April 26, 2022
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Accounting, Collateral, credit, Dick Bryan, Hayek, Marke mechanism, Marx, Performance, Profit, value
What Counts and Who’s Counting: Potentials of Non-Capitalist Markets
Dick Bryan on counting differently and its consequences on credit, collateral and expression of value. In the current capitalist economies, the question of what constitutes ‘Value’ is directly tied to the question of what counts. The principal counting criterion is profitability: the more profitable a production process (what we call a performance) is, the more it registers on a profit-based counting system and more Value it is deemed to create. That’s just as true of Marx’s labor values as it is of neoclassical economic market values. But not everything created in current society complies with this capitalist rule. There are many socially valuable outputs that aren’t profitable, and aren’t counted systematically, but they keep being produced. In the conventional wisdom, their provision must be understood as a consequence of at least one of the following: philanthropy, subsidy or irrationality; or they are just dismissed as ‘non-economic’, and hence unworthy of measurement. They are framed as innately unsustainable, and so survive only via private and public ‘generosity’.
January 20, 2022
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Asset, cryptoeconomy, Dick Bryan, Macro, money, Unit of Account, value
What is Cryptoeconomy: A Macroview
Dick Bryan on macro. Investing in crypto should be understood both as a short position and a long position. What does that mean? The short position is a bet that currently-known assets are entering a period of uncertain prices and potentially general decline. As economic assets they are passé. But the long position involves seeing the cryptoeconomy not just as an alternative asset class within a capitalist economy, but as a different notion of an asset itself.
15 Oct 2019
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CESSUMMIT2019, cryptoeconomics, Dick, Dickbryan, expression, liquidity, MIT, protocol, staking, value, video
“Economic Protocols for Liquidity Creation, Staking & Value Expression” MIT PROTOCOLS FOR A CRYPTOECONOMIC NETWORK
“We are existing inside a capitalist Economy, and at the same time trying to create an alternative to the capitalist economy. (…) We are not a sect. We are trying to say this alternative Economy has to have porous boundaries.
This ECSA economy will come alongside commodity exchanges that individual people will do in a capitalist society. The porosity of the boundary adds complexity to the analysis. What we had to worked towards is – How can we not quarantine this total economy? How can we give privilege to a certain set of metrics that will give people the pursuing individual goals and incentives to pursue things that are not driven by profitability? So we are not adverse to individualism, but we can decouple indivudualism from profitability.
We believe inside all people there is a desire to do social good, but the problem with the profit system is that it doesn’t give oxygen to do that. We are saying we are designing something that will encorage and nurture people to do social good.”
(from min 6:29)
October 2019
Towards Post-Capitalism
This article discusses a crucial tool that we work with: the notion of a grammar pervading the protocols of Economy.
As all our efforts go into the creation of a language for new forms of economic expression, it should be noted that although ECSA’s grammar is capable of expressing capitalist network protocols, it effectively surpasses them. It can encompass capitalist value calculus, but express more qualified values. The grammar we propose refuse their collapse into the monological value-expression that disqualifies non-money values as economic externalities.
May 2018
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cryptoeconomics, meansofexchange, unitofvalue, valuation, value
What is a crypto economy? And why now?
Crypto economy announces new economic possibilities that, while not entirely novel in their vision, are wildly new in the conception of their reach and mode of organization. What are the breakdowns in economic conventions? What are the key features of the emerging crypto economy?