GIFT(x) FTP Invitation

So, FTP has been rolling around my head since the beginning of the year. I haven’t finished the math, or the website invitation, but after speaking with Patrick Anderson, I pulled together this provisional video. From even the briefest perusal of Patrick’s G+ About page, it’s clear he is insightful and working towards bettering the world.

In terms of the system, I already have a Stripe submission in play, though will be looking at alternatives for moneyflow for content, eg for this site, which constitute ‘Surplus’ which is divided in the ratio of SEA. That is, the system is minimally operational!

the triggering dialogue

david pinto
Interesting. I found you on linked-in… searched for your future product foundation thing on the internet, didn’t find you, but eventually came round to your g+ page — and you are already in my circles! How are things going with you?
1:57 PM
Patrick Anderson
Hi David. I’m doing well. How are you?
david pinto
Hi. Yeah, pretty good. Too many convergent thoughts since the new year. Way too many. Hence my rather rare attempt to outreach, eg with you. Perhaps a few other players who are on the fringes, who are exceptional, may share the… burden of exploration 🙂
2:32 PM
Patrick Anderson
I don’t know where it comes from, but once you see in a new way, you are compelled to show others. I see your G+ response to my old, repetitive post. In not really sure what you mean by math or model, but I am willing to work with you to develop those interpretations
2:38 PM
david pinto
Ah, nice. You talked about fractional ownership, I think. I was asking if you have any math for this? To track fractional ownership. If this is what you were working on, coding, etc? With your product future foundation?
2:39 PM
Patrick Anderson
Ah. Hmm… It seems so elementary that I don’t see how math would help
2:41 PM
david pinto
hehehahahahah ok, cool heheha I have the opposite problem. When I engage my peers who are trying to develop algorithms that track value, they don’t see the simplicity of our solution. So, good.
2:43 PM
Patrick Anderson
I may be wrong, and an willing to try, but let’s look at a small example and then scale up to see where we lose track
2:43 PM
david pinto
Well, that’s it exactly. Ok, you free for a quick chat? Or perhaps a major engagement? How serious are you about this? By major engagement, I mean, say, an hour, where we delve as deeply as we can. So that we establish the parameters of our engagement.
2:44 PM
Patrick Anderson
I am extremely serious about this. I can prove it is the optimal organizational form
2:45 PM
david pinto
Can you prove it financially? Are you loaded? Are you living in comfort? A life of luxury?
2:45 PM
Patrick Anderson
I want to chat right now, but I have to go to work in about half hour Just because I’m not living and luxury now doesn’t prove this approach invalid
2:46 PM
david pinto
Same here. However, if you can prove something mathematically, that’s a big bonus. Something useful to leverage with.
2:47 PM
Patrick Anderson
I haven’t actually implemented anything yet because nobody understands me yet
2:47 PM
david pinto
I’ll put £5 forward to engage you over the next 20-30 mins or so. Will you.
2:47 PM
Patrick Anderson
I appreciate your offer but I am so anxious to explain this solution that I would be willing to pay you:-D
2:49 PM
david pinto
Exactly, will you put money forward? I will take you at your word. Which means, if after we engage, you don’t think it has been useful, then don’t honour your word. From the little I have engaged, I believe we are worth £5
Patrick Anderson
You want me to pay you?
2:50 PM

david pinto
Not really, it just goes forward. Part of the discussion… I’d like to have a video up explaining it, but, that’s still in the pipeline. The actual math hasn’t been finalised yet. Hence this engagement. You might be part of the solution. Doesn’t prevent us from experimenting, though. So, I am willing to put £5 forwards. Are you? Actually, with this time now, let’s reduce it to £1 since we don’t have much time left…
2:52 PM
Patrick Anderson
The system I am trying to describe “cancels out” most of the need for money
2:54 PM
david pinto
Yeah, I know, I know. I need something to sustain my exploration. I’ve done enough over two years and have to go back to work because of ‘problems’ in communication. Let’s talk another time when you have the time and the £ interest. You definitely are saying the right things. It will be good.
2:55 PM
Patrick Anderson
We will need some money to start, but I’m sure a kickstarter campaign will work once we can explain it to others
2:56 PM
david pinto
Good luck! Get back to me when you are ready to engage logarithmically.
2:57 PM
Patrick Anderson
I am in severe debt right now going through a divorce and was out of work until just the beginning of this week
2:57 PM
david pinto
Tell me about it… That’s why our engagement will be valueable. Don’t waste it through this little text chat. You are highly valuable, so am I, and our engagement will be valuable. Don’t worry. If I had the money, I’d invite you personally, but I don’t. So, be assured, get back to me when you have time.
2:58 PM
Patrick Anderson
Okay, it would help me understand your needs if you would send me example of algorithmic engagement
2:58 PM
david pinto
ehehe — which comes first, understanding or experimentation? I have enough info from your posts that I want to experiment with you. Based on that experiment, I will have more understanding, and so it builds… It’s fine, don’t worry. This engagement has already been useful. Believe me. I will record something, post it, and invite you to review it.
3:01 PM
Patrick Anderson
Ok, set you later. *see
3:02 PM
david pinto
Cool. Have a good day, really 🙂
3:02 PM

readability of this post — the turning point of understanding and information

Editing a Google Hangout Chat has been a real pain. I hope it is readable. How well you penetrate this, how deep your reading, will determine the depth of our engagement, and the speed by which this protocol takes shape in 2014. Your temporal co-ordinates as you read (early January? Spring 2014, Summer? Perhaps 2015), compared to the current saturation of this (FTP) protocol in the current marketplace, will determine your importance in this process. You  know, early adopters and all that.

So it comes down to understanding. I have explained complex math to kids. I am a professional communicator. And yet, with ecosquared, the resounding response from the beginning has been lack of understanding — and get this — a demand for more explanation. Just look at this site — it is two years worth of explanation! I have risked my wellbeing, my family’s wellbeing, on ecosquared. I believe ecosquared holds the kernal of a global solution, and this FTP may be the actual turning point — it enables a means of moneyflow that helps us learn how to operate a completely alternative economics, an ecological and ethical one, one based on giving.

Is there enough information, through the video, this post, the other posts on this video — is there enough INFORMATION, that it warrants engagement? It is through the process of engagement that understanding will emerge. That is, is there enough INFORMATION that you are willing to conduct an EXPERIMENT? Not just theorise, discuss, chat, etc, but actually conduct a financial experiment?

But where does the money go?

Yes, that’s the trick, isn’t it? Where indeed…

You’d like to know where it goes, but as we know from our current situation, the money end up in the pockets of those who have it. Capital. Money attract money.

Ecosquared protocols perform two hacks on money, namely MTTP and SEA. FTP performs the equivalent function of ‘capital’, though it operates more like ‘insurance’.

For now, suffice to say, you will get a say in where the money goes if it ever has to leave the network. That is, FTP is merely the decision to give money forward to a future date where you and others decide what to do with it. What power you will have in where it goes, depends on the quality of engagement you have, the value you co-create, and so on. The money doesn’t really ‘go’ anywhere. It is like a standing wave of collective intention; the accumulated FTP indicates the health of the network, the level of trust we have in one another.

Perhaps faith. Once our engagement occurs, our initial faith in one another will be honoured by trust. With small amount of money, small periods of engagement, and small projects, and over time this grows — based on results. Just like any enterprise or company or government or any social organisation in recorded history. It’s results driven. But to have results, one needs experimentation.

It’s up to you. Right now.

So, are you willing to gift £x forward to an engagement? You don’t have to pay that up after the engagement if you didn’t think it valuable. Of course not. But if you do think it is valuable, you will be happy to, and indeed, perhaps give more money forwards as your confidence in what we are doing is proven. Yes, in what we are doing. FTP is the financial protocol for collective co-creation. It is the process by which teams form in a network. And it operates from the get go.

Perhaps you will need some more information, so read on. Perhaps you need someone social validation, an article in some trusted source gets written at some point, or someone you know invites you to FTP later in the year, and after a few invitations, your trust of your friend or colleague overcomes the need for ‘understanding’ and you give it a go. And then, you will have experiential evidence of the experiment: how money-trust-time operate in ecosquared. Then it is for you to decide what to do next. Lovely.

This is a win-win-win solution. It’s just a matter of time. It’s a matter of who reads this: those who already resonates with it, and those who are willing to risk their word-action to test it. And of those who participate, those who can iterate a better version of engagement than this first, rather crude, iteration of video and blog post.

I look forward to meeting with you!

animation of EDP and SEA

So, people have adopted MTTP and co-created something. What happens if money is attracted to this?

For example, a team have invited one another through a web of peer-to-peer MTTP social contracts, and they produce a book. Traditionally, they would try to “sell” the book. However, with ecological economics, the book is given. Of course, in order for the participants to continue writing or doing other things, it would help if they were given money in return. Thus, the value that the team produce attracts money. We call this surplus.

The money that is attracted to the value co-created is divided equally to all participants. This is EDP — Equal-Distribution-Protocol. (On this website, this used to be called dmp, the distributed-money-protocol.)

For added flavour, to capture the quality of different people’s contributions, they can use the Subjective-Enumeration-Algorithm.

animation of mttp social contract

OK, this is rough, but it is amusing to think that I have actually done this — walked into businesses and presented ideas framed in the MTTP (Money-Time-Trust-Protocol) contract.

At the end of the meeting, the person is usually amazed. They have received a new idea they may use in their business, have had a super-interesting discussion, and they end up with more money than they came with.

I tried this with advertising companies and got very close to money-flow. Nobody I spoke to, however, saw the potential for using this methodology when approaching their potential new clients. Not yet at least. The idea of giving away your ideas seems to go counter ‘pitching’ and competing and owning. Once people get it though, it may turn the business world upside down, just like open-source half-did on the internet. This time, it is in the real world with anything.

Time Trust, demurrage and directions of the humble mttp

A few observations which seem to evolve from the money-time-trust-protocol quite naturally: Time Trust, demurrage, the “problem” when two givers meet, and sourcing the origins of giving.

time trust

Of course we should not be surprised that someone came up with Time Banks. In fact it was a chap called Dr Edgar Cahn during the 1980’s.

Ecological economics began with the financial handshake that turned out to be called mttp — money-time-trust-protocol, and over the months, awareness reveals some more qualities of its fractal structure. We have already mentioned moneyflow and the powerlaw as money can be decelerated, eg I am looking for about five £100-days per week to be able to make a living. Well, with due consideration, we may also wish to estimate the period of time such a contract may exist, eg for a season. That is, we have a number tagged with three periods of time. Eg, five people contract me for £100-day per week for the duration of a season.

A previous thought has been credits which developed further on ideas I had with Tav when I first engaged the Espian lot back in summer 2007. Back then, I influenced Tav to shift from thinking of personal economic units, that is a currency relative to every individual, to subjective weighting, so that money was distributed through the ratio of values each and every individual allocates. The development in terms of credits was to map it in terms of two dimensions, open-closed and black-red. The safest credit to receive was black-closed, which effectively acts like money: it is money that is guaranteed because the person is in the black and the total allocation of credits is closed so that whatever value one gets is the value one gets.

Tav didn’t see the point in a system that had normal money in it. Now that we have come up with ecological economics, it is a useful way to track how one behaves with one’s credit allocation through life, perhaps promising a lot of open-red credits say, and then phasing into giving out black-closed credits for important things. And more importantly, it allows us to track our collective behaviour, giving us a chance to shift from a money-production culture to a value-creation one — all with the self-similar social contract of mttp. In fact, mttp might be renamed as mutual-time-trust-protocol, and the thing that is formed a Time Trust. This may be the name of the book I am writing about ecological economics.

demurrage, or rusty money

And in case this is too much, too far, one potential point of validation is to recognise 1) the limits of current understanding and 2) demurrage or rusty money is built into mttp.

In relation to the first, I am perpetually making sense of the jumps I have made. It is gratifying to note how credits has become useful after making that leap nearly two years ago (in this dunno book when I started to live in Madeira). I still have no idea about how to square closed credits with third order periods of velocity of money, but I am sure it is doable. This is also an invitation for anyone to contribute to this space. The first financial bods to seriously consider ecosquared and mttp, will be able to bring to light many aspects which will not only make them famous, but will provide us with further understanding and a stable evolution of the eco^2 entity. That is, everyone is welcome.

In relation to the second, it is gratifying to note how rusty money appears in this formulation. We have not had to graft it on, like a scaffolding of categories, but rather it evolves from the same mttp social contract. Namely, when I invite someone for a day, my £100 is fixed and does not change. Even should the entity die that week, they will receive the £100. Because it is fixed, it is useless. It is not reinvested by a bank, and does not pay interest. This may not appear significant at first, but if you consider an invitation for £10m which is for a century, that £100m will not be worth much in a century’s time. That is, it “devalues” — at least in traditional economic terms. That is, it rusts, because of inflation, primarily.

A remarkable observation, which naturally evolves from mttp.

the four directions of mttp

Examining the abstraction of money as a number set to periods of time (duration, rate and period eg £100-day per week over a season), we can re-examine the initial mttp contract. Namely, a decision is made before the period of time which way the money goes. In fact there are three possible contracts when money meets equally as given by the following truth table:

One of the options is your classic money contract: both people want to take, and so they negotiate in the form of a competition. This can take the form of a contest of skill to be determined throughout the period, a random game like throwing a coin, or through some more complex inter-subjective manner which amounts for what we call “business”. Two of the options provide the classic mttp of ecological economics: the person who invites agrees to give the person who is invited the money. Thus, there is confluence in that the giver and the taker align in the vector direction of money.

What has not been accounted for so far in eco^2 thinking is if both people wish to give. This can not be resolved in the manner of a competition, at least not in the same way two takers compete. It is gratifying to note that the money that is derived by two givers could become fluid and pay for those individuals who are taking. That is, it constitutes the second major means by which money flows into the entity; the first was invitation via mttp, the other is attraction. Depending on the decision gate state, this money is either distributed to everyone participating as dmp or it is fed directly into honouring the mttp contracts of individuals coming to the end of their contracts and who are taking as they leave.

sourcing the origins of giving

And further, it is interesting to note that numbers used in sea provide at least two indicators of how we behave:

  • the values given to us total up to the total money that comes when there is a surplus payout via dmp
  • the total values any one of us gives out, provides us with the style and quality of the way we value (cf credits above) as we grow older

That is, we can sum up the totals of points that are given to tell us something about how valueable we are perceived by others, the object of the vector; and we can also see how the value of a person in their allocation, the origin of the vector.

So, when one meets another person and one invites them to eco^2 and they also decide to give, this act of generosity of giving their money for other people who they may not even know, should be valued. That is, one can look back at the historical giving of a person and see the values they set out with in terms of their pattern of subjective enumeration coupled with the way they dealt with their first eco^2 invitation.

I can not discern it linguistically here and now, but there is a means by which the simple math of subjective enumeration can bring to the fore those individuals who are not only providing greatest value to others, but also those whose eye for value is appreciated. And in terms of social engagement, this may be appreciated as wisdom.

The reaason why I can not discern this clearly is because when I was trying to invent a numerical game for adolescents so that it was the giver who ended up being respected, not those who received, my mind could not do it. I believe it is in the math of the application of number to subjective evaluation. Money can be likened to the number that is given to another person, when I say that a conversation with John was worth 7 out of 10 say. I “gave” him 7. But I have also given 7. What is the maths of the giver?

 

and finally…

The social contract instigated by mttp is quite phenomenal. That one can use mttp to replicate employment and investment and direct action, is quite something, and now to recognise the powerlaw and the logic of giving, I am humbled. I look forward to hearing how others explore this as they experience it. I did not misname it when I intuited mttp to be a fractal social contract.

 

invitational-protocol

Invitational-protocol (ip) is a variation of mttp, used specifically to outreach to new participants. When Anna meets Barry at a conference, they conduct ip by Anna inviting Barry to come to the next in-person gathering, and offering £10 to be matched by Barry. The conditions are very similar to mttp:

  1. bring both £10 to the meeting
  2. optionally invite others to the meeting

If Barry turns up to the weekly meeting, he is welcomed warmly. He brings with him £10 and has invited Chuck, who himself turns up with £20.


In this way, trust becomes transitive, and new participants are genuinely welcomed for turning up for the first time having been attracted to the person who engaged them, the value that was seen in them, or the financial protocol that beckons a completely new economic social contract.

Money can be traced through the trust relationships formed through ip before the meeting has even occurred. Mathematically, the money that is brought to the meeting is at the fringes of the network of trust that has cascaded through ip relationships. There is no money at the centre: the “regulars” have given away their money, and in this process it doubles as ip propagates through a population. (For those interested in the detail, mttp can create equity cycles where a chain of invitations create a closed loop as the initiating inviter is finally invited; this is linear, whereas ip takes this into a two-dimensional radial pattern.)

This is not a straight linear relationship, variations evolve. For example, Dave, Charlie and Barney “nominate” Anna, a particularly effervescent and active member who has time to talent scout over the week. They invite her at £10 each to the next meeting, so Anna starts the week with £40 which she can use to invite four people using ip. If she fails to invite anyone, she can return with £40. Perhaps she invites four people and none turn up, perhaps eight do with £80 in total.

Seen in this way, invitational-protocol is a kind of test for the strength of the social fabric. Not only a social bond between regular participants who attend weekly, but a test of the environment “out there” as new people are approached with eco^2 protocols of trust.