Protocols for Peer to Peer Value Creation

= an economic grammar for post-capitalism, proposed by the the Economic Space Agency economic white paper ‘Protocols for Cryptoeconomic Networks’.

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)

Discussion

Akseli Virtanen:

“In the economic white paper, we deconstruct the basic protocols of capitalist economics — like price, market, money, profit, equity, clearing — and reconstruct them in ways they articulate with the potentials of a cryptoeconomy. We for example show how disaggregation of the different functions of money into separate protocols allows us to disconnect maintaining liquidity from validating the store of wealth. We then outline a distributed exchange and a peer-to-peer issuance of rights, money, credit, stake holding and sharing of surplus as distinct protocols — a peer-to-peer value creation system, really, as Jon Beller has already called it in his preface to the economic white paper.

These protocols — this language — allow their participants to set the terms of finance, of economic interaction, and valuation. It is an economic grammar. Like Jon writes, sharing it democratizes the ability to author and to offer “futures”. Democratizing the authorship of futures means not disintermediation but extensive and distributed remediation — a massive multiplication of the moments in which and points from which economic agents may denominate value. Furthermore, we illustrate why the building of cryptoeconomy requires a distributed network protocol and, thus, why something like that cannot be built with current technological paradigms (centralized server/Google; logically centralized replicated state/Ethereum).

We also demonstrate how a distributed exchange protocol opens up the capacity to create liquidity without any one central party; and how the capacity to create liquidity (based on a capacity to issue and accept offers) is foundational for any cryptoeconomic network.

We also show how it is possible for us to fund a new economic space (the place where the language for new economic expression is uttered) without having to own it; how we can make the value of the network as a whole liquid without owning it, i.e., how can you capture value of a network with a much more nuanced relationship than “ownership”. (https://medium.com/econaut/towards-post-capitalism-7679d2831408)

More information

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