Ideas to keep Maidsafe Net & Safecoin as open as possible

Autonomi Network Token (incl (e)MAID)
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(sorry, multiple updates, title changes- thank you to the admins for the ability to change titles)

Start with Maidsafe Net & Safecoin

  1. Time based Safecoin payments to every end user- supports their micro contributions to app developers. Meant to be a primary means of distribution to developers. Payout to end users indexed to the value of global gross attention.

  2. End users make Safecoin micropayments (contributions) for future works to developers of open systems whose products they like as they use those products. This isn’t a donation system because the money is meant to fuel an open systems cooperative economy where the money is more efficient. This is a no strings, minimum coercion, minimum friction arrangement. This maximizes the discriminatory power of end users. Contribution is completely voluntary (no suggested retail) as is the amount although a default setting might up increment a given user’s micro payment increment if time based funds accumulate. Auto micro payments are avoided- some users might get around to the seeding task only yearly, but they’d be working with good accumulations and their choices would be personal and based on inspired use. Honest systems take money exclusively from their end users and avoid multiple masters sponsorship style conflicts of interest that corrupt society at large. 1% seeding of Safecoin for Devs is also an end user seeding.

  3. Honest,transparent, open search and trending completely free of ads-sponsors-tracking with a reputation system that filters out sites with coercive elements of any kind i.e. modal elements, scroll manipulations, back/forward button manipulations. This gets rid of the conflicts of interest. Sites that had any kind of agency, premium (profit by restricting access) or limited time offering would also be filtered. Word of mouth works with honest trending there is no products placement as it would indicate stealth sponsorship. These coercive elements would be deemed acts of censorship and filtered out (search is after all a filter that filters results you don’t want.) This is a spam free, noise free network as opposed to a system that runs on spam and democracy nullifying sponsorship. This would require culture and education but its in line with open systems values.

  4. The open hardware and open software of the network would be completely end user owned and controlled (in the open systems sense) where the end user has total control over the end user interfaces- no modal anything. No apps with Adobe style manipulations, they’d be down voted and filtered out. The challenge here is to make an open mesh phone with as much power, bandwidth, efficiency and storage as possible- optimized for Maidsafe. Adjunct hardware could include mesh nics and free space optical and solar kits all open of course. Tech that can leverage interference may be able to turn mesh into something that is more like mobile fiber. Hopefully open phones become as cheap and efficient as solar calculators.

  5. In a sense a virtual economy would only be constrained by attention as such is it not a normal economy being relatively free of scarcity in important ways. Relative to attention and usage there is still enough risk of failure to keep it interesting and provide for challenging obstacles. There may be some far fetched notions like phones competing with data centers and bits competing with food but its probably still a good candidate for the exemplary core for the general economy and what the general economy will come to resemble as technology progresses. It should be irrevocably open in its workings.

A note on farming attention for mind share. It might be that a DAO or app is set up to redirect micro contributions to other end users as an incentive to grow its use or mind share. My concern here is that it devolve into quasi employment or encourage tolls. Don’t want to foster dependence or money flowing in the wrong direction. Let such redirects go to the general flow of time based micro payment(contributions) for all users. These are an attentional equivalent and they ensure the influence flows in the bottom up direction that is compatible with power sharing.

Not sure if this open approach is a step toward a resource based economy or would help replace income lost in the transition from state monopoly capitalism for ordinary people or the well off, but it may provide resilient communication that could be basic to those efforts.

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The only way to discover the best use is by scientific method. Trial and error.

I’m in favor of micropayments and microtransactions. Every link you click should cost Safecoin. Every valuable character you type should earn Safecoin.

This would allow you to do access control as well using tokens. If the user does not have the token they do not get access. So if there is a safesite then it can charge per minute, it can charge and reward different users with different levels of access in accordance to how much Safecoin they are willing to pay.

But I think using Safecoin in this way is inefficient. An even better way is to let each site operator have their own token which represents access to their specific Safesite. Example if you have a blog on SAFE Network and you want to make it profitable then in order to access your blog everyone has to buy your token which acts as the ticket.

This same ticket infrastructure could work for anything. You buy a ticket to access different portions of the SAFE web. You buy tokens to access different decentralized applications. You earn tokens by using decentralized applications and by contributing valuable content to or using safesites.

As long as everyone can earn and spend it works. The collaborative open economy works but only to a point. People don’t really get paid for “time” because you cannot really define time as anything important. That is like saying people should get paid for numbers of measurement.

People get paid for attention. Attention and time are not the same thing.

A machine which doesn’t live or die has no true sense of what time is but it can that a lot of humans pay attention to certain things or want attention given to certain things.

Attention is something you pay to others. Others must earn your attention. Cryptocurrency can enable you to sell your attention.

How much attention should cost has to be left up to the free market but it should at least be enough to be sustainable. So like you said it would probably have to be enough that everyone can use their attention to farm with so they can buy tokens, shares in decentralized apps, and contribute to the economy.

I don’t think Safecoin is going to solve all of these problems. I think for the underlying wealth the Safecoin is a good commodity.

I think your intentions are right but you aren’t explaining why businesses will be interested in purchasing attention if there isn’t an advertising capability.

Without attracting businesses to SAFE Network it’s just going to be a nerd playground. Nothing is wrong with that but that isn’t going to create a community or build an economy.

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This should be the other way around. Users should get paid for testing and using products. Otherwise there will be no income to the user to enable them to buy future products.

Think of it like this, if we are in a jungle and there is a famine where all the prey animals start starving and dying out then what happens to the predators who must live off of the prey animals?

The prey animals must live off of the land. If the land isn’t producing enough food to sustain the prey population then this affects the ecosystem in such a way that the predator population starts starving and must hunt other predators until eventually all the animals are wiped out.

Predators like businesses require prey to survive. In this case I’m using the word prey to mean fuel/food source to decentralized apps. Fuel in our context would be Safecoin or the token representing shares in the decentralized app.

In order for the decentralized application to sustain itself and grow it requires users. It cannot get these users to feed it if it consumes them without leaving a way for users to grow themselves. To ensure that it can always grow it must be able to live off the land (earn Safecoins), live off the users (get paid in shares of it’s own DAC tokens), and also give back to the users which improve it’s capability or chances of sustainable survival.

For example builders can build apps and receive Safecoin and this would be like builders living off the land of SAFE Network. Farmers also live off the land of SAFE Network. The problem is the users who are not farmers or builders must provide attention to SAFE Network to become economically useful.

Decentralized applications must use their “pollen” to attract the users attention

This could be considered a function of the builders but I would say if we provide Safecoin for attention it’s not as efficient as letting each decentralized application have it’s own token which it uses to reward attention.

The decentralized apps would advertise themselves according to an algorithm and attract attention using their share/token reward incentives (similar to how flowers use pollen to attract bees).

The decentralized application cannot grow if it does not attract as much attention to it as possible. It also cannot grow if it is not given fuel in the form of either resources like Safecoin or tribute to the shareholders (who are in this case some of the earliest users of the decentralized app).

The result of this is that you’d have something like what we now call a “middle class” individual who can get by just by testing apps and being first to try new innovations. These people are critical because they will be the ones who tell their friends about the cool new app in order to increase the value of their own shares and support their income.

This sort of decentralized app forms a symbiotic relationship with the user. The decentralized app essentially pays the user for paying attention to it, and it can pay the user for bringing more attention to it because the earliest users have shares. It’s the same sort of self-fulfilling prophecy mechanism which Bitcoin and altcoins use to grow. The difference here is that there would be no need for having to mess around with fiat exchanges.

If you don’t have fiat you can farm with your computing resources or with your mind. This would mean you wouldn’t even need to directly interact with the fiat economy for lift-off.

On the other hand you should still in my opinion court businesses. Some businesses want to advertise and some users want to get paid steady income because they have monthly bills to pay. Additionally not all businesses will be traditional businesses so a decentralized application must have some way to tell the world that it exists and therefore you must create some sort of mailing list or some mechanism to make people sell their attention.

So for that reason you cannot remove choice from the user with regard to how to sell their attention.

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@luckybit

I am nervous about anything that would allow profit by restricting access, that to me would fall under the expanded definition of spam and get filtered by community moderated search.

In the current system the tiny minority capitalist has access to everything and claims to right to take by virtue of the returns to concentration and the ability to socialize loss and really has almost no risk and can consolidate power on a schedule.

I want open unenclosed society, locks and tracking are part of enclosure. I see open systems taking over. To me we flip the current situation where the base of the entire pyramid takes the position formerly occupied by the capitalist and we don’t really have to do the tracking. We don’t really have to worry too much about the conversion of work (time/space/energy) to attention or the converse because end users will fund by dispersing time accrued safe coin to the open source organizations that best serve their own estimation of their interests.

It was always interesting to me that we had this capitalist overseer middle man class that loved to associate itself with founding or innovation that was supposed to steward society through technological progress but was always confused and tended to argue that its own greed is what best served society.
We ended up with cars designed to break on schedule and 14 trucks of waste per truck of product. We are a long, long way from true cost or a resource based society.

In the proposed system there is minimal tracking just time based dispersing of safe coin followed by their handing it over to open organizations that best meet their needs and without strings- it’s always a bet on the people providing the service, it supplies an income which they use in service of their own attention as they see fit. This aligns the interests of buyers and sellers (also in the search approach by removing the sponsor middlemen and countless tracking regimes. It’s very close to Jaque Fresco’s picture of unlocked universal fabbers or vending machines for every source where people take as much as they need but with awareness of ecology. These are more cooperative than competitive and beyond blindness of the free market. The competitive market will always produce a victor who becomes unresponsive but able to break the function of the market. It becomes supply side which is to say increasingly useless.

Also, as we begin to consider true cost, I don’t think the focus remains on profit which is an abstraction that often runs counter to mutual gain, that is profit can very much come to one part at a lost to every other party. Profit can very much run on successively building and burning down facilities. Also I am not alone in not wanting the same lines of power that go all the way back to the European dynasties to
retain any kind of exceptional power- it’s time to put an end to any kind of feudal sensibility, survival demands it. The whole essence of capitalism was enclosure and profiting from power differential as in boss/employee. Notice the open in open systems.

I don’t know that the supplying organizations or even DACs are businesses or profit seeking mechanisms, they don’t do profit for profits sake as that’s a distraction that doesn’t track costs and externalities accurately. So its been fine to imagine what comes after the state and corporation but this is what comes after the business and its busy-ness for the sake of busy-ness. It’s my sense that society for the sake of business was never society and we can remove the risk that business represents.

Notice the internet fight right now, firms trying to do the no value added justification for increasing profit. This is the typical enclosure gig of restricting access to justify profit. Some will get there faster and inevitably others will get their slower as a result and really it will be prioritizing spam and commons destroying sponsorship.

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@luckybit

This is a bit chopped up and may flow like non sequitur. Sorry.

The bee references sound a bit like Mandeville’s “Fable of the Bees” or private vices, public good. As for chicken and egg there were 500 developers before way before the prospect of end users.

Warren said:
End users make Safecoin micropayments for future works to developers of open systems whose products they like as they use those products. This isn’t a donation system because the money is meant to fuel an open systems cooperative economy where the money is more efficient."

Lucky bit said: “This should be the other way around. Users should get paid for testing and using products. Otherwise there will be no income to the user to enable them to buy future products.”

I’d rather everything be open and accessible from the start. I like the open systems model. If some wouldn’t be able to pay on their own if left to their own devices or they don’t contribute adequately and it results in a bit of slippage and inefficiency- well that I think is more than justified by global access for everyone. This is quite appropriate I think for virtual items and ideas. And as we advance that must be the core because energy is malleable.

“For example builders can build apps and receive Safecoin and this would be like builders living off the land of SAFE Network. Farmers also live off the land of SAFE Network. The problem is the users who are not farmers or builders must provide attention to SAFE Network to become economically useful.”

But to me its not really useful attention if its coerced. The end user must be free to direct their own attention. I don’t think we disagree on that, its just that I don’t think locks and gradations of locks and premium and product placement and all of that is necessary. It think of any push as spam or noise in volition. I always laugh when I see junk mail where they start off with misrepresenting who they are on the envelope- oh yes I want to do business with them after they start off with a lie. Trust is vital to open exchange wherease coercion (manipulation of any kind) quickly erodes it.

I see that we both see a crucial role for word of mouth.

"If you don’t have fiat you can farm with your computing resources or with your mind. This would mean you wouldn’t even need to directly interact with the fiat economy for lift-off. "

That’s been part of my assumption. I think fiat brings with it the existing order and that’s not change.

“On the other hand you should still in my opinion court businesses. Some businesses want to advertise and some users want to get paid steady income because they have monthly bills to pay. Additionally not all businesses will be traditional businesses so a decentralized application must have some way to tell the world that it exists and therefore you must create some sort of mailing list or some mechanism to make people sell their attention.
So for that reason you cannot remove choice from the user with regard to how to sell their attention.”

Removing choice from the end user would be the last thing I would want. But to me the end user is not impoverished, not even from the start. On the contrary, if there is any ownership in the system its the ownership where end users own the overall system. Everyone is an end user.

I actually think with honest level playing field search, trending (free of sponsorship/ads/tracking) and word of mouth and with the end user community delisting feed back mechanism any site that uses any of the expanded spam definition techniques will be delisted. I think we have a practical way to remove push marketing by basing search on something other than spam and getting search to do what it was meant to do: FILTER data to produce useful results. Under this arrangement aligns the interests of buyers and sellers resulting in potentially much tighter relationships with a leap in product/service quality and value. There will still be quality product/service information but completely on the end user’s terms.

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If you personally pay every users bills then they’ll be free. Otherwise they have to pay the tax man, the rent man, the electric bill, the hospital bill and so on.

How do you remove coercion from one part of the world and leave it everywhere else yet expect a different result? The whole global economy is based on the sort of coercion you speak of and while it would be better to not have to pay for anything we aren’t at the point where we can have a resource based economy in 2014.

What do we do to transition and how do we survive until then? The ideas you mention don’t really work in the environment today but might work in an ideal environment once we solve some of the problems we have with artificial scarcity.

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I think that is very well put but we have to start somewhere. And starting with that virtual core since its compatible with the established open source movement looks like a good place because its also the end point and likely to be the heart of even a very advance resource based economy. A resource based economy is free of employment and other forms of coercion. It so enclosed now that most of us feel like its a coup when we can bust into the prison of employment. A thousand years from now its still going to be employee and employer. Its unthinkable. At least we agree that the theft of attention must stop, its a starting point or a turning point.

Outside of the Maidsafe or the opensource movement or technologies that act to rework the system our options seems grim.

What are the chances of a boycott of Comcast and Verizon? They want us to pay more to prioritize sponsor spam and further rig our elections. Notice what they do with our money when they aren’t being paid to rig elections with their sponsored coverage- they lobby against our rights and ability to speak. Don’t want more 911s, more Iraq type wars and more head in the sand responses to existential threats then push hard neutrality and convert the cable and telcos into dumb pipes and force the spin off of their content elements. Its as much a conflict of interest as sponsored media.

Another point. A bunch of risk capital is at at stake. As if that matters! Still it could be another dot com bubble on an already fragile austerity hobbled economy. At least as much is our capital from inflated rates.

This prioritization is separate but equal style segregation that even on the face of it would nullify the incentive to improve an already worst in the world price/performance. Under this scheme if they actually improve the network for most people, well there goes the premium. But that premium gets passed on to us as end users. So we pay more to ensure that we get slower service in the future.

We need to get rid of these companies. Giving these firms their expected return on equity is a huge opportunity cost mistake. Start replacing them with municipal and then end user owned and controlled replacement internet. Maidsafe is a vital start because it can begin to lock out a bunch of their manipulations. It switches off their manipulations and reclaims hardware the public paid for many times over.

Now their new thing is we don’t need neutrality, we need competition. They also try to say some guy invented neutrality and that guy doesn’t think neutrality is an issue. Tim Wu didn’t it was part of the net to prevent contractors from locking in the government with proprietary network equipment hence the internet so that portions of the net made by different vendors would be required to be interoperable. Vendors were not allowed to discriminate by locking out competition and locking in future contracts.
Same enclosure nonsense as always. Well there are jobs at stake. Then in the mean time make the firms wholly employee owned add get rid of the current management and shareholders. We need a telco and cable company de-chartering act.

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Open access, noise free economy is not a donation economy

Its seems natural that Maidsafe would embrace the open model for its market structure as well. It seems that the pay walls generate most of the noise and are of course the main source of enclosure. The pay walls and the enclosure they create are the incentive and enabler for the noise and its a big conflict of interest if the whole system is based on that. Broadcast network TV was half way open but it was also pure noise- its whole purpose as to move noise. And it was one way top down. It was murderous in its actual structure. That’s not what we want.

We want an open system. In thinking about thinking about this- if there is going to be something like a community subsidy to development it wouldn’t make sense to send that hypothesized 1% to Microsoft to try to develop proprietary apps to dominate categories. MS doesn’t need the 1% and that would be throwing good money after bad. It’s not that MS would be shut out or necessarily denied the 1% but its presence would be irrelevant to what needs to be done.

I’d say we need a model where everything is open to begin with, its an open universe and its not full of ads and associated locks and pay walls. What’s the point of Maidsafe if it is or ends up being filled with ads? To me that would be a good litmus for failure. Its also not enough to say that if they can’t track they won’t be able to shotgun ads or won’t have an incentive. We really do need open, honest, transparent search and trending that completely filter the spam.

This kind of approach has been chided as a donation economy, but I think that nothing could be further from the truth. The notion here is that if the market isn’t enclosed or locked up it won’t have enough juice or money to work. I disagree. The point is to end the status quo with incredible value and open access. As Steele said, Open systems will conquer the 1%. And Tesla just took their cars open source. Regardless, open markets and distributions systems are the way to go. With open systems you don’t have the patent lock up, the intellectual property lock up and can do highest common denominator solutions. Its cooperative but the people that are doing good stuff and contribute can be compensated. Its not necessarily outrageous compensation but they get their compensation in part from a better society and at least enough resource to develop tools for change. If it weren’t for open systems we might still be having to hear about operating systems, but operating systems have kind of faded from the foreground and are much better for the exposure to the open movement.

Open systems have clear advantages. If I am doing something because the boss is going to scream at me or because of profit or because I don’t really want to do it but I’ve got to pay the bills- that’s half ass- that’s profit motive- that’s dead. The Wall St. crowd gets involved and it just really full of noise. But if I am doing something from the open systems angle and its just for the pure passion of it, that is un-compromised. I also don’t have to worry about whether I can afford a patent, or must develop a work around or pay a bunch to research patent strategy or have the insecurity around IP at least not as much. I hope in Maidsafe helps bring on a total reset of IP, copyright and trademark. Whose set of rules are we going to abide by? The Chinese governments? Its going to be global, they would have a harder time with enforcement than they would with a global tax on capital, and I see this as a level playing field alternative to that type type of global tax. Maidsafe will be an ironic red light zone. With open systems you will publish it and it will be transparent and they may try to come after you even on Maidsafe but in some or many open systems cases you aren’t making money off the IP.

If its a one click crypto micropayment to encourage future works by a particular person or persons, good luck trying to attach a patent to an income stream in any way that can be enforced on. There are no strings. People give if they want, exactly what they want without coercion or friction. Is that even a payment? The wares are free/open/transparent with universal access. In conjunction with a secure network like Maidsafe this would seem like a very secure way to proceed.

Its funny how terminology works and gets reversed. If one starts talking about a truly open and intelligent market (or distribution replacement) than the people who are “free market,” this and “free market” that, start getting scared because they can’t find lock down and enclosure, they can’t stack the deck. Really they fear there won’t be enough coercion. That doesn’t seem very free. Its more like enslaved market. They don’t want a truly level playing field and they always use the ‘free market’ rhetoric to try to avoid it.

When you get rid of the noise the payment for attention in such an economy is implicit. This is a result of having unlimited access to everything. I don’t think that works when someone starts trying to create the equivalent of a pay wall by trying to lock up people’s attention by granting access to something for jumping through some hoops involving watching some bs. We don’t do the coercive side, that’s not open, that’s closed.

Everything the RIAA ever did was theft, its very existence a crime (if that word means anything,) we need systems that rule out any thing it ever did. But its just one example of a broken model. Let us never hear again about parasites recovering any degree of price control again. If they’ve got price control its a non starter proof of enclosure. Tesla taking their cars open source wasn’t an accident, Musk was known to say" F the oil industry" in a crowd. Clearly the oil industry is the worst example of enclosure, at the very least every oil company should be nationalized and we should cease combustion of it.

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It’s late and I need sleep but I thought it worth mentioning it doesn’t need to be either or. Just like in meatspace you can create either a business or a nonprofit or any other organization so too on maidsafe are you free to organize things however yuo like. You can use quid pro quo, you can use donations, you can download whatever app, it doesn’t matter. Just saying there are options. Ok sleep time. Good night.

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I see your point but we already have project safe getting squeezed by the cable model with unnecessary enclosure nonsense designed to kill the net because its a threat to enclosure and lock down and artificial scarcity. If caps and upload throttling and kill switches werent enough we have lobbiest or vested interest in here trying to make project safe spam friendly with more pay walls or even a pay wall for bit torrent an a peanut gallery echo chamber to make the pro spam agenda look like consensus. Always trying to pretend spam or money is speech instead of censorship.

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The pay wall was just one thing leading to another, it was pretty offtopic i agree but it was not some sort of pro spam agenda. Money is an important issue when you have a company and employees, it should be discussed and i am glad it is so open and transparent.

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But seriously, @warren, you need to stop with the mudslinging. It’s insulting, mean, manipulative, and makes the forum less receptive as a place to grow ideas.

You’re worse than a politician with all your underhanded wordplay.

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Thank you Russell. I agree with you its not good for the forum so it needs to end. I am not claiming I am smarter or know better. I am really not. But the contention doesn’t seem to be ‘facts,’ ‘beliefs,’ ‘approach’ but values.

My opinion is we need a system that empowers end users and other interests are a distraction. That’s absolutists and its inflexible and it may be wrong or impractical, but those with power have proven very able to take care of themselves. The internet is coming apart but for many it would be just fine to have exactly what we have but more private. To me that would be a massive lost opportunity.

If your constituency or concern is artists the argument seems to be that a donation economy (not what I’ve had in mind but its related) would simply be inadequate that people wouldn’t survive the transition to a scale that could support them- I don’t know how to respond to that. Call it digital divide or something like that but I want information to flow as fast and as freely as possibly so that it profits everyone to the maximum. We can’t save artist’s income only to have the world come apart. We need honest unfettered communication and I don’t think noise in the channel approach has worked out.

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Quite the opposite, if we stop rewarding creativity, then the world I want to live in has already fallen apart.

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