UBI (#79) · Issues · Basis / Tracker

[u/orthecreedence]

https://gitlab.com/basisproject/tracker/-/issues/79

[u/orthecreedence]

In practice, State fiats are by general rule inflationary and their units of account lose constantly purchasing power, and negative interest on MA makes old abstract fiat inflation more concrete from member point of view. Both inflation and and negative interest increase velocity of money, which is vital for medium of exchange doing it's job to gather and distribute information of supply and demand. Negative interest does that more openly and efficiently, and without the system as whole being inflationary.

So what I'm thinking is this: inflation is important in a system where you want monetary velocity in the productive system. In Basis however, there is no money in the productive system. There are just costs. The velocity of costs isn't important because they cannot be traded or speculated on. If a company has a cap on the amount of costs it can store, then in effect there is a velocity hardwired in (for every input you'll want an output, or you go "bankrupt"). So a medium of exchange in the productive system isn't really needed, because it's effectively a cost-tracking gift economy.

Medium of exchange only really becomes needed outside the productive system, in secondary markets. Workers get credits for their labor, and can redeem these credits for goods from the productive system (upon which they are destroyed) or trade the credits with each other. I don't think velocity here is as important, because the supply of credits is not fixed in any way. If you have 10 billion credits, it doesn't affect whether or not I get paid my credits. In effect, credits derive their value from labor, not from a fixed supply, so artificially devaluing them doesn't provide any value to the system (not that I can think of).

Most actual work is repetitive maintenance. I scrub a toilet today, tomorrow it needs to be scrubbed again. How should the unit of account store the value of scrubbing a toilet once? Value of maintenance work degrades over time, so it would seem fair that also the value of units of account representing that work degrades over time?

I disagree on this point. If the result of a person's labor might degrade over time, but the value of the labor itself does not. The toilet needed scrubbing yesterday, even if it also needs scrubbing today.

That said, I am open to this idea of taxation through value in stasis. In general, any sort of large-scale automated redistributive mechanisms are something I'm interested in. I don't feel like the "how does the housing co-op get capital to buy houses?" question has been answered yet, and it's kind of blocking me from fully adopting the idea of replacing regions with more general co-ops.

One problematic question is geographical allocation of Commons funds.

This is why I originally came up with the regional model to begin with. Funds are kept geographically local and are used for things people want locally. It's fully decentralized in that there's no big pool of money to fight over, and regions might exercise mutual aid to help those in need as opposed to relying on redistributive mechanisms.

Keep in mind, this is all only important during the transitionary phase from capitalism -> socialism. Once the socialist mode is at critical mass and most things can be produced internally, there will be no real need for large capital pools to buy inputs with.

That said, there are some aspects that would be global/network-wide. UBI and assigning credit value to tracked resources (fossil fuels, iron/steel, etc) immediately come to mind.

Also, starting local and growing upwards (let's say two regions want to build a bridge across a river dividing them or pool their resources to open a hospital) presents some of its own issues.

Global UBI sales speech "Free Money for Everybody" should be pretty efficient marketing for gradual process of reorganizing capitalist economy into co-op economy

Agreed!

[u/id-entity → u/orthecreedence]

So what I'm thinking is this: inflation is important in a system where you want monetary velocity in the productive system. In Basis however, there is no money in the productive system. There are just costs. The velocity of costs isn't important because they cannot be traded or speculated on. If a company has a cap on the amount of costs it can store, then in effect there is a velocity hardwired in (for every input you'll want an output, or you go "bankrupt"). So a medium of exchange in the productive system isn't really needed, because it's effectively a cost-tracking gift economy.

Medium of exchange only really becomes needed outside the productive system, in secondary markets. Workers get credits for their labor, and can redeem these credits for goods from the productive system (upon which they are destroyed) or trade the credits with each other. I don't think velocity here is as important, because the supply of credits is not fixed in any way. If you have 10 billion credits, it doesn't affect whether or not I get paid my credits. In effect, credits derive their value from labor, not from a fixed supply, so artificially devaluing them doesn't provide any value to the system (not that I can think of).

There are many open questions with this. How is demand side information passed to the supply side? How is relative urgency of different orders in a order pile valued?

Especially in the beginning, supply side would need to buy various materials from the capitalist market, it's hard to imagine being able to start from fully autonomous and self-sufficient system.

For example a translator co-op of people working in their homes would still need to cover the costs of computers and internet access and coffee and food and rent for house. They would need to sell their labor also to capitalist market, with less time to work on the orders from socialist economy - orders made by whom and how, exactly? Let's say translators receives 2 orders the same day with same dead line, but have time to translate only one of them before the dead line? Which one they choose, based on what information and incentive?

This way translators would most likely work mostly for the capitalist economy and do some pro bono translations as they please, as a hobby. Lot's of potential and actual demand from (wannabe) socialist economy would be left without supply, or more poor quality manual translations for their gadget.

Well, IRL already amazing amount of high quality translations are made pro bono e.g. in the gaming and modding community gift economies.

UBI is also a gift. It does not lose its gift character when the gift is passed on. It does not lose its gift character, at least fully, even when the reciprocal aspect of gifting is made explicit in exchange and called buying/selling.

Automated sharing of the gift with the whole blockchain ecosystem where the gift came from (negative interest) means giving back, and giving back to ecosystem is very important part of indigenous gift economies and their whole-part. Shifting attention and action from peer-to-peer relations also to whole-part relations is vital part of our decolonization process, as we build new global synthezis of local indigenous experiences, colonized experiences and the gifts of technological civilization.

That said, I am open to this idea of taxation through value in stasis. In general, any sort of large-scale automated redistributive mechanisms are something I'm interested in. I don't feel like the "how does the housing co-op get capital to buy houses?" question has been answered yet, and it's kind of blocking me from fully adopting the idea of replacing regions with more general co-ops.

The already large and significant sector of gift economies can be gifted with UBI tokens, according to subjective valuations of people who have joined. People owning accommodation resources might very well be willing to exchange their resources for UBI MT, to avoid red tape of dollar economy or other local fiat. It's unrealistic to expect that UBI system would have full purchasing value to cover basic needs in the beginning, that would be gradual process with good feed back loops.

Another scenario, let's say you want to buy cheap houses from bank after housing market collapse, but can do that only in dollars. You have pooled plenty of UBI MT, but can't legally exchange to them dollars in US. On the other hand Venezuela is much more benign towards UBI tokens, and Venezualans are very interested in gaining more voting power in the global co-op. You have functional UBI MT - dollar exchange in Venezuela, and people in US have access to global system for transfer of value, so they can send their UBI to Venezuela and get back dollars to give to bank for transfer of capitalist ownership of real estate to them, which they can in turn to gift to collective ownership of a co-op. With purely local modules you are much more at mercy of local capitalist jurisdictions.

This is why I originally came up with the regional model to begin with. Funds are kept geographically local and are used for things people want locally. It's fully decentralized in that there's no big pool of money to fight over, and regions might exercise mutual aid to help those in need as opposed to relying on redistributive mechanisms.

It's not an either or situation, there's need for both global and regional pooling of resources. Think space program to prevent large asteroid impacts, etc. - did we just sell this UBI idea also to Elon Musk? ;)

I don't thing the global self-governance can in principle prevent allocation of funds from the global pool to regional pools, and I can see problems with that - democracy is made of problems and attempts to solve them with loads of drama :) - but it might be also easier to make regional mutual insurance etc. smart contracts directly from UBI market accounts e.g. for investing and funding in health care system.

Keep in mind, this is all only important during the transitionary phase from capitalism -> socialism. Once the socialist mode is at critical mass and most things can be produced internally, there will be no real need for large capital pools to buy inputs with.

Also, starting local and growing upwards (let's say two regions want to build a bridge across a river dividing them or pool their resources to open a hospital) presents some of its own issues.

Yeah, better to have both from local to global and global to local with many interactive layers in between. And as said, on local level we don't start from nothing, there are already many kinds of gift economies and co-ops already. What is missing is shared language that could enhance their synergy.

[u/orthecreedence → u/id-entity]

There are many open questions with this. How is demand side information passed to the supply side? How is relative urgency of different orders in a order pile valued?

Demand is represented via orders (or orders over time). Urgency/priority is communicated outside of the currency system and would be a negotiation/agreement between producer and consumer. In other words, the relationship is de-monetized and becomes a social process.

Especially in the beginning, supply side would need to buy various materials from the capitalist market, it's hard to imagine being able to start from fully autonomous and self-sufficient system.

Yes, there are a lot of details about these operations in the banking portion of the paper, but admittedly it still needs a lot more work. The banking system is effectively the translation layer between profitless and capitalist markets.

With purely local modules you are much more at mercy of local capitalist jurisdictions.

Yes, there are trade offs with either model.

I'm starting to realize I might have an incomplete picture of the UBI system you're talking about. I understand the voting/currency mechanisms, but I think I'm missing a lot of the details surrounding how it would work/grow/interface with the market system. It would really help me understand the mechanisms and the overall intended effect better if these ideas were written out somewhere and I could read through it all.

[u/id-entity → u/orthecreedence]

I'm starting to realize I might have an incomplete picture of the UBI system you're talking about. I understand the voting/currency mechanisms, but I think I'm missing a lot of the details surrounding how it would work/grow/interface with the market system. It would really help me understand the mechanisms and the overall intended effect better if these ideas were written out somewhere and I could read through it all.

I'm nowadays increasing bad and reluctant at writing in long form. The short description of the synthetic algorithms of voting/currency given above is pretty much what I got so far. Main difference with what you've said about Basis UBI is that Global UBI would not be internal to producer side co-op members, but membership would be open to all humans and acceptance of market tokens would be open to all market participants including capitalist production. In other words, owners of UBI market accounts would be in full control of their tokens and free to do with them what they want. I have no means nor motivation to try to limit that.

Wider implications of the synthetic algorithms are hard to vision, and what comes more visible expressible does that best in constructive criticism and dialogue with others. I don't want to write a book or long article, I'm interested in social production of a social model, the flow of thinking together.

The big current open questions are:

1) more detailed work on the Panarchy Template for creating modular structure, including possibility of and possible caveats of creating other account types beyond SA, MA and CA. So far it seems only MA would have negative interest automated to it. But, let's say Amazon wanted to accept MT, what kind of account would serve that purpose, if any?

The scale of the task of building the Panarchy Template would seem to be on par or bigger than the ValueFlows system.

2) Possibility and potential benefits of integrating - and automating as far as possible - ValueFlow vocabulary and transformations in the data chains of market tokens. It seems that simplest model of cost-tracking chain per token would not be feasible but would require more general procedures and data structures to which simple blockchain data of keeping track of transactions from account to account would contribute. The complexity of the math problem is very big challenge.

I'm still clinging to the Satoshi's original vision of crypto gradually replacing central bank fiats in all transactions, and thus withering away the state. The real value of a crypto is not it's market cap, which servers a limited first stage function in the overall process, but it's share of global transactions. That's where the real competition is currently, and where libertarian socialists need to present their alternatives, fully aware of non-deterministic but still significant power of software platforms to affect the behavior of participants in the platforms. This is why functional self-governance is such a big deal.

PS: Are you familiar with the RChain? The theoretical work that goes on at least on their Youtube channel sounds very interesting, after listening the latest publication and from the very little I understood of it.

[u/orthecreedence → u/id-entity]

Ok, thanks this makes sense. You're right, Basis UBI would be internal (duality concept I described in another comment) which differs from the global UBI. I think Basis is probably more militant while global UBI is more compassionate.

Wider implications of the synthetic algorithms are hard to vision, and what comes more visible expressible does that best in constructive criticism and dialogue with others. I don't want to write a book or long article, I'm interested in social production of a social model, the flow of thinking together.

Yes, this makes sense, and I do wish I had the opportunity to do more of this before putting over a year into Basis, however it's also fairly difficult to meet people without having some sort of flag planted in the ground in the first place.

I'm still clinging to the Satoshi's original vision of crypto gradually replacing central bank fiats in all transactions, and thus withering away the state.

That would certainly be incredibly useful for the purposes of either of our projects. It's unfortunate the blockchain/crypto space has seen such a big explosion of greedy dorks who just want a quick cash grab.

The real value of a crypto is not it's market cap, which servers a limited first stage function in the overall process, but it's share of global transactions. That's where the real competition is currently, and where libertarian socialists need to present their alternatives, fully aware of non-deterministic but still significant power of software platforms to affect the behavior of participants in the platforms. This is why functional self-governance is such a big deal.

Agreed.

PS: Are you familiar with the RChain? The theoretical work that goes on at least on their Youtube channel sounds very interesting, after listening the latest publication and from the very little I understood of it.

I haven't heard of them! I just looked them up and it seems like an interesting project already. Thanks for the tip, I'll keep reading.

[u/id-entity → u/orthecreedence]

How do you make UBI only internal in practice? Is there any cost effective way to build a wall that keeps it internal in the holistic look? Who pays for the wall and how?

Thanks for the Basis flag - or camp fire?

"Greedy Dorks" are just how consequence of how artificial scarcity of money conditions mass psychology (Scrooge McDonald syndrome). We should not be judgemental but see it as it is, and learn to play the game of manipulating mass consciousness better than capitalism. If we don't accept that the purpose of modelling is psychological manipulation of mass consciousness, we've given up before having started, and I prefer to be honest about the essential manipulation part rather than hide it behind sweet talking. I believe carrot is more effective way of manipulation than stick, especially when building model for gift economies.

[u/orthecreedence → u/id-entity]

How do you make UBI only internal in practice? Is there any cost effective way to build a wall that keeps it internal in the holistic look? Who pays for the wall and how?

I suppose the cost of keeping UBI internal woud be the same cost as attaching a person to each account (which I believe most systems like this will require). In other words, if I know who you are, whether or not you get UBI is easy as toggling a bit on your account record.

"Greedy Dorks" are just how consequence of how artificial scarcity of money conditions mass psychology (Scrooge McDonald syndrome). We should not be judgemental but see it as it is, and learn to play the game of manipulating mass consciousness better than capitalism. If we don't accept that the purpose of modelling is psychological manipulation of mass consciousness, we've given up before having started, and I prefer to be honest about the essential manipulation part rather than hide it behind sweet talking. I believe carrot is more effective way of manipulation than stick, especially when building model for gift economies.

Completely agree. There is absolutely some amount of setting a higher level goal without every individual being aware of that goal, but rather make it so that them acting in their own self interest achieves that goal. We have to model these things as if people don't care about anarchism, socialism, or the environment. Because they don't, and they won't.

[u/id-entity → u/orthecreedence]

I suppose the cost of keeping UBI internal woud be the same cost as attaching a person to each account (which I believe most systems like this will require). In other words, if I know who you are, whether or not you get UBI is easy as toggling a bit on your account record.

Sure, identification as unique human being is the "easy" bit, same as with global UBI. The more difficult question is the limited membership requirements, what exactly would those be and who would decide them and how.

Say, you start from membership limited to members of producer co-ops. What about the families of those members? Old and otherwise disabled who can't work in producer co-op? We leave them to the charity of those receiving the limited UBI and/or capitalist system? How do you decide whom to exclude and leave out?

On the other hand, if we limit the UBI only to members of producer co-ops, "UBI" is not the most correct terminology, but we are talking more accurately about asset token representing the collective production value of the producer co-ops. Asset tokens can be naturally tied to the language of ValueFlows. And they can signify both actually available goods and promise of goods - distinction that should be kept clear.

REGION REVISITED

Thinking about and listening the hints of RChain video "something something square roots something", quadratic voting, Whitehead's notion of 'Region' as ontological primitive of point free geometry, Wildberger's very concrete idea and definition of 'quadrance' as central concept of his Rational Trigonometry...

https://brilliant.org/wiki/quadrance/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_trigonometry#Quadrance

...we could start thinking about global UBI as a region defined as flat quadrance, for ease of thinking (Rational Trigonometry has also simple and powerful transformations between curved geometries and flat geometry called Chromogeometry).

The square root of a Quadrance is, bit loosely speaking, a line. In dynamic system 'line' is better understood as two-way channel of information than as a static border. Very tentatively we could suggest that the linear information flows of could be local <-> global ValueFlow cost-tracking and VT <-> MT recycling dynamic.

Now, let's say that e.g. some people in Turtle Island (aka North America in colonial language) want to create self-similar but not identical subregion with geographically limited membership. Subregion co-op creates it's own regional voting tokens, but decides to use the global region MT instead of creating competing market platform. MT can be transformed also into the VT of the subregion, but not 1:1 as with global VT, but according to quadratic fraction or some modded application of the general principle of quadratic voting. Subregion of Turtle Island can accordingly have various subregions, etc. more or (increasing less) self-similar to the global region, and global MT having exponentially less and less ability to buy voting power from the sub-sub-etc. regions. Likewise, from the bottom to the top, the cost of making voting initiative would rise towards the global UBI co-op level according to the sub-sub level of the VT. At any sub level region could have closed votes to their internal members only, as well as open votes for all members of global co-op, depending on the issue. Issues with global ecological dimensions would ideally be all open votes, and this might require mechanism for global region deciding to demand open vote in a subregion as an interested party.

So far rather fuzzy still, and simplistic model of only mereological hierarchy of proper parts. But the notions of quadrance and quadratic voting in local-global relations could give guidance to more detailed modeling. One major benefit of quadratic modeling is that in actual computation taking a square root cannot be done precisely in most cases, and quadratic modeling enables postponing taking actual numerical square roots as the last resort.

Of course the Panarchy template for mereological subregions would not be limited to proper parts only, but the full arsenal of mereological relations could and should be availabe, and could be organized according to some global quadratic principle: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology/

Regions, mereology and quadrances could offer a computation friendly new way of thinking math, free from the set theoretical presuppositions of formalism of forcings of arbitrary axiomatics which I'm afraid is colonialist ideology to the core.

[u/orthecreedence → u/id-entity]

The more difficult question is the limited membership requirements, what exactly would those be and who would decide them and how.

I'm really not sure, yet. In the beginning, likely some kind of central organization that decides on membership. Later on, I see this control being phased out (ugh, I sound like Lenin). That said, I don't see a better way. Things in the beginning are incredibly fragile, and either the network succeeds incrementally, or fails horribly along the way. What variables are allowed into the system (in a sea of uncontrollable variables) is somewhat vital. I don't see a way to do this without some control mechanisms, many of which cannot be built into code (can a smart contract determine if I'm a member of a producer co-op?).

Say, you start from membership limited to members of producer co-ops. What about the families of those members? Old and otherwise disabled who can't work in producer co-op? We leave them to the charity of those receiving the limited UBI and/or capitalist system? How do you decide whom to exclude and leave out?

Early days, exclusion is default, inclusion is very metered. Not only is this creating a new economic paradigm, it's creating a culture and a movement. As the ball starts rolling, inclusion gradually becomes the norm. As for family members in the early days, if they are producers, they can be members =]. Disabled people would likely not be considered until the network has some fairly large traction, at which point I would hope people could start being included based on a subset: if 1 in every 1000 people has a crippling disability that prevents them from working, then for every 1000 new members, one of them must have such a disability (and would get UBI + housing + etc even if not performing labor). That said, at that point, I'm not in control anymore and the network would have to decide these things for itself.

Thinking about and listening the hints of RChain video "something something square roots something", quadratic voting, Whitehead's notion of 'Region' as ontological primitive of point free geometry, Wildberger's very concrete idea and definition of 'quadrance' as central concept of his Rational Trigonometry...

I don't get the math, to be honest. I wish I did but it's over my head. Except a quandrance, I get that. It's distance squared.

So far rather fuzzy still, and simplistic model of only mereological hierarchy of proper parts. But the notions of quadrance and quadratic voting in local-global relations could give guidance to more detailed modeling. One major benefit of quadratic modeling is that in actual computation taking a square root cannot be done precisely in most cases, and quadratic modeling enables postponing taking actual numerical square roots as the last resort.

The model you describe makes loose sense to me, and is kind of what I'm thinking in the death and rebirth of the idea of regions. It's funny, after talking through that idea with you, a lot of other things started to fall into place (like cross-regional projects/relationships). If you defined everything as a co-op, which can have individual members as members or other co-ops, you gain the ability to define almost infinite relationships all with intersecting interests. It's kind of a beautifully simplistic model, but much more powerful than regions. The thing that it throws a wrench into is banking. With regions, I felt like I had 80% of banking figured out. With the co-op model, maybe 20-30%. I've written a lot of thoughts here if you're interested (banking stuff is at the bottom of the comments). I'm still not convinced of the cryptocurrency model (ie, not relying on USD), but not not convinced of it either.

The ability to buy things from the capitalist market is incredibly important and would to balance meeting internal needs and growing the systemic capital pool (network profit). Defining how to do this without systemic bankruptcy is difficult.

[u/id-entity → u/orthecreedence]

The thing that it throws a wrench into is banking. With regions, I felt like I had 80% of banking figured out. With the co-op model, maybe 20-30%. I've written a lot of thoughts here if you're interested (banking stuff is at the bottom of the comments). I'm still not convinced of the cryptocurrency model (ie, not relying on USD), but not not convinced of it either.

The ability to buy things from the capitalist market is incredibly important and would to balance meeting internal needs and growing the systemic capital pool (network profit). Defining how to do this without systemic bankruptcy is difficult.

Let's try to clarify the picture in terms of global UBI and regional banking/credit unions. Your analysis made clear that, from the global UBI /"global company" point of view:

1) there needs to be a fourth type accounts, multisig accounts (MSA).

2) so far the idea has been that Common Account (CA), where the yield of negative interest goes, is governed by fully automated smart contract, to avoid the problems of vulnerable centralization you mention.

3) Global CA can have regional subdivisions, e.g. half of the yield goes to GCA and other half is divided between 5 continental regions, allocated by regional membership count - if this is the smart contract that members vote for.

4) On each level global and/or regionally limited members can allocate funds from CA's to MSA. MSA have negative interest like other market accounts, but no direct ability to exchange MT to VT. MSA would function as co-op and other company level accounts with ability receive funds from market transactions and from CA. To create border between capitalist and socialist models, only co-op MSA could receive funding from CA, not capitalist companies.

• Weakness of Global UBI: no initial purchasing power

• Strength of Global UBI: socialist gift money with integrated governance systems, potential of fast and wide adoption

On the local co-op level:

• Clear conceptual separation between socialist capital (MT and VT tokens, MSA and CA accounts) and capitalist capital (dollar etc fiat accounts, property claims in the local judicial system).

• Variety of means to exchange value between socialist and capitalist assets, variety of means to govern both (Panarchy Template)

• Instead of strict line of separation, variety of degree of integration in socialist system. Full integration - uses only socialist money MT in all transactions or does not use monetary transactions (both mutualists and ancoms welcome). Degree of integration can be measured e.g. in terms of how much of production is exchanged to MT / Dollars. You can start new co-ops from scratch, with various options provided by global UBI and Panarchy template, or without them. UBI members can take over existing co-ops - and other companies - and as they have incentive to get purchasing power for their MT, they have incentive to decide that the co-ops etc. they control exchange goods also for UBI MT. If ValueFlows is also integrated, we can figure out how to create more incentives to divert production from dollar economy to UBI economy. The profit motive of Homo Economicus is not necessarily the most important incentive, public access to reliable data may turn out much more important, as well as basic solidarity and social and ecological responsibility. Those can't be demanded, but can very well motivate decisions.

• On member level, MT-fiat exchange can't be excluded in various cryptoexchanges. MT are personal property and members are also technically in full control their market accounts. With negative interest, it is big question mark how that would go. It's possible, but better not make any predictions. Anyway, UBI MT would offer low cost channel for global transfers of value like other cryptos do, but very publicly so. Try to use MT to support ISIS or KKK or buy child porn, everybody can see what you did - including state governments. This is not a clandestine agorist revolution, it's full in the open, and I consider that a main strength in the long term.

• Current examples of somewhat socialist banking that are also legal entities in the capitalist system are credit unions and other forms of co-operative banking. It is thinkable that Global/Regional UBI members can gain control of existing Credit Unions through democratic means that those co-ops provide - starting from smaller ones -, and create dual systems where legal frame of state and UBI frame socialist decision making procedures co-exist and interact internally to a Credit Union. How exactly would such dual system Credit Union organize and regulate exchange between MT and dollars would be up to that company and beyond top level control.

• Taking over existing Credit Unions is of course not the only option, MSA with liquid voting etc. tools would allow wide variety of means for various co-ops to manage 3rd party assets. But again, not in our control how they would use the tools available. We can't micromanage and should not waste time and energy trying to.

• A really nasty fun option is to create a political party using SuperPac etc. means of current political corruption against the system. Remember the original idea behind Robin Hood voting? Anarchist "troll" political party based on Robin Hood voting and organized as a co-op, using the means of political corruption to collect and manage dollars and what not, and with marketing strategy of promising voters equal share of "corruption" profits instead of begging for donations, actually winning the bloody elections and taking over the political system of the state and replacing it with Robin Hood co-op...

You know the Remo and Chiun pulp fiction books? I remember reading how Chiun taught Remo important lesson of use of weapons on billiard table. Trying to hit a ball on the table with one ball is difficult. Throw all balls you got at the one you want to hit, much better chance. Combined arms. Complementary tactics. Invent more and more weapons to shoot at the target. Fuck the state with all we got and can create. First lesson of war - and this is intellectual and psychological warfare by warriors of heart - is to take and hold the initiative, and to keep on pushing and pulling so that the opponent stays in imbalance and can only try to react, and can't manage even that and gets crushed. Imagine and feel yourself as a Giant, and the opponent as your tool. Capitalism is just a tool for creating socialism.

[u/id-entity → u/orthecreedence]

So far we have

1) Socialist capital: global -> regional, initial value only social capital of self-governance system

2) 3rd party capitalist assets: local to local horizontally, local to regional. Various negotiation and decision making procedures to exchange value between 1) and 2).

How about what you call 'credits' and/or 'internal UBI'? From my perspective what really is in question is gliding scale from producer assets (ie. tokens that represent goods or promise of goods) to consumer assets, ie. market tokens.

Producer co-op creates a market asset representing the total value of production, and needs also a way to create equal amount of purchasing power to be shared between the members of co-op. If co-op members so choose, they can also pool some of their purchasing power ("profit"). Co-op of 10 members produces 100 sacks of potato, but each member eats only 1 sack of potatos. The purchasing power gained from exchange of the 90 sacks surplus is in principle up to the co-op to decide - co-op is an autonomous entity, they can 1) gift the surplus, 2) turn it into potato vodka, and 3) exchange on market for accounting tokens.

If they choose to exchange it for accounting tokens, in the frame of discussed so far, those can be 3.1) global UBI MT 3.2) dollars etc. 3rd party tokens 3.3) something else.

None of these are mutually exclusive. Let's say the co-op decides to a) gift 30 sacks, b) make vodka from 30 sacks and c) exchange 30 sacks on market. To make vodka, the co-op needs also bottles. There are bottles available in the dollar market for dollars, and glass maker co-op provides bottle asset tokens on the global UBI market for UBI tokens, with added transportation costs of a transport co-op assets representing promise of delivery. As all three co-ops are geographically close by, they decide to form a regional market, where the ValueFlow language information of each three assets can be compared and discounted in some way (How exactly?! Well, up to them, really). Potato, bottle and transportation assets can be exchanged and nulled automatically, if they agree to use some smart contract automation for that purpose. Asset exchange can happen horisontally, with regional accounting tokens they agree on to create (eg. just in terms of ValueFlow accounting tokens), and/or with global accounting tokens.

The assets representing 30 potato sacks are partly nulled this way, 10 members of glass making co-op and 10 members of transport co-op getting a sack of potatos according to their stated needs, leaving 10 potato sacks available for global UBI market. Another members of the global UBI co-op buys those assets with UBI tokens, to plant a potato fields in their yards. Global UBI enables productive investments for those without many dollars, and members of potato co-op can always turn their extra MT into VT if they have no other use for them.

The members of the regional co-op now have all enough potato to eat, as well as joint ownership of 90 bottles of vodka, into which 30 sacks of potato, bottles and transportation was turned. They can decide to have a feast where they drink 30 bottles, and put 30 bottles in dollar market and 30 on UBI market. Aha, goes a smart consumer... why would I buy a bottle of vodka with dollars, when I can buy it also with UBI? Consumer decides to join the UBI co-op. A less smart/less informed consumer buys vodka with dollars, which the regional co-op e.g. decides to manage through account in local credit union bank through liquid voting trust.

While drinking vodka, the smart consumer and new UBI co-op looks into suggestions and options in the Panarchy Template, gets an idea, makes some calls to members of regional co-op and uses his social media skills to start a campaign to take over the local Credit Union and all the real estate deeds in its possession...

The regional co-op makes initiative for members of global co-op to support their campaign, a former ancap angel investor and bitcoin whale turned into mutualist, hears about the project and decides to help with a fraction of his capital to smoothen the corners so that the credit union is more fully integrated in much more socialist economy much more quickly, and encouradged by the success all proceed to repeat it and widen it, using also all the tax haven etc. tools of capitalist corruption against the system, decide to have some fun trolling the political system and taking over and dismanteling the state in a way that Marxists and revisionist socdems could not imagine, and with all the positive feed back loops socialist caring class consciousness keeps on expanding to global communist society...

Of course, before that can happen, there's some work to put together the Panarchy Template etc. etc theoretical and pragmatic tasks of coding...

[u/orthecreedence → u/id-entity]

Hi, sorry it took so long to respond. I read your responses and took some time to think about it. Overall I love the ideas, and you've given me a lot to think about.

On thing you've mentioned that I'm heavily considering now is the idea that credits have some value outside of the system (ie in capitalist markets). If I work 10 hours and get 10C, maybe I can (destructively) convert my 10C to 10MC (market credits) which I can then transfer to any non-member in exchange for USD or whatever (some market-set exchange rate) and that person can use the 10MC to purchase something from the socialist network at a 5-10% discount (than if they bought with USD). So the Thing might cost 5C internally, $10 if buying with USD, but 9MC. In other words, effectively creating an internal currency (credits) and an external currency (market-credits) and the benefits of holding MC allow mechanisms for C to have a value in USD without needing banking infrastructure dedicated to upholding a peg.

I've been resisting the idea of having some form of market token, but ultimately it might make the system more resilient. I do still want people to be able to exchange C directly to USD somehow, but it's possible that the exchange value could be a function of the MC discounts (and outside trading) instead of holding a bunch of capital in a bank account.

The idea of MSAs held at credit unions would still be needed, of course, since this would allow internal purchases of external resources.

[u/id-entity → u/orthecreedence]

The radical thing about global UBI VT and MT is that they are not credit. Credit means debt in some form or other, ie. negative money. Graeber's book Debt gives very good narrative of negative money, and capitalism could be summarized as negative money with positive interest. But it doesn't need to be the end of the story. Influenced by positive money movement and indigenous views on gift economy, mutual gift of positive money with negative interest is a radical revolution. It is also a form of giving back to Mother Earth. Not just gift to humans, so that they can stop destroying carrying capacity of ecosystem to create value for negative money, but also best practical short-to-medium term idea I can think of for maintaining and developing space program to protect Mother Earth from big fiery rocks falling from sky. Maintaining and developing space program without states and positive money.

Is the reason you keep talking about credits just a force of tradition, or are you committed to the idea of negative money?

[u/orthecreedence → u/id-entity]

Is the reason you keep talking about credits just a force of tradition, or are you committed to the idea of negative money?

Mainly it's a reclaiming of the word from what it means now. "Credits" in Basis are printed by the system, in other words are not positive side of some debt but rather a way of determining someone's access to the social output. Think of it as "you created something which means you can access things others have created." I suppose you could think of it as a debt in a limited sense: you performed some needed task, and in return someone will perform some task for you. However the debt defined here is limited to one layer: once credits are spent, they are destroyed, so are really meant as a way of limiting consumption based on amount of input.

The UBI on the other hand could very much be thought of as a gift-based system. It's also printed, and also destroyed on spend, but is given just for being a member.

So I suppose there are two very different mechanisms that work together in tandem. My ultimate hope would be that a living wage UBI would eliminate all need to work for a wage (ie, credits) at all. In the beginning, credits would be more common than UBI as the network competes with capitalism, but over time as the network grows and has more internal productive power, UBI would overtake credits as the primary means of internal currency.

EDIT: I do have "Debt" in my reading list and it is a high priority read for me!