Description

Akseli Virtanen:

“We have 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, for example, 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.” (https://medium.com/econaut/towards-post-capitalism-7679d2831408)

Abstract

Maybe the most difficult thing to understand about a cryptoeconomy is that it has the potential to cause an irreversible change in what we understand as ‘the economy’: making the economy itself a design space. In the face of a widespread rejection of ‘neoliberalism’ as both an economic and cultural agenda, and a distrust in the capacity of states to deliver the social good, we are looking to design and build an economy that is distributed and decentralized, while directly responsive to socially-constructed visions of ‘value’.

This paper expands upon the technologies that enabled bitcoin to create a virtual economy and present an economic stack (see Appendix 1) to develop new distributed organizations and value forms. This stack is the structured collection of protocols on which a new decentralized, interoperable cryptoeconomy, and new vision of ‘value’, can be built.

This vision involves three key ingredients:

A cyber-social stack which enables distributed agency through a shared grammar on top of a secure distributed computing substrate to create a programmable social network with transparent governance.
Multi-agent peer-to-peer token issuance on a logically distributed ledger network, rather than single-agent token issuance of a logically centralized ledger. The supporting economic grammar, which all the agents share, means that agents themselves create the conditions of exchange, liquidity and risk sharing.
A new peer-to-peer value calculus in which the economic protocols enable new value forms, modes of measurement, and definitions of ‘surplus’, that embrace different starting points and social goals, including aesthetic and qualitative evaluations of what is thought to be ‘valuable’.

This proposal starts by re-encoding capitalism in the language of cryptoeconomics as but a particular value calculus, to be juxtaposed with the ECSA offering. ECSA offers an alternative to a capitalist mode of doing economics. We describe our offer as ‘The Big Put’: styled as a put option to short current capitalism. It enables participnats to buy the right to off-load their exposure to the capitalist calculation of value and gain exposure instead to new value forms.

This economic white paper spells out the economic background to this value agenda. It also explains ECSA’s multi-level token system and the governance processes which make this alternative economic calculus both verifiable and viable. It stands as an independent statement but is best understood in combination with ECSA Technical White Paper and ECSA Political White Paper.

3.1 Market is a “space of exchange”
3.2 Sociality as a design field
3.3 Mutual issuance of ‘rights’
3.4 Tokens and money
3.5 Mutual issuance of tokens
3.6 Mutual issuance of ‘equity’
3.7 Tokens and network derivatives
3.8 Knowledge and individual economic agents and individual economic spaces
3.9 Trust
3.10 Significance

4 Performance Indices in the new economic space

4.1 The task
4.2 Valuing care, valuing art, valuing intangibles, valuing biosphere
4.3 Performance indices put at par: a derivative logic of the social
4.4 ECSA as a data union, not a data market
4.5 The ECSA surplus

5 Money in a Distributed Cryptoeconomy

5.1 Money without state backing

5.2 The functions of money
- 5.2.1 Medium of exchange and distributed exchange protocols
- 5.2.2 Store of value
- 5.2.3 Unit of account

5.3 The role of credit

6 ECSA’s Tokens and ‘Fundamental Value’

6.1 Background
6.2 MV=PQ: Real Exchange Economy
6.3 MV=PQ: Monetary Economy

7 ECSA’s Token System

7.1 Distributed exchange protocols and tokens
7.2 Unit of account
7.3 Commodity tokens
7.4 Liquidity tokens
7.5 Stake tokens

8 Issues of Governance

8.1 Governance of stake tokens
8.2 ECSA tokens and ECSA securities: the roles of ECSA Finance and ECSA Agent
8.3 New issuance of ECSA Security Tokens

9 The Big Put

Excerpt

Chapter 2 at https://medium.com/econaut/crypto-political-economy-dd91c6fcff7

More information

Jonathan Beller on Creating Peer-to-Peer Value Creation Systems

Protocols for Cryptoeconomic Networks

Contents