payments directly, but pay indirectly with the other type of transactions. I suppose this works unless TUA is empty, but in this case TUA will be empty all the time. And there will be a lot of bots trying to empty it just in case. Most of the transactions can be implemented as a strange Bitcoin/AltCoin wallet: Payment is easy. Support, Endorsement and Coupling are just a matter of sending the correct amount at the correct time. Even the balance cap can be implemented as a voluntary automatic payment. The strange part is the Inhibition transaction. > Inhibition is a two-sided transaction over some duration t. If X inhibits Y over t, then X reduces the income or expenses of Y over t by some proportion i. By inhibiting Y, X effectively reduces the impact that Y has on the Strangecoin network by i over t by forfeiting that proportion of income and expense. To initiate the transaction, X specifies Y, t, and i, which must be approved by Y. If Y has to approve it, I don’t understand why is there an X there. It can be a 1 side transaction where Y inhibits itself. In Inhibition is bad for Y, then it’s easier to implement using NOP, because nobody would use it.
- djestrada 13y ago
  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.
smartwater 13y ago
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=549669 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=549669
- djestrada 13y ago
  For what it's worth, that's not me and I'm surprised that someone is already trying to scam on the idea. Lol.
TophWells 13y ago
I'm rather disappointed that in spite of promises that transactions can be non-zero sum, on close inspection these transactions just draw money from other accounts - usually TUA. From the description, I expected new Strangecoins to be created out of thin air by transactions, and I wanted to see where you were going with that design. If money's still just flowing from accounts into other accounts, then it's something that would be doable with dollars or Bitcoins if the people involved signed appropriate contracts. Some of your proposed transactions have real-world equivalents; "coupling" sounds like creating a joint account for a married couple. Others, like "inhibition", I don't understand their motivation. What's Strangecoin for, exactly? Are you supposed to be buying goods and services with it? Why have features like continuous-time transactions or free money for all, what benefit is gained from them?
- djestrada 13y ago
  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 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 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 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. =)
msandford 13y ago
From the article: "If I give you a dollar for a burger, then I've lost a dollar and gained a burger, and you've gained a dollar and lost a burger. Assuming this was a fair trade (that dollars and burgers are of approximately equal value), then as a result of the transaction we've simply rearranged who has which good, and no additional value was created in the process. What I've lost you've gained and vice versa, so that the total value between us has not changed after the exchange is over." I can see how a person would think that, but it's not really correct. If that was true then nobody would have any reason to hold either dollars or burgers or whatever; we'd constantly trade them for one another since they are of literally equal value. Who cares which $10 bill they have in their wallet? Nobody since $10 is $10 is $10. Hell, most people don't even care if it's $10 or 2x $5 or $5 and 5x $1, so long as they don't need singles for the vending machine. But we don't see that kind of behavior in the economy, which leads us to the conclusion that when people exchange things they're not exchanging things of equal value. They are of nominally equal value, which leads to there being a price. But if they were truly of equal value then the guy selling a burger is making $0 profit (something he is unlikely to do) and the guy buying a burger technically isn't any better off either. Why would two people make an exchange where neither is better off? In aggregate they wouldn't even if there are some exceptional cases where they would. When people exchange things they are trading something which subjectively to them is of equal or lesser value than the thing they are getting. That also explains why people buy just one burger instead of ALL the burgers. When someone is hungry it shifts their subjective valuation of burgers higher and money lower; once satisfied their preferences shift back to "normal" and they stop buying burgers. An economy already has value creation "baked in" because when people exchange things they only do so when it increases total satisfaction. People tend not to make trades which decrease satisfaction or merely hold it equal. The transaction cost helps ensure that is the case. Everything else equal before the trade satisfaction was X, after the trade it was X + Y. Y is the amount of increased satisfaction that prompted one or both parties to engage in the trade. Now obviously someone could argue that Y is negative but that doesn't hold water. People don't buy things that are "too expensive" or "crappy" or whatever you'd like to call it. I will concede that my argument might seem tautological. I might even agree. In the absence of a third party with a gun I can't see how or why two people would choose to enter into a trade that don't benefit at least one of them, and probably both.
thisiswrong 13y ago
I think the "Strangecoin transactions can be nonzero sum" idea is flawed. But did I understand correctly: Would this be a cryptocurrency with a money base that expands/disappears as the 'fait value' rate goes up and down? That would be cool!
- djestrada 13y ago
  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.
  - thisiswrong 13y ago
    So would the Strangecoin value be algorithmically controlled in any way to keep it at a constant 'fiat value' exchange rate? i.e. when the 'fait value' goes down, the % of Strangecoin confiscated during a transaction increases? (Fiat value tracked through distributed exchanges' data feeds).
  - spaceapple 13y ago
    I think it's a brilliant idea, but I don't think people will be motivated to move forward with it without a clearer picture of what they would be creating in the real world. We are strongly conditioned to try to "capture" value. You are attempting to redefine value in such a way that it is no longer advantageous to "capture" it at the expense of the overall system. But what would it look like in the real world? It is a genuine challenge to envision real world transactions and a society based on Strangecoin, and even more difficult to come up with a profit motive to create it in the first place. Does a barista "couple" herself to a cafe when she gets a job that pays in Strangecoin? What are the effects of this vs employment as we know it? How does she fare as a result when compared to someone working for dollars with an employment contract? Money serves many purposes, and one is to create incentives. Often these incentives are coercive. They don't have to be, but there are philosophical as well as technical challenges to overcome. When everyone is acting according to one set of rules, it is difficult to create a competing set of rules without some clearly defined advantage for doing so.
djestrada 13y ago
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/ http://digitalinterface.blogspot.com/ https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024 https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024

113 points by djestrada 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

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deleted 13y ago
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iancarroll 13y ago

Strangecoin transactions can be nonzero sum. A Strangecoin transaction might result in both parties having more Strangecoin. Strangecoin transactions can be one-sided and can be conducted entirely by only one party to the transaction. If I'm reading that correctly, could I give myself infinite StrangeCoin?

djestrada 13y ago
Users cannot engage in transactions with themselves. Updated the doc to reflect this.
- TheLoneWolfling 13y ago
  How would one enforce this? (Answer, you cannot. So this is not a valid solution to this problem.)
- iancarroll 13y ago
  What would you do if I created another address?
  - eximius 13y ago
    This was immediately what I thought of. It would take a very short amount of time for a client to show up which automatically manages and balances your accounts.
  - djestrada 13y ago
    From my G+ reshare, in the context of a question about account caps: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm > I suppose one way around the cap would be for users to maintain multiple accounts. I have no objection to this in principle, although it has an impact on the networks they can develop on any one account. If I have 20 Strangecoin accounts all coupled to and supporting each other, but are only receiving income through one account connected to the external network, then my subnet isn't going to grow larger as a whole than the one node connected externally. So I can't use multiple accounts to inflate just my identity. If I'm using multiple accounts, it's because I want to maintain multiple identities. Again I have no objection to this, or at least the protocol I've described doesn't rule it out.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - whyenot 13y ago
    author: don't use a url shortener or HN will kill your post. For those who don't have showdead turned on, here was his response: From my G+ reshare, in the context of a question about account caps: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm > I suppose one way around the cap would be for users to maintain multiple accounts. I have no objection to this in principle, although it has an impact on the networks they can develop on any one account. If I have 20 Strangecoin accounts all coupled to and supporting each other, but are only receiving income through one account connected to the external network, then my subnet isn't going to grow larger as a whole than the one node connected externally. So I can't use multiple accounts to inflate just my identity. If I'm using multiple accounts, it's because I want to maintain multiple identities. Again I have no objection to this, or at least the protocol I've described doesn't rule it out.
    - infogulch 13y ago
      @author: Define the "external network". What keeps a single entity from simulating a network just as large as everyone else combined? At that point, how does one determine which network is the "correct" one, though both are the same size with the exact same connectedness stats?
    - djestrada 13y ago
      Thanks! Fixed.
- hibikir 13y ago
  I don't even have to engage in transactions with myself, but create a small cartel that really love each others' transactions. Think of the good old link farm sites from the early days of Google. You pay, and a bunch of positive feedback is provided between sites. In your case, you could even do the opposite: Pay me and my friends, or we will dislike every transaction you will ever make. Built-in racketeering
kanzure 13y ago
> If I'm reading that correctly, could I give myself infinite StrangeCoin? I don't think it will work with just a single strangecoin, but instead have one strangecoin per user (or more, but at least one strangecoin asset type per user on the network). Then when you issue new shares you're only inflating the supply or your reputation, which might cause a market reaction. Mind you that I am not saying the reaction would be a good or bad thing.

A1kmm 13y ago

'Basic income' which is not coupled to any expenditure (e.g. by mining) will have a tragedy of the commons problem in a pseudonymous system. In a pseudonymous system, I can make as many addresses / accounts as I like (since a pseudonym is, by definition, not tied to any real identity). Therefore, to maximise income, someone can create duplicate addresses, causing the basic income to be distributed according to the number of addresses a person has.

djestrada 13y ago
Answered to another question below, from my G+ reshare, in the context of a question about account caps: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm > I suppose one way around the cap would be for users to maintain multiple accounts. I have no objection to this in principle, although it has an impact on the networks they can develop on any one account. If I have 20 Strangecoin accounts all coupled to and supporting each other, but are only receiving income through one account connected to the external network, then my subnet isn't going to grow larger as a whole than the one node connected externally. So I can't use multiple accounts to inflate just my identity. If I'm using multiple accounts, it's because I want to maintain multiple identities. Again I have no objection to this, or at least the protocol I've described doesn't rule it out.
witten 13y ago
While this is a valid objection to the design as stated, there are solutions. For instance, the insight behind Bitcoin is that instead of the one-IP-one-vote policies of previous distributed protocols and the sock-puppeting that ensues, proof of work means that it's one-CPU-one-vote. And schemes like proof of stake go even further so it's one-coin-one-vote.
- vbuterin 13y ago
  Bitcoin already has a basic income distributed via one-CPU-one-vote: it's called a mining reward. And if you distribute a basic income via one-coin-one-vote it's called an interest rate. The whole point of BI is to be per-person.

hibikir 13y ago

What is the motivation for this? The big advantage of money is as a communication mechanism: An increase of demand of pencils, though price chnges, can increase the demand for burgers in a town where the wood for said pencils is made, even though the purchasers have absolutely no idea, and no control, over the results of their actions. Sending positive and negative feedback to transactions has the opposite effect: It avoids the information hiding that is the key to making the economy tractable, and makes what are simple decisions much more complicated, but I suddenly have to care about what people think about the suppliers of my suppliers. I suspect a economy running on this strangecoin would be less effective than one running on a regular currency, just like it's much harder to be gay in a tiny homophobic town than in a large, relatively anonymous big city.

djestrada 13y ago
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.
- jchrisa 13y ago
  I think Strangecoin is super interesting. I think his analogy was that with a coin where relationships matter, you have to care how a person is connected, when you deal with them. I think it could be a feature, not a bug, even if it makes things less efficient.

maxk42 13y ago

That's numberwang!

tonypace 13y ago

I was always dispirited by how conservative in sentiment Bitcoin and most altcoins were. It always felt to me that Bitcoin was mostly redundant to gold, neglecting the inherent advantages of ecurrency. Something more ambitious deserves to be implemented. That endorsement aside, the inhibition transaction does disturb me. It would seem to encourage mob-like behavior in the culture of early adopters, as heretics of whatever sort were forcibly ejected from the system. I don't trust the dynamics of groups enough to think this will be a good form of self government.

olalonde 13y ago
> I was always dispirited by how conservative in sentiment Bitcoin and most altcoins were. It always felt to me that Bitcoin was mostly redundant to gold, neglecting the inherent advantages of ecurrency. Something more ambitious deserves to be implemented. There is a good reason Bitcoin is conservative: it has to be, by design. It's also what makes it attractive. Also, you are completely wrong if you think that lack of ambition is the reason we don't have a cryptocurrency that doesn't neglect "the inherent advantages of ecurrency" by now. Lots of smart people, including esteemed computer scientists, have been thinking really hard about the subject for years and I find your comment a bit insulting towards them (I'll pass it off as ignorance on your part). I too really hope we can eventually come up with a better cryptocurrency but please don't assume people are not trying.
yale 13y ago
Inhibition is a two-sided transaction, requiring the consent of both sides.
djestrada 13y ago
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.
- mst 13y ago
  Given the number of people confused by it, I think perhaps it needs a different name ... my mind is blank when I attempt to come up with a better one, though.

aaron987 13y ago

This is an interesting economics thought experiment, but I don't see this working simply because it is too complicated. Virtual currency already has a learning curve that most people haven't gotten used to. Adding strange attractors into the mix certainly isn't going to help.

djestrada 13y ago
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.
- evv 13y ago
  I agree that truly different crypto-currencies is a very exciting frontier. The distributed block-chain technology has implications far wider than a basic ledger. For example, I'm quite excited by namecoin, a distributed DNS. I share your enthusiasm about extending bitcoin's technology to create a distributed, general-purpose trust network. However, I am quite confused about strangecoin. Maybe the whole thread is going over my head and I'm lacking an Explain-Like-I'm-Five description of your idea. I'd love to be a supporter, but I don't see how you can build a trust network around something as complicated as this. Could you explain how, even in a vague sense, strangecoin could act as a reputation system? It seems like bitcoin itself works as a pretty great trust network. Just look at the mess surrounding MtGox: everybody seems to have a clear understanding that MtGox is totally culpable, despite the claims of transaction malleability attacks. Because the block-chain is entirely available for analysis, the financial activity of all organizations can be traced, which can reliably verify trust.
13y ago

rdl 13y ago

This seems incredibly complex and described in an even more complex way, but I think you could accomplish most of the good from this proposal by having an infinity of potential instruments, issued by individuals, with the market sorting out the meaning -- e.g. PG General Liability IOUs trade independently of rdl general liability ious which trade differently from rdl newproject equity.

eatitraw 13y ago

> If I give you a dollar for a burger, then I've lost a dollar and gained a burger, and you've gained a dollar and lost a burger. Assuming this was a fair trade (that dollars and burgers are of approximately equal value), then as a result of the transaction we've simply rearranged who has which good, and no additional value was created in the process. This is incorrect. I sell a burger because I value it less than your dollar, and you buy a burger because you value it more than one dollar. Win-win. It is a positive sum game, not a zero sum one.

aninhumer 13y ago
And the article goes on to say that two paragraphs after that line.
phaemon 13y ago
If that were true, then surely no-one would ever feel cheated in a transaction, and there would be no such word as "profiteering".

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

sharemywin 13y ago

Anyway you could lay out what your talking about with a bunch of examples. Maybe add a section here's the problems with the current systems.

gus_massa 13y ago

There are many problems. I’ll try to explain two: > The Universal Account (TUA): > [...] > TUA can make a payment only in the following situations: > [...] > X's account balance = 0 at t. Any additional transactions outgoing from X at t are drawn from TUA. When your wallet is empty, you can continue to make payments! Perhaps you can’t make payments directly, but pay indirectly with the other type of transactions. I suppose this works unless TUA is empty, but in this case TUA will be empty all the time. And there will be a lot of bots trying to empty it just in case. Most of the transactions can be implemented as a strange Bitcoin/AltCoin wallet: Payment is easy. Support, Endorsement and Coupling are just a matter of sending the correct amount at the correct time. Even the balance cap can be implemented as a voluntary automatic payment. The strange part is the Inhibition transaction. > Inhibition is a two-sided transaction over some duration t. If X inhibits Y over t, then X reduces the income or expenses of Y over t by some proportion i. By inhibiting Y, X effectively reduces the impact that Y has on the Strangecoin network by i over t by forfeiting that proportion of income and expense. To initiate the transaction, X specifies Y, t, and i, which must be approved by Y. If Y has to approve it, I don’t understand why is there an X there. It can be a 1 side transaction where Y inhibits itself. In Inhibition is bad for Y, then it’s easier to implement using NOP, because nobody would use it.

djestrada 13y ago
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.

smartwater 13y ago

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=549669 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=549669

djestrada 13y ago
For what it's worth, that's not me and I'm surprised that someone is already trying to scam on the idea. Lol.

TophWells 13y ago

I'm rather disappointed that in spite of promises that transactions can be non-zero sum, on close inspection these transactions just draw money from other accounts - usually TUA. From the description, I expected new Strangecoins to be created out of thin air by transactions, and I wanted to see where you were going with that design. If money's still just flowing from accounts into other accounts, then it's something that would be doable with dollars or Bitcoins if the people involved signed appropriate contracts. Some of your proposed transactions have real-world equivalents; "coupling" sounds like creating a joint account for a married couple. Others, like "inhibition", I don't understand their motivation. What's Strangecoin for, exactly? Are you supposed to be buying goods and services with it? Why have features like continuous-time transactions or free money for all, what benefit is gained from them?

djestrada 13y ago
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 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 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 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. =)

msandford 13y ago

From the article: "If I give you a dollar for a burger, then I've lost a dollar and gained a burger, and you've gained a dollar and lost a burger. Assuming this was a fair trade (that dollars and burgers are of approximately equal value), then as a result of the transaction we've simply rearranged who has which good, and no additional value was created in the process. What I've lost you've gained and vice versa, so that the total value between us has not changed after the exchange is over." I can see how a person would think that, but it's not really correct. If that was true then nobody would have any reason to hold either dollars or burgers or whatever; we'd constantly trade them for one another since they are of literally equal value. Who cares which $10 bill they have in their wallet? Nobody since $10 is $10 is $10. Hell, most people don't even care if it's $10 or 2x $5 or $5 and 5x $1, so long as they don't need singles for the vending machine. But we don't see that kind of behavior in the economy, which leads us to the conclusion that when people exchange things they're not exchanging things of equal value. They are of nominally equal value, which leads to there being a price. But if they were truly of equal value then the guy selling a burger is making $0 profit (something he is unlikely to do) and the guy buying a burger technically isn't any better off either. Why would two people make an exchange where neither is better off? In aggregate they wouldn't even if there are some exceptional cases where they would. When people exchange things they are trading something which subjectively to them is of equal or lesser value than the thing they are getting. That also explains why people buy just one burger instead of ALL the burgers. When someone is hungry it shifts their subjective valuation of burgers higher and money lower; once satisfied their preferences shift back to "normal" and they stop buying burgers. An economy already has value creation "baked in" because when people exchange things they only do so when it increases total satisfaction. People tend not to make trades which decrease satisfaction or merely hold it equal. The transaction cost helps ensure that is the case. Everything else equal before the trade satisfaction was X, after the trade it was X + Y. Y is the amount of increased satisfaction that prompted one or both parties to engage in the trade. Now obviously someone could argue that Y is negative but that doesn't hold water. People don't buy things that are "too expensive" or "crappy" or whatever you'd like to call it. I will concede that my argument might seem tautological. I might even agree. In the absence of a third party with a gun I can't see how or why two people would choose to enter into a trade that don't benefit at least one of them, and probably both.

thisiswrong 13y ago

I think the "Strangecoin transactions can be nonzero sum" idea is flawed. But did I understand correctly: Would this be a cryptocurrency with a money base that expands/disappears as the 'fait value' rate goes up and down? That would be cool!

djestrada 13y ago
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.
- thisiswrong 13y ago
  So would the Strangecoin value be algorithmically controlled in any way to keep it at a constant 'fiat value' exchange rate? i.e. when the 'fait value' goes down, the % of Strangecoin confiscated during a transaction increases? (Fiat value tracked through distributed exchanges' data feeds).
- spaceapple 13y ago
  I think it's a brilliant idea, but I don't think people will be motivated to move forward with it without a clearer picture of what they would be creating in the real world. We are strongly conditioned to try to "capture" value. You are attempting to redefine value in such a way that it is no longer advantageous to "capture" it at the expense of the overall system. But what would it look like in the real world? It is a genuine challenge to envision real world transactions and a society based on Strangecoin, and even more difficult to come up with a profit motive to create it in the first place. Does a barista "couple" herself to a cafe when she gets a job that pays in Strangecoin? What are the effects of this vs employment as we know it? How does she fare as a result when compared to someone working for dollars with an employment contract? Money serves many purposes, and one is to create incentives. Often these incentives are coercive. They don't have to be, but there are philosophical as well as technical challenges to overcome. When everyone is acting according to one set of rules, it is difficult to create a competing set of rules without some clearly defined advantage for doing so.

djestrada 13y ago

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