Introduction - help needed to develop an idea.
I´m making this website to find people to help me with an idea I´ve been working on for about the last five years. This idea is about an alternative currency system to replace the centuries old system we have now. I´ve spent a long time looking for anything that resembles this idea and failed, so I believe it´s original, which also means it´s going to difficult to explain. This difficulty mainly comes from the requirement that the reader must forget all their ingrained assumptions about money, property, law, policing, government.. once you get over this hurdle it is relatively easy.
A very simple explanation of the idea
Imagine it as a reputation system (like the stars the people get given on Ebay or Amazon) but for everything you have ever done. 5-out-of-5 stars means lots of people like the way you do things and will help you. 1-out-of-5 stars probably means you have done lots of bad things and people will ignore you. That´s too simple to replace a currency right? However we have some tricks up our sleeve. First, you personally might not care about some of the stars that the person has got, maybe you really like animals but the person has got all their stars from doing drug testing on animals, well you can just filter out all the stars they got for that work. Other people don´t have to use this filter, as maybe they think animal testing is a good thing. So this system could be described as a filtered reputation system. This system allows you to only interact with and help the kind of people you want in society and ignore those that you don´t want in society, thus shaping the kind of society you want to live in (like voting, but voting through interactions). I believe that such a system if implemented correctly could not only replace money (in its current form) but also government, police, private property and all other forms of unnecessary unjustified authority.
Do check out the FAQ and the Analogy, it clarifies a lot.
What does this mean in practice?
Imagine everyone has a handheld device that contains a list of all their actions: who they have helped, what resources they have used, bad things they have done, how much energy they have used, how much carbon dioxide they have created, etc. Basically anything and everything that has happened in the public part of your life. When someone wants something from you (a service, a resource, etc) , you can use your device to interrogate the data on their list, you can´t read the specifics of their data, but you can run algorithms (of your choosing) on this data to get an idea of the kind of person you are dealing with.
For example, maybe you value care in the community quite highly, hence people who help at schools and old peoples homes would score more highly and you would be more willing to help them, perhaps you consider arms manufacturers, violent people, people who own a Humvee to be bad for society, they would only get a lower score for these traits and you would be less likely to help them (or maybe you rate these things highly and would like a society full of gun-owning, violent Humvee drivers, in which case you would help these people). People who fill both your bad and good criteria would get a middle score. Conventional currency can not do this: the person you conduct business with might be exactly the kind of person you think is bad for society, but it doesn´t matter as long as they have enough numbers on their bank account. This is just one of the important problems that the proposed system will cure. Because the type of people you help determines the society you live in, it is like voting, but quicker, simpler and without all the slow bureaucracy. The rules you use to analyse the data are like the laws in current society, but less authoritarian, faster to adapt to trends in society (anti-racism, sexism, homophobia, etc) and also very powerful.
It sounds simple but that´s basically it, by replacing conventional currency with this very simple system I am going to show how you can create all the other things (government, law, policing, property) we need for a fair, sustainable and happy society, without all the disadvantages of the old systems.
Yes, we need to do lots of work on security of data, prevention of gaming the system, but for that we can use lots of techniques that are already in use in Information technology today. I´m already starting to explain possible solutions for these - look at pages like Security, System specifications, Frequently Asked Questions or the other links at the bottom of this page. Please remember this is a work-in-progress and that I mainly made this website to find people to help me.
Things this idea is not (before you start getting the wrong idea):
Communism - the idea has no government, no heirarchy, people are in control as individuals, bottom-up decision making, not top down, so it is not communism.
Meritocracy - maybe it is a meritocracy, but if so then from the bottom-up, not from a government definition of what is worthy and what isn´t.
Gift economy - my understanding of a gift economy is you just give something and hope one day to get something back, the idea proposed here is not so open to abuse.
LETS, Time-based currency, cryptocurrency - the idea proposed here is nothing like these things either (but they are good and worth reading about).
Things the idea is similar to
The idea is however very similar to some forms of organisational anarchsim (no - not hooliganism or vandalism, that´s something else), as it is: non-heirarchical, those doing the work decide how to do it, and what you work for decides the shape of the society you live in.
Direct democracy: From my basic understanding of direct democracy, the idea is very similar to it, as the people decide the shape and direction of the society they live in by choosing who they cooperate with and ignoring the people who have directly opposing ideas about society.
That sounds interesting, how can I help..
So, if any of that sounds interesting to you watch this site and read on. If you have a background in any of the following fields I could really appreciate your input: information theory, general cryptographic techniques, information filtering, manipulation of very large data sets, Anarchist organisational theory (Platform, collectivist, etc). More than anything I need people who are interested, can understand the idea, can add something to it, who believe in the general idea and purpose yet also realise it needs a lot of work and improvement.