Scale trust
Some thoughts around how this project can help steer us toward a decentralised future of hope and abundance:
Trust + Complexity cannot compete with trust alone
- John Carvallho
The practice of ‘double entry accounting’ forced much of humanity account for every single cent in accordance with international accounting standards. Even write-offs and losses are booked and tracked. Communities (inc. nations) that aspire to be better and more resilient should probably be doing more:
- Charity
- Debt forgiveness
- Barter
- Community credit
A maximally decentralised cypherpunk project has the opportunity to re-imagine and influence how people use money and exchange value, using UX/UI-nudge in order to influence market participation.
For example, in addition to being able to pay with bitcoin, we could incorporate a ‘barter’ function so that the old lady with chickens can OFFER some eggs and BID for some potatoes, or fish.
If she doesn’t have any eggs left today, but still needs potatoes, perhaps she could mint a community credit note; a form of IOU valid in the local community.
If Alice owes Bob, and Bob owes Carol, and Carol owes Alice… goods or labour of approximately the same value (say ±20% based on price data source or collective reckoning) a cohesive community with shared values and shared objectives might consider the debts to balance to zero, in the interests of the universal proliferation of good times.
Pubky / Synonym are currently in the early stages of a project called ‘Atomicity’ that seeks to scale trust. It might make sense to build to a common specification.
Reduce reliance on names, routes, and root authorities
Marketplace participants identify themselves by public key. This creates a need for tools to store and manage keys, as well as the meta-data associated with them (i.e. name / nym / store name / phone number etc.). Periodically downloading or synching keys would allow people to maintain communication and trade using XOR in cases of infrastructure failure or takedown.
Forking an open source web-browser to accept Ed25519 keys in the search bar, and combining this with P2P routing, would provide a considerable upstep in user sovereignty and resilience.
Incentivise sovereignty
The creation a platform that’s used on a regular basis, would provide an opportunity to nudge users toward their own freedom and sovereignty. In the same way that Air Miles programs use incentives and gamification to encourage the accumulation of miles and ‘status’, features could be built to do things like:
- Provide a discount (maybe 1% or so) to users running a full node.
- Provide a small discount to people who contribute hash to a mining pool (using proof ‘shares’ or confirmed purchase of a Mining Note).
- Provide larger discounts to people who contribute a larger amount of hash to a mining pool. (i.e. perhaps Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum tiers akin to airline status tiers).
- Users who make at least one purchase per day over 5 consecutive days receive the latest pack of stickers for free.
- Sellers who frequently accept Plebmarkt barter offers get boosted profiles/listings.
- etc…etc…
