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Bryan Curtin, Roberto Valenti:

"Under the prevailing economy, human civilisation has achieved the height of its industrial and technological success. Yet, increasing inequality and environmental degradation are forcing us to consider whether the paradigm is serving people and the planet. Looking for alternatives, we recognise that an improved economy must begin to respect ecological boundaries and social wellbeing, and shift from prioritising self-interest towards encouraging prosocial relationships. How can we disrupt the established paradigm and bring about systemic change in the real world?

With the latest advances in AI, complexity science, and blockchain technologies, we now have the opportunity to create novel protocol-based social coordination systems. Widespread transition to a new paradigm now involves people opting in to a digital social-economic network when they are ready, instead of necessitating the difficult process of conventional political transformation.

The need for elected human representatives and centralised institutions is replaced with consent-based protocols which define how we conduct our relationships with one another and our environment. These new ‘economic’ protocols can be designed with different rules and explicitly defined objectives embedded into their very architecture.

The core economic rules are like the DNA for a large component of our collective social and economic behaviour. A minor, well-crafted change in this DNA would yield immense transformation of the emergent social behaviour and impact of our species - reshaping our social relations, our economic output, and our collective impact on the planet.

Therefore, we devise an holistic, peer-to-peer social coordination protocol, implementable on existing blockchain technologies.

Its core rules are designed to emergently fulfil the following objectives:

Facilitate prosocial coordination, favouring co-creation and collaboration over competition
Fulfil psycho-physiological needs, ensuring wellbeing for all humans
Regenerate the planetary resource ecology, attaining widespread abundance
Remain viable across locations and through time, respecting the local and global boundary conditions of place and planet
To realise such a design without falling into the trap of reinventing the prevailing macroeconomic system, we must begin from a new set of fundamental assumptions. To this end we adopt a tabula rasa approach, where we start by revising our assumptions about our relationship with the world."

Abundance Protocol as a Prosocial Coordination Protocol for the Planet

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