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John Rodrigues

CoiNative - 1 views

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    Brief on some alternative economies. Internet complications: web represented only by facebook or games to some people, cell phones preferable to others. Tablet banks TBD. Thanks.
Kurt Laitner

New Currency Frontiers: Membrane Currencies - 1 views

  • 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.
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  • 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."
Kurt Laitner

The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable - 1 views

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    LMAO, TOS with ban of sale of "anything who's purpose is to harm or defraud such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction" peace dude.. pass the joint
Wildcat2030 wildcat

It's all about autonomy: Consumers react negatively when prompted to think about money ... - 1 views

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    "Whether they are aware of it or not, consumers dislike being reminded of money-so much that they will rebel against authority figures, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "When consumers are reminded of money, do they conform, shrug it off, or react against others' attempts to influence them?" ask authors Jia (Elke) Liu (University of Groningen), Dirk Smeesters (Erasmus University), and Kathleen D. Vohs (University of Minnesota). The researchers found that money reminders lead consumers to react against people who would normally influence their decisions. In three studies, participants were subtly reminded of money by either working on a computer with a hard currency screensaver or by formulating sentences using money-related words. "Because money reminders boost the importance of consumers' autonomy, those subtly reminded of money perceived the authority commands and off-handed peer opinions as threats to their autonomy, which did not occur among those not reminded of money," the authors write. Specifically, the participants who were reminded of money reacted in opposite ways from authority figures or peers when it came to evaluating products. Conversely, participants who were not reminded of money followed commands or suggestions of authorities and peers. "This reactance to social influences only occurs when money-reminded consumers made decisions for themselves," the authors write. "When these consumers were asked to make decisions for a relatively intimate other, they were indifferent to social influences (i.e., the unsolicited opinion of another consumer)." "This research highlights money's ability to stimulate a longing for freedom, and has potential implications for interpersonal communication, advertisers, and markets," the authors write. "Money cues are frequently present in the social environment (e.g., televisions spots mentioning savings or discounts, in-store signage with dollar signs, billboards advertising the state l
François Dongier

Are jobs obsolete? - CNN.com - 1 views

  • Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.
  • What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.
Kurt Laitner

Learning from Microfinance's Woes - Randall Kempner - Harvard Business Review - 1 views

  • lead to situations where people rob from each other to pay off their debts.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      sounds like capitalism
Kurt Laitner

Welcome - New Currency Frontiers - 1 views

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    watch the vid
Kurt Laitner

open money: techne - 0 views

  • The Churn Whereas the mesh is the accessible state of the players, their identity and functional relationships as the history of the wealth-acknowledgments between them, the "churn" is the process by which new entities are added to the mesh and by which existing entities become further enmeshed. This "enmeshment" is the result of discrete events. Thus the mesh is the "nouns" of the open money world, whereas the churn is its verbs. There are just a handful of events, and they can be seen as procedure calls with parameters. Create Namespace: parameters: new namespace name, parent namespace Create Account: parameters: new account name, parent namespace Create Currency: parameters: new currency name, currency specification, parent namespace Join Currency: parameters: account, currency Acknowledge Flow: parameters: declaring account, accepting account, flow specification
Kurt Laitner

New Currency Frontiers: Critical to expand perception of Currencies - 0 views

  • A currency organizes connections and interactions between groups of people into a kind of collective behavior which creates a kind of living social organism. The design of that currency (the rules about issuance, transaction, conversion/co-function, retirement/expiration, participant classes, governance, etc.) are the DNA of this social organism
  • DNA doesn’t tell us exactly what each individual biological critter will do, but it does define a particular range of possibilities and tendencies
Kurt Laitner

On Voles and Openings « flow - 2 views

  • “A falling tree makes more noise than a growing forest.”
  • Once I’d stepped through, there was no going back, because suddenly I understood three things: 1) money was a human invention 2) this particular invention is foundational to all human social patterns 3) we can change it, and there-by change our social patterns.
  • Namely that 1) money is information, 2) the pattern of flow of that information in relation to communities should be circular, i.e. issued within the community so it would flow around it, not through it as happens with moneys issued outside of communities.  3) That there must be a rich ecology of currencies appropriate to each communities circumstances.  4) That these currencies must exist in the context of a network that emerges out of an interplay between communities of function (what people do together) and communities of identity (how people see and name themselves).
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  • He had realized that money is a tool that focuses on building tradable wealth, but that tradable wealth is just a small subset of measurable wealth, which itself is a subset of acknowledgeable wealth.
  • But it wasn’t until I came to understand Art’s deeper definition of currency, as “current-see” or formal information systems that allows us to see and interact with currents, flows, that the things really came together.  These different levels of wealth, corresponding to the levels of systemic integrity, also needed corresponding currency types, to manage the different types of flow that are taking place at those different systemic levels.
  • wanted to build a generalized “wealth acknowledgement” system.
  • Regenerosity, which used the idea of laying down what amounted to a social network graph to record the changing relationships in a community, which is essentially what monetary transaction are.
  • But what I realized, is that money is still very concrete, and just like pictographic writing. It’s not abstract at all because all moneys so far use the same encoding mechanism they always have for value: relative scarcity (just like all pictograms use the same encoding mechanism for meaning: shape)  And that encoding mechanism is only really appropriate for tradable wealth where scarcity is a true for parts and products of systems.  It’s not appropriate for the wider levels of wealth.  What I saw is that we have no “alphabet” for encoding all the levels of value, and that’s what the open money system I’d been working on could evolve into.
  • It appears that the greatest leaps in “novelty,” i.e. increased possibility that we know of, all arise because of the emergence of new embodied information encoding systems, what I like to call “expressive capacities”.
  • Our current day money is to that new expressive capacity as the coordinating hunting grunts of some proto-hominids is to language.
  •  What we can it evolve toward, is, for the lack of a better term, a language of flow.  
  • Expressive capacities are all built out of fairly simple nested composable units.
  •  The rules for composability at each level are fairly simple, yet the variety of that which is expressible is infinite because of the combinatorial explosion.  
  • a small vocabulary of composable parts, mixable with definite meaningful grammatics.  
  • “Composition requires creation of a negative space, i.e. receptors for an as of yet unknown interaction.”
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    excellent romp through the issues
Wildcat2030 wildcat

Pop-Up Human Capital: A New Employment Model? | Endless Innovation | Big Think - 1 views

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    "Around the world, it's becoming easier than ever to sell your human capital - the sum total of your knowledge, experiences and talents - to the highest bidder. Using new P2P marketplaces like Sidetour and Gidsy, you can sell a lifetime's worth of experiences and memories the same way you might sell a pair of used shoes. Using educational marketplaces like Skillshare, you can sell your esoteric knowledge to people with an interest in a specific topic. And by taking advantage of sites like TaskRabbit, it's easier than ever to earn quick bucks for completing mundane tasks for people who live near you. In major cities from New York to San Francisco to Berlin, the pop-up human capital store is fast becoming a reality. Douglas Rushkoff even suggests that this "more freelance, direct P2P means of exchange is going to replace what we thought of as employment.""
Kurt Laitner

The Core of MetaCurrency: Composable Abstractions for Wealth Building | The MetaCurrenc... - 0 views

  • "What would it take to make currencies as powerful for building and sharing wealth, as language is for building and sharing meaning?"  
  • The answer to that question, I believe, lies in discovering/inventing a set of composable abstractions for wealth building
  • Notice a pattern in each of these layers of composable abstractions: a set of fairly tight constraints allows the production of a huge number of "expressions."
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  • It was developed before we had really spent much time thinking about the four opens (Transport, Identity, Data, Rules),
Kurt Laitner

Home - Cyclos Project Site - 0 views

  • develop open source complementary currency software that is easy to use and maintain
Kurt Laitner

browsearth | and SEE! - 1 views

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    prezi has an interesting area (off path) on currency
Kurt Laitner

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs - 0 views

  • private banks create credit on the basis of a cushion of capital specified by the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, and this credit created out of thin air is exchanged for interest-bearing Treasury debt
  • The only constraint on credit creation is now the capital cushion that banks must hold to cover defaults by borrowers and operating costs
  • Tax has never in 800 years in the UK been collected and then spent
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  • The truth of it is that tax-payers' money has never been anywhere near a tax-payer
  • fund that expenditure through the unnecessary issue and sale of interest-bearing debt to private banks, and through taxation
  • Public spending on credit came first, and when stock was returned in payment of taxation this credit/money was retired.
  • I believe that the collapse of Lehman Brothers in October 2008 will come to be seen as the definitive end of the centralized, but connected, Economy 2.0 paradigm operated by and for the profit of middlemen.
  • there has been a parallel series of innovations in legal vehicles for investment in productive assets, involving trust law and partnership law, rather than company law
  • In my home turf of the oil market, all the signs are that in the absence of massive new flows of quantitative easing dollars from the Federal Reserve, and/or substantial cuts in oil production, especially from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, there will be a collapse in oil market prices in the first quarter of 2012. Indeed, some market participants have already taken option positions in the oil market in anticipation (or in fear) of a fall in the oil price as low as $45 per barrel in 2012.
  • Owners of productive assets simply create and issue undated credits/units that are redeemable in payment for the use of the asset. For example $1.00's worth of rental revenues pre-sold for 80 cents will give an absolute return of 25%, but the rate of return depends - literally - upon the rate at which units of stock may be returned to the issuer and redeemed against use.
  • users of productive assets such as occupiers will always buy stock at a price less than face value in order to redeem it against use.
  • My vision of a 21st century "Open Capitalism" is of new forms of stock based upon land rentals which will come to be what are essentially networked land-based national currencies created literally from the ground up.
  • Open capital - Stock may in fact be seen as currency sold forward at a wholesale discount
Kurt Laitner

Square for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store - 0 views

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    iPhone c/c swiper
Kurt Laitner

Home - 0 views

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    another group considering the meaning of money - see also the film crowdfunding site http://moneyandlifemovie.com/wp/
Kurt Laitner

The most important 48 hours in EU history? | Reflections on a Revolution ROAR - 0 views

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    "Only dimly aware of the structural problems in the eurozone and the looming insolvency of some of Europe's largest banks, EU leaders met up with some of the continent's richest and most powerful bankers last night. In the luxurious comfort of a Roman palace, they debated how the private sector could contribute to a 'real' solution for the crisis." That quote really says it all doesn't it?
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