big day, in that little kind of way

This won’t excite anyone else on the planet, but I noticed it.

I was replying to an email from Scotland’s talent scout for Angel’s Den. His email went to the heart of it — understanding Ecosquared, explaining it, and trust. For the later, he’s actually introduced me to a colleague of his from Oak Team, to check the worth of our system, before he can approach individual investors. So far so good — though if we were operating Ecosquared, all this would involve moneyflow.

I finished my email thanking him for his candour — I am so glad I am operating in Scotland! — up-front and honest is the way I like it. And I mention (in parenthesis) that I am recording it. I sent off the email, and went to the Ecosquared Prototype app and dutifully recorded my evaluation of the engagement: partly for his observations (he said it was a waste of his time or it was brilliant), and partly for what was evoked in me (genius is in the mind of the beholder). He’s second on a specific list of people (the people I have introduced to the app, not the core group), and fourth in terms of SQ. I sat there, checking the evaluations, how people compared, and thought yes, that’s fair, at least from my point of view. And is the SQ fair? Difficult to say since there’s not enough density of engagement. SQ matches my evaluations just about perfectly with the exceptions of Colin and myself.

And then this happened. I closed the app and noticed that it was on a side page. I flicked to my home-page. I use Ecosquared all the time. I like using it. It is useful to me. Yup, home-page is where it deserves to be. Here’s what it looks like now:

Screenshot_2015-01-22-10-10-28

Gmail, Maps, a torch (I have used this a few times, very practical), and now ecosquared. What did it replace? Google Play Store. Yup, it ousted one of the Google products. Question is, will it ever replace one of the docked apps? Phone, Chrome, Camera, Settings…?

ok… anything slightly bigger to share with us, David?

In the wider world, things are going relatively well. Jorge is making headway with the back-end coding of the Gifting Mechanism. My God it has been a rigmarole getting a server and server-admin, and we’ve got a new URL to operate in the background. All his work is being hooked to the front-end, so we should have something to see pretty soon. All very exciting, in a back-end kind of way.

Meanwhile, I’ve spoken with Kevin from the Alba Innovation Centre. Once before Christmas, and twice since new year. He’s set up a meeting this Friday with an IP specialist and a regional manager from Scottish Enterprise. We agreed last week to meet at Kevin’s offices in Livingstone Tuesday. At his request I have been writing up a business plan over Christmas and New Year. Finally I have succumbed to ‘business sense’. Business Plan, horrible thing for what Ecosquared is, wrong tool. It reads more like an academic paper, nearly 50 pages. And on Monday, I decided to pivot, the lean-business term to basically signify a change of direction, taken from basket-ball I believe. I forked a business plan exclusively concentrating on the Gifting Mechanism. Much more succinct, and much more attractive to investors.

Mistakenly thinking Livingstone was south of Glasgow, I thought it sensible to make a few appointments in Glasgow to make the journey from Dundee worthwhile. I called up three angel investor groups, two responded positively: Lancaster Capital (the chap running caught me when I got my first knock-back last year; there’s a story behind that which I will go in to one day if that avenue turns out well), and Kelvin Capital. Meetings went well. Why? Because of the maths! I’ve modelled the Gifting Mechanism using InsightMaker. Take a look at the following.

healthy viral page

I’m not going to explain it. Perhaps it will make sense to you, or perhaps it just piques your curiosity. But it sure is exciting.

anything else?

My parents have been ill. Influenza of some sort. They are rather old, and it has floored them. My father in bed for a week with aches in his bones. Illness like this makes them age visibly before my eyes. My mother hobbling around, coughing to the edge of the very end of her breath. I’ve seen news reports about flu and how significant it is to that generation, but only in person does it have meaning. Honestly, their mortality is visible, to themselves too. Definitely a wake-up call.

Why mention this personal thing in this Ecosquared blog? Because the thing that is missing when I talk to people is the real experience. Adults are so used to simulating things in their heads, with business plans and financial projections, etc etc. The level of misunderstanding that Ecosquared triggers is very very basic. People think it is about ideas, on models. It is not. It is based on genuine, real relationships between people. Friend, family, living relationships, of blood, of feeling. This is why it will work. Not because it is commercial. It is real. It is an accounting system which tracks genuine value between people. And old people in our society deserve all the help they can get. Ageuk is one of the charities I’d like to pull in for the soft-launch in Easter.

It’s less about age, it’s more about wisdom. If the app doesn’t help us generate a sensitivity to wisdom, then it isn’t worth it.

Projects Function & business update

So, here’s a screen shot of the Android app, Projects Function:

projectsfunction

What does it do? You simply evaluate how enthused or committed you are to the projects you are involved in. ‘My’ shows your current value, 0 to 10. ‘Soc Av’ shows median — and because not enough people have evaluated their projects yet, the medians are uniformly 0!

Why this function? So that everyone can see how the project is doing at any moment. It should be possible to get data from the server to show individual scores within a specific project, which would then allow users to get the heads up very easily on how people are faring. Think collective project management. We’ll be doing a lot more in this direction once we get moneyflow.

up next

I’m paying Jeditech to code one of the financial functions, ‘Gift’. I had thought of doing ‘Invest’ first, but when speaking with angel investors over the last month, it is the Gifting Mechanic that seems to attract their attention. It’s our ‘route to market’, as they say. It is so counter-intuitive, some ran screaming, specifically one whose background was marketing. When speaking with Scottish Enterprise, Business Gateway, and Scottish Investment Bank, it makes sense — but only when I have a meeting. Written material just doesn’t seem to work in its favour, at least not the way I write it. Which is problematic because I’ve started business plans. Hard work trying to transform the content of a gifting economic into the structure of business plan. The usual questions — problem solved, unique solution, route to market, competitors, etc — are difficult to answer. I am the wrong person to answer. Or at least, my answers are great, but they don’t conform. Such questions lead me to think of the current system and I consider potential ecosystem that may form around the app. I don’t like projecting into the future false figures, I detest those projected figures over 5 years, and I don’t like ‘expectation’ period. Seems very close to speculation. However, a bit of maths has come to my aid.

While explaining the Gifting Mechanism to my coding partner, Colin, a couple of weeks ago, he pointed me at a brilliant bit of free online software — InsightMaker. I’ve been modelling the Gifting Mechanic ever since, onto the 12th iteration. Amazing. It allows the user to choose various rates of gifting, amounts of money, number of people who take, and so on, and runs a simulation, and I’ve included some standard deviation too. It even allows ‘sensitivity testing’, allowing 50 simulation runs simultaneously so it is possible to hone in on the rates that produce favourable results. That is, virals. Amazing! This is not only useful for potential investors, but for people using the app in the future to guide their behaviour — its the gifter’s equivalent to the ‘buyer’s guide’! Each user can get an idea of the kind of behaviour they need to exhibit if they want the thing they are recommending to go viral. And with a financial dimension, this means the money follows things we value. Viral doesn’t necessarily mean exponential growth, it can mean sustainable growth.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Point is, after working on this, I feel confident I can produce some potential figures in a business plan that actually make sense. Combined with the prototype version of the Gifting Mechanism, investors can make an informed decision. Part gut from direct experience, part mind from models and projections. Nice.

bonus insight

And this experience has given me an insight into what a traditional business plan is. It is nothing to do with the product, its all to do with the financials, costings. And because I am naturally aligned to lean business practices, I have come up with a minimal MVP for under £3,000, and the next one at £30,000 for a global open-ended viral capacity. This doesn’t take into consideration salaries for me or my coding partner, nor costs for compliance, etc, etc. It is the minimum to get us off the ground. If we reach the next threshold of funding, so we can pay for the heavier costs. Sustainable growth. I’ve never thought of taking money from an investor to pay me. Which is why our costs are so low. If we factor in salaries, even reasonably small ones, and the other expected costs like ‘sales’, we are dealing with £100,000, which is the figure that all government business loans and most investors are looking at as being ‘realistic’. You live and learn.

interested?

Drop me a line. I’ve been terrible at finding user-cases, which would provide us with some valuable data for the business plan. And an investor of course. And coders, etc, etc. Download ecosquared prototype at google play, athe iPhone version should be online very soon. Help to make good things happen — and get generously remunerated for it. Why? Because there’s a global population somwhere down the line who will be incredibly thankful to those who act now.

investor gatekeepers

After a few weeks of putting the word out, here is a summary of my experiences of the angel investment situation here in Scotland.

first there were ten

Of the ten or so contacted, it has been relatively easy to arrange meetings, once I learned that I have to talk about level of investment and equity, nominally £30k for 16%. Of the few who request written info before even contemplating a meeting, they all respond with a negative, saying it does not match their criteria. I usually have to reply with a rather forceful email requesting what criteria exactly, and on two occasions this has led to a meeting.

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from five to two

Of the five I have met, one did not have a clue what I was talking about. I am on point, and I do explain how the gifting mechanic works. This can be overwhelming. For all but two so far, the app-server combo does not conform to the criteria they use to evaluate and subsequently pass on to their syndicate of funders. Most of these syndicates consist of reasonably well off professionals who are looking for different investment opportunities. In comparison to ISAs or playing on the stockmarket, investment in any kind of company or startup is a high-risk. They are not looking for innovative. They are looking for a niche product, something which fits the current market and makes a reasonable case for growth. Most are physical companies, many biologically orientated for some reason, and only a few in app development, eg controlling household boilers or lights with a mobile app, that kind of thing.

Of the three that said it was not suitable for their syndicate, they did offer to pass on my proposal to specific individuals they thought might be interested. None have honoured their word. The quality of response of individuals I have met here in Scotland is higher — where what they say and what they do match more closely than business people I have met south of the border. It is a tiny sample, for sure, but I suspect there is more hardness in the Scottish businessman. He doesn’t want to promise anything he can’t deliver. But still, I find the gap between word and action is still wide enough that I mistakingly take a barge of bullshit for a trustworthy relationship. I am learning. I am now entirely skeptical. It doesn’t matter what anyone says they will do now, it means less than the vapour from their tongues, insufficient to moisten a stamp let alone a letter of intent, or anything resembling useful action.

Why this behaviour? Because there is no moneyflow. I have dabbled with the notion of introducing MTTP into the initial engagement, but I have found that it appears to be too much of a gimmick at the moment. Only when I have sufficient funds and a body of practice behind me, will it operate well. Indeed, operate for anyone on the planet. Point is, we need to have moneyflow from the initial conditions. The current system has all this hot-air, talk, preparation — which could go on for months! — until eventually ‘gold’ is struck. And course, the investment has to be worth the time and effort that everyone has put into make the decision. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that upward of 25% of money funded goes to pay the time and effort before funding is released. Absurd, and also makes for a distrusting business environment. The alternative? Money flow from the start.

I am tracking people’s contributions through the app, of course. So, when moneyflow does arise, I can distribute it to those who have have actually been helpful. I tell people this, but because this is early days, they can’t ‘compute’ the significance of this. When I end up distributing £1,000,000 to these critical first-steps, the world will be a different place — it will pay to be sensitive and helpful.

two interested — why?

Through this relatively painless procedure, two have shone through. Despite the obvious challenge of comprehending the app in the first place, they were open-minded enough to listen. This indicates a qualitatively different mind-set. Both were quite unlike the others. First, they were investors themselves. Second, they were not simply going through a checklist, establishing what other products our app is like. They were genuinely looking for newness.

One began to relate ecosquared to trust networks already out there. For example a child-sitting service which was growing slowly in the US west coast (where else?). He talked of the importance of sharpening the pitch so that it was super-clear what was being offered, giving me examples of mechanical buzzards, of all things. Of course, the problem I have is that the tool has potentially ubiquitous use, but what I need to do is pin-point some specific potential user-cases. Specific problems solved, so the ‘market’ will find the offering obvious. And this chap offered to do just this.

Another had direct experience of equity investment and he was specifically interested in the gifting mechanism of our app. He recognised what I call the ‘fractal seed’ of the gifting mechanism, and revealed that another company was pitching this for £500,000. Good news to know there is a competitor, so I don’t feel so bad when I meet someone who has no idea what I am talking about, their response being more a reflection of what they don’t know or haven’t come across. The bad news is, they are putting together a professional bid with plenty of commercial bells and whistles. Another bad thing is that it was intimated they are using a traditional business model and will not be using the gifting mechanic themselves on their own product. That is, those who are tinkering with the gifting mechanism may be first to market, appropriating our one last great chance to escape the capitalist system (or thing-ownership strange-attractor).

In both cases, these individuals were genuinely engaging. Genuine potential here.

a final surprise

My nephew did something unusual, in fact doubly so. Firstly, it is unusual for (my) family members to mix business with blood, and secondly, it is unusual for someone to recommend something when they do not understand it. Both, I believe, are natural to the human state and once ecosquared has some validity, people will find it is healthy to trust friends and family first, whilst also developing the courage to explore things they do no understand or feel is right. That is, genuine trust network, and thus a strong enough existence to explore new experiences. Strong roots, strong branches.

So, my nephew showed a few slides to a neighbour of his who is a successful entrepreneur, and his response was positive. From what I heard, very positive. It looks like the most positive response has occurred indirectly, ie not through me directly — which is a good sign. It indicates that whatever is presented is reflecting what the viewer already knows. That is, they have observed the elements in society themselves, and my composition brings these elements together in a rather pleasant composition. Thus, resonance and acknowledgement, followed by appreciation and excitement. I am only speculating at this stage, since I haven’t met the gentleman. But I do know how the psychology of discovery works based on my experience with young adults.

I am, in fact, envious, that my nephew witnessed the buzz. Had I been present though, I am sure I would have white-washed whatever their excitement was with my own. This is a major problem with inventors or creators, at least for some. Without recognition, the creator internalises the lack of response, and so whenever even a glimmer of appreciation appears, it can often lead to an incandescent explosion of delight from the creator, which all too often snuffs out the joy of the receiver. I don’t make this mistake with kids. Or rather, when I see a kid start to light up with a discovery, I add my passion like fuel to their flame not just for having a new enlightening perspective on fractions say, but expanding it out to the joy of mathematics in general, and the ability of any one of us to learn! I have found that this genuine learning flame is weak in adults and can get easily snuffed out, whereas with young adults it has the radiance of nuclear fission, all-at-once intellectual, emotional and indeed spiritual.

conclusion

So, who is to know what may emerge? It is slow progress. I am certainly not excited about a positive response any more, because I have had people say ecosquared is genius before and very little came of it. In fact, the opposite — I trusted their perception and their direction and risked too much, losing my family in their enthusiastic promises. I won’t make that mistake, indeed I can not.

I have also begun the route through the public funding maze. Very nice engagement with managers at Business Gateway and Scottish Enterprise so far, with potential matched funding or 70% funding, but it is going to be 12 weeks putting together the proposal and then a further 12 weeks getting a decision. We’ll see how far I get along that path before I run out of steam, though perhaps some business-minded people may be attracted to complete that journey. Again, the method justifies the accretion of more ‘business folk’. The more money involved, the more people, and the more it costs to get anything to happen. Something which our app has the chance of cutting completely.

Meanwhile, Colin continues to develop the back-end engine and I fund the front-end app, which can be found on Google Play, ‘ecosquared’. I’ll write about user-cases in another post — feel free to submit your interest in the comments, via the app itself, or from the ecosquared.co.uk website.

ecosquared app

So, to recap. Early this year, Colin Kilburn went ahead and coded a back-end financial engine on a server. He also coded a web-app. Meanwhile, I taught maths in order to make some money. This autumn, I paid a chap called Abhinav to code a front-end android app, some cash and some %-equity.

Here we have a working prototype.

Screenshot_2014-10-02-16-56-42

It allows a user to choose a project (touching the title at the top, in this case ‘peek at app’), choose the name of someone (eg Tim), and choose a score (eg 6). Users can see their relative values they give for each person, thus getting a gauge of the priorities they think are important, and the SQ, the Social-Quotient, the result once everyones relative values are relativised themselves using our algorithm. It can be sorted by the tabs (in this case, SQ).

Screenshot_2014-10-02-16-57-18

 

We’re looking for interest from various partners:

  • user-cases to test in the field — reasonable density, people who interact relatively regularly over a week or two, so a group of people can evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm to capture ‘intangibles’
  • angel-investors — around £30k to make the engine more robust, secure, and scalable on a virtual server so that anyone on the planet can use it
  • coders — to develop the other modules (Colin has run out of money and is now working for money, poor man)
  • business folk — to flesh out some commercial potentials, business plans, etc
  • contributors — landing-page designers, designers, philosophers

 

I’ve had plenty of people who want to commercialise it. Either by tracking value in a building renovation setting, licensing the code to enable people to value emails, gift buttons — all of which are under licence, using our back-end financial engine. Still, nobody as yet has seen the commercial potential in the app itself. So, I am especially interested in people who have the vision to see how this can be applied ubiquitously. Basically, anyone anywhere who is doing anything, can use the app to track the contributions people make to whatever they are doing.

When I started out saying ecological economics, I didn’t mean as a category. I meant it as a description. It is an alternative economic. A gifting economic. A network economic. An instant economic. And this app is the first working tool that enables it. We are coding the other functions later this autumn into winter.

how much does running a car cost?

I’m returning to education, and because of the rural area in which I live, I shall need a car to get to schools to do supply on a daily basis. So, I shall have to ‘buy’ a car. Which brings into question how much a car costs to run, the issue of ownership, petrol costs, taxes, and so on. Also, a brief look at current ‘alternative’ solutions like Zipcar and a local car-trader down the road who is trying to compete with a low-tech solution, and then we’ll look at how an ecosquared car use may be financed. And if cars don’t rock your boat, we’ll look at other applications of the same math such as with health, revealing a fundamental core to economics: the relationship between capital (a static fund) and regular payments.

front_s

everyday running costs of ownership

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These costs are ‘reasonable’ for running an average car; with new cars devalue, replace the ‘maintenance’ costs with devaluation. ‘Upgrade’ is the amount of money that is put aside to pay for a new car; eg sell a car at a loss of £500 over the year will mean that the new one will be bought to re-coupe that loss; that is, it will cost £50/month to just stay ‘level’.

Still, if you have a car, these costs are reasonable. That’s £3000 to £5000 a year! Cars burn money…

running costs of rental

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Roughly £400, which is £250/£100 more than ownership. No head-aches of ownership. New car. Surely there should be a non-new rental deal out there? There was, but more of that later. Let’s look an a new ‘alternative’ to rent/buy.

‘alternatives’ like zipcar

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 Based on a trip daily to work and back, clearly Zipcar isn’t the right solution. Another one is Uber, but that’s beyond the horizon at the moment; it’s touted to do to logistics what Amazon did to book-selling, and everything else-selling, kinda. It’s what ecosquared will be competing with a few years down the line, if we’re not clever.

a guy down the road called Darren…

I spoke with a guy last night, Darren Sharpe, an interesting guy. He was ahead of the curve and came up with ‘rent-a-banger‘, basically renting out non-new cars. He ran this for 15 years, but the insurance was a real head-ache, and people abused the system; as we know people take care of things they own, and tend to trash or neglect rented cars, flats, tools — a mentality shift which is critical for longer term sharing solutions.

Now, Darren sells five-year old cars for £2k, and guarantees buy-back at £50/week. So, if you want to return the car say 10 weeks down the road, he will buy it back for £1,500. Thus, cost of use is £200/month PLUS £100/£200 ownership costs. That is, using Darren’s system you need £2k capital, and it costs £150/month more than ownership.

summary of current offerings out there at the time of writing

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Looks like ownership is still the cheapest way to run a car, with all the head-aches that ownership entails. Basically there is a financial separation between the players: the owner of the car, those who build the roads and the insurers, the car-mechanics who maintain it, and the company employees who supply the petrol. They are all working together, using the same economic system, with the belief that competition provides us with the best service at the lowest cost.

ecosquared?

Well, it depends on what scale the ecology is at. Let’s say it we have levels of social saturation, which I’ve used before, but in reverse order this time, from the ‘fantastic’ to the realistic, me now looking for a car:

  • Yellow Saturation with massive game-changing coverage
  • Blue Network where a wide sector of people are sharing within ecosquared protocols
  • Green Team of a few people connected and using the protocols
  • Red Solo just starting with only you using the protocols

Yellow Saturation

A world where there are enough people in the network to own Esso; where the users and employees of the petrol stations are the shareholders, have %-equity. Nobody is making a profit from the petrol you get at the station. You drive up, fill up the tank, resource use is tabulated, you drive away. No money transaction. Of course, your petrol use may be higher or lower than others, and this is related to how often you use the car. Remember, none of it is yours: its an economy of use, not possession.

(By the way, Esso is evaluated at $300b. 100million people putting in £3000 each (the cost of petrol for a year for some folk) could buy Esso outright. That’s something to think about. An FTP open moneystream of $300b; that’s everyone on the planet contributed $40 each. Will we ever reach this ‘fantastic’ situation? Well, we have the protocols. We have the intention and love and trust between us as friends and family… we just lack the trust in their operation. We are trapped by our traditional mechanics.)

And the cost of petrol is much lower in certain countries, those which have decentralised their government. Just like Esso is %-equity crowd-shared, so is ‘government’. A double win for the folk who manage that first!

Blue Network

A car-pool where insurance is brought within the fold. That is, a crowd-owned insurance company. Again, no-one is making money out of us. When an accident occurs, it is covered by FTP. Of course, it comes down to trusting people to drive cars around. Do you give a super-dooper car to a young man? Only if he proves he can drive well. Insurance companies have the math worked out in terms of rates of injury etc. We should be using this math to simply reduce costs of premium, or in our case FTP contribution towards this BitCar project. Money is not put into the organisation competing with other organisations, a massive marketing and advertising game, both externally and internally.

Screen Shot 2014-01-05 at 19.00.08

This is from Direct Line’s 2012 Annual Report (p98).Operating costs 25% of revenue, over a £1billion. That’s a lot of ‘financial’ machinery being paid for.

In terms of ecosquared, we don’t want an insurance company; in fact, we don’t want any company for that matter. We simply use the assurance we have between us: MTTP for p2p, and FTP for one to many. If some network of people give a flash car to one of their group, and they don’t have the resources locally to cover it if things go wrong, then they will require other networks to subsidise them. This is the typical fission-fusion and 1:5 grouping that all kids are familiar with by the age of 11. Not complicated. Fractally complex, but essentially — mathematically and psycho-socially — simple.

Green Team

For this to work, the team has to be concentrated. That is, people who live close by, who share the same garage for example. Each participant ‘owns’ their car in the sense of paying for Road Tax and Insurance (£50-£100/month). Instead of paying for when the car breaks down, a contribution is made to keep the car running smoothly. How much? Depends on how many cars are in the network and the size of the garage, but let’s say around £50/month. They may need to take more people on during periods of stress, or pass cars on to other garages if the demand is too high, as occurs nowadays. And when things are slow, cars are invited in to upgrade them. The objective is to keep cars healthy, so that they do not ‘lose’ their value. Courses are put on to invite owners to be involved in the maintenance of their cars.

Instead of saving funds in private banks, or accessing credit, participants GIFT(£50/month) for the use of the car, FTP{Bitcar}. This accumulated FTP (within a year, 10 car-owners accumulate £6000) not only attracts other car-owners to the network, but can operate like insurance, and to buy in new car, perhaps when a member of the community gets to driving age.

Red Solo

Difficult. Two things possible: hack ownership, and share %-equity in the income enabled by car-use.

hacking ownership

Let’s say I manage to generate the funds to ‘own’ a car at £2k. Let’s say I give-it(car)-forwards-to the ‘BitCar’ project. I also give-it(£50)-forwards-to FTP. Which means I have 100%-equity in all three ecosquare value vectors, Vp Vk Vi, namely the Aggregate (ie the car), FTP or Moneystream (which will be £300 by summer), and SEA.

Who knows how I can leverage this in the future? Perhaps attracting others to the Bitcar project? Perhaps someone may wish to GIFT(car)(£50). Perhaps, I will be able to give my car to someone (rather than selling it), and produce the dynamics described in the Green Team? Either because I leave the country and don’t need the car, or I buy a new car. Perhaps I can use the FTP to buy a new car, and thus include the car within the BitCar network?

So, running costs are identical to ‘ownership’, only difference is, the money that normally goes into the ‘bank’ (for whatever nefarious purposes they put it to) when saving up is replaced with FTP, an open-money-stream:

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invest in people, not things — we are the ones ‘making’ the money anyway

Secondly, an alternative way of thinking about this, is to think what the car enables. I will be able to teach, making around £80/day after tax. The car enables this. Without the car, I can’t get to school. So, in a way, the person who gives me the car, is enabling me — they deserve some %-equity in my income. If I make £1600/month, what %-equity would they want? Same goes for the garage mechanic — how much %-equity do they deserve?

Whoever has contributed the car (£2k), the mechanics at the garage (£50/month), I still have to pay for insurance and road tax (£50/month). Based on a plan which is half-way between rent and ownership, at around £250/month, those who supply the car should get around £200/month, which is 12.5%-equity of my income stream.

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After one year, the ‘owner’ has recouped their investment, and the garage has made £323.99, regardless of the repairs. Total, £2400 to use the car.

Now, with this kind of relationship, if I kept using the car by the end of the second year, the car-gifter will have made £1722.78 ‘profit’, and the garage another £750 from the second year to cover the costs of maintenance. Total, £4800 to use the car over two years.

A few questions may come to mind, about what the gifter of the car may do — perhaps offer a better one, and if so, what is the rate now? And does the garage-mechanic keep getting more and more until they are taking all of the 12.5% equity reserved for car use? Well, funnily enough, no. It tends to a number. After 10 years, for example, the car-gift owner will be getting £50/month and the garage-mechanic £150/month. Perhaps the car will require that amount of maintenance, but probably not.

the core of economics: numbers and time

Whatever your interest is in cars, the math pattern deserves attention. Why? Because it shows the relationship between capital and regular investment. Think about this in a completely different field — health. Do you pay for health treatment when something goes wrong (capital), or should you be paying a regular investment for health (regular)?

This relationship is at the heart of all our finances: the difference between a static lump sum and regular payment.

FTP, the accumulation of money as an index of trust within a network, combines both: regular payments to a static ‘standing wave’ of money. Where is this money? Well, it is like a bank, but unlike a bank, accumulated FTP does not get used. Like MTTP guarantee, it remains in escrow between the parties. So, FTP acts more like a guarantee, to be released if not enough revenue is generated from what is co-created; to ‘buy out’ those who do not wish to have %-equity in the co-created product.

The thing to get your head around is that %-equity is at the base of new economics, ecosquared or otherwise. Moneyflow is secondary.

And there is a race going on: as capitalism gets finer and finer in resolution, turning everyone and his dog into a capitalist, versus the sharing economy, where we are all part of a greater whole, a collaborative commons, where we share everything. Capitalism has massive momentum, institutionally, mechanically (financially), and psychologically. The internet has cracked open a massive opportunity in the form of open-source and it rejuvenated the commons and after a decade a massive sharing meme. But are the proponents of the sharing economy fooled by their relative luxury, royalty within the citadel playing games because they live in a world of material abundance?

It’s a tough call, and we each have to make it. We do so in our daily actions. We do so with every single financial transaction. I for one, am not convinced, as I turn to ‘buying’ a car, filling it with petrol regularly, and fueling the current system which is so destructive to our environment, and our collective soul.

MTTP animation

Been working with a bunch of people on a new version of SEA equations, to include things. Well beyond my interest or experience, however, it does have more traction in the current economic system. After deriving some equations, they are making moves.

Meanwhile, I returned to the original MTTP contract and have seen the potential for a new version that is not pure p2p, but is more like the ha-ha structure, and I’ve tentatively named it FTP. More of that later.

Here’s an animation of the MTTP in action with fake numbers. Each bar indicates a person who has been invited (or is attracted, bigger bars) to the entity using pure p2p MTTP. They appear, and when they leave, they leave with double their money (unless they were attracted). An attracted player is the equivalent of a government player, or charity, where the work that is co-created by participants is for social good alone with no monetary attraction. Co-created value that does attract money (ie selling stuff), is distributed by SEA. Since participants are covered by MTTP contracts, this is Surplus, and with enough surplus, players will want to plough that back into the system — this is the ‘attractors’. Alternatively, for the initial months of the entity, all surplus is ploughed back in to honour MTTP contracts without going through individuals, by default.

THE NUMBERS ARE NOT ACCURATE, they are representational only.

Notice the inverted pyramid effect. Those entering at longer time scales honour the payment of those who are exiting at shorter time-frames. The red figure is the amount of money that is static or fixed as the guaranteed part of the invitational protocol. That is, the red represents the people who are currently in the system at the NOW line. The green figure is the amount of money that honours the MTTP contracts. It shows the health of the entire entity. When the green hits zero, the entire entity dies, and whoever is left in the system NOW will only receive their half of the MTTP contract, that is the money they came with. That is, they don’t lose, they just don’t win. This is the failure state of the entity, and it is dependent on the number of people who are invited and at what values.

Of course, this is just the ‘boundary’ of the entity. The real stuff is what do people co-create? This is what is sold, or does social good, or both.

considering the ecosquared equivalent to Return-on-Investment

Someone asked, in the context of doing things you love, how do we get remunerated:

“What additional work is required to maximize the RoI of time and energy?”

There is no need to maximise the time you spent to produce what you love — it was its own gift, and it is over now.

Think about it across different people: say a farmer digs out the carrots, his work is done; the distributor accepts the carrots and takes them somewhere, and his job is done. By having a system that imbalances the equality of this, ‘maximising roi’ or ‘marketing’ or ‘advertising’ or ‘selling’ is simply eating into the efforts of the distributor. Or another way of thinking about it, the farmer is happy to pass on the carrots and the distributor is thankful for the carrots so they can distribute them, and the people who eat the carrots are thankful to the distributors; the number of thanks increases. Or a third way that comes to mind, the farmer doesn’t need to worry about RoI because the distributors are taking care of that — their act of distribution is the RoI. And this is clearer when the distributor gives the carrot to the thankful person at the end, both parties know exactly what their RoI will be — the eating of the carrot.

(I don’t know if that makes sense, or whether the meaning comes across. It is a bit terse, but I think valid.)

A more important question:

“What is the most efficient way to translate your work of love into income?”

My answer is, pay the person before they do what they love, so they are free from the burden of ‘getting a result’. And this is scalable in time, so they end up doing more that they love, especially as it changes over time.

 

centerless politic and old people!

I think I’ve worked out the social form that creates a dynamic, centerless politic! It’s come out of the experience of the ha-ha’s, and involves compression and expansion of the phase space of £-people-time. Circulation of money in equity cycles, what I originally understood as horizontal and vertical but is now sequential in time, makes money ‘well-behaved’ while giving rise to a subjective enumeration network which tracks our own individual personal value. Lovely.

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A centreless politic is something I have had my eye out for over a decade. How to create a social dynamic that is centerless, and yet stable? Our current politics and economics suffers from emphasis on the centre, on the pinnacle of the pyramid, on ego, on selfishness and ownership. We area culture dominated by ‘leaders’, and worse, institutional forms that places control centrally regardless of the capacity of the people who occupy central positions. A centerless politics provides us with a completely different social dynamic.

Because of the initial conditions of giving money before deciding where the money is going to be directed, the ha-ha’s create a centerless structure. However, it was only half of the dynamic of the torus — the compressive aspect. That is, when a bunch of people agree to give-it-forward to a smaller number of individuals, represented as the movement from outside the torus to the inside. The other half was not obvious, and is the reason why the ha-ha’s failed — the expansive aspect. What is the social force equivalent to more people being involved? Yup, the Invitational-Protocol. During the co-design period in August, I put it to everyone for the second meeting that we needed to come up with the IP that would work given the limited technology. We don’t have a means of tracking our Invitations, so we settled on using an off-the-shelf ‘crowd-funding’ template.

Anyway, if we sort out the IP, being careful how money-people-time expands, so we have the two parts to making this centerless politic exist!

how many people will we need to make it work?

Because we are dealing with fluids, it is not a straight forward ‘number of bodies’. Just like one’s pulse can be measured not just by number of heart-beats per minute or the blood pressure, the Chinese have several more subtle indicators.

We need to consider density — the number of people within a period of time. We might have several ha-ha’s running simultaneously, each with their own settings. Most of the feedback during the ha-ha’s involved suggestions to improve the tech, making it easier for people to be represented, dreaming up new bespoke tools — check these rather interesting social toys, by the way, specifically Points of Unity.

We wanted to get 100 people in the last ha-ha, to create the conditions that is beyond a small group. We simply don’t have any direct experiential feedback at this level, apart from when we work in companies and governments, or when we are audiences, or take part in self-organising systems like driving on the roads. We didn’t create the conditions, we didn’t meet the right density.

We may also want to consider density in terms of the Invitational-Protocol, how many people we invite, over what period, and with what quality, and range of gleick-group we are tapping into — it is wiser to invite only a few from each social group we may have, rather than all from a social group of like-minded people, which is our traditional way of organising ourselves.

and where to the old folks come in?

Because it works scalably, I have no idea of the threshold numbers from this end, from initial start-up situations; less than a hundred, perhaps only 40, but over a few ha-ha’s. From the back-end of global unity, using the old back-casting thought-experiment we should be familiar with by now, I know the peer group that can make it happen — old people! When we are talking about change over a couple of decades, over a generation, there is only one generation that can almost guarantee that they will not be about, thus deriving our centerless politic. Ie, if it is started with old people, rather than young and wilful, they may be able to kick-start the conditions that in a decade bring fruition for us all globally. It requires this level of vision, something we tend not to think old people have. However, with their age, this kind of period is well within their grasp to understand and to operate by. Think about old folks and their grandchildren, and the legacy they are leaving them globally.

I tried this idea out with a housemate, and the idea got immediately dumped. He only saw the problems that may arise from children worries about their parents being fleeced. Yes, there are problems, and problems which we may not be able to overcome. Still, global unity isn’t going to come about without challenges. This is a challenge that they may need to take on. It is not up to us.

So, I believe this is a rather beautiful invitation for old people to regain some of their lost respect, and bring into existence a sustainable world. I doubt if anyone will get this in this day and age, and also because very few (less than a handful) have any insight of the potential of the protocols, but my, it is beautiful. And the invitation goes to those who are terminally ill, or those who are suicidal — a possible way for them to contribute towards creating a centerless politic. And those mature souls who are playing a less-ego-bounded game; for though they may live to see it happen, they are centrelessness enough in their daily practice, that they have some chance of avoiding the power that comes with social attention.

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