Akseli Virtanen, Dick Bryan
September 2019
Akseli and Dick discussing premises of the upcoming ECSA economic white paper: Economy as a network. Capitalism as a narrow definition of a network. Hayek and his digital disciples. Price, market and the rule of profit as a protocol. How to challenge a capitalist protocol? At the core of the ECSA project: The creation of a post-capitalist economic grammar.
Glossary
An Agency is a collective Agent: a Network of Agents appearing and acting together as a coherent whole without any central decision making. A contractual relationship of many to many via a Network derivative. Also known as the composite Agent, synthetic Agent, Derivative Agent, distributed Agent, Derivative community. Agencies may be public or private, uniquely identifiable and able to participate in other Economic spaces as a coherent whole. Through this composition the Space-protocol">Economic Space Protocol enables the creation of large scale collaborative organizational Networks. When viewing Agents in these Networks organized around a specific intent we refer to them as Agencies.
Economic Space Agent is a first class citizen in the new Economic space: has a private Space, is able to issue and hold Rights, to accept and receive Offers and it has an internal ordered event timeline (own “blockchain”). All Agents can be issuers and clearers, engage in creation of credit, Collateral, Stake and other financial relationships. Peering together through a shared Protocol – a shared Economic grammar – Agents form a Networked economic system with privacy preserving, scalable architecture, with no central data broker, host or owner.
An emergent social co-creation.
Capability to set attractors for one’s own behavior.
The means to put the risks of Capitalism’s fragility back onto the Market. Another name to the ECSA Token. Big Put is a play both on the capitalist desire to short itself (it is wasteful, fragile & unstable: a cultural-financial asset in decline) and the Spread that will emerge between the Network capacities of the existing capitalist economic Network and the post-capitalist economic Network: a Spread between their Stability, accessibility, efficiency of distribution, adaptability, scalability, privacy, functional equality and programmability.
A wasteful, fragile & unstable economic system: a cultural-financial asset in decline. Dangerous in the way being long Capitalism aggressively shorts the environment and the qualitative dimensions of our life and society. Key problem: the lack of capacity to express dimensions of Value (Monocracy of Value).
A Circuit of value refers to the process where an Economy goes through continuous processes of production, sale, consumption and investment leading to new production (hence a circuit). Expansion sees the Value of output grow as it moves round the circuit. Crisis is associated with a break in the circuit.
Netting with an inter-temporal component. Key function in the ECSA distributed credit Protocol: every Space-agent">Economic Space Agent using it is also a clearer. Agents learn to do Clearing through the creation of Liquidity tokens: when you issue a Liquidity token, you issue it to the credit Network. Every Liquidity token becomes part of the credit Network. That is how it is possible for them to clear. Liquidity tokens are used to facilitate and confirm ledger entries, generating Stability in economic flows; they are not coins to accumulate, or loaned for profit.
The Collateral question in Capitalism is who gets to determine what ‘assets’ are, and how they can be utilised for leverage. Workers’ primary asset – their capacity to work – is only Collateral in the context of slavery: the capacity of the employer (owner) to use the worker as Collateral; not the workers’ capacity to use themselves as Collateral. The Collateral question is the financial version of ‘class’. In Post-Capitalism, all Agents can issue assets to be used as Collateral. The construction of an economic Protocol for distributed Collateral is itself the key challenge to the current capitalist order. It is the centrepiece of a strategy for a distributed (not centralized) economic system.
Collateralization of affect produces community.
Commodity Token is a Network derivative. It is issued by the buyer in acknowledgment of the completion of a transaction. Makes any Information exchangeable.
Must become a different way of doing the Economy
Economics of the hidden (the social relationality of production).
A Market needs to have two Prices. Dealer makes the Market by creating the inside Spread, the Spread that appears as “the Market”. The dealer collects the inside Spread. And crosses the outside Spread. The dealer model of providing Liquidity is very different from the lender model.
A historical Protocol and a social relation. An inferior mode of finance. In financial Capitalism the growth in the forms of inDebtedness is the condition for capital accumulation, just like expansion of labor force participation, was for expanding commodity production. Our collective capacity to assume Debt and pay taxes and be the direct bearer of austerity measures create direct vehicles for financial asset accumulation. The increasing supply of government bonds s possible only through deficit cuts and excluding all inflationary spending. This is like the financial equivalent of raw material for industrial production. In financial Economy the surplus is extracted more directly from this collective capacity to become more inDebted and pay taxes than from the stagnating number of people employed in goods and services production.
DeFi has so far introduced ‘stablecoins’ as mechanisms for Token exchange rate Stability with respect to fiat currencies and pooling mechanisms for stabilizing Token Prices; and, more recently, also decentralized banking and insurance Protocols: that assets need not lie idle, but can be mobilized for borrowing and lending, with mechanisms of insurance Offered on the side. Lending is then giving rise to the potential for leverage: borrowing in order to take positions in Markets. That, in turn, is opening up issues like Collateral requirements with margin calls and default risk. Predictably, we are seeing next the Issuance of Derivative financial products like credit default Swaps (CDS) and Collateralized Debt obligations (CDO) designed to on-sell default risk from those who wish to avoid it to those prepared to carry it for a fee. These developments have the hallmark of the sorts of Derivative products being traded in the lead-up to the 2007 global financial crisis. Whether they are pointing to crypto’s ‘Minsky moment’ ’is questuon, for the products themselves were never the source of crisis; it was their Governance, expressed in pricing models and the conditions of access to leverage they were built upon. It is not surprising that the emergence of cryptoDerivatives and a focus on DeFi Governance are emerging concurrently. We are interested in moving from DeFi to Social derivatives (using finance to create different socialities).
Decolonised finance means the necessity of financial Protocols to become the focus of democratic demands. Yet very different to Decentralized finance. Decolonisation means unmaking the naturnalness of dominating principles of rule (the Protocols), mostly unconscious embrace of terms of exchange – like Price as the only index, profit as the only measure of Value, the capital/labor relationship – that are uneven & unequal, but are encapsulating forms of economic and financial association, community and selves. Never a straightforward question of escape (the colonised_desire_their colonisation and hate the decolonised), but of reappropriating the capacity of assembly, of affinity, of association, of Value giving circulation – that capital & finance claim to belong to them. Decolonisation means reorienting the principles (the Protocols) by which people rule their own movements & how they Value these associations on their own terms. ECSA is decolonising finance.
Derivative means generally a financial exposure to movements of an index (predominantly but not exclusively Price), but without necessarily ownership of the underlier to which the index refers. They therefore Price risk, and enable all risks to be compared. Derivative contracts differ according to the sort of exposure attached to an index. Furthermore, we are moving from a definition of Derivative as a “self-executing contract that reduces counterparty risk” (Ethereum white paper) to understanding a Derivative as a relationship between co-text and context and a sensitivity to changes: we understand Derivatives as an ongoing ability to isolate co-text from context, to turn co-text into something useful for measuring. This is a very different sense of “smartness” in Derivatives. We think they have a social logic. See Social derivative.
Derivative community is also known as a composite Agent and Agency. See Agency.
A failed revolution. Social media horizontalized our communication, but left the Information and Protocol layer called the Economy untouched.
A Protocol for credit Issuance and Clearing: Agents issuing Collateralised credit enable Transactions to be netted (cleared) on Network ledgers. By issuing and Offering/accepting Liquidity tokens Space-agent">Economic Space Agents gain the capability to enter the P2P credit and Clearing Network. Reciprocal Issuance of Liquidity tokens involves Offers of credit. When matched by an acceptance, credit is granted to enable the Network’s ledger to be netted (balanced) efficiently, without a Clearing house. The Protocol gives everyone in a Network the Right and responsibility to enable smooth functioning of economic relations. Gives everyone the Right to issue “Money” based on the production of a Value (care, research, knowledge, environmental impact, etc.). Making thus liquid heterogeneous Value forms, making possible the creation and circulation of new collective Values. A key piece in the Space-protocol">Economic Space Protocol (ECSP).
A partition resistant, scalable P2P exchange. Facilitates parity path of any Tokenized Information into any other among n-parties without a central state/global replication. Creates a “Space of exchange” for different social meanings, properties & intentions to become expressible & exchangeable (i.e. liquid). A key piece in the Space-protocol">Economic Space Protocol (ECSP).
A ledger is an accounting record that contains Tokens of a specific kind and is associated with a holder. A Distributed ledger is a Network of ledgers belonging to different Agents, where in one ledger’s entry there is a record of a quantified “obligation”, and in another ledger, there is always a matching entry that records its corresponding a quantified “Right”. For example, if the entry represented a Debt instrument, on one ledger we would have a debit, and on another ledger we would have a credit. The entries on the ledgers connect them forming a Network, where the sum of all Rights and all obligations equal zero, that is, for every entry in one ledger there is a counter-entry of the same kind and the same amount in another. The ledger presumes that Tokens of the same kind are both divisible and additive: they can be infinitely divided into smaller amounts, or added up to a larger amount. The Distributed ledger is a record that results from the Distributed Exchange Protocol.
Performance index (or Network index) indexes certain aspects of the Performance of a Network/Space-agent">Economic Space Agent. Performance index can be any computed Value of a Network, anything that can be measured, registered, computed. It turns a series of such Informational events (Performance) into a purely Information based commodity: anything that can be perceived as Value be articulated as an Economic event. Indices give Economic agents the capacity to make sense of Information and guide their behavior. They Offer a capacity to enact new social priorities; to author futures in cooperation with others; to set incentives and attractors (temporal, indexical measures) for collaborations to occur and make them self-sustaining; It allows Economic agents to collectively Value intangibles and other Values, making them collectively sensible, visible & recognized as valuable, putting them into operation, circulation, organizing, regulating & incentivizing social behavior around their production. A key piece in the Space-protocol">Economic Space Protocol (ECSP).
A Protocol for Space-agent">Economic Space Agents to create Stakeholding relationships in each others’ Value productions and to Collateralize credit lines. By issuing and Offering/accepting Stake tokens Space-agent">Economic Space Agents gain capability to enter the P2P Stakeholding Network. Offers of Stake tokens are accepted, creating a Stakeholding relationship, and a transfer of a specific ownership. Stake serves as Collateral for credit. The Stakeholding Network is like a subNetwork created through the Stake tokens: how a Stake token relates to another Stake token (the logic) is inside Stake tokens. Putting on Offer a Stake token introduces the capacity to create another Network (a Stake holding Network) into the DEX Protocol. The capacity of P2P Issuance of Stake enables Agents to diversify (share) risks: to risk-together. Capacity to issue Stake into a Value production opens up new fundraising forms. Gives Economic agents a capacity to create recognised Collateral for credit Issuance. In short, gives Economic agents a capacity for wealth creation and accumulation around heterogeneous Value productions. Allows new forms of sharing risk & upside (new kind of relations) directly among peers, and allows Space-agent">Economic Space Agents to design these forms; you can organize/Stakehold around Values and Networks that you Value. A key piece in the Space-protocol">Economic Space Protocol (ECSP).
Navigation in the new Economic space. In a Token Economy context of transparency and decentralized open source data we need a reliable runtime and a Grammar that can help us navigate and operate this Space and build knowledge Derivatives (indices) of it. Without these tools we are today without politics, economics, incapable of expressing and intervening in processes and future of our life. This is the technology development task we are taking on in ECSA. It is a new content discovery paradigm. Renaissance scientists, like Galileo Galilei and Leonardo da Vinci, invented the experiments and instruments to navigate, understand and measure the newly opened Space-time reality — the microscopes and telescopes to reveal micro- and macrocosms, inclinometers to determine latitudes, thermoscopes to show change of temperature, barometers to reveal atmospheric pressure, nautical instruments, experimental methods to understand invisible phenomena, velocity, acceleration, Gravity — we will need to do the same now for the new Economic space-time. It is going to be a new renaissance See also Navigation, and Index.
An Economic agent can issue and redeem Tokens: it can keep track of its own and its counterparties ledgers. It records them as assets and liabilities (balance sheet approach), one Agent’s asset is always another Agent’s liability. Together they create a distributed data structure: the Distributed ledger. Instead of a centralized state/ledger/Offer queue each Agent is holding only its own records and replication happens only at connection points i.e. only among the interested and involved parties, not among the entire Network. This provides a Network topology in which any arbitrary number nodes can fail but as long as there are other nodes present trades can still happen. Distributed state Offers a different kind of fault tolerance and scalability VS. brute force global state replication.
Anything the Network can recognize and record. A legible and verifiable interaction that can be placed within a Space and a time. An event can be defined as the result of a series of dependent interactions that form a causality Network.
We’ve realized that we are creating a Language for new Economic expression. It is an economic Language that can express capitalist Network Protocols, but even more, it can go beyond them. It can encompass capitalist Value Calculus, but express more qualified Values and refuse their collapse into the monological Value-Expression that disqualifies non-Money Values as economic externalities. It is capable of valuing the biosphere, care, intangibles and social Innovation — without reducing their Information into one index of Price and one measuring unit of profitability. It is a post-capitalist Language (a Language for post-capitalist Economic expression), in a literal sense. A new Economic grammar for the Information age. The place where this post-capitalist economic Network Language is spoken and understood is the new Economic space. It is a place of Value creation where qualified Values — at once in excess of and more granular than that of USD or BTC — can both be expressed, composed and rendered interoperable. It multiplies denominations, which remain interoperable, because they share the same Grammar.
Bitcoin identified the Trusted intermediary component of Capitalism – Capitalism is a regime of verification which depends on faith, which depends on violence and coercion – and saw that there can be more freedom. It thus unleashed the question of the _sociality_of Value (Value is always social-institutional), but didn’t give a Language to express it. Ethereum opened our imagination for possibilities of such Language. ECSA Economic grammar actually gives us that Language: with it you can express new Value forms and the sociality and organizationality of Value (aka “composite Agents”, and “Value Networks”, “social interaction Spaces bounded by Protocols”). See also Social derivatives.
If Capitalism is economic Monocracy (understands, and is ruled by, one Value only), ECSA is Economic heresy.
Economic media describes the convergence of financial, communicative, computational and organizational media. ECSA wants to undertake the redesign of Economic media collectively, cooperatively, consciously as a new form of literacy and political engagement. Economic media are (1) Money in all its forms including bullion, currency, credit/Debt, financial instruments, and equity (‘Money’, financial and synthetic financial instruments and property of all types with their differing degrees of convertibility), and (2) all other media (print, cinema, television, social media, computation). For more than a century these media, ‘financial’ on the one hand and ‘cultural’ on the other, have been convergent. Social media is already Economic media: it horizontalized our communication, but left the Information and Protocol layer called the Economy untouched: we can’t control the economic Protocols that underpin the Value capture of our communication. And for example “Money”, “Debt”, “equity” are already social media, they express a certain kind of social relationality: the social relations Capitalism has claimed as the meaning of the word “Economy”. Post-capitalist Economic media redesigns this convergence. We want to create a more expressive Medium to describe our economic Networks, their participants, the nature of their relations and how they change, what they Value, how it is measured and exchanged. A post-capitalist Economic media which open and free to use, gives everyone equal capacities of Economic expression and does not collapse into single universal Value definition of a fiat Money or one “master Token” (e.g. BTC, ETH etc.).
We think we are discovering a new Value form: a new social and relational form that characterizes the Information age, and the old Economic grammar does not express or understand. We call it the Economic space.
(1) Economic space is an economic collaboration Space bounded by a Protocol.
(2) Economic space is an Expression, but can also become an expressor, i.e, an Agent or Agency. Why is it important to see an economic interaction Space bounded by a Protocol also as a synthetic Agent rather than just a Market? This reflectivity means that a Network can fold on itself, it can express itself as a living thing: that it can create its own subjectivity, talk and reason about itself and create its own (Economic space) Agency. It means it can have an ethic, a relation to itself, to affect and be affected by itself. [We are moving from a mere endless “multitude” (Deleuze) to “severality” (Bracha Ettinger) or to a “fold”]
(3) Economic space is an Agent that is able to hold, issue, clear, credit, Stake and trade. It is like a hybrid of a wallet, a ledger, a trader, a dealer, a Stakeholder, an organizer, a Market maker, a curator, a navigator. An Economic space has its own ledger(s) and is able to send, receive and engage in financial relationships: to create relationships with other Economic spaces. Network of Offers enables the creation of persistent patterns (“organization”) in these relations.
(4) Economic space is also known as a Social derivative.
An Economic heresy. A Market & sense maker for a post-capitalist future. A Volatility Space Innovation: a collective risk generating and arbitraging practice, leveraging on our ability to act together on an opening and collectively enjoying the upside. A group of radical economists, software architects, game designers, activists, monetary theorists & media influencers deeply passionate about the Economy.
Economic Space Agent has the same capacities as an Economic agent, but follows a set of Protocols that enable it to create relational Value forms, Liquidity, and risk-sharing through commodity (Performance) Tokens, Liquidity tokens and Stake tokens. Via a distributed payments and settlement Protocol, they can issue and clear credit among each other by issuing Liquidity tokens, denominated in a shared Unit of Account with a parity exchange agreement. Via a distributed risk sharing Protocol, Agents can issue Stake in the output (Performance) of an Space-agent">Economic Space Agent; it serves as a Collateral for Liquidity tokens and determines the size of the reciprocal credit line. Together these Protocols make a formal Economic grammar: a new economic Language for expressing economic-organizational relations.
Economic Space Protocol is a peer-to-peer economic Networking Protocol composed of a Distributed Exchange Protocol, a Distributed Credit Issuance & Clearance Protocol, a Distributed Stakeholding Protocol and a Distributed Performance Indexing Protocol. The Space-protocol">Economic Space Protocol forms an economic-organizational Grammar that is capable of making the Value of a community, care, knowledge, research, an open source technology, commons, aesthetic and political Values etc. Offerable, exchangeable, Stakeable, liquid, consumable & spendable – economically expressible and relatable – without needing to monetize it via advertising, without restricting its use by proprietary ownership, without hiding its source code, without collapsing all Information into a “Price”.
The Economy is a Network: a group of Agents interacting under certain agreements, i.e. Protocols, that define the relations that form the Network, their state and how these may change. Starting with Networks situates Agents in a social context and gives focus to their collective endeavour as ontologically prior to their individual interactions. Revealing the Economy as a Network means that the Protocol that unites its Agents does not need to be taken for granted, but can be redesigned. Framed this way, the Economy is programmable: how the Economy works and what are its key conventions – under what kind of relations, interactions, Agents, Values, state changes the Network operates – can become a design Space, continuously open to its participating Agents.
Efficient Market hypothesis is the proposition that Markets reflect all available Information, so at any time Market outcomes are efficient, but all new Information will change the efficient outcome, so that efficient outcome will continually change.
Exchange units (aka units of account) are utilized by the distributed exchange Protocol to provide a Unit of Account that serves as a shared Value reference frame that does not favor any one specific Token type; and to increase the possibility for matching an Offer.
An Expression is a sequence of symbols following the Space-protocol">Economic Space Protocol that is meaningful only within the scope of an Economic space. Economic space Expressions may refer to the resources contained in the scope from which it is evaluated and clearly and unambiguously describe the actions that you or other Space-agent">Economic Space Agents may perform. These actions may include the creation of a new resource, an interaction with another Space-agent">Economic Space Agent, alteration to the Economic space record, or the invocation of another Protocol.
Re: Giorgio Agamben’s well known book The Time That Remains on political theology. Agamben develops a strategy — to question the logic of sovereign powers — which does not seek to destroy the established order of social and political relations, but deactivates and moves beyond them by re-framing and re-potentializing our experience of “now”. Political theology works always with the change of experience, opening the field of the possible, and thus, with the creation of subjectivity. That is also the business of Economic space Agency.
Fundamental Value refers to the idea that there exists an underlying Value of outputs which is discrete from Price. In some versions, Fundamental value approximates long-term Price (i.e. ignoring short-term Volatility); in other versions Fundamental value is determined by forces other than supply and demand. For Marx, this determinant of output Value is socially necessary labour time. In the new Economic space it is Performances.
A prototype of Derivative, a qualitative instrument of social Volatility.
Governance is Economy. Economy is Governance.
A Grammar is a coordinating tool, a co-referencing tool, that doesn’t require a global clock. A Language operates differently: it has no synchronization, but with validation by indexing, by embedding temporalities to one another through indexing. A Grammar makes possible the telling of multiple stories at the same time: coordinating the time of speech events, not through one utterance, but through unfolding of the many conversations as they are calibrated against each other: a Grammar coordinates any potential conversation with another with no central time. How does this relate to the Economy? The Economy cannot really be mapped to or by the calendar time – calendar time does not have the play of creativity of indexicality, creativity of each utterance being coordinated (co-referenced) with one another.
Gravity is an open, safe and Trustworthy programmable computer Network accessible to everyone. It’s composed of a Network of Gravity Cores (VMs) interacting through the Gravity Protocol for message broadcast and ordering. Gravity Protocol creates order – shared time and Space – across Gravity Cores without one central replicated state.
An index is a knowledge Derivative which measures a certain aspect of the Performance of the Network/Economic agent. Indices, Network and knowledge Derivatives build from this Information will be the primary content discovery paradigm of the Economic Web where nodes are Space-agent">Economic Space Agents and Tokens the links in the Network – just like keyword based search was the dominant content discovery paradigm in Web 1.0 (where nodes were documents and hyperlinks the links in the Network) and social based feed was for Web 2.0. (where nodes were people, brands and likes/follows the linking mechanism).
We are creating a new kind of Information infrastructure which allows new kinds Information flows – what counts as Value, what counts as Collateral, what counts as liquid – to enter accounting system that articulates, accounts, moves and creates Value.
At the core of the ECSA project because it is mutation, Innovation and creativity that drive Economy – not Prices. That is why we start with a decentralized Grammar (not physics). It allows us to tap into the virtual: change, freedom, duration, creativity VS. blockchains just making everything actual
Issuance means the creation of new Money, securities (stocks, bonds, notes, debentures, bills, Derivatives) or Tokens. In the legacy financial system, Issuance is undertaken by banks in the case of Money, and other legal entities in the case of securities (corporations, Trusts, governments). The distributed exchange Protocol says that any Economic agent can be an issuer, so long as the Network Trusts the Issuance.
Why do we use a Language framing? With it, we can express the capacity of a Network to define itself as an Agent and to redefine itself. Language framing reveals the Protocol as a communication agreement: a capability to create new Spaces and Agents through conversation. Governance not about structures, but about Expressions, who can express and what. It also reveals the symmetricity in our approach: if everyone speaks the same Language, everyone has the equal capacity of Economic expression, by which they can start to define Roles, make agreements about subLanguages etc. (vs. the predefined Roles of the server-client model)
Liquidity is for us messaging capacity: being liquid means being able to message, to link, to issue & receive messages: it tells what kind of a membership/capacity one has in the Network. What counts as Liquidity and who decides this is one of the key questions defining Capitalism as a financial system. In Capitalism Liquidity is governed by the state, the banking system it superintends, and the Money it endorses. When only those state-approved Agents can issue, then a Liquidity premium (a rate of return on Money) can be charged for the risks involved in holding illiquid assets. Post-Capitalism challenges this hegemony as the source of Money Issuance, proposing instead p2p reciprocal Issuance amongst Agents in a Network. Where all Agents can issue, there need be no Liquidity premium. This doesn’t make Liquidity costless, but it can be backed by Stake (risking-together) rather than the power of Issuance and the transference of risk. Stake, or risking-together, becomes the ‘complement’ of Liquidity, giving the notion of ownership a very different meaning from its application in Capitalism.
The ECSA Token constitutes the Liquidity bridge between existing capital Market and Economic spaces.
ECSA Token creates a Liquidity bridge between existing capital Markets and the new Economic space.
The capacity to change, to move (a particular Right) without a dominant unit of exchange.
We cannot assume a Market. The Market is itself not a free good. The Price I have to pay for using it is the Liquidity premium. That is why Collateralized assets are Valued “at a haircut”.
Liquidity Token is a Network derivative. It is the oil that lubricates the Netting process, by temporarily ‘standing in’ for different sorts of Performance commodities or Stakes in the facilitation of the Netting process. In other words, Liquidity token is the representation of credit; the mode in which the Network records credit between one Agent and another. As credit is general, unlike commodity and Stake tokens that are specific to particular Performance commodities and Stakes, the Liquidity token is the universal Token in the Network denominated in the Unit of Account. It must be redeemed on demand for any Token on Offer by an Economic agent.
We think a Market is a Space of exchange. ECSA is making Market for new Performances. Creating new “Markets” and re-engineering “Markets”. It means structuring the Space of possibilities for economic properties of objects populating such Space: giving structure to a Space of exchange (Space of possible).
McLuhan (1964) famously said: The message of any new Medium is the change of scale or pace or pattern it introduces to human affairs. What is the message of Economic media?
Metapragmatic Grammar is the multi-Agent, real-time design and play (Expression) of Performance scripts (aka Social derivatives), participation in them and sharing in their outcomes. The metapragmatic nature of the ECSA economic-organizational Grammar allows multiple players to script Performances (productive organizations) like interoperating narratives, with the kind of nuance, immediacy and reflective multi-Agency native to narratives.
Metapragmatic Grammar Offers a more fundamental understanding of the communication situation VS. the contract model and the efficient Market model. Metapragmatic grammar reveals Market as a Protocol (and that Protocol is not a Market): it is the Grammar that links, not the Market. Metapragmatic grammar redefines distributed system as a whole defined by the changing relationship of its parts, which does partitioning by indexing and does not have to choose between consistency and fork.
Money is not a thing, but a system of relations: the monetary system is composed of an assemblage of different things which have been grouped together under the name “Money”. Historically Money does not arise from exchange, but from the taxing and funding activities of states. Furthermore, not all Money is the same. When Perry Mehrling says all banking is just a Swap of IOUs, this is exactly what he means: all Money is not the same, all Money is somebody’s promise to pay, all Moneys are different instruments, their Value depends on who you are what you can do in the Network: what is behind the IOU. All Moneys are social relations, social contestatations.The illusion that all Money is equally Money is maintained by monetary authorities during the “normal” operation of monetary systems. It means that the nature of the monetary system as an outcome of a social struggle (who are you, what can you do in the Network) is erased: Money is “put out of the question” in the sense that the configuration of the monetary system is taken off the table as an object of political negotiation and contestation. But during monetary crisis, Money is “called into question” in that the differences between different Moneys leaps onto the table — the difference between good Moneys and bad Moneys, the difference between the Money of the rich and the Money of the poor — and Money itself, and the constitution of the monetary system, enters again to the political imagination as an object of intervention and as a vehicle for the pursuit of justice. And that is what we want to do: we want to call it into question and reengineer its Protocols. So that it cannot be put away from the table. Money is, itself, a site of political struggle.
Capitalism is a Monocracy of Value. It has only one Value like one true church with one true God of the form of univocity.
Finance is normally thought through pricing Information, Market-hypothesis">Efficient Market Hypothesis and rational decision making under uncertainty. We are moving into bringing the qualitative, the affective and flowing into the picture. It means a fundamental change in understanding economic sense-making and relationality. It is more about Navigation: navigating the new Economic space-time. See Econautics.
Netting is the process by which a range of diverse ledger entries are calculated to a net position for each Agent in relation to each other Agent.
Two or more Agents connected to each other through the same Protocol
Tokens and assets are Network derivatives. As a concept, Network derivative expands Token beyond just a “Token”, to the metrics that are the underliers of the Token. If Network index (Performance index) is a measure of an aspect of the Performance of a Network, then the Network derivative represents a position on the index: it expresses a connection to the underlying vitality of each specific and purposeful Network. Network Derivative is a Right to an underlying – it carries always Information about the underlying process that creates it. Network derivatives are like a two way interface to massively distributed systems: through Network derivatives you can both sense into them and affect them. Network indices and Network derivatives build from this Information will be the primary content discovery paradigm of the Economic Web where nodes are Space-agent">Economic Space Agents and Tokens the links in the Network – just like keyword based search was the dominant content discovery paradigm in Web 1.0 (where nodes were documents and hyperlinks the links in the Network) and social based feed was for Web 2.0. (where nodes were people, brands and likes/follows the linking mechanism).
A unit that measures or tracks one or more dimensions of Value (or “Performance”), as one magnitude. An index counts Performance occurrences, “events”, and increases according to them. A Performance index can be Tokenized.
(1) Offer is a Protocol, but also an Expression of intent among Agents. It creates a new relationship and a new Space for that relationship. An Economic space is collaborative in nature. Since collaboration requires voluntary participation, such collaboration is mediated through Offers. An Offer is the mechanism by which Agents express to each other specific instructions to accomplish their intent. Like a Protocol, an Offer is a set of Expressions that unambiguously and clearly encode a process to be reliably performed within the scope of a Space. Unlike a Protocol, these Expressions are not determinate, and can be amended through an “Offer composition” process, making the Offer an Offer Network. The Expressions in the Offer must follow the Economic space Grammar, and may issue or invoke Economic space Rights; for example to issue other Offers, create new Spaces, new Roles, new tasks, new Rights or new objects, altering the state of the Space.
(2) Offer is a social relation beyond contract: it is a very different way to create structure to organize Volatility. It is more than a contract, because it adds and opens a time interval and an interpretant, moving us thus beyond the semiotics of Nick Szabo and Mark Miller (smart contract as an authoritarian concept). Offer moves us from contracts to metapragmatic, co-textual, optional, Social derivatives.
(3) Offer is one of the key structures to multi-Agent reflective Network programming.
Every Economic agent has the same capacities and operates without centralized management.
Peer-to-peer credit is one of the forms that Self-issuance may take. Token Issuance starts with an Offer and is realized on acceptance of the Offer. Users exchange Tokens grafted to their Economic spaces in effect issuing each other credit in an act of mutual Trust. This provides users with Liquidity. Rather than paying interest for Liquidity as one does with tradition credit in capitalist sytems, here one Offers and recieves Trust on a Peer to Peer basis. This economic dyad becomes the basic building block of the social and economic fabric of the ECSA platform.
Performance is activity of an Agent. It is a series of events, causally connected to each other, making Performances naturally composable and divisible. A Performance is the result of a Performance tracking function.
Performance index measures one or more dimensions of activity of one or more Economic agents: it measures its/their economic Performance. The measurement of a Performance is a vector: a scalar associated with the specific logic from which it is generated (it’s logical dimension). A Performance index represents the compression of the Information of the Performance unto a numerical index. This compression can take many forms, such as a Performance event counter, an average, a mean, or even Derivatives measures, such as speed or acceleration. Specific Performance index Values may represent economic events themselves, and as such they can be utilized to create new composite Performances and indexes. Economic spaces contain a wealth of Information that can be utilized to create Performance indices/metrics. The available data readily includes not only all data about “Tokens” and their Performances (supply curves, vestings, sales outside TGEs, Stakes/state changes of key Stakeholders, valuations), but also all data about Network organizations and their Performances (material progress, Governance, Stakes, realized state changes, Agents and their behaviors, what has been accomplished).
Contains the Economic event’s logic and its sequencing. Serves as a “view” of the Network that is able to “detect” when a particular Performance has occurred.
This is a simple term to cover the combination of cryptography, secure distributed computation, object capabilities and blockchain technology.
Post-Capitalism is the economic Network that comes after Capitalism. In Post-Capitalism, all Agents can issue assets to be used as Collateral. Implicit here is the idea that a Post-Capitalism framed through finance can be depicted as an Economy of continuous creation of new Value-forms.
Price is a Derivative index on underlying Information that reduces complex Information into something simple. It is just one way to index Information, and though it gets treated as the privileged index of valuation in Capitalism, it is just a political and social construct, i.e., an Expression. We can design many different kinds of indices to help us navigate. Price does not capture Innovation very well. It runs only on one note. What if we could have a symphony?
Protocol is a shared communication agreement: a named sequence of Expressions, describing actions across real and virtual Spaces to be performed to a completion. It is always about the organization of a potentiality Space, about creating and organizing a potentiality Space.
A Right gives an Agent access to a resource available in a Space or from another Agent.
Capitalism involves firms, and increasingly households, pricing risks and deciding which to hold and which to trade. As these risks are imposed increasingly on households – via precarious work and decreasing state provision of services – Risking together involves a conscious choice to calculate and manage risks socially rather than individually.
A Space Role is a bundle of responsibilities expressed as Role Functions that may be assigned to one or more Space Agents.
We don’t approach Security in the sense of hiding (anonymity etc.), but in the sense of a substrate that can be audited, of a source that can be relied upon and has integrity, social accountability and injects itself into social structures.
The ability and Right to issue Tokens grafted to any project, where Tokens are understood as a primary user-interface and building block of an Economic space. Thus Self-issuance is a way to design Economic space and to write Social derivatives.
When we say blockchains are “Trustless,” what we mean is that there are mechanisms in place by which all parties in the system can reach a consensus on what the canonical truth is. Power and Trust is distributed or shared among the Network’s Stakeholders, rather than concentrated in a single individual or entity (e.g. banks, governments, and financial institutions).
Social Derivatives are the new basic economic cells of post-capitalist society: a new social and relational form – a form of risking and opening new opportunities together, and sharing its risks and upsides – that characterizes the Information age and which the old Economic grammar does not express or understand (it only talks “commodity”, “company” and “private ownership”). The ECSA Protocol is designed for expressing such new social-economic forms. They are our strategies for surfing the Volatility of our precarious world and the joy in working together. Derivatives are much more than mere self-executing contracts that reduce counterparty risk. They have a social logic that takes us beyond mere profit taking exchange and ownership as the form of sociality. The Derivative is a logic that allows us to understand how heterogenous parts move together, how to Value and sense the ways we are linked together, how Value is made in motion and of change, and what it means to risk-together. ECSA (like all Economic spaces) is a Social derivative, a risk generating practice which Arbitrages, speculates and leverages about being able to act together, on a certain gap or an opening or an opportunity. It makes our flows of Stakes and risks intertwined in a way that articulates and expands the “inDebtness” that we are making this together.
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(1) Space is a programmable environment enabled by the Space.Agency/vision/#space">Space Language. It expands similar semantics to SmallTalk or Self by adding the Agent and the Offer as first class citizens of the Language to become able to describe logical Networks. This makes Space a powerful, capability oriented, multi-Agent Network programming environment. In other words, it is an organisational calculus to reason about and describe Networks as relationships and interactions between Agents within a Space. Within Space’s semantics, “a space” is a stateful container that binds resources and Agents together, creating a relationship where their Expressions and interactions gain a context.
(2) Space is a Language to describe and define Networks, multiAgent interactions (or “DApps”), in a formal and mathematically modeled way (an organizational calculus). It makes Networks, their Tokens and Agents and their logics – both economic and governmental – programmable. With Space Language we can define who are the members of the Network, what are the Protocols the Network follows, what are its records, names of things, how its state transitions take place. Space programs these relations statically in Space, but also in time, meaning their progression, how they compute: the Network (“DApp”) is a living creature, it acts, orients towards the world, it changes, it transforms, it evolves.
(3) A Space as a stateful place of interaction that can be private or public. A Space is a container that helps you organize and delineate your actions, and the resources necessary to perform them, as an ordered and coherent whole. The function, structure, and contents of your Space is determined by your intent. To keep a Space focused and effective, a Space must contain only the resources required to perform its intent. A Space contains Agents, Protocols and other Resources and defines authority boundary. A Space can be private or public. A private Space is a Space of interaction that is shared only across specific parties. A public Space is a Space of interaction that is shared with anyone who wants to participate in it / enter it. Agents have private Space and are able to issue and hold Rights, accept and receive Offers, they maintain their own “blockchain”. Protocol is the basis to create Rights, it is the rules of interaction, a sequence of Expressions that describes a state transition. Reference points to a resource, it is authority over the referenced resource and utilized in Expressions. Offer is an Expression of intent among Agents, it creates a relationship, a Space for the relationship, and composes into Networks of relations. Accepting an Offer creates a shared Space. Space transfer enables moving from shared Space to distributed Space, from verifiable state to a verifiable Protocol. We can understand Space as a place of interaction among two or more Agents, whom are able to change it only according to the rules of the Protocols (the physics of the Space). Spaces are stateful and always shared whether by the programmer and the runtime, the user and the application, two or more users, etc.
(4) Space is a Grammar whose actions and words are: Space, Agent, Offer, Function, Task, Object, Protocol, Reference, Record, Channel, Message
(5) Space is a Protocol: a set of Expressions following the Space Language (that follows Space Protocol Grammar), that clearly and unambiguously describe the reliable Performance of actions among multiple Space Agents and affecting or requiring resources. It enables you to reliably collaborate with other Space Agents, organizing without necessarily favoring centralized and/or hierarchical structures. Although the Protocol allows the Expression and operation of legacy organizations if such is your desire. The Space Protocol is designed to be substrate independent. It is our desire to see a wide array of implementations: As sophisticated as a programming Language or as simple as a board game.
Spread is a financial term for a gap – usually between the bid (buy) and ask (sell) Price where a profit can be made by trading the difference. In a social framing a Spread is a gap between two positions that provides an opportunity to maneuver to make a gain.
Where do you go when you want to dissent from fiat, when you want to take a stand against fiat, the hierarchical social relations and destruction to the environment it represents? Where do you go when you want to bet against it (short it), when you think it is a cultural-financial asset in decline, and you want to find new Stability from a different set of economic and social relations? When fiat currencies face their next future crisis, we want to be talking already about what new stabilities — new social relations, processes and goals that we believe should be constant; new metrics of Stability — we are advocating. We think this is the real social potential of Cryptoeconomy.
Stake is an ownership of a financial exposure to the contingencies of Performances. It frames contingency as economic potentiality: it is a financial position on a Performance index. It captures the preparedness to invest in some ownership (a set of Rights) of a Performance Derivative. It creates a social relationship, through a set of Rights, different to equity, but definitely invoking the skin in the game aspect. Stakes are Offered to the Market, with no knowledge of which Agent (prepared to accept the Offer) will end up the owner, and can circulate in a secondary Market. Buying Stake in a Performance is a way to signal the Network what you want to make happen.
Stake Token is a Network derivative. It can be issued by an Agent in return for a Stake in their activity. It gives the holder the Right to participate in the surplus generated by the issuing Agent’s economic activity.
Stakeholding is a relationship like equity is in Capitalism, but the focus is on commitment to support creativity and Innovation, not just seek yield on a financial position. Stakeholding focuses on the collective, joint commitments of investing rather than the private profit interest.
While futures and options address the risks of future Price changes, Swaps engage the risks of future flows of wealth. The difference is not complete, for expected yields can be Priced, but the emphasis is critically different. Yields invoke both the contingencies of on-going ownership of assets and their Performances, and therein lies a richness of the ‘social’ not captured in relations of one-off exchange. Moreover, the focus on flows, rather than rational decision-making under uncertainty, opens an approach to a Network that Values time, historical data and Volatility. It can track the way Agents decide and how they relate, not just what trading decisions they register on the Network.
Token is a Performance Derivative. An entry in a ledger record. A Protocol equivalent of a financial asset that has an underlying.
A Trading agent is an Agent in the distributed exchange Protocol. It can publish an Offer and match an Offer.
Transaction within an Economic space holds a variety of relational possibilities that aim to strengthen synergies, create securities and Value intangibles. Transactions are not simply to clear the Market, but to build mutual knowledge that can potentially transform what gets transacted towards a thriving ecosystem. Each individual Economic space Token accordingly shares a common Token.
Blockchains minimize the amount of Trust required from any single actor in the system. They do this by distributing Trust among different actors in the system via cooperation with the rules defined by the Protocol.
Unit of Account is the numeraire by which all other aggregates might be measured and put at par. (compared). Units of account a.k.a. Exchange Units are utilized by the distributed exchange Protocol to provide a Unit of Account that serves as a shared Value reference frame that does not favor any one specific Token type; and to increase the possibility for matching an Offer.
In the Space-protocol">Economic Space Protocol Value is no longer a one-dimensional (e.g. a dollar or BTC denominated) monologue. Through the Protocol it is possible to Value, in economic terms, “externalities” such as care, the community, the environment, and indigenous forms of life. The wagers that people make in the realm of culture (as they’ve done on say Instagram or TikTok, but also as novelists or technologists or social architects), can themselves aggregate participation in complex ways to accomplish their own ends.
Social relations are majorly influenced by the ways in which Value is being determined. It is a well known fact that Price is as a form of coordination, with effects on every individual, every corporation and every government participating in fiat Markets. The ECSA stack allows a discourse to take place where Finance traditionally does not concede it. This discourse is automatically part of a mathematical procedure, its results take place in the calculation of Price. These steadily updated forms of measurement allow Value to be distributed and allow new definitions of “surplus” to emerge.
Value graph is the visual representation of the Distributed ledger, and depicts the Network of relationships through distinct Value forms within the Agents of the Network. The size of the nodes represent the Network valuation of a Token type at any given moment of time. This valuation is contained in the accepted Offers utilized in the distributed exchange Protocol.
Performances are the key to new Value creation (see Fundamental value). A Value theory of performance emphasises that Performances are designed and implemented so as to create Value.
Volatility means the propensity for change; the speed and extent of these changes. In finance, these changes are about Price, and Derivatives can Price Volatility. Financial traders often embrace Volatility (non-directional change) as the source of profit. Volatility can also relate to social change and Innovation (see Fundamental value) and the potential for creating new Economic space. We embrace Volatility. See Social derivative; Econautics.
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