Steemit and the Ultimate Recourse: Blockchains For Everyone!

Steemit and the Ultimate Recourse: Blockchains For Everyone!

Having written at length about the possibility of solving quite a number of problems with Steemit by applying an orthogonal web of trust system over the top in order to individuate the user experience (in Steemit And the Web of Trust: a Potential Love Story), and later taking up some of the philosophical problems with the way that Steemit and steem work against building communities which are focused on serving those who reside within them and instead manifesting the authoritarian impulse, in Steemit and the Dynamic of the Authoritarian in Assumption, I think it's time I bit the bullet and actually try to join the mainstream by writing something that actually suggests that the blockchain might be a solution to a problem.

Radical, I know – and completely unlike me… But here we go.

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Having recently consumed the Smart Media Tokens whitepaper by @ned and @theoretical, and letting it gel with a couple of ideas that had already been floating around my mind, I had a moment of painful epiphany.

That is, aside from the fact that it reads not like a set of stereo instructions, all hail Beetlejuice, but that it simply doesn't go far enough. Over complicated, overinvolved, way too obsessed with managing reserves and fiddling with supply and not enough with "how can we use this thing to actually affect things that are not this thing?" – But not as ambitious as it could have been.

Let's take things to the next level, and make a crazy assumption:

What if everyone, every user agent in the system, had their own SMT?

Like I said, radical. Why in the world would you want everyone (and in theory everything, but we'll get to that) to have their own cryptocurrency coin? How would you even manage an economy that was built on such a thing?

If I can trade a thing for other things, there's an economy. By definition. If I have a token and I can trade it to someone else for another token, I have an economy. An economy doesn't require an entire network of complex contracts built into the very fabric of the system; humans are quite capable of doing that. All we need is a basic mechanism of trade.

So what does this trade actually involve? As I conceive of it, it involves trading interest and trust for things that I want, namely interesting new media. That could be because someone actually creates that new media or because they have found that new media outside my normal view and brought it before me. Either way, that's good and I want to reward that kind of behavior.

Enter the personal SMT.

For the moment, let's refer to this one as the LexCoin.

How does the LexCoin come into being? I apply for an account on a site that uses a blockchain in some sense. When I do so, it automatically creates the LexCoin and fills my pocket with them. This may involve a modest stake or it might be simply an exchange of value for my personal information. After all, we are constantly informed that our personal information is worth actual money. As such, it should be valuable enough to provide a basic stake.

Now I have LexCoin.

What do I do with it?

It represents a quanta of my attention and approval. It represents a quanta of trust. While not infinitely divisible, each quanta is pretty scalable if we're using a blockchain like steem. The most important thing that I can do with these quanta of attention and approval is to give people attention and approval.

Let's talk process.

I'm surfing the site, I find something that I really like, and I upvote it. When I do so, the system recognizes this and opens a box and puts my upvote into it. The system marks the thing that I upvoted with a note that I intend to give the people who provided it to me some LexCoin and that the coin is positively aspected.

I continue on for an arbitrary while and find something that I really don't want to see going forward, for whatever reason. I downvote it. The system makes note that I want to give some LexCoin to the people that provided it to me, makes a note that said LexCoin is negatively aspected, and I go on my merry way.

Now the system enters its update cycle. It goes through my box of updates, figures out who needs to get some of the LexCoin that I possess, then splits the value I have to hand over between all of the votes that I've made, divvies it up between all the recipients based on how many up and downvotes that I've made and who was involved in providing me the things that I have expressed a reaction to, and adjusts all of their blockchains appropriately.

As part of cleanup, the transaction box removes all of the upvotes and downvotes that I've done, fills my personal LexCoin wallet back up to my original stake, and prepares for me to go through the next cycle. This cycle could be any arbitrary length, whether it be five seconds, an hour, 12 hours, a day, a week – whatever the administrators of the site want the usual engagement length to be.

(My experience suggests that a relatively rapid transaction cycle often turns out the best. You get more observable immediate results when transactions are executed in between 15 and 20 minute windows.)

And here's where things get really strange.

The LexCoin that I give to other people remains LexCoin, and when they receive it it remains colored with the aspect that I gave it to them with, either positive or negative. It stays as part of their personal inventory until it decays.

(We'll get to decay in a moment.)

So now some users are infected with LexCoin. I've given it to them. They possess it. And whenever they interact with a piece of media and give away some of their personal coin, a proportional amount of LexCoin goes along with it. Their upvotes and downvotes go into their personal transaction box, the system will allocate coins from their personal wallet which now includes a percentage of LexCoins, those coins are transferred, including a portion of my own, there while it is refreshed including the LexCoin that they have in their pocket, and the next cycle begins.

Now we get to decay, because technically decay is part of dealing with the transaction box. It's one more step, one more mechanic to do before we go to the top of the round and start again. LexCoins out of my pocket have a lifespan. They decay at some arbitrary rate, but probably something on the order of tens to hundreds of times the length which the transaction box empties.

The idea is for my quanta of attention to not be permanent, merely long-term. If I like what you're doing today, odds are good that I will like what you're doing tomorrow. If I don't, I still might like what you're doing the day after tomorrow but less than someone that I have said that I like what they're doing today. If I like what you're doing both today and yesterday, then odds are good that you have a good chunk of LexCoin which has been refreshed for tomorrow.

This runs for everyone who ends up with some LexCoin. If Alice does stuff that I like and I give her an upvote, she has some LexCoin. When she upvotes something, more people will have LexCoin – just a proportionally small amount. If they in turn upvote or downvote someone, those transactions will all carry a little bit of LexCoin with the same aspect, positive or negative.

Eventually the amount of LexCoin involved becomes too little to be concerned with, so there may be an optional step which checks during the transaction box clean up phase to see if there's enough value to transfer to be worth executing.

Thanks to decay, the tiny bits that may trickle out fairly far into the network don't have a particularly long lifespan, though they can accumulate. This is a token that represents almost purely "things that I care about," and that care can be negative. It's not intended to be a medium of fiscal reward, but rather the medium which allows me to observe the state of all the provided media which I might see, and order it based on what I am likely to care about.

It's easy to tell what I might care about. Look and see if the creator or curator of a specific piece of media has some LexCoin. Order the whole list based on maximum LexCoin to minimum LexCoin by aspect, so that elements which have a lot of positively aspected LexCoin are at the top and elements which have a lot of negatively aspected LexCoin are at the bottom, and the stuff in the middle is the system saying that it doesn't really know if I have an innate likelihood of being interested in that stuff based on who is involved with it.

Now I have an individual view of the system, based in blockchain operations, distributed across all the agents in that blockchain network.

I have a web of trust built out of an infinitely renewable token economy, not one intended to be traded for or connected to the US dollar, but one that exists specifically to do one thing and one thing well: give me stuff that I may not have seen that I'm likely to like.

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I have a little secret.

This isn't even my final form.

I've deliberately over complicated this system. As a set of game mechanics, which is how I think of all of these sort of operations, I can simplify this easily with one change of concept:

It's not just all users or user agents that have their own SMT. It's all things, all entities, which have their own SMT. Each of them has a wallet, each of them has a transaction box, and all of the rules which apply to any entity apply to every entity in exactly the same way. All that's important is what their connected entities are.

Think about this. Instead of thinking about rewarding users, we make the idea simpler and talk about rewarding media. Rewarding posts. Rewarding videos. Rewarding books, a page at a time or otherwise. Possibly rewarding creators and authors directly. Possibly rewarding people who curate well directly, with complete intention. Possibly rewarding entities which aren't actors at all but conceptual placeholders. Tags. Communities. Even bots.

All we need is a way to tell the system about the relationship between entities, those relationships can be interesting indeed.

What if one of the entities is the day the post entered the system? That's a perfectly valid entity. You might even want to vote up that day if it was one which a lot of really cool post came in on, or it was a day where a big national event happened and you're interested in what was going on. What if the entity is just one that maintains relationships to the current people in your state legislature? That's a perfectly valid entity; it describes an organizational group. You might want to upvote that entity because you care about things related to those people – or downvote it because you care that you should never see stuff from those people.

Relationships can be meta-textual.

For those people who see a blockchain, feel like they have a hammer, and are looking for a nail – this is the most extreme possible representation of the blockchain as distributed consensus-synchronized database that you're going to see. It's all about relationships between entities, taking the meta-textual information about entities in the system and making it operable, and – not as a second thought but as a primary goal – giving people something that is a useful tool in their lives.

Crazy talk, I know.

Maybe this isn't even possible. That's certainly a reasonable position to take. The blockchain is sort of the Jesus technology of the moment; like AI, just adding it to your company description and changing nothing else will increase your stock value.

But wouldn't it be interesting?