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Kurt Laitner

New Currency Frontiers: Membrane Currencies - 1 views

blog.newcurrencyfrontiers.com/...membrane-currencies.html

*ericharris-braun

shared by Kurt Laitner on 26 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • This fact, that the boundaries of a membrane are somewhat fuzzy, is particularly interesting because that's exactly what membranes themselves are: boundaries. They are the component of a system that makes it appear to be a separate, complete, and integral system in the context of some environment.
  • Membranes can be seen as that which creates a context, or environment, in which subsystems can be coordinated to into being an integral whole.
  • Membranes are permeable. One of the most important features of any membrane, is exactly the form and shape that it gives to permeability. This permeability, is clearly a mechanism for regulating flows in and out of a system, of coordinating how the inside of the system will see the outside, of limiting/enhancing/controlling/shaping/transforming what gets in and out.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • In some living systems it's very easy to see the membranes as they map one-for-one with the very things we see.
  • Michael realized that for a self-organizing resilient currency network to form, there had to be a self-declared boundary system by which currencies and accounts in those systems could be declared and named, such that they would be visible and known to the entire network, but also such that any such group had it's own autonomy and control within that domain. This is a profound insight: naming is one of the key elements that creates the membrane of the social organism. Names are part of what creates the boundary that make a social organism distinguishable as an independent whole.
  • The flowplace design included the notion of a "circle," which was a way to group users and currencies. The circles were completely separate from the currency network addresses (which we were now calling wallets). We conceived of circles as providing a context for action. So any group that wanted to use free currencies to build wealth together, could come to the flowplace, and start by creating a circle, and a bunch of currencies that it would use to measure it's wealth.
  • When you have such circles, immediately you need to address the "security" questions of who gets to add new members into the circle. And then also the question of who gets to create currencies in a given circle, and so on. So I sat down to code these "administration" features into the flowplace, when it hit me that the meta-currency infrastructure we were using to create the currencies in the flowplace, was exactly what I needed to implement these permissions structures for the circles
  • Well, the meta-currency infrastructure provides a language (XGFL) for creating those formal systems, and in the flowplace I'd already used it to create some trade, performance metric, and reputation currencies.
  • I saw that I could use this same language to specify the permissions that participants of the circle have in regards to the currencies that the circle uses, and that that very specification could simultaneously serve as a naming, i.e. a mapping, between people, currencies and roles in the context of the given circle.
  • we realized that the membrane currency also has a broader naming function in that it is also responsible for creating names for all the currencies in use by the circle, be they currencies that are created by circle for internal use only, or be they currencies created externally. The membrane currency brings such currencies "inside" the circle, by virtue of giving them a local name.
  • It is a membrane, which is the systemic component that both separates and connects the organism from its environment
  • The membrane is not so much a static physical barrier, as it is an active process that mediates between "inside" and "outside."
fishead ...*∞º˙

untitled - 3 views

www.wired.com/...ff_futureofmoney

money

shared by fishead ...*∞º˙ on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
shalkydri liked it
  • Just a decade ago, the idea of moving money that quickly and cheaply would have been ridiculous. Checks took ages to clear. Transferring money from one bank account to another could take days, as banks leisurely handed off funds, levying fees nearly every step of the way. Credit cards made it a little easier to pass money to a friend — provided that friend owned a credit card reader and didn’t mind paying a few percentage points in fees or waiting a couple of days for the payment to process.
  • fishead ...*∞º˙ on 08 Mar 10
     
    All your prayers are answered in this article, Kurt.
  • Jack Logan on 09 Mar 10
     
    All of this sounds great in this article. Apple, in particular, has a wealth of understanding of how to handle on-line trades and money risk management.
Wildcat2030 wildcat

Shopping is not a hobby | Suzanne Moore | Comment is free | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...shopping-not-a-hobby

shopping hobby

shared by Wildcat2030 wildcat on 10 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Wildcat2030 wildcat on 10 Sep 11
     
    "One of the many ways I fail at being a proper woman is that I loathe shopping. Trailing in and out of sweaty changing rooms with friends, as they try on clothes which you are meant to oooh and aaah over, is my idea of hell. I am one of those blokes who sits outside looking bored saying: "Yeah, that looks alright. Buy that." If you can't buy something in 20 minutes, we have a problem, Houston. Supermarkets overwhelm me and Ikea produces such bizarre mood swings that I have calculated the psychic damage is not worth the money you "save". For a few fevered minutes I do believe that a "storage solution" is the answer to all existential worries but then I come to the till holding two dozen egg cups, some box files and a bargain bath mat and have to have be revived with a plastic hot dog."
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