ponderjaunt

The last word sage, an Etomancer. Unfilter the noise – Let it consume you – in that chaos comes structure, but at the cost of humanity.

The future of the Dollar

Around the world, cash liquidity crunches continue to affect a globalized digital economy in transition throughout a prolonged pandemic response. There are theoretical limits to physical currency mediums being used for value exchange in this environment as traditional economies test the limits of archaic transaction methods.

Seemingly, now more than ever, economic thought leaders around the world are starting to ponder the utility of a cashless society – or at least a less-cash-based one. Regardless of past lessons around reserve notes issued by central banks, current conditions in global markets will require some dynamic and diligent planning if a quick recovery is even monetarily possible once stimulus is restricted to cash dominated systems.

The question around the world right now is: “How can cash move faster?”

As of the writing of this post, the Treasury has announced that future household stimulus will utilized prepaid debit cards to more effectively move minted money. But, there are costs associated with such methods that may restrict the means in which this cash can be utilized – high fees for dealing with cash-only businesses who may not even access debit/credit on their premises.

The United States Dollar hegemony has also had its future called into question in recent months. The CCP through the People's Bank of China have moved towards a central bank digital currency that dodges exchange rates to USD dominated commercial markets internationally. However, even with the pandemic limiting cash liquidity abroad, the United States still lags behind in the arms race towards legal definition of digital assets and their regulatory frameworks domestically.

Introduction to the Digital Dollar

The Digital Dollar Project is a partnership between technology firm Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and the Digital Dollar Foundation (DDF) to advance exploration of a United States Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). The purpose of the DDF Project is to encourage academic and commercial research supported by public discussion on the perceived advantages of a digital dollar offering backed by the US Federal Reserve.

The groups plans to convene with private sector thought leaders and actors to propose possible models to support the public sector's utilization of a digital dollar offering. The Project will develop a framework for practical steps that can be taken to establish a dollar CBDC with full protections from the FED and full confidence of the US consumer.

Former CFTC Officials Ramp Up Push for Digital Dollar With Accenture Partnership – CoinDesk:

As an example, the ability to directly exchange a CBDC for a tokenized security will have profound effects on global capital markets.

Taking a step back, the idea of a digital dollar is not new or novel. This concept is simply a domestic reiteration of the infamous Tether $USDT stable coin pegged to the value of BTC relative to the $USD. Various international exchanges have also gone so far as to issue a representative dollar denominated stable coins that attempt to reduce exchange spot trading risks due to volatility. The relative stability of a USD stable coin helps to help lower costs for users who operate across international jurisdictions as well.

Interfacing with the monetary inter-workings of the United States Dollar is no simple task. The red tape of regulatory familiarity is drawn thick, and not enough reward exists for firms to challenge the financial definitions around digital assets in state and federal courts.

Yet firms like the HODL PAC and Ripple have taken steps to lobby for regulatory reaffirmation. Read more about the Digital Dollar Project in their press release.

Digital Dollar Stakeholders

Who are the leaders at the forefront of the fight towards a bolstered USD in the form of a Digital Dollar? Indeed, some big names (most of this is taken directly from their website):

J. Christopher Giancarlo is Senior Counsel to the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher and the former Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Mr. Giancarlo also served as a member of the Financial Stability Oversight Committee (FSOC), the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, and the Executive Board of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO). Mr. Giancarlo serves on the Advisory Board of the Chamber of Digital Commerce and as an independent director of the American Financial Exchange. He is also Chairman of the Board of Common Securitization Solutions, Inc.

Former chairman Giancarlo had this to say about a Digital Dollar,

A digital dollar would help future-proof the greenback and allow individuals and global enterprises to make payments in dollars irrespective of space and time.

Charles (“Charlie”) H. Giancarlo is an entrepreneur, investor, and executive. He is currently the Chief Executive Officer of Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG). He formerly served in senior executive roles at Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Silver Lake Partners, the private equity firm. Daniel Gorfine is Founder and CEO of Gattaca Horizons LLC and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center teaching FinTech Law & Policy. He previously served as the CFTC’s first Chief Innovation Officer and Director of LabCFTC.

Dave Treat is a Senior Managing Director, co-Lead of Accenture’s Blockchain Business and Accenture Lead of the NY Fintech Innovation Lab. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Linux Hyperledger Project, Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Global Blockchain Business Council and the ID2020 Alliance, is a member of the World Economic Forum C4IR Global Blockchain Council and is a program advisor for the Chamber of Digital Commerce.

Both the Giancarlo's are standouts in the finance space for obvious reasons, they comprise the perfect mixture of public/private financial exposure. But Dave Treat brings some serious experience to the digital assets spaces. Accenture has been at the forefront of the CBCD research projects undertaken by leading firms around the world. This balance of public/private and foreign/domestic experience around currencies makes the Digital Dollar Foundation a force to be reckoned with.

Will we see major pushes towards regulatory clarity with the Digital Dollar Foundation leading the charge in the conversation? Only time will tell. In the meantime, the below interview with ex CFTC chair Giancarlo is worth the watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzK-d5Vhcls]

~ Δ

https://twitter.com/PonderJaunt

What is utility in a globalized world? Some may consider a utility in a physical sense, as a necessary service to promote a better life: clean water, energy, communication, and transportation infrastructure, all provide a foundation for a modern society to flourish. In a more economic sense, utility is the concept of 'usefulness' of a specific good or service.

By understanding the definition of modern utilities, how might Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) modify our understanding of these concepts in the future? Utility tokens already exist; they are issued to fund the development of digital goods or services offered by the originator of the asset in both physical and digital spaces. This dynamic concept of a utility token may, in fact, provide a framework for the application of classical utilitarian philosophy in modern globalized economies.

Before such claims are made, it will be valuable to understand where exactly these ideas of utility originated. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) created the idea of utility as an aggregate of positive action towards the common good. His work has created the foundation for the modern philosophy of Utilitarianism, raised from the roots of the Era of Enlightenment during a time of rapid global industrialization and commercialization.

Bentham was fascinated with social reform from a legal, economic, and philosophical perspective as the world around him rapidly changed. He penned a rebuttal to the rebellious United States Declaration of Independence, from both a hybridized legal and philosophical standpoint under a pseudonym, and yet he also supported the early concepts of classical Liberalism during the earliest days of the French Revolution.

His exposure to each of these systems and their intricacies inspired more domestic reforms. During this time, Jeremy Bentham quickly became respected around the world as a socioeconomic and legal philosopher. Energized, Bentham turned his focus towards the UK where he helped establish the concept of 'preventive police' developed around a dedicated patrol force that would act as deterrent to criminality along the Thames river which was a notorious spot for theft of goods from moored ships moving commodities and information around the world.

Inspired, Bentham then expanded upon his blossoming social justice theory with interpretative designs for a modernized prison system, which he called the Panopticon. The concept was once again related to the prevention of bad behavior before it was acted upon; his designs encompassed a circular prison, with a single guard tower in the center, designed so that the prisoners couldn't see the guard while the guard could see every prisoner; when their limited attention was directed to any block of cells.

With this structure in place, Bentham argued that prisoners would naturally assume they were being watched, but never be able to tell exactly when the guard's attention was focused. As such, inmates would be less inclined to be disruptive. Bentham's prison experiment never truly got off the ground, at least in his lifetime, but his theory rapidly evolved to become the foundations for modern surveillance and intelligence structures to expand.

Learning from these past experiments, we can apply some of Bentham's theories to a modern distributed system. Utilitarianism may be a model to explore utility as a measurement of liberty itself in a distributed system, more-so than a way to discreetly track the exchange of commodities, securities, or even digital assets between peers.

We know goods and services already move within these developing systems and yet, there seems to be a growing conflict around *which* goods and services should utilize the technology; further, who should have authority over such systems as they scale in the age of information?

Bentham proposes the less restricted a utilitarian system is for any individual the better it becomes for all individuals, especially if each party is seeking to expand their own liberty without limiting that of their peers. But, can liberty truly exist in a system where authority is dynamically defined – unique to each jurisdiction it might serve? Let us explore an idea around the abstraction of authority away from the individual, or any centralized group of individuals in the form of an organization or jurisdiction, and towards a liberty-utility contract operating dynamically between all peers and spaces equally.

Utilitarian contracts represented as smart contracts may interact in a digitally egalitarian system without creating conflict at a higher degree than an intrinsically centralized system. If they succeed, new systems of governance must also exist to enable these process-based systems to interact across traditional borders, while also limiting friction between modern and legacy systems. An even greater value proposition is possible if these actions could occur without introducing unnecessary complexity or additional costs.

As these new digital utility systems are developed, new forms of organizations may find their spotlight on the world's stage as modern standards are redefined globally. These dynamic constructs, known as Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAOs), have a checkered past and a promising future. These process-centric constructs help data driven systems communicate securely by coming to consensus around rules and procedures that govern smart contract interactions. They also bring renovations towards efficient conflict resolution, and distribute value back to individuals and other traditionally structured organizations such as non-profits.

With these rapidly distributed digital interactions defined, a comparative model for blockchain utility, based on the concepts of classical utilitarianism is made possible. Where the least restrictive limitations, that offer the most value to the most number of users, become the framework for governance in a dynamic socio-economic system. Centralization in this technology stack is not only theoretically limited but structurally so. This decentralized nature may offer the most potential value for users who begin to store their own utility within it, thus helping to redefine the ecosystem in which they exchange their own labor for assets as a form of payment.

With global attention focused on advancing distributed finance across borders, in light of recent pandemic responses from traditional governance models, the time for assessing the calls to protect the value of liberty in relation to utility continues to grow. With the right philosophy, an expansion of liberty through utility may increase the value of the economies they service without limiting the freedom of their peers.

https://twitter.com/PonderJaunt

How user-utility through shared data affects the future of liberty in digital systems.

This article will shed a narrow light on the global financial war being fought over the control of user's data. It will solely highlight *Efani*, a company who is waging a silent, but deadly, guerrilla war against the current standards of user data protections.

These are simply my thoughts on a proposed solution to data security via mobile phone hardware services.

Efani is a telecom SIM service. It's a mobile service provider that claims to ensure secure access to existing networks. Efani wants to protect you from other people assuming your identity through your mobile device – before that adversely affects your life.

I believe these services are an absolute necessity in a modern and globally decentralized financial system. Will Efani remain the sole defender of user data privacy on domestic US telecom networks? Only time and the open market can claim to know the answer.

In my own observations, modern companies that sell-out their user's data need to have those profitable practices fundamentally rejected by the market. In this current digitally globalized environment, a user's rights to privacy are routinely infringed based on a terms of service agreements that most users DO NOT read.

The valuation of Facebook is not based on the value of their technology to the user. Their valuation is based on the value of the user's data to other entities who want to access it effectively.

Some people may think Facebook is adding value to their lives, but that value is not realized by the user without Facebook pushing back against that claim in almost every way in every jurisdiction they service.

The markets that these entities service need to have the data they access distributed away from centralized control. The value of the user's data needs to always belong to the user first – and exchanged for a good or service after the value has been realized primarily to the user first.

Inversely, companies that protect their user's data, while increasing the ability to interoperate in traditionally data-centralized systems, like telecoms and finance, need to be highlighted and rewarded for their innovations in the face of this modern market environment.

Some companies, like Efani, have decided to compete against these traditional user data aggregator giants.

They are the last line of defense against the complete abstraction of the value of information in the form of data to the user who creates it. This data-utility dilemma establishes a problem that leads to an imbalance of value between the data of the user in relation to the service provided by a third party.

How far must a user's natural rights be infringed upon before basic protections are not a marketable service but, become a user data privacy standard? Tough question, but it creates a small voice of reason when the answer is pondered.

The main issue with the current user-data security model lies in the valuation of your data to the entity that provides access to a good or service in exchange to access a user's data – this synthetic imbalance always favors the service provider generating them a realized portion of the value of your data as profit.

Your personal information, in the form of the data you create by interacting in a digitally globalized world, is priceless – but only to you. Other people only want your data to increase their own value.

The Founder and CEO of Efani, Haseeb Awan, says this in the best way,

We’ve more Identities linked to our telephone number than the social network. Think about it, a personal corporation has far more data on you than the government itself, and that organization is only meant to maximize their profit and serve its stakeholders. Rest assured, you don’t count as a stakeholder. You’re just a product for them, who serve their purpose as they want.

Haseeb's entire blog is an actual goldmine of wisdom in this sense. I implore you to read up on this thought leader. The user-facing hardware service that Hasseb, through Efani, is focused on is commonly called a SIM card.

A SIM card, a subscriber identity module, or subscriber identification module is an integrated circuit that is intended to securely store the international mobile subscriber identity number and its related key, which are used to identify and authenticate subscribers on mobile telephony devices.

If you have a mobile phone through a traditional carrier network in the United States, it has a SIM Card. If you want to migrate your information from one service to another, that information comes from your SIM card (even if a virtual clone is stored on a server somewhere the raw data is coming from your device).

Your worldview is based on this data, and your value to society is judged by it. The more we use our phones to explore the world, connected to a mobile network, the more valuable data you create around yourself and your actions.

In the eastern world socioeconomic credit systems proposed to be run on mobile phones is becoming a major trend. Driving the rest of the world to ask hard questions about social norms in relation to technology and data privacy to adapt to this dynamic model.

The SIM card on mobile phones is traditionally the only reliable way users can protect their identity from others around the world claiming it.

However, this information is rarely actually protected by the service providers, because it costs too much for them to offer security as a part of their terms of service throughout the customer's life-cycle. Again, they just want to sell your data for profit – not protect you from illicit access of that same data later on.

In fact, entire deep-web marketplaces exist to trade and exchange known user information based on cracks/hacks/stacks of badly managed user data that has already escaped from the data-prison that is centralized corporate or cloud servers. Cell phone information is a relatively easy attack vector once identified. Robocaller volume is a perfect example of this increasing trend.

Unfortunately, most people don't worry about their information being compromised until it adversely affects their financial lives. However, by the time these red flags are noticed it is much too late to do anything about the availability of your data all over the internet. Tracking down the source of the exchange of your information through these deeper channels is fruitless.

How might this information be used against you? Let's explain an intriguing tactic known as a Sim swap.

**What is a SIM swap?
**A SIM swap is when nefarious actors access your basic information online and combine it with a digital sleight of hand to switch the SIM on your mobile device for one under their control.

Once your device's SIM is established under their control, they can brute-bypass traditional 2FA security and begin to essentially do whatever they want through your device as you. Because you are your SIM to the telecoms companies. *But what happens when someone else breaks those terms – as you (or your SIM)? Who is responsibly for that breach of contract?

*Let's paint a picture to show this question in a hypothetical sense. In our example let's assume hackers want to liquidate digital assets from an online exchange you use, or even your traditional bank account.

For this to happen, attackers only need to access a telecom carriers notoriously terrible customer service network to exchange your basic user information (which they obtained nefariously) in exchange for access to your mobile device just so that they can pretend to be you for a few more moments.

Once they have tricked this telecom service provider into thinking that they are you, the burden of proof for really claiming your identity back is now solely on you.

Meanwhile, as you rush to figure out how you can prove to a customer service representative that you are who you claim to be – which to them seems like a phishing attempt in itself.

In the eyes of the service provider, you are claiming not to be you – you have been hacked; but you also no longer have any other means of proving your identity without giving up MORE information to the telecom.

As you fight this paradoxical battle over the phone with customer support, the nefarious actors are now changing your email password. You can't even access the digital files proving your identity now. In an additional stroke of woe-unto-you, they discover links to reset your financial passwords via your bank/digital exchange service. Now you can't pay for anything in the hopes of restoring access to your services.

Meanwhile telecom customer support needs more proof that you are who you say you are. By now the attackers are figuring out how to move your assets out of your accounts. They are porting over as much of your personal information for future use as they can get. And they are starting to burn the bridges that lead back to their bad actions. You could lose everything.So how do you prevent this from happening? Well once it has already happened – damn, good luck. We need to think about discouraging the attack from ever occurring. What are the options? Well you really have to think outside the box, adapt to the attacker strategy, and chase after the source of any previously leaked identity online. This may be a seemingly impossible task for the average human – that is unless you utilize Efani.

Efani is like the personal digital bodyguard that reacts to a threat before it becomes one. This reaction time is were its value lies inherently. Efani is a fraud-seeking digital search-and-destroy missile system for your digital identity and it WILL go after the source of the threat before attacks seek the same information for nefarious means.

Remember, this is a financial war fought over control of data. In times of war, ammunition depots are almost always destroyed to stop them from falling into enemy hands. Efani is willing to go blow up your 'data-ammo', wherever it may be, before attacks can use it against you.

After this base service, Efani goes even further to ensure that you are protected from the threat of your data being exposed to such networks again. They do this in brilliant ways. The security service of their business model is HIGHLY advantageous when compared to traditional mobile phone service packages.

To a data aggregation company such as a telecom, search engine service, email provider, or even a social media platform, your data is not priceless. In fact your data has a dynamic price attached to it. These services sell that information to third parties when the cost of securing the same data drops below the profit point for securing it.

Firms buy this information on surface markets and sell this information on sub-surface markets.

This is good business in the world of centralized finance. And terrible business in the world of decentralized finance. As the world continues to race towards a distributed financial environment, so too must the services that provide security to that ecosystem adjust to value their customer's secured data over the free-market's bid to access it.

Some may consider themselves immune to such notions. They would claim that they do not have an attack vector that is worth exploiting because they are not “valuable enough”. This baseless assumption is the reason why there exists both surface and underground marketplaces to sell people's data to others who value it more than the originator.

To consider your data worthless, and not in need of protection, you fundamentally give up the right to protect it, and pass that right onto the service providers.

Efani, assumes that sacred right of privacy in exchange for a fee that includes the traditional mobile network experience. You aren't sacrificing data security for access to a network – you are ensuring that a portion of that service fee is directly spent protecting you against harmful actions originating from the use of your data. Their service lies in prevention of existing data being used against you, and ensuring future data generated is not sold, shared, or exchanged by other users.

Hasseb, when asked about his ideas of data ownership again strikes true with this quote that he shared with a trusted advisor of mine, this is the quote that inspired me to look deeply into his service as a philosophical stance, not a simple product offering:

Personal information such as your name, DOB, House/Work address, occupants in the house as well as your cellphone records and the live location is also available on the illegal markets. Think about if a criminal is paying for it, what return does he expect to get out of this investment? Would you prefer to pay for a product or want to be a product sold to criminals?

I want to see other mobile networks even attempt to begin to talk about how they protect their user's data outside of their own systems.

I would applaud a domestic cell carrier to even acknowledge the amount of information that has been gleaned from their systems already by bad actors. In fact, I would even go so far as to ask them whose actually owns that information. The answer would surprise you I would wager.

Efani is challenging the status quo of mobile data security by calling into question the proposed value of a user's information in a data driven world. Should this be a feature in a modern market? Should we assume our data is not protected until we pay someone to protect it?

Until we can force information and user generated data to be valuable to the user first, such security services as features are an absolute necessity – especially if you are involved in digital economic spaces, where 'proof of self' lies in the pudding, and the pudding is your SIM card.

Cheers to Hasseb Awan, through his company Efani, for calling current standards inadequate and offering the market a fair and effective way to protect themselves. Perhaps one day in the future we won't have to worry about the attack on our right to privacy, until then I will continue to look for the best weapons to defend oneself from an aggressor – Efani is one of those services.

~ Δ

Preface: This post was inspired by 2-digital spaces I call home, The Ethereal Realm & The Bulwark (in its many forms).

A special thanks, to the fellows with whom I share those same digital spaces.

https://medium.com/@memetic007/liquid-democracy-9cf7a4cb7f

A primer is available at the above link for the concept of Liquid Democracy which I believe is a prerequisite upon which further expansion can begin below.

This writing is in the form of living document and will see subsequent revisions posted in separate responses and annotated in-line. The original will remain intact fully, outside of grammatical corrections, even if the ideas are deemed banal; alas, one must live and die by the pen in the same way of the sword.

_____________________________________________________________

Introduction

Our journey will require indulging a thought experiment based around a conceptualized idea we will henceforth refer to as, 'entropic effects' which are theorized in Vitalik Buterin's quadratic funding mechanisms.

https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/liberation-through-radical-decentralization-22fc4bedc2ac

There is little difference in the act of funding a corporation, charity, or creed, to the funding of a government. The major difference is the value each entity gives back as payment to its laborers.

If we can hold this statement to be reasonably true, at least in the northern part of the North-South Divide, then there is little difference between quadratic funding and quadratic voting in a distributed system modeled on utilitarian principals.

In a theoretical egalitarian republic the act of a vote by proxy, or the transcription of liberty to an other, must introduce some decay that devalues the votes given-up by the original holder of such liberty, to a proxy voter, based on a logarithmic time-based metric that has yet to be quantitatively defined.

My additions to this school of thought must start with this statement:

The longer a voter holds their vote, the less utilitarian value it provides for the system it services. The faster the utility of voting is transferred to a proxy voter who(m) values liberty over time, the longer period a vote has immunity to this value-decay.

We shall call this entropic-immunity phase, resistance. This concept will be expanded upon in further writings.

All votes in this model are relatively equal,  until the act of revealing their summation, at which point the true value of each vote is measured by a total product of the utility of liberty, which can be defined by the voters intrinsic desire to understand the on-ballot issue intersubjectively as a cost benefit analysis conditional to the value of time to each Individual simultaneously.

Liberty, in this experiment, is the independent cost an Individual is willing to stake towards an action, or the will to learn of an issue that holds value in the worldview of the voter. This cost is realized in the time it takes to educate one-self on the value of the issue, or the product of labor deemed more valuable to the individual during this phase.

The Value of Time

Remember that time is money

Such words were said by Benjamin Franklin in 1748. This utilitarian cost of time can be realized by the Individual voter or credited to an organization who assumes its value, bidirectionally and near-instantly, upon settlement of a contract to pass ownership of the right to vote, or liberty, to that other.

Tax, or a compulsory contribution to state revenue, may be the cost of liberty in the current physical system. However, in a distributed Republic, tax becomes a payment to the voter in the form of a dividend.

This dividend is measured by the utility function of time over value at the opportunity origination to vote, held in relation to the production value of the entire system it affects, and only upon settlement of any contract operating within the standardized voting parameters does the market pay out that difference to all participants based on their accumulation or dissipation of liberty.

Relativistic Democracy

This ownership of a right to vote is natural and equal among all conscious beings under the current definitions of consciousness. The ownership becomes synthetically debased until that utility is associated with the value of all other votes within the system after they have been cast.

https://medium.com/@glenweyl/a-radicalxchange-between-vitalik-buterin-and-glen-weyl-328d8ad088cf

An organization, or group of voter-members, must take upon itself the burden of understanding  any standard measure issued by a democratic system by realizing the utilitarian implications of that vote first Individually and only after that fact, systematically.

This relative position must be staked by the transaction of utility tokens to a proxy who will either:

A) Protract the vote-utility again to yet another Individual or organization, forgoing the risk of realizing the resistance (as defined above) - at no cost to itself. In doing so they must stake assets in the form of payment for labor in any other system they held more valuable than liberty at that time.

Or

B) Realize the remainder of value within the vote based on the current speculation of total resistance by casting it. However, by this act they inherently create a leading indicator to which future voters may speculate on the remaining resistance, and choose to cast their votes accordingly.

These secondary assets are held in custody by consensus and contractually obligated to the originator only so long as the outcome of all votes remain unknown.

These assets are disbursed as payment to the free-market participants of all voting organizations upon the conclusion of a singular vote; even to those who have sold their voting-utility to a proxy, effectively forsaking the liberty to vote for the value of their own production in lieu of.

Further expansion of the mechanics of de-staking during a voting period must be explored, but at its most basic level the value of time spent with collateral backing a specific voter or organization must be called debt, for now.

Debt, in this model, does not function as a restrictive label in any form, which requires even more abstractions from the current socioeconomic model, but I digress.

The spread created by this speculation on a secondary market, which holds the value of the vote to a measurement of the predicted outcome of that vote, should create an index of what may be most simply equated to a Liberty-Utility Index.

This index may be used to determine a dividend value by measuring the consensus of a free market's speculation on the staked utility of each Individual who wishes to produce something other than a vote, backed by the assets that represent that production instead of realizing their own voting utility.

This occurs to all possible votes on a distributed exchange managed by all voters and organizations who value liberty over any other asset continuously, while the real cost of each observable vote to the rest of the constituency remains suspended, or abstracted, until the votes have been counted.

This protracted cost is realized as credit to the proxy voter as a proof of stake in the system without a realized production. This microeconomic function creates a time-as-value utility inherently. There is no abstraction of the entropic-will, or Individual resistance, of the voter before the product of voting itself is realized.

The value of all utility in the system is held relative to the value of the labor of voting, backed by the production of all those who trade their own liberty-utility for utility-production.

The production of a vote therefore has an associated cost, as well as an associated value, depending on the relativistic observation of that value , which remains hidden-yet-speculated-upon until the vote is measured against all other votes.

***

Individuals as Organizations and Vice Versa

A member of an organization is a person or process that wants to participate in a digital group operating on a standardized protocol. A member can belong to multiple organizations that all compete for their systematic utilitarian value.

Any organization starts when a single member joins it, and ends when the last member leaves it. At which latter point, an organization becomes an Individual. The production value of the organizational liberty-utility is held equal to the value of all its individuals when expanded infinitely, or contracted into it's smallest scale, which may never be less than one individual.

Which way this utility adds the most production value to the organization is decided through a process of consensus, ratified further by quadratic funding/voting, and limited to the desires of the group.

The functional limitations of this voting system begin when it cannot do anything to change the structure of the organization, or change the end-value of the tasks or products held within it.

This market operation creates a mechanism for organizations to interoperate based on demand of their utility in globalized economies without sacrificing the standards within the production of that utility as defined by that organization.

Voting to simply exercise the option of liberty with no product outcome is worthless in a globalized economy. The speed of consensus must approach the speed of light in a quantum economic system.

The structure of this market should be maximally free, and minimally governed by any centralized authority, or community which supplants natural systematic authority. Robert Nozick's, Anarchy, State, and Utopia references this call most eloquently,

... Yet Nozick also says that the framework might not have any 'central authority'. Still, the framework is akin to the minimal state because it is an institutional structure that enforces peaceful co-existence among voluntarily formed communities.

A good organization should not have any incentive for a member to leave, and inversely none should exist for a member to join as well.

Free interactions between members should be held to existing utilitarian standards agreed on by most members, which limits can be further defined by a majority of the members in any organization.

The members of the organization can then change the conditions of the internal voting system . Proposing these changes to other organizations requires staking a portion of the assets gained by enacting that vote within their own system prior to creating the means of change being introduced.

Each organization should never hold a comparison between the value of the utility of any other member at a negative value. However, the value of speculation and the encompassing risk-reward ratio can be a negative value.

This clause requires much more expansion by myself and others, but for this experiment, we must assume that one cannot be held as indebted to the system for refusing to vote through the process of abstention; in fact an abstention may hold even more potential value in this proposed system by increasing the variability of predicted resistance.

Conclusion

Finally, the notion of any current government which holds itself to the status of a leviathan to be worshiped, where the markets act as a altar for that worship, must be inherently rejected.

Wherein this proposed system an offer exists to return to the roots of the Lockean state of nature, this translation does not come without the cost of chaos, which is most accurately embraced through the lens of J.S. Mill (Liberty, XVIII: 263),

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develope itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

Therefore, the liberty of each Individual is only a product distribution of the value that is realized after any market assumes control of the end result of that labor .

In this experiment, labor is a liberty-utility function of voting . This production is held against every other product available in any other market which claims to be free within an acceptable range of tolerance; where any Individual or organization distributes a price premium in the form of collateral staked to all laborers who value liberty over production, at least when held upon a utilitarian scale.

Further mechanics, a sort of digital yet distributive version of Robert's Rules of Order, must be examined and proposed to operate as guidance for the earliest forms of these experiments in near-reality.

And yet, based on the foundations expressed above, what happens when the value of the liberty-utility is held in relation to labor that is not equally and totally free? The product of which is offered unto other free-markets with the caveat that the abstraction of its own labor is hidden even still further behind a combined assurance that the product itself is much more valuable than liberty, yet only demanded by others whom consider themselves more free?

I believe the answers to these queries lie somewhere in the concept of custom (Liberty, XVIII: 272),

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement.

Custom will be expanded upon further, as well as some existing economic theorems that may allow for this proposed system to exist outside of my own mind, forced into existence only phenomenologically by others who deem it worthy to ponder the future of a static system that is failing us all now, in real-time.

It may be time to sell tradition itself on the open market, as our perceived liberties have already been offered up to the beast without consent...

Which systems protect the value of liberty? Which tools will allow the most utilitarian slippage from the DISC? All these ideas, and more, will be features of future ponderings.

As for now, thank you for your utility,

***

P.S. The painting used as the header to this writing is attributed to the great artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Introduction

Adopting blockchain technology offers compliance cost and filing time savings for financial institutions serving high risk industries. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) helps to reduce friction while increasing the transparency of shared data in systems that rely on verifying identities to create trusted relationships when disseminating information between traditionally trust-less industries.

There exists various uses for DLT in modern financial industries including pathways for providing banking services to traditionally restricted capital markets as we have seen with remittances. Another optimization based on current standards of modern financial services is the ability of distributed ledger technology to create a new universal business language around shared financial information which is the proposed solution for limiting costs associated with compliance.

A universal standard to communicate metadata associated with transactions between global financial institutions is one of the larger macroeconomic challenges facing rapidly globalizing data systems around the world. As we see more transactions move across borders at a faster rate, the speed as to which the information attached to those transactions must match or exceed the speed of the transaction.

Financial Industry Opportunities Utilizing Blockchain

Blockchain as a technological solution in high risk industries becomes more important as the relationship between money and attached information continue to grow more complex. This relationship will be explained further, but first let's briefly describe the concept of a blockchain.

Blockchain technology is based on a cryptographically secure distributed ledger containing information stored in peer to peer network. Copies of interactions between each participant on the network is kept on the ledger in a near immutable way to limit any single point of failure. The proposed system relies on a validation protocol called a proof which guarantees individual transactions, and the meta data contained about them based on existing records on the ledger are correct and can be shared effectively.

Multiple areas of blockchain technology has seen exposure in the current financial system around the world. The economics of global remittances, Know Your Customer protocols (KYC), and Counter Terror Funding (CTF) or Anti Money Laundering (AML) processes are seeing the impact of utilizing distributed ledgers to store information.

Let’s look at remittances over the last few years as an indicator of the kinds of problems banks are running into in regards to adequately tracking information associated with transactions in a modern globalized economy. Worldwide, an estimated $625 billion (USD) was sent by migrants to individuals in their home countries in 2017. Tracking remittance payments worldwide is difficult because many countries do not track funds that are sent or received.

There are many reasons why the process of tracking money is a complex problem for modern governments. In the scope of this research, the focus on the cost of compliance in tracking financial information and reporting it to each jurisdiction that requires regulatory reporting is the major friction mechanic of any transaction. The process of building a regulatory report is time consuming and expensive because it relies on traditional financial compliance solutions to track the movement of complex digital transactions which are becoming more popular across the globe.

Human capital costs are a large portion of the expenses needed to accurately run compliance checks on money moving through international systems. Managing the flow of liquidity needed to facilitate these types of transfers offers a new set of challenges for financial institutions who attempt to do business overseas in developing markets through remittances and international wire transfers. This stems from the various forms of regulation that overlap and intersect when the process transferring funds begins.

The wording of such regulation might be insufficiently clear or difficult for firms to understand. Sometimes this reflects the challenge of writing a set of instructions that can be understood and implemented by multiple types of public and private firms operating under separate jurisdictions and regulatory structures. This is where KYC and AML information become regulatory requirements so that financial institutions know who is involved in the process. Banks are required by law to process and record data associated with the identities handling the transactions so they can monitor the internal compliance teams to ensure that the information is validated before funds are settled.

The systems that currently act as the compliance layer for banks are built on the utilization of archaic human-capital rich resources and rely on transcribing information across non-standardized databases that can be changed and edited at will by financial institutions who must revisit certain transactions over time to ensure compliance information is maintained for regulators.

Immediately one can see how the prototype blockchain systems being proposed today may offer significant efficiencies in sending information about transactions without centralizing complex processes that commercial firms currently carry out locally. One such feature is being able to understand and interpret regulatory instructions for digital identities and producing logic to generate regulatory reports and distribute information to all financial firms via a DLT platform.

For instance, blockchain can act as a distributed set of technical standards. These rules are agreed upon protocols in which the coded language of regulation will communicate with financial systems. Language standards will be required for how financial firms organize their data before providing it to any proposed blockchain system. The system must also provide an environment for data to be reused across multiple regulatory systems, built to differing standards based on regulatory requirements that they operate in as per existing obligations or limitations associated with existing practices.

However, as previously noted, ensuring regulatory reporting is done correctly has major financial and legal implications for banking firms who must comply with Bank Secrecy Act regulations. Ensuring that correct regulatory reporting can be translated across borders with the money that is moving simultaneously is one of the processes that should be migrated to a DLT platform which may act as significant cost saving tool as these markets continue to scale.

Financial institutions currently have security standards built out to prevent data being accessed or used inappropriately by any one single entity that may have access to a distributed network. Similar universal business language standards can be applied to blockchain without the same costs in head-count and expertise when maintaining information on a distributed ledger can be simplified to a point of near automation if a universal language is used in mind with current financial messaging standards.

One of these standards, ISO 20022 was developed by SWIFT to ease the burden of sharing information around transactions, ISO 20022, “allows communities of users and message development organizations to define message sets according to an internationally agreed approach using internationally agreed business semantics and, whenever desirable, to migrate to the use of a common XML or ASN.1-based syntax.”

Developing modern financial compliance frameworks built on the concept of interoperability and transparency without increasing friction when sharing such information can save time and money when dealing with high risk industries. This concept of universal business language or (UBL) lays the foundation for distributed ledger technology to define new messaging standards in a decentralized way.

Blockchain Enhancing Current Regulatory Processes

In this section the various aspects of digital object tracking are explored within the context of blockchain solutions applied to their unique financial markets. These corporate entities are experimenting with DLT in ways that allows their financial information to help lower friction and access new high risk markets, ultimately lowering costs for their services.

Digital Identity With DLT

Blockchain technology is currently being tested for identity fraud detection through the creation of distributed digital identity networks maintained by the financial ecosystem they service. This is because DLT offers the ability to streamline communication between partitioned databases that can rely on digital signatures to validate interactions between participants on the same ledger.

Bluzelle Networks, a blockchain-based data storage start-up, in 2017 worked with a consortium of three banks in Singapore—HSBC, OCBC, and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group—to test a blockchain platform for Know-your-Customer (KYC) and its effects on internal costs of compliance. The project showed that a blockchain platform would improve efficiency, cut the risk of financial crime opportunities, and increase the interoperability of existing datasets all pointing towards the optimization of information sharing for data rich financial institutions utilizing DLT solutions.

Elsewhere, Norbloc, a Swedish start-up that builds regulatory applications on blockchain platforms, is working with Belgium-based infrastructure provider Isabel Group to build a platform to simplify identity management. Both examples show a continued demand for technology that makes sharing sensitive information over digital channels more effective in increasingly digitized financial systems.

Meanwhile in payments, Mastercard has patented a system for identity and credential protection and verification via blockchain. What does this mean? In the past, financial institutions were often required to make risk management decisions based on limited data, obtainable from a few brokerages and agencies. But in a future built on blockchain, information can be accessed in a compliant way when standardized business communications attached to transactions are the norm.

Digital identities are a great way to build the digital banking future consumers want, while leveraging the payment and identity information already in use by high risk industries.
In the current financial system, digital identity validation is a service provided by a third-party authority that utilizes public information based on previous interactions within a corporations technology stack, for instance an existing database that tracks the money services attached to social media platforms digital identities.

A large social networking company like Facebook may want to connect their platforms private user information with their own proprietary payment processing data to create a living KYC compliance engine. The recent development of the Libra project run from Facebook’s need to optimize their money services business practices when it comes to dealing with their users information in light of Europeans GDPR regulations is one aspect of digital identity experimentation that is creating discussions at every level of government.

Thanks to a combination of technological advances, including the increasing sophistication of smartphones, advances in cryptography, and the advent of the blockchain, it is now possible to build new systems around exchanging identity information such as social media, and existing payment datasets.

Blockchain technology offers the potential for pooling large volumes of data that can be anonymized and protected by the ledger’s encryption protocols. Data carried on a distributed ledger could be accessed without explicit at-the- time permission (customer consent can be granted via pre-programed smart contracts). Information partners theoretically, could view data that has been uploaded by any bank in the financial network without worrying about the accuracy or regulatory parity of such data. The result should be faster decisions, more efficient processes, and the potential for a more informed credit allocation process.

Blockchain Enabled Augmented Data Reporting

The common thread between all of the above mentioned projects is that every regulated financial firm is required to submit data to regulators through regulatory reports. Governments provide the instructions for how financial compliance reports should be built and delivered.

The amount of money services business regulation and regulatory reporting has increased significantly in the decade since the financial crisis. Given this increase in reporting and regulation, the complexity and time it takes firms to manage regulatory reporting has also grown.

Financial firms provide regulators with reports defined in regulation, but regulators also make ad hoc data requests for financial data in the form of audits. FinCEN requires united states based financial institutions to run independent audits to ensure data accuracy over time. A prototype DLT system may reduce duplicate data storage and associated costs for running audits on historical transaction data potentially reducing some data security risks by eliminating erroneous data transfers between firms and regulators when it comes to archived information.

Any KYC data used to generate the compliance reports or fiscal audits would remain with the firms while a trust-less record of transactions could be linked to the banks historical transaction ledger with ease. This means that not only the augmented compliance report would be shared with the regulator, but the information attached to each interaction with the dataset as well.

By making financial data available on demand, fiscal regulators may also store less data in their own digital systems, helping regulatory IT budgets reduce strain on the departments who are tasked with maintaining financial trust, but are restricted to the amount of data they can securely process due to human capital costs. Finally, by executing standardized UBL code within financial firms own digital infrastructures, the fluidity of data, as well as the transparency, is potentially increased while reducing the friction of sharing financial information associated with past processes.

More than a few retail banks are dipping their toes in the blockchain pool based on those proposed savings. Santander, a major EU financial entity for example, worked with California-based Fintech Ripple in 2018 to launch the first blockchain-based money transfer service focused in the global remittance market. This ties to one of the proposed use cases of digital assets, helping reduce the friction associated with cash moving around global markets, while promoting the use of digital applications to track the customer information associated with the movement of those funds.Still, for the retail banking industry to move forward at scale, further proof of value will likely be required.

More validations of distributed ledger technology are seen with each passing day. While we have passively identified three major pain points when it comes to dealing with high risk financial marketplaces— know-your-customer/ID fraud, internal costs of financial compliance, and risk management scoring— more proof in the cost saving potential of all Know-your-customer protocols are critical tools in the battle against fraud, which is a significant and growing challenge. Currently banks lose $15 billion to $20 billion annually from identity fraud alone.

A related issue is money laundering. A report estimates that global anti-money laundering (AML) spending alone exceeded $8 billion in 2017, up 36 percent from 2013. AML headcount increased as much as tenfold at major US banks over the past five years.

Retail banks have made significant efforts to combat fraud, protect data, and prevent money laundering, investing in automation and standardization, introducing real-time information sharing, and building predictive models. Blockchain enables these systems in new and exciting ways.

These distributed ledger technology initiatives have increased efficiency do have significant upside potential but have also led to longer on-boarding times for clients interested in the technology as government regulatory clarification lags behind.

Between that and higher costs, reflecting the significant operating model changes and manual effort required to adjust to new methods around blockchain. Automation and machine learning may be a potential solution. For example, on-boarding or account opening can be done by referencing image based identification, cell-phones can help to physically or digitally sign transactions across the world.

Blockchain-based technology enables physical and digital customers to have their interactions with a financial network securely tracked and near immutably recorded in the form of a digital identity which may be attached to the financial engagement they perform. Similar to how an actual physical fingerprint can be used as a unique identifier to see what a person has touched in the physical world, a digital fingerprint should be established to see how entities touch digital information, especially when it comes to digital transactions.

This data can be safely stored on a distributed ledger and have a verifiable receipt of any reference by any bank in the network. The owner of the digital fingerprint can use it to submit new account applications and prove her identity universally. They could decide which entities can access their data similar to a license model.

In this new system the decentralized blockchain structure eliminates overlapping KYC and AML compliance checks by helping standardize the language in which banks share digital identity authentication information. The on-boarding of a customer need only be done once by use of existing technologies such as mobile phones, fingerprint scanners, and facial recognition technology.

Augmenting Compliance Auditing

We’ve discussed how distributed ledger technology can help augment the way financial institutions access data already stored on their own ledgers, and how standardizing how that data is communicated can act as an additional form of due diligence in future filings or audits.

An additional benefit of blockchain is its basis in encryption which ensures that an entity on the network has access only to the information to which it is entitled. Even if a customer’s file is meant to be transparent, a log should be kept both as to when the change was made and by whom which can be referenced by validators on that network. Transaction audits and compliance surveillance can also be automated more fully when a standardized methodology is agreed upon.

Benefits of the distributed ledger architecture included the ability to provide a secure channel to send codified regulations to multiple firms, to provide a single source of truth for a shared set of facts and a consistent environment that ensured the code ran successfully.

Blockchain technology could bring value in core parts of the digital and retail banking business models. However, retail banks have been slow to engage new firms to build open source and shared solutions, opting for more traditional, internally optimized traditional software solutions. The future of distributed ledger technology faces challenges in terms of scaling, the volatility of digital assets which currently are used to track engagements with distributed systems , and trusting the framework in which information can be shared without giving up competitive advantage.

Conclusion

A blockchain-based universal business language standard around transactions and digital identities may create a new method to communicate financial metadata associated with physical or digital transactions between money services businesses (MSB) and other financial institutions. Eventually, banks and other MSBs can establish a framework for optimized global data sharing systems around the world.

Another optimization based on current standards of modern financial services is the ability of distributed ledger technology to create a new universal business language around shared financial information which is the proposed solution for limiting costs associated with compliance.

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) helps to lower friction while increasing the transparency of shared data in a system that must rely on verifying identities to create trusted relationships when sharing information between traditionally trust-less industries.

- Ponderjaunt

To seek the true value of the individual within a rapidly changing financial system, I will try to comment on the following: how might technologies such as blockchain impact economic policy in the near future?

What role will labor and the perception of human value in production continue to play in global fiscal and monetary policy? Which role does humanity take in a value-exchange system that increasingly does not require humans?

Furthermore, in this piece I only wish to express my own observations on some pathways to a world that embraces a new form of banking using blockchain and Distributed ledger Technology (DLT). Consider this a stream of consciousness exploring possible systems, rather than a piece attempting to convince you of their potentiality.

Establishing Bias

As a precursor, Plato and his republic would despise me. I am a son dependent on the wealth of his father, my skills derivative of a public education based first in achievement and culminated upon by complacency.

Currently, I simply exist in this world and ponder the workings of humanity and the systems it creates. I tell you these things because the bias it creates is imperative to understand if you wish to see a potential future of the global economy as I see it.

Such a future relies on each of us understanding how currency is impacted by the various forms of production seen around the world, and how we as laborers interact with the systems of production. The focus of this writing will be on new concepts of consensus labor, while also commenting on classical ideas towards the objectification and alienation of labor in digital and traditional economies.

Before I explain this potential future, I wish to further explore the idea of consensus — which is important to me surely , but may be even more important to you eventually; for you may base your ideology tomorrow on my writing today, and over time as we come to view the same concepts in the same way, we remove the various bias that would normally prevent us from truly interacting.

This affirmation could continue for each reader until we have all come to some sort of general agreement regarding my worldview in relation to that of yours and those around you. Once this ‘consensus’ in a network has been established, and is trusted by all actors within that network, incredible things can happen. So, as I write of labor of consensus I mean more: the act of coming to agreement around value, which should clarify things further on.

Now that we understand the basic definition of consensus, my personal relation to the global economy is something I wish to discuss in more detail. How you perceive my value is imperative to how others perceive yours, as we explored above. This is the idea of a value of consensus and is the precursor to a new layer of digital interaction which is fundamentally intriguing to me as a political scientist.

Essentially, if our value can be perceived by another to be inherently lower than their own value, while we simultaneously perceive that effect to be compounded in all economies, and the consequences split along geopolitical boundaries based on traditional definitions of labor and civil rights; we must then assume that all markets that currently exist under such perceptions must be inherently biased. They exist to abstract the worker from the value of their labor and to profit on that abstraction.

Biased markets are limited in their functionality as soon as monetary policy begins to blur the lines of class utility within the economy. We see this concept played out in social class revolutions, or between old and new wealth in economic epochal shifts, but does this phenomena translate to digital spaces as well?

These are the kinds of questions that should be explored in the design and development phase of these blockchain technologies, as we have the opportunity to study the impact they will have on the world as adoption increases.

It is my own personal theory that we are in fact exploring these concepts in real time through a sort of living experiment within economics, I’ll explain further down, but first:

Establishing Bias: Continued

What mechanisms exist to allow me — a dependent, a philosopher, a man in a machine of modern monetary policy that can live on subsidized education — access to loans and equity from the government to pursue my education, while another across the globe can struggle to maintain adequate health standards for their family while working nonstop to exist in a rigged labor economy without any financial assistance from their government?

Furthermore, how can we ever hope to interact as two extreme economic examples within the same global economy without abstracting the true value of either of our production efforts?

While yes, blockchain is a technology that brings us closer together as global citizens, we still do not share the same concept of value as producers in the global economy. Because, if we can exist in the same ecosystem and create the same valuable contributions in different forms, that does not automatically mean that we share the same potential value for the production at any given time.

This is due to costs of production for the labor, and the cost of access to technology and networks in some parts of the world, where near constant use of digital tools is limited or impossible.

External network constraints like taxes, wages, and local economic issues like weather and even politics all play a part in determining the value of labor within a traditional economy. By decreasing the value of labor, or increasing the costs to access to the centralization of production, the value of the labor is centralized to the owners of the means of production.

But why does the value of labor matter in terms of global interoperability? It allows markets access to greater liquidity. And why should it not be centralized? Because labor is abstracted and its value is taken by those who control access to the markets.

Cost of Production

As long as access to production technology is controlled by those who would enrich themselves by their use, the concept of digital labor will fall into the same socioeconomic pitfalls of the previous generations of humanity. We will be forced to reward labor disproportionately based on the infrastructure of the past.

Where the labor of the population is undervalued based on the scarcity of access to technology, and control of the means of production by a centralized few, economic progress for the populous is undermined.

Consensus towards the true value of the labor produced in these markets is impossible until the the production can be assessed organically. This must be accomplished without bias extracting value before production has even commenced.

In order to exist in an age where labor is considered equal in terms of potential value, we must embrace a new architecture that gives all the labor performed within it the ability to be valuable before the point of production.

Online engagement is a great example; for instance, I can read an article and pay for the author as I scroll through the content. I can stream a song by the byte and pay each artist individually.

The author does not have to wait for me to reach the end of their writing to extract the true value of their words. The musician does not need a label to extract the value of their art.

And neither should the reader expect to pay for a service they wont fully utilize the preservation of words on paper, or a listener pay for the production of a physical disk.

In this rewarded phase of pre-production, the author and artist can receive compensation in real time based on their labor. Not the result of their labor after its been abstracted by other means.

The value of the book lies in the words not the binding. So to does the value of the labor lie in the production not the result.

While, the reader is rewarded by receiving valuable content for a reasonable price, and the listener is rewarded by getting access to music on their devices without sacrificing storage.

None of the parties expect a full labor contract to be completed before either of them receive the value the inherently got from this perceived interaction.

How can I find value from a book without reading it? How might I know if I like a song without hearing it? It’s an organic value transaction that only needs to be tracked in consensus in order to be realized truly, without abstracted value deflation.

When I think of engaging in digital economies, I know my actions to be inherently valuable within that digital space, regardless of how much labor I’ve produced in the present. By existing in a digital space I create value.

Therefore, I should be able to realize the value from my engagement at any time as long as the actual labor is eventually performed. This is where my primary argument for ‘Consensus Labor’ resides:

Consensus Labor is the idea that a task or contract exists in a perpetual state of dynamic value as agreed upon by the consensus of free market which remains unobstructed by the sociopolitical bias in which the network participants independently reside. This labor’s value can be realized as production commences because the perpetual state of dynamic value can be adjusted at any time during production.

In light of this concept, I argue that there must be forms of my labor which are left unrealized in my current economic system. Where my value as a digital denizen is misrepresented by a restrictive economic process of evaluating the total domestic value of production without taking true labor into account.

In this abstraction, the value of the individual laborer is lost by being held to the combined value of all potential individuals laborers within any operational economy; they are awarded with cash connected to artificial monetary inflation that the laborers themselves cannot control.

This is why iPhones are made in China, and yet the factory workers who manufacture the product find it hard to afford an iPhone themselves.

The value of the product of their labor has been abstracted by the bias of their inherent national economic policy. The production of the phone, has more value for the centralized controllers of that production, then the phone has for the external economic market participant.

In this scenario the laborer becomes a commodity. Not the phone. The phone is the result of production, but it’s value pales in comparison to the value of the laborer. Which reveals the true transaction is in labor not the goods that labor produces.

If someone can transact within global markets without being affected by the bias of those markets the transaction has a higher value inherently as we’ve laid out. This is also reflected in the stability of economies affected by war and other domestic disruptions like natural disaster.

If the markets of that specific economy are taken offline, then new markets must be sourced before the gap in production ripples through the global economy. But it is not the raw goods that must be replaced, it is the raw labor.

Blockchain replaces human digital labor with automated processes. It also sources global markets for the transaction of goods and services, and does it without the bloat of managing the flow of capital around the world by human means which extracts value artificially. Embracing blockchain technology will continue to erase the abstraction of the value of production.

And yet, it is not the economic policy towards raw goods that affects global costs, its the policy that affects the labor which produces those goods and services which can affect costs the most. The ineffectiveness of tariffs in modern economics is a great indicator of this flawed concept.

Labor holds the true value in the economy. Proliferation of goods and services means nothing if the lower cost of those same goods and services comes from the increased human cost of the labor. Because in that objectification the true value of the laborer is actually lost.

To understand it, let’s return to how I personally exist within the economy. Perhaps after which, you can relate it to how you exist within the economy and further strengthen how it relates to your personal experience within this developing global economy.

For example:

I am a student of political science, I study the world and its people. To do so I subsist on subsidized student loans, on the borrowed value of others worth — a beggar of time and space. In this role, I can choose to labor and to learn, or do neither. I can choose to produce and extract simultaneously, or not. In this role I have become a dependent of society. Essentially free to be free, if only by the means of others.

This existence reeks of worthlessness to the old world, and is at the same time of unlimited potential to a new economy; How can I be worth enough to be loaned money to educate myself to the same value of worth of the loan?

If I do not produce, I have no worth; and yet to be lent such vast sums of cash implies I have worth. This worth without labor is a fundamental benefit of consensus labor. It is an agreed upon contract of worth based on potential labor in a free market.

This consensus of value is also proof that my academic production holds more potential worth than any other labor possible in my economy. For control of the means to access that form of production, a university degree, has now been taken over by the United States Government. They value my education production more than any commodity production in the American economy because I do not have access to commercial loans with the same ease or limiting conditions.

Labor Production

To further explain the concept of potential labor we must look at the various forms of labor in the past: in the old world I could extract knowledge from a collective system of learning spanning the entire world and its people through time, while also producing something for that world to use in return through a trade or skill — this is labor production.

The creation of something-from-something: turning a stone into a statue, a book into a dissertation, or plant oils into art. The additional creation of social classes allows the low cost labor market to exist; there must be makers and takers in an exchange system which values the labor of each independent actor at a different rate based on the skill they have learned over time, or the resource they extract.

In that exchange of rates lies my value, yours, and all others. An entity must be entrusted to conduct this exchange of labor production by creating a currency which allows greater liquidity and interchangeability.

The real value of the currency is normally measured only in the labor produced by that economy.

In other words, the entire economy is based on trust, in which a centralized entity is authorized to establish the rate of exchange, and is using relevant market data of the labor economy to do so. It may also fully dictate the value of all independent laborers within that economy by rewarding them with cash based on the product of their labor.

External to this centralized entity empowered to create a currency lies the various laws and regulations created by oversight agencies to protect the future value of labor by further methods of abstraction.

This is done in the formation of secondary markets where the flow of value is only barely related to the actual production of original laborer. It is in this concept that humanity conceivably exploits the value of others by abstracting their labor into markets where they eventually lose access to the markets and the primary value contained within them.

The financial system of the modern world was created to protect the value of the production within a society through the abstraction of that labor into cash and protecting that purchasing power of that cash globally with military power.

It is in this abstraction that I may equate my dependency, my role as a student living in debt, to the labor of a man who toils in a field, or works in a factory and how the exchange of such value creates a global economy.

In these separate markets, there exists an exchange rate that is controlled by a wealth protected by might. The value of the laborer opposite of me is missing the abstraction of might in order to make his value equal mine in a free market.

He does not have the power to argue against a larger economic entity that his value in relation to his production is equal to mine.The regulation of the rate of exchange is based loosely in law, and strictly in perception.

We have established one of these perceptions to be military based, yet there exists many others. While each domestic society maintains their own unique perception, governments may work together to enact laws that balance the operation of their economies between borders. This inter-operation is based on trust.

We trust governments control the rate of exchange through specific mechanisms called banks which, again we trust. These banks manage the flow of cash in relation to labor as described by the treasury.

Back to my specific example: while there are many forms of lending through banks, student loans are most evident in the control of an exchange rate between the abstracted production of labor and the value of the individual to the economy.

If I take out a loan to learn, the knowledge itself becomes dependent on the labor used to extract it, a labor that I am indebted to perform. So that if I borrow money to learn, in order to be of more value to society, I am already indebted to society by attempting to learn.

The labor has become objectified and therefore its value has to be realized or else the worker is a slave. I have assigned myself a debt-future contract at a leveraged margin based on the value of my life as determined by the potential value I may create for my nation.

By not realizing the value of that specific form of labor as production in education the concept of ‘human capital’ is reduced to ‘human commodity’, and the student must accept themselves as a slave to the system. Instead of production laborers they have become alienated objects.

Essentially if this concept is realized at a macroeconomic level, a certain portion of the youth population can be used as a resource to farm debt in order to print more cash to hedge organic inflation in the domestic economy for the remaining population.

As student loan debt increases the ability to print more cash also increases, which in turn allows more loans to be given out, and even more debt accumulated. This new labor mechanic is a futures play where labor is tied to the value of production and not goods or services it creates. The labor of education is valuable, but only when realized in the future.

Therefore as a student, I exist as a time-slave within a labor based economy that produces no current value, only future value. I am the object in which the value of currency is created from debt attached to my present being which can only be realized by the value created by my future self; a self that through further objectification could cease to exist as a producer.

The real value in labor production is created when you blur the lines between human capital and human commodity. Where human capital investment is not a priority and labor is rewarded based on centralized control economic prosperity is limited. To reverse these limitations simply decentralize access to human capital potential.

In a centralized system control of rewards is dictated by an oligarchy that’s interest is in maintaining the value of the commodity in relation to the supply of the labor. They do not want the free market to dictate the value of that same labor without controlling the flow of cash that is created by that labor.

However, as the world continues to globalize and we reach new levels of economic interdependence, we start to see that fiscal policy that limits foreign economic interaction, restricts loans with high interest rates, while inflating the currency to maintain their own ledgers only disrupts the organic growth potential that technology brings to human economies.

Technologies like blockchain which help to decentralize access to production value become increasingly attractive to the creditors and debtors alike as themselves as they start to understand their own inherent value.

As production labor adopts technology that allows its own value to be less abstracted by friction based services it helps build a new framework for the rest of the world to also adopt the same technology.

This network effect then allows liquidity to take over, and gravity to take over after that; like how many little streams joining together creates the mighty river. Our human civilizations always seem to sprout up next to those specific geographic points with access to liquidity, seeing as it provided the easiest access to the flow of new goods and ideas.

But that is all of the old world. The new world lies in the value of consensus labor. The same rivers exist and new ones sprout up every day, they are just digitized. the technologies that allow humans to transact with digital goods and services in a free market are going to be the same tools that change the world fundamentally from this point on. Understanding how they work will be pivotal.

The civilizations of the future will be built along new digital liquidity coordinators. Yet, the one major difference between future society and that of that past is that the value of the production in the future economies will be measured at the individual level with technology enabled by distributed ledgers.

Consensus Production

And once again, back to my specific academic example — the western example, the typical United States story: the unrealized labor of the student in the labor production economy is what gives rise to the possibility of a consensus production based economy.

My ability to take a loan out from the government to receive an education is an economic relationship built based on trust and validated by standardized academic labor. An agreed upon future value of production of which a conditional contract is built upon is the basis of my higher education and its potential value.

To elaborate further, consensus production is a form of imaginary labor based on a an abstracted time relationship; the labor does not need to be realized immediately in order for the value to be realized immediately. Because of this, most frictions within a labor production economy are not as present when abstracted to a consensus economy.

There are three important aspects of consensus production that are required to grow into a consensus economy or ‘Internet of Value’: scalability, liquidity, and Interoperability. Scalability ensures that as the volume of consensus labor increases, the exchange rate experiences the least amount of volatility possible.

Liquidity is generated in stable growing markets as the risk associated with friction in trust is reduced or removed. Finally, Interoperability creates seamless transitions between various types of consensus labor (as production labor is phased out) contracts and their associative secondary markets in the form of raw goods, unrealized labor, services, and even bonds.

Because I exist with enough trust within my economic system, I am given access to fiscal tools that others would not have if they didn’t have they same trust from their own economic comptrollers. What happens when trust can be established through engagement across borders?

If I build value by increasing trust within a decentralized network through my consensus production, then access to financial tools through that same system are increasingly made available. If I create global value through education, can I not then source the financing of that production globally?

As more potential value is created by sacrificing production labor for consensus labor due to the costs of production being lowered, the value of the labor itself increases fundamentally. It creates the ability for concepts like education to be funded based on the potential value they will bring a future economy.

As more trust is established within this new rapidly growing production network, more consensus is required between trusted nodes to validate the new market participants; the trust builds upon the consensus of the production within the network, also known as validation.

This validation is imperative because it rejects the previous production labor concepts of controlled and abstracted value by having a centralized entity affirm or reject the transaction. A gatekeeper that can create arbitrary bias.

Decentralized validation requires consensus to affirm a transaction, and if the centralization of the validation does not increase the cost of production, while simultaneously not introducing bias centralized controllers, the entire economy becomes more valuable.

Now some form of centralization is necessary as a fail-safe to vet the validity of the new participants, as validators join and leave the network, an initial trust-relationship must be established and strengthened from some entity that has custodianship of the data on the network.

Once enough primary relationships have been established, these new validators can further decentralize the system by repeating the process to bring new partners on. Overtime the custodian ship itself can be decentralized and abstracted to fully erase the potential of tampering with a ledger.

All of this combines to create a decentralized transaction ledger that is immutable, as not one centralized authority has the ability to accept or reject transactions within that ledger without establishing consensus from the other validators. Bias is not introduced, labor can be realized at any time, and yet value is moving instantly and infinitely faster over time.

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I want to explore some mechanisms that have been tied to mass strategic adoption of technology, also known as critical mass network theory, within a global crypto and fiat economy to perhaps shed an alternative perspective on the power and value of what Ripple may become within that system. It all starts with understanding how banks will use xRapid to create value for the entire Ripple network. This concept is based around making complex and archaic systems more efficient for the customers and clients they service.

Do you agree, “that the value of a network is positively affected by the number of geopolitical dispersed locations it serves and the number of its users” [1]? If you accept the notion that ideas spread more rapidly when there are dynamic sources for adaptation globally, you may assume that one of the only conceivable avenues for Ripple to truly reach its full potential is to focus on strategic network adoption instead of mass speculative adoption like we are seeing currently with other coins like BTC.

Mass adoption in this sense refers to the general cryptocurrency community as the consumer base which would have an opinion on Ripples value. Lend me some of your time to explore a theory as to why Swell, the recent Escrow lockup and, the remaining xRapid strategic partnership announcements are actually a massive tactical advantage over any other altcoin project in 2017. If we are starting to get hyperbolic I apologize, but the scale of this strategy is truly something to marvel at, so bear with me.

Recently, there has been an intense scrutiny of gains, or the perceived lack of, by the community on many crypto platforms around the web. I would urge those naysayers to consider the global game of chess that is being waged right now. There is a strategic avenue to out maneuver perceived market leaders like BTC, LTC, ETH by exploring existing crypto market caps, and how they might be affected by new money entering in 2018.

My hypothesis is centered around the sleeping giants of the industries opening their eyes to the optimization potential of blockchain technology in Q2 and Q3. When companies like Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, and Alibaba look into the rapidly maturing world of block chain technology how will they judge the current market leaders?

I believe that these types of mass volume economic players will look for the same three things that allowed them to overtake traditional competitors in their verticals:

> Liquidity

> Stability

> Scalability

Liquidity provides less friction in a globalized economy which in turn promotes rapid adoption and value for the network. Stability provides pathways for exits and entry from fiats, and allows for large volume batch transactions to move quickly and transparently around the world. Finally, scalability allows for the previous two aspects of a successful blockchain technology to compound growth and allow for critical mass market reach to be achieved.

For example, “if a bank decides to adopt a particular electronic payment technology, this benefits other banks that use the technology, because banks that already participate can then directly exchange payments with one more institution. Moreover, because electronic payments products are technologically intensive, they may be characterized by informational networks, where the value of the good increases with more users because user familiarity lowers costs. If present, network externalities may give rise to a market failure where the good is underprovided” [2].

That last line is imperative to understanding the real value of the Ripple package as a whole in the future: as more banks adapt xRapid, the entire network becomes exponentially more attractive to more institutions who are looking for a stronger indication of the move from traditional fiats through RippleNet. It eventually becomes necessary for businesses, financial institutions, and even governments who would then find a need to acquire access to such features. To a point which ensures that populations have continued access, that is not at any point ‘unprovided’, for fear of market capitulation. That right there was the basis for all my personal research into this project and why Ripple technologies are so impressive.

xRapid liquidity costs are going to become very attractive at high volumes which is something that will be talked about over the next 12 months as various systems across every major financial sector are tested within it. I’m especially excited to see what happens with Cuallix and US-MXN cross border payments in 2018.

Increased liquidity means less barriers to entry for new on-boarding institutions which promotes more rapid growth for the entire network. With this critical mass approach, Ripple will obtain a rapid adoption rate, even more so than BTC in respect to application and utility based integration around the globe.

In fact, the positive public opinion for XRP will only reveal itself when consumers come to depend on the features of it’s platform. Before then it’s pure speculation as to why it is better or worse than any other crypto based offering. However, I do believe the key to Ripples long term success will be traditional financial institutions leveraging the technology to increase effectiveness of their individual platforms. Because Ripple is the only coin where central banks have any inkling of ‘FOMO’ (Fear Of Missing Out), especially due to the Escrow capped disbursements. Banks will continue to watch what the Ripple platform can do and the more they see the benefits of it, the harder it will be to ignore the glaring issues with current solutions and crypto-competitors. The recent XRP Escrow was massively important towards this end and is a topic that actually revolutionized modern capitalism, but I’ll save that rant for another day…

It is also worth mentioning that Ripples fintech summit, Swell was positioned as to compliment its traditional rival Swift’s Sibos keynotes, specifically with how Ripple could approach the same problems much more effectively and at a lower cost and increased transparency. This was designed to attract adoption interest at the highest tier of economic liquidity on the planet, the banking conglomeration.

These tactics are not to alienate the the masses of ‘Ripples Hodlrs’ (Hodls are a meme-speak version of Holding an established position). In fact, I believe the bank parleys are an interesting invitation into the world of volume liquid asset transfers, of which Tech Crunch founder Michael Arrington, and his 100 million USD XRP exclusive crypto hedge fund will undoubtedly take advantage of.

Current holders will essentially have bought into the global high stakes poker tables of Nostro Account Consolidation with a royal flush. That aforementioned link is basically, “50 tips on how not to lose a billion dollars in the maze of the global monetary hegemony”, of which a select few will find great humor and others will find great confusion.

Ultimately, while the romantic ideas of some of the more ardent voices in the cryptocurrency community suggest that centralized projects are antagonistic to the growth of real “decentralized” coins, I would suggest a moment to consider the following: in order for a economically decentralized future to even become possible there has to be a massive campaign to educate the public consumer base to the benefits of that decentralized system.

Not to mention that Ripple and their clear road map promotes a more pure interpretation of transparency and decentralization than Bitcoin’s rapidly centralizing core development team which is trying to maintain the coins value even as it bastardized the original intended use.

Bitcoin, a digital asset, has gained ever-increasing public clout as futures are listed and the short is held at bay. BTC is becoming that instructive vehicle that the masses need to learn. CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate (BRR) is basically a torch to light the way for an entire older generation that needs traditional economic validation before jumping into a new market.

Essentially Bitcoin is educating the masses on the fundamental aspects of blockchain technology. And while it provides great speculative value short term, is there any evidence of an initial technology offering maintaining its dominance in a rapidly growing, technologically competitive marketplace?

Meanwhile, Ripple is going after the same entities that have time and time again created fundamental change globally through pure economic methodology. In order to increase overall adaptation, banks rely on actual equations to determine the profitability and risk of introducing new electronic payment systems across their networks [4].

If Ripple leverages the profitability of blockchain adaptation at the global banking level they can take on the speculative mass adoption strategies of the Bitcoin campaign by simply outmaneuvering most of their competition with a highly profitable technology that solves liquidity problem much of the masses were completely unaware of. Thus obtaining critical mass and becoming the catalyst for global crypto adaptation, just like the same banks ushered in global adoption of ATM and other electronic payment technologies in the past.

Currently, Ripple is listed as result number 5 on the front page of Google with their pitch for “Cost Cutting” within global interbank settlement systems. When you consider how much noise in the general crypto environment, it’s kind of easy to forget the trillions of dollars in existing infrastructure that is looking for that last bit of grease for an old machine as it’s disassembled and rejuvenated for the future economy that is much more interconnected and much more rapid.

To me, it’s intriguing to even have the opportunity to hold an asset that most central banks, and world governments will want to buy soon to ensure a smooth transition of funds that are moving across their geo-political systems. More dependence means more value for the entire network which will promote an age of economic spurred globalism and promote rapid technology advances in the worlds developing nations.

When this centralized adoption strategy is proven to be more effective and efficient, the market will embrace the new technology laden with incentives to ease the burden and risk of on-boarding into the system, knowing that any new partner exponentially increases the value of the asset across the entire network over time. India is leading the charge in the realm of state sponsored transition to digital assets, and it makes a lot of sense why there is a Ripple office in Mumbai.

There remains a clear difference in the strategy, and the effective approach of these varying cryptocoins and their penetration into the global economy. Ripples recent escrow has proven their ability to do EXACTLY what their entire project is based around. A flawless execution of a 15 billion USD transfer of 55 billion XRP into escrow accounts which will control the liquidation of the remaining XRP over the life of the ledger.

I believe those with the foresight into hodling these specific encrypted keys to to a new digital kingdom of rapid asset transfers will be the same people that benefit from a system that requires access to mass liquidity.

The more liquidity the market enjoys the more it will come to depend on it for growth and 2018 will be a big year for organized finance in almost every sector in the world.

Thanks for the read.

[1,3] Saloner, Garth; Shepard, Andrea. (1992, April). Adoption of Technologies with network effects an empirical examination of the adoption of automated teller machines. http://www.nber.org/papers/w4048.pdf. Page 2, 11

[2,4] Gowrisankaran, Gautam; Stavins, Joanna. NETWORK EXTERNALITIES AND TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION: LESSONS FROM ELECTRONIC PAYMENTS (2002, May) . http://www.nber.org/papers/w8943.pdf. Page 8, 14

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