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# System prepended metadata

title: Autonomics Comments / Questions

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# Autonomics Comments / Questions
Dil Mar 4 2020
### P6:
- **'Society and Culture'**: imho the most apposite term here is Civilisation. 
  - Quite small groups of humans - too small to really need money, develop recognisable 'society' and 'culture'. 
  - But 'civilisation' connotes an extensive co-ordination of otherwise 'out' groups over space and time. 
  - To use a crude physics metaphor: economy is the emergent co-ordination system (say, the interior of a star), which operates via exchange of value-exchange messages, of which a key constituent is currency units (photons) propagating across and interacting through a field which is the civilisation's general understanding as to the parsing of  messages and formation of appropriate responses.
- **'essentially the same thing'** will generate pushback that is imho justifiable - see above. Care, religion, science, sport, personal artistic expression are all aspects of community/society/humanity/culture which can exist without economy. Economy and Civilisation, for me are the appropriate terms for scopes which extend across varieties of culture, society, community. The history/anthropology of money I think supports this usage.
### P7
- **Mutual Credit: 'intractable problems'** : these apply certainly to LETS schemes, but the credit commons work addresses precisely these points with credible and simple strategies (and I can't see how this doc nails these issues in re Autonomics tbh).

### P10
- Points i. and ii. - beautifully put!
*(comments on other points left until later - but 'v.' looks like a technology, rather than a principle)*
### P12
- **'Money is the fuel of the economy'**: I would say that human labour is the fuel of the economy, that human desire is the driver of the economy, that money is the messaging layer of the economy.
- Nice general example of systems vs the obvious thing that appears to be what matters.
### P13
- again, nice examples, laying out of relationships, developing meaning.

### P14
- **'the proper purpose' of an economy**: taking a cybernetics approach, the purpose of a system is what it does [POSIWID] 
   - I would say that:
   - The proper purpose of the economy from a civilisational perspective is:
     -  to act to maximise the opportunity for individuals and groups of individuals to pursue their productive lives in the manner that seems most meaningful to them (and in the process serve the purpose of life - to create the conditions for more life).
  - From the perspective of an individual or group participant, the purpose of the economy is:
    - to provide a framework within which a life lived well allows for satisfaction of desire to an acceptable degree (key desires being: confidence as to basic material needs and healthcare, security/peace - especially as regards place, the chance to raise children in confidence that they will have a fair crack at well lived lives, the prospect of a decent dotage, the possibility of joyful self expression)*(it should be noted here that this 'bottom-up' perspective is a partial one - which obscures the systemic purpose. This situation is more appropriately covered by Mechanism 1. below)*.

*The above are possibly not relevant to this document (although if they aren't here, they - or some equivalent - must surely underpin this work).* 

*I think the points you are wanting to make - about incentivising and purchasing - are answers to the question 'What are the key mechanisms through which an economy achieves (promotes?) this purpose?'.* 

I would set out these points - answers to that question, as follows:
1. It provides a socially validated value measure that is used:
   1.  to send messages to individuals and groups about the level of desire for the productive work they undertake, and
   2.  to enable individuals and groups to send messages about the value they attach to fulfilment of their desires.
2. It acts as an integrator of these messages across the economy, to produce systemic indicators as to aggregate desire-satisfaction capacity and valuation, in the interests of effective co-ordination (effectiveness measured in the service of purpose).

### P15-16
Nice discourse on specialisation.
### P17-19
- imho 'the profit motive' is a framing that is largely derived from and implicated by the commodity/fiat money system.
  - The etymology of the word 'profit' is from Latin *profectus*, "advance, increase, success, progress," and from Old French *prufiter*, *porfiter*, "to benefit." - which gives quite a different sense, one which does support what I take to be your intended meaning.
  - This sense has been suppressed though, buried under three centuries of usage in the context of capitalism, making this the wrong word imho. It just doesn't work for me in the examples you give - it really isn't profit that gets most people up in the morning (some combination of need, fear, and social pressure I would suggest).
  - My preference is to use the word 'desire' - as this allows for any and all wants (for instance, it covers both need and greed, requirements and whimsy - all of which must be allowed for). This word can be problematic too, as anglo-saxons tend to read sexual intent into any word they can - but imho this is a benefit to understanding, as we clearly are not talking about sex, and thus the reader is forced to wonder what we do mean (which imho is an explicit rejection of the need/greed dichotomy as nothing more than an artefact of puritan bullshit) - rather than using the capitalist culture framing of 'profit' and distorting your meaning in their heads without noticing.
- I like the attack on the idea that we can do without specialisation/trade/profit(desire).
### P21
- side note - 'soldier' in the list of functions is interesting. David Graeber makes the point in '*Debt*' that soldiers tend to be goldbugs - they like money that can be melted down (in case it has the loser's head embossed in it). War changes money in powerful ways. Central banks were typically instituted to pay for wars.

### P22
- **Trust/faith**: I have developed a particular approach to the words around this aspect of money (which is right at the heart of it).
  -  Money is a social **promise** - a promise, to be made good on by the society which recognises this particular kind of number (however instantiated - bags of barley, weight of gold, numbered token, accounting record) as money, in desirable Objects of Trade, at some point in the foreseeable future.
  -  A promise requires an understandable landscape of **confidence**. It's a landscape because a promise is not a contract. Promises are made to be broken, as well as kept. It is implicit in our understanding of promise that there are circumstances in which it will be broken (sometimes we ask for promises of others in the full knowledge that they will be broken). We need to be sure of the landscape this promise exists in before we can have confidence that it is the sort of promise we wish to accept.
  - The key qualities that shape this confidence landscape are described in terms of **trust**, **power** and **inertia**. Our confidence in the value of this social promise is composed prinicipally of some mix of these three (as used in this context).
    - **Trust** is the true social quality of the promise - it relates to personal knowledge of the character of the other members of the society. When trust is high enough, we may even dispense with money - experience something like a gift or care economy, or what Graeber calls 'communism'. In a money context, this trust relates directly to scale - as the number of participants in the money society increases, our level of knowledge of the other members degrades, and so does our trust.
    - **Power** is our understanding of what level of promise enforcement can be expected within the society - what forces may be mobilised to ensure that the money number is accepted and retains its value. Again, when power is very high, money can be dispensed with - this happens in situations of strong hierarchy, (also inside businesses), when exchange is governed by power and patronage. In a money context, power is required as scale grows and lessens the possibility of strong trust. Traditionally, the only way power could be exerted was centrally - through kings and banks, but the recent rise of blockchain has offered another form of power - that of the inhuman algorithm (although, of course, it has become clear that as imperfections in the algorithm need correcting, the power lies with certain groups of nodes, leading to confusion and loss of confidence). Decentralised tech at last offers the possibility of developing high quality trust without centralisation - but only on the basis of strong social design which the tech serves.
    - **Inertia** is an interesting condition - it denotes the reification of a money system; the cultural 'weight' that accrues by virtue of usage of the system over long periods. The British people did not lose faith in the pound during the periods of enormous inflation in the 1970s - the loss of confidence that drives hyperinflation did not materialise, despite rates staying above 16% for four years (peaking at  25%). Arguably, the British people believed throughout this that somehow the situation would be sorted, and kept faith with the £. This factor cannot be ignored when introducing new money systems - technical 'betterness', lower cost-in-use, all may be in place, but most people have no idea at all about money theory, and take history as part of their confidence landscape - probably quite sensibly. New systems with no history are likely to have higher volatility and lower confidence levels than established systems.

### P23
- '**simplicity and utility of tokenised split barter**' - nice. (Although 'tokenised' is a term that implies a commodity currency - apparently n-coin is a commodity type (although see Questions at the end), but it undermines the strength of this 'theory' section by ignoring non-commodity options).

### P24
- 'properties' would seem to me to be the wrong term to describe these four - which I really like. They seem more accurately to represent stages in a lifecycle (which framing would allow an important stage to be added - 'CIRCULATED': obvious meaning, but there would be no need for money if this wasn't going to happen - it would obviously come after 'BACKED FOR VALUE'.
- Again, the usage of tokenised/token presumes something that is not necessarily the case.
- CIRCULATION as a life-cycle stage would reveal interesting distinctions between forms of money - as commodity forms tend to be hoarded, while accounting unit and scrip type money tends to have higher velocity and different money supply drivers.

### P25
- '**REDEMPTION**' - The MMT view is that it is the state wich redeems money, when paid as tax, and that the services provided by states are of real value. States define legal tender by saying what units they are prepared to accept as tax. Whatever we think of states, to ignore tham as economic actors in an analysis of the fiat system makes no sense to me.
- '**emergence**' - the course and behaviour of a river emerges deeply from the hydrodyamic interactions of water molecules, gravity and soil particles; if these changed, the possibility landscape of river outcomes would change dramatically. 
- But real river outcomes are also strongly influenced by interactions with higher order systems - like wolves, deer, beavers and trees, for instance (as is made clear by the 'trophic cascade' film about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone Park). I would like to see here (and throughout) more recognition of the systemic roles played by higher order structures within the money system. 
- Of course, water would flow downhill on a lifeless earth, but the variety and richness of river instances would be orders of magnitude lower. And it is variety and richness in an economy that supports specialisation.

### P27
- '**money system separate from the political system**': this is, of course, ultimately impossible. Money is tolerated as a proxy for power only to the extent that the money system preserves the power of those who already have it - that it works to reproduce the power relations that benefit them. Of course, as a complex system, the best-laid plans of those in power produce unintended consequences, and so their power is not assured. 
- But any money system that is significant will attract politics. This, for me, is why we cannot expect that interventions in governance, or money, or knowledge as single initiatives, can achieve deep systemic impact. Whatever we do must embrace and correlate developments in all three to have any chance of working. Of course, we don't want the ochlocratic politics that is currently offered as 'Democracy', but that's for a different paper.
- Any system which says it stands outside politics will be subject to external politics, or to an internal 'Tyranny of Structurelessness' or both, and will fail to understand or manage this reality. 
- the 'money supply' Riegel quote is great.
- the NEF clarity about the distinctions introduced when understanding money as a creditor/debtor relation, in contrast to considering it as a commodity is also really nice.

### P28
- the insight into the incentives of banks leading to money supply for asset speculation and financialisation, rather than production, is also strong - the root of the scarcity of money experienced by those across the production sector.
- '**perpetual growth and sustainability are incompatible**' - clear. What is not clear is how this can be addressed by Autonomics, if it is so firmly based in the 'profit motive' - without reframing that motive in terms that are clearly self limiting (as desire is).

### P29
- '**failure to redeem**'': I know what you mean, but as stated I don't think this is a sustainable position, as noted above.

### P30
- '**Trust**':  this use of trust is congruent with my usage above (handily). The subtle and broad way you explain it is excellent, and makes it clear why this is so hard to sustain as a trade network gets larger.
- I wouldn't use the term 'algorithm' to desribe the internal workings of the human mind - it's much less determinate than that (and yet can come to a decision) - but this is quibbling...
### P31..6
- '**Reputation**' : again, I like the richness of the descriptions here - and in particular the understanding of reputation as some sort of aggregate of individual trust.
- For me, 'Trust' in the sense we are using it here does *not* scale in a global way - it's too fine grained and dependent upon subjective factors (you set them out clearly). 
- I prefer to rely on the aggregation of trust, distinguished by two different modes:
  - first, as a single trader, trusting the combination of many other participants to develop **confidence in the currency** (promises made in the context of many traders whom you have trust in), and
  - second, as a single trader, trusting another single trader on the basis of aggregated information about previous trades they have participated in, as the **reputation of a trader** (some sort of quantifiable aggregate of the trust many traders have for one individual). I am strongly of the opinion that single numbers here are sub-optimal, and have developed a graphical technique that can communicate multi-variant information in a visual way, but that's detail at this point.
- Fiat and trust: what you describe here is imho better characterised in terms of trust, power and inertia as above - fiat uses the latter two to compensate for the lack of the former.
### P37/8
- **'The double challenge**' (should this read 'triple'? There are three points): I will comment on the n-coin system in a different mode, so here I am addressing these as  'challenges', rather than implementations.
1. **Trust and Reputation data**: The idea that a currency can carry such subjective assessments with it is interesting - and attractive - Nora Bateson's call for 'warm data' applies here - I like the idea of 'contextualised money'.
    2. I think the distinction between the contribution trust makes to the necessary confidence in the money system itself and the reputation traders use in making decisions about individual trades is important. 
        3. Confidence in the social promise that the money unit represents is fundamental to the basic viability of the money system, and the greater the contribution of trust to that confidence, the more likely it is that the money supply will be well matched to the productive capacity of the economy (since trust judgements made by individuals, aggregated across markets, will outperform any algorithmic or 'expert' anaytics).
        4. The use of reputation by traders is of crucial importance to markets, of course - providing mechanisms whereby such reputation can be established is a key function of markets, but imho should not be integrated directly into the machinery of the money system - different markets will have widely varying assessments and conditions, for one thing.
5. **Universal, stable Currency** : Universality is a design approach to something deeper, which is , imho, 'capacity to coperate across global and complex supply chains' (or, as I wish them to become, global demand chains). Universality is one such approach - and is 'obvious' , given our familiarity with the dollar and with bitcoin. But it is not the only approach.


## N-Coin/Autonomics commentary
Thus far, the document is analytical / propositional, and so a commentary seemed the right approach to responding.

But the latter part describes the autonomics / N-coin money system more technically, and here a different approach seems appropriate. 

First, I will try to set out what I understand from the document in my own words (as tersely as practically possible) - with two aims. First, to give you feedback on what your words produce inside my head, and second, to be sure that I have understood the explanation (and thus hopefully the system).

Secondly, I will set out the key questions that I need clarification on.

Thirdly, I will offer any commentary which seems important.

### My understanding
Please treat misunderstandings here as questions!
#### 1. Currency
1. Currency units are created (minted) by a primary seller when necessary (when they do not have, or choose not to use existing units for spending).
    1. Each is labelled with the creator's ID
    1. Each coin is associated with rich data on its history - trading parties, trade details etc - to form a record of its complete history.
    1. This is public data
2. Currency units may be redeemed by the original minter while in circulation, once they have been used to pay for any kind of primary value production.


#### 2. Technology
1. Distributed (ie fully decentralised, with no servers/hosts anywhere) p2p
2. Everything works through a secure message protocol
3. mobile-first banking-like app
4. Data mining of all kinds is encouraged across the histories of all currency units in the system. 
5. Data mining tools will be simple enough for all users to access, 
6. tools for reputation, trust, credit limits prices, externalised production costs and terms of trade will be developed on the back of the data held in currency units.
7. The Autonomics network is considerd not as a simple currency movement platform, but as a social network of a kind
8. 'Social Graph' analysis is allowed to infer relationships, for use in building of trust and reputational data.
9. Allowance for more complex technology that uses the currency unit data structure / p2p messaging protocol is expected - to allow for other kinds of trading to be develped.

#### 3.  Accounting
1.  Each node(participant) maintains an immutable log of all trading activity.
1. This is collectively validated by all other users (*defn*: **sigchain**) to form a *defn*: **distributed ledger**

### Questions
1. Do you consider n-Coin to be a 'thingified' commodity money or a credit/debit informational money?
    1. Corollary: if n-coins are 'things', then won't they be hoarded? And then can't hoarders lend them out at interest, or use them to corrupt politics?
3. Is there one, single, worldwide marketplace (at least for the typical '*one-off, low volume trading*' you mention)?
    1. Corollary: Would it be possible for there to be many markets that interconnected? Or does using '*the same fundamental p2p messaging schema*' mean that there could either be; many markets that did not connect, or one single market that contained all others?
4. Minting: I read that global data mining is used to assess credit limits, but I can't see how that works. Is there an algorithm that everyone subscribes to which tells any user when they can and cannot mint new coins?
5. Redemption: I understand the conditions which have to be met for redemption to occur, but I'm not sure what redemption actually means in this context. Given that the coin that can be redeemed is definitely in the wallet of someone who is not the minter of the coin, I presume it can't disappear. So what happens? I can imagine that the global credit rating data mining tool could show that the minter's outstanding debit to the system might be reduced, that s/he might be now free to mint more coin, but I can't see why - as s/he has not necessarily produced anything of value for the system. None of this stacks up for me, so I need a clearer explanation.
6. Privacy: if everything about everybody's trading history is available to everybody, and data mining is explicitly encouraged, then what's to stop smart/rich people mining everyone's data, doing social graph analysis on it, and abusing it for market advantage / big brother purposes / spying on their spouse / stalking popstars?
7. Governance: If this system depends on a protocol, then the protocol will need to be updated for a variety of reasons. Who decides on this? How? 

### Commentary
Apart from technical points raised in the Questions above, one main issue causes me trouble. At first, it seemed an insumountable objection, but having worked carefully though this, I think actually that it requires just one discussion topic - and that is the idea of universality versus federation.

Most of the aspects of this proposal that raise doubts in my mind stem from the universality condition - trust, privacy, analytics, governance, credit limits, adaptability to local conditions, markets to suit places  - all seem in principle viable as described (whatever the detail design issues), if one posits a tiered federation of networks (all running the same protocol), each considering each of their members as nodes, and not as a whole set of individual accounts to be data mined / tracked. 










