skilesare

Karma: 137

skilesare Apr 21, 2015, 2:59 AM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
The wine buyer is not rewarded for buying from a wine maker that will make a better wine bottle tomorrow though. Think for a bit on if she was.

I’m not sure if the velocity of money is a result or a cause of economic activity, but my reason tells me that if it is flowing faster, ‘I’ have a better chance at having some flow to me. P(making 100k at mv 6) < P(making 100k at mv 12)

Can you name a form of non artificial capital that is a cash equivalent? Maybe gold? Any non elements that aren’t subject to entropy? Ultimately, yes, I think all artificial forms of ‘store of value’ should have an artificial form of entropy added to them because that is the way the world works.

I bet if you don’t know what good value is that you at least know bad value when you see it.

I talk more about the full output of labour in this paper: https://www.dropbox.com/s/k97dzssxc58ux1s/hypercapitalismwpv1.1.pdf?dl=0

...as for the robots. I’m a little serious. If agi emerges into a world where economic nodes are dependent upon each other and it has more to gain from cooperation than dominating, it might buy us a few years to find a balance.

skilesare Apr 21, 2015, 2:38 AM
0 points
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
This is a tough one because most of the readily available literature on competition and market take a specific approach. Specific in the sense of time. Of course at the instant we don’t want people favoring more expensive things...unless there is a damn good reason to. If you add in time though things get very interesting. This system alters the proposition to current market decision + future potential. You wouldn’t pay more just to pay more, but you might buy a Tesla instead of a Honda accord because you think that Tesla had better long term earning potential and you are getting in on the ground floor.

Most of the things we buy aren’t commodities. There is some trade off on features vs cost. This system does tip the scales toward things that may be more expensive, but only if there is a long term advancement that can be leveraged.

In the instance where we actually deal with a commodity, more emphasis will be placed on the long term repetitive production of that commodity. If the commodity can’t be renewed it will be less favored. Thus I’d expect a vector away from depletable goods and toward renewable alternatives.

These assumptions are harder to work into a model.

skilesare Apr 20, 2015, 7:31 PM
5 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
See my answer below:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/m38/publishing_my_initial_model_for_hypercapitalism/ca33

I mean that some of us are better at generating some kinds value than others. (Division of Labor)

A wine maker who has been in the business for 25 years can make a better bottle of wine than I can. If he wanted to make the same bottle of wine that I can, he could do it more easily.

skilesare Apr 20, 2015, 7:29 PM
5 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
This is a great question. Privacy is important. How important is it? I’m not sure.

For example, I have some Apple stock. I don’t hold it anonymously because I want to them to know where to send the dividends. People tend to quickly lose interest in privacy when they have something to gain from not being private.

On the other hand there are certainly some times where you want privacy. The system allows for this by having privacy pools that you can pay through that preserve privacy. It isn’t as optimal as knowing exactly where the money came from, but if we can optimize 80% of transactions and 20% still need to be private, we can gain a lot of ground.

There are also some cryptographic solutions to the privacy issues that could solve the issue of privacy.

skilesare Apr 20, 2015, 6:16 PM
5 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
Hmm...I’ll have to look into this more. There certainly is a difference between ‘rent’ and ‘economic rent’. I’m really don’t think I’m misusing economic rent.

You can call it profit if you want. In the model, some nodes have a better ability to extract profit than others. Or we can call it ‘make moneyness’.

skilesare Apr 20, 2015, 6:03 PM
5 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
The economic rent is in the fact that there wasn’t an apple tree on your the walk to the store.

Economic rent isn’t always bad. Otherwise we’d have an apple tree infestation problem.

skilesare Apr 20, 2015, 5:58 PM
5 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
Maybe a better question is what do I know and how do I know it? :)

Money was different than it is now 40 years ago. It was different 30 years before that. I know this because wikipedia tells me that Nixon took us off the gold standard in the early 70s and that standard was established at Bretton Woods in the 40s. Because of this I apply a very high probability to the likelihood that our money will operate differently in the future then it does now.

I guess the problem I’m trying to solve is, if we are likely going to be using a new kind of money in the future, do I want that to be a good kind of money or a bad kind of money. I want it to be a good, human centered kind of money that help us solve hard problem and makes the world a better place.

I think I know that our money is ‘bad’ (sub-optimal may be a better word) because I look around our world and I see the following things:

A crappy income tax An inability to get money out of politics ultra poor people Ultra rich people Wasted human resources (see the entire finance industry) Corporations sitting on billions in cash when they could be ending cancer

I think changing our money can solve some of these issues because I’ve read the literature on what drives people to make economic decisions. If we can implement a system that rewires the drivers in a positive directions, we can solve some of these problems.

I think hypercapitalism is the answer because I’ve written some simple models that shows it is more efficient that regular capitalism. I left 10 other solutions on the cutting room floor before I put this together.

skilesare Apr 20, 2015, 5:47 PM
5 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
I think it is semantics that depend on your assumptions:

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economicrent.asp

Profits are economic rent are the same in a lot of instances. If all markets were perfect their would be neither profit nor economic rent. Can you think of a situation where profit is not economic rent?

skilesare Apr 20, 2015, 5:12 PM
5 points
in reply to: Xerographica’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
1. A slow down in the velocity of money.
2. How to make money with negative interest.
3. How to optimize for creating ‘good’ value.
4. How to restore the dignity of labor(reconciling leftist ‘full value of labor’ with the reality of market dynamics)
5. How to make the robots not kill us.
What links here?
- skilesare's comment on Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism by skilesare (Apr 20, 2015, 7:31 PM; 5 points)

skilesare Apr 20, 2015, 5:09 PM
5 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
Oh...and I think economic rent is a fairly standard term. This is the amount that people pay for a thing above its cost because of a disadvantage they are under. Some economic rent is good, some is bad. You can argue that it is ‘value’ though if someone is willing to pay it. If they weren’t getting that value out of it they wouldn’t pay it.

skilesare Apr 20, 2015, 5:06 PM
5 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
I guess I need a better way to intro the concept. Would you be willing to help me work through that?

Does this video help at all? Maybe I need to have this as text? Maybe simplify it first?

skilesare Apr 20, 2015, 2:50 PM
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Stupid Questions April 2015
I took your advice and posted this over in discussion:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/m38/publishing_my_initial_model_for_hypercapitalism/

skilesare Apr 10, 2015, 4:53 PM
1 point
in reply to: djm’s comment on: Lessons from each HPMOR chapter in one line [link]
If you do any driving the HPMOR podcast is a pretty good use of drive time.

skilesare Apr 10, 2015, 12:12 PM
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Stupid Questions April 2015
Any suggestions on how to think about it a deeper level? I’m new around here just trying to get my head around some of these ideas.

A couple points, if your one year decay rate is 12% and you have $1 billion in the system you will decay $120 million that will flow back to the system. Yes it will matter how close you are to the nodes of activity. That is the point. This updates our decision function when engaging in commerce. The question isn’t is this the most affordable apple, it is is this the best apple made by the best process in a way that will lead to the most value for future apples.

I still have othe options to entice the mining of my transactions. Potentially more attractive than fees.

I’d be more than happy to engage the existing banking system and with unlimited capital I wouldn’t involve Bitcoin. The cost from 0 to transaction 1 on btc is 1000x less than 0 to 1 on the banking system. State of Texas wants 20 million in reserve to even sniff your banking application.

skilesare Apr 10, 2015, 1:28 AM
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Stupid Questions April 2015

If a citizen creates a legal entity, doesn’t he get his second account?

The wine seller creates a legal entity “wine shop” and transfers the money from it into his citizens account whenever the shop get’s any money.

Yes...this is possible. I would expect a legal entity to pay it’s employees. The Legal Entity also benefits for what is paid out to employees. The string of accounts and how many lengths away an account is will be a short term concern but not a long term concern. In addition wine buyers can hold the wine maker responsible for making this decision if they feel it is defrauding them in some way. The theory is that the market will tend toward vendors that use cash to invest further in the industry vs. immediately shifting money out of the industry.

Of course you can transfer a few satoshi. On the other hand that doesn’t stop you from paying bitcoin fees. The bitcoin blockchain is incapable of doing cheap micropayment transactions.

I can put together some transactions I guess...but I promise it is possible. Input 0xA $5.02 0xSystem $.04

Output 0xB $5.00 0xDecayAuthority $.02 0xMinerFee $.04

Later that day

Input 0xDecayAuthority $15.04

Output(This will have 10 outputs) 0xA’ .02 0xn1....-n99 $14.98 0xMinerFee $.04

That sounds like a corporation could issue a citizen account to someone who already has an account.

When I first wrote this I was envisioning a system that anyone could implement with possible a number of entities setting up different currencies.

In general if you do have to trust a government to enforce rule of law, why use the expensive bitcoin system where trust relies on the blockchain?

Only because the banking system is more expensive and because there is a significant amount of technology that allows the actual transfer of real value on BTC. I’d prefer to have proprietary system, but that takes more time and more money. This system is based on the existence of a public ledger and BTC has one of those.

The assumption that the business man doesn’t do anything with his money is unrealistic. It also doesn’t make sense to assume a 3 person economy. It would make more sense to run a model economy with 10,000 participants and assumptions about how the market participants interacts with each other via an open python script. Including a miner who gets his $0.04 for every transaction.

Yes. This was my first computer model. I did a second one that added a government and taxation. Next step is to write some much more detailed monte carlo simulations that have many more actors that make rational and irrational decisions and do their best to sink the economy.

Thanks for the comments they really do help me see what needs reinforcement and what ideas are weak.

skilesare Apr 9, 2015, 9:57 PM
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Stupid Questions April 2015

You don’t say anything about how is supposed to have the power to enforce that statute.

I say a lot about it in my book. The system relies on Rule of law: https://github.com/skilesare/art_and_democratic_hypercapitalism/blob/master/the_pattern_language/law_rule_of_law.md

And yes, we limit citizens to one account and legal entities, and governments have different kinds of accounts with different restrictions.

https://github.com/skilesare/art_and_democratic_hypercapitalism/blob/master/hyper_capitalism/citizen_accounts.md https://github.com/skilesare/art_and_democratic_hypercapitalism/blob/master/hyper_capitalism/legal_entity_accounts.md https://github.com/skilesare/art_and_democratic_hypercapitalism/blob/master/hyper_capitalism/state_accounts.md

Have you done any math to show that they add up?

I’ve run a computer model in a closed system. I present the results here: https://vimeo.com/user17783424/review/115279592/1bb88f885d

Also in a system like Bitcoin where it costs $0.04 to do a transaction, are you sure you can transfer $0.0000032 effectively?

Yes. It can just be a few satoshi’s to an output with the rest(the bigger values) going somewhere else. If the amounts are too small they can be kept off chain.

Economic systems work by their agents trying to maximize returns. That means if there a way in your system to maximize returns in a way you didn’t anticipate the calculation based on the ways you anticipate is worthless.

Thus the need to experiment and try to blow the thing up. I agree 100%.

skilesare Apr 9, 2015, 9:43 PM
0 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 06 - Apr. 12, 2015
Great point. I need to flesh out the exact process. The high level solution is that we can ‘fold the blockchain.’ Since we have a record of where money flowed, when an entity fails, we can fold the inputs and connect them to the outputs.

N1 sends cash to N2. N2 wastes it on a bad idea spending money at N3,N4, and N5. The great thing about ‘money’ is that N3,N4, or N5 have a new chance to do something ‘valuable’ with it. If N2 fails, we can ‘fold the blockchain’ and pass through the benefits from 3,4,5 back to 1.

Money doesn’t disappear...it generally flows some where else where the next person in the economy has a chance to create a recursive value engine.

In the short run, the system is not very different than today. Short term profit motives are virtually unaffected. In the long run there is a value incentive and reward for proactively finding value. The theory is that it is possible to do both.

skilesare Apr 9, 2015, 6:26 PM
0 points
on: Open Thread, Apr. 06 - Apr. 12, 2015
I’ve been working through the sequences and have been trying to apply things to my current project that has to do with remaking money. I’d appreciate any feedback. Did I miss anything major? Am I on the right track to fix my thinking?

http://www.hypercapital.info/news/2015/4/9/hypercapitalism-what-you-think-about-money-is-wrong

skilesare Apr 9, 2015, 2:56 PM
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Stupid Questions April 2015
I’ve tried to set up a system where tax avoidance is reduced or eliminated. Because the transaction system will reject transactions that don’t pay the fee when they use their cash, they are stuck with the decision to participate in the system or not. Once the cash is in the system, they must pay the tax or the tax will be taken from them(using btc multi-sig where the decay charging authority is held accountable to only charge the fee on delinquent accounts.

N2 can certainly set up Nx and move all cash over there. Lets use a real example.

N1 spends $100 with N2. N2 wants to avoid the decay(but the system always charges at least one day of decay during a transaction) So they move the cash to Nx. The transaction occurs and $0.003 cents goes back to N1. Now the cash is in Nx. What are they going to do with it here. If they let it sit for 30 days they will be auto charged a decay fee of about $0.10. This flows to N2.

Even if N2 is proactive and sends it back to N3 immediately, $0.0000032 will flow back to N1. A small amount to be sure, but overtime these small amounts add up.

And if Nx uses the cash to develop something that brings in far more cash than went in, the amounts get much bigger.

That is besides the point because we want to avoid the situation entirely where N2 tries to devalue N1s benefits by passing to a shell corporation Nx

Nothing can keep someone from just passing cash and on and on and on to cash it owns except rule of law and accountability. Accountability can be observed in the blockchain and bad actors identified. Rule of law comes later. (I try to cover this in STH. Statutory Theft—https://github.com/skilesare/art_and_democratic_hypercapitalism/blob/master/the_pattern_language/sth_statutory_theft.md )

Re: Fees—I don’t have a great solution to this other than offering miners a share of future pref payments for any mined items that they charge no fee for. This involves them taking risk, but also provides substantial long term rewards.

All of this goes much deeper than the original question which I think now is best framed as ‘does having a backflow of cash based on amount spent enhance the information we can get out of an economic system over the standard capitalistic model of today.’ If we add too many things in we end up in a conjecture bias situation.

Once I answer the first question in the affirmative, then I can move on to whether the implementations of the system are rational or not. If achieving the prior is a priority, there likely exists an implementation that can achieve it. At least I think.

skilesare Apr 9, 2015, 1:35 PM
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Stupid Questions April 2015
I did ask it in the stupid questions thread. :)

I think that both can be true and yet still have real results. Take humans, reproduction, and marriage. Typically a man is fertile for more years than a woman. We see in marriage a tension between men staying loyal to the wife of their youth and moving on to a more fertile partner. I don’t have statistics in front of me, but over history the tendency is to stay loyal. Patrimonialism has a profound evolutionary basis and my theory is that you can use that built in bias to form a sustainable system where legal entities have life spans instead of immortality. If the life span is too short, than it is useless.

As far as the fees go, Bitcoin’s fees are non-zero but very close to zero and many alternate payment schemes can be constructed. Typical CC transactions are 3%...much higher than the about .05 needed for a BTC transaction. There are also ways to convince miners to mine your transactions even though no BTC Fees are provided.