Project Magic Dragon #2 - How it fits into the bigger picture
Project Magic Dragon
In this post I want to paint the essence of what Project magic Dragon is about into the bigger picture of economic disparity and the basic economic flaws it seeks to address, as well as the tech landscape within which it can operate.
In Essence
Sociologically speaking
There is this old saying about rather teaching someone in need to fish than giving them free food.
In that sense PMD provides the tackle and free bait enabling everyone capable of doing so to take care of themselves.
Economically speaking
It is said that money is the oil that speeds up bartering and makes it easier to trade over greater distances.
PMD is about providing free oil in the form of free tokens, together with a free means of transacting over distance and a free incorruptible bookkeeping system in the form of an exchange on an open ledger internet connected system.
As a bonus, making use of the multilayered functions offered by miracles like Etherium, Steem and Eos, it is possible to have PMD being a complete open market providing facilities like advertising, trading, invoicing and bookkeeping, all available on any of those beautifully engineered systems.
Furthermore
It so happens that by the choice of 'bait' and the type of 'tackle' offered by PMD, it also addresses two basic flaws in the current ecomomic scenario, namely the innate instability of currency value and the very corruptible means by which currency is fed top down into the economy. But more about that in later posts.
Please note - PMD is seen as financially running in its own closed enviroment, in the sense that it's monetary token can only be traded on it's own exchage, thereby isolating it from speculative sentiments in the open market - a point to keep in mind when considering the stability of it's value.
Please also have look at the Community Exchange System for examples of a similarly isolated community exchanges that have very successfully been trading goods and services for many years, though not with everything PMD has in mind.
Technologically speaking
Efficiency in handling massive numbers of trades is the most important criterium by which to make a choice of on which system of infrastructure ('blockchain') to run a project like PMD.
We are all aware of the sad fate of Bitcoin at this stage of the game in that, because of the competitive Proof of Work (PoW) means of procreation and bookkeeping with which it intrinsically functions, running it consumes massive amounts of energy, consumes more and more time to process blocks the older the system gets, and correspondingly makes it more and more expensive to use.
Etherium, the first blockchain I am aware of to provide the necessary means to do all that PMD requires, is, even more sadly, at this point in time suffering the same maladies as Bitcoin, because of the PoW part of its inner workings inherited from Bitcoin.
And then along came Steem, just doing everything quicker and more efficiently, and it's follow-up named Eos, out of the same stable, led by the the same venerable you know who(!), which leads us to believe it will work even better.
Community involvement
And this is where community interaction come into play concerning the possible implementation of PMD.
PMD is here offered as a possible community project, with members of the Steemian society forming a team to do just that - implement a healthier and more fair means of trade with all the side benefits mentioned.
PMD is just an idea, offered here by me to you to consider its viability. It is an idea with, as far as I can see, huge potential in resolving a number of social and ecomomic problems in a way that furthers possible achievement of our shared dreams of freedom from tyrrany, relief from the flaws inherent in the debt based monetary system we currently are forced to suffer and of freely having the means at our disposal by which each of us can be enabled earn a fair living, while having those incapable of being productive are taken care of by the same mechanism.
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Sounds too wonderful to be true?
You decide!
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I will explain the concepts involved one by one and how everything fits together as understandably as I can in coming posts.
I am not in it for any money to be made. In fact, if this project, or something similar delivering the same results, can be made to work, I will gladly step aside and let an inspired younger brigade run with it!
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Some of the points to ponder
(not in any specific order)
- Why overstep a golden rule and use energy as parity?
- Unspoken consensus about the values of currencies and how that applies here
- Why feed purchasing power in at the bottom? Why free money?
- How the PMD currency differs from other altcoins
- Immunity from market sentiment
- Taking care of the unproductive sector and sponsoring entrepreneurs by the same mechanism
- Will PMD be a game changer?
- Can PMD co-exist with other means of trade?
- What are the social benefits?
- What are the economic benefits?
- How PMD fits in with a robotic future
- How much boodle every week?
- Calculating the parameters - squaring PMD with existing global figures
- Security concerns and measures
- About launching this project
- A development team
- Funding development of this project
- How PMD can sponsor its hardware and Witnesses
- Limiting the volume of tokens in circulation - how and why
- Why limit the lifespan of the project?
- Why the cycles? Are there other ways of limiting the volume of tokens?
- How promotion of PMD can be rewarded
- Must we start it up and trow away the keys?
- The fascinating synergy of PMD's parts
- Why a female dragon?!
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Is this just an idealist vision, or can we make this project, or something similar, work to benefit us all?
It all depends on cooperation and support in refining the idea till it becomes a launchable product!
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by the way..
Playful token pic: touch pad finger paint, YT!
I see one big problem: in order for the money to be accepted as money it has to have perceived value & usability. Both don't come from nowhere. In your project I can see neither. Just another token with no real function. There are plenty of such "dead" coins lying around and doing nothing so there must be some incentive to use those tokens in order for them to gain any (even very minor) perceived value.
(Of) the people in Kenya have no money, or at least too little to make ends meet and no easy access to banks. Many have access to mostly natural resources though - a milk producing cow, pasture, grass to weave mats and baskets from, a banana bush, venison, their own creative talents, muscle power, etc - and strangely enough cell phones!
Then someone came with the bright idea of using airtime as a currency, based on the fact that their Service Provider allows transfer of airtime between users..and over time this became a widely accepted means for transferring value, in exchange for goods and services of course. And this has been going on for years, no trouble . That is a currency with a practical value, bought and paid for somewhere in the chain of transactions, with it official fiat currency, which in fact makes it merely a substitute currency.
The CTTE (Cape Town Talent Exchange), on the other hand, uses a completely fictional currency, called the Talent. It is not backed by anything or mathematically linked in value to any other currency or other commodity. It is a closed Members Only system, with a central bookkeeping ledger where all transactions are recorded, open for any member to inspect. There is simply a limited number of tokens in circulation and the exchange was kickstarted by the founder saying "Lets start off imagining this token to have more or less the same value as the local official currency". And that is it - I have been a member of that community since about 2006 and the community is still going strong to this day. I have traded holiday accommodation in exchange for this token about 400 km out of town. Years later I used some of my earned tokens to pay my backpackers fee in the middle of town, no trouble - I merely had to browse the CTTE catalogue to find a member owning a backpacker facility close to where I had to do my business in town, make my reservation, transfer the fee, and voila! - I did not have to spend a single penny of my fiat money at all for sleeping over in town.
The point is, the money on that exchange is a complete fiction and it is only by consensus amongst members that it has value at all, and its value is in the end determined by competitive bidding in a free market supply and demand environment. Please follow that link and have a look around. I could of course not cover all aspects of it in this reply.
All clear but: airtime has an intrinsic value as it may be consumed in form of a phone-call and this Talent token got an intrinsic value from underlying services or goods being bartered. So value was sort of first and then came pecuniary usability. Reversing this logic might pose a big challenge...
I don't think it is reversing the logic, with all respect. In fact it is making use of exactly the same logic. The E token made available by PMD is no different from the Talent token made available by CTTE as a means of transferring value.
The difference currency-wise is that where the Talent is by built in parameters and by unspoken consensus amongst members retaining a value close to that of the local currency, the PMD E token is by consensus agreed to have a value close to that of a unit of electricity.
The reason why energy is chosen to be the reference base is because energy will always and forever be an important part of the input into producing especially essential goods. Having a currency valued in terms of purchasing power for energy will therefore provide you with the security that your money will never devaluate in its purchasing power for goods you need to survive on.
Thanks for your continued interest - would it not be wonderful for sanity to prevail in providing our daily needs and nobody has to be in a constant state of panic the way the current rat race forces them to be!
PMD's contribution to this is to try and provide a stable and secure means for accessing the necessary resources, for everybody to be enabled to be productive in their own right and by their own choice and for everybody to be able to trade in a secure environment with a stable and secure means of trade.
"would it not be wonderful for sanity to prevail in providing our daily needs and nobody has to be in a constant state of panic the way the current rat race forces them to be!"
Agreed. That's why some countries are considering introduction of unconditional basic income. It has already been tested on small scale in Canada and in Finland. But they distributed tokens (cash) which had well established perceived value.
Your idea of a token & distribution thereof has to be tested in practice. Might work but to be honest I don't think it will. But I wish all the good luck to those who try :)
Thanks for your interest - and I respect your opinion.
The idea was to launch it strictly as game specifically for the sake of testing, e.g., in schools of economics, etc. One has to be careful though, as an automated system with unrestricted membership can easily escape the lab, so to speak, and go viral, starting where the need for something like this is desperate. And if presettable parameters are not set wisely, undesirable consequences could result!
There are communities so terribly deprived, being sidelined by unemployment and neutered by hyperinflation caused mainly by political malfunction out of their control, where an independent trade facility and means of funding could only be welcomed.
Zimbabwe is a good example. It has plenty of resources (has been referred to as the one-time breadbasket of Africa). Zimbabweans have an above average level of literacy and education, but their economy has been ruined by reasons too complex to dwell on right here, which had literally hordes of them migrate elsewhere.
Maybe even a copy of a well tried and tested closed locally populated marketing system like those affiliated with the Community Exchange System can bring relief there.
I have been a member of the Cape Town Talent Exchange, a founding precursor of the above, for donkey's years and it has only grown in popularity to this day.
PMD in short wishes to add another dimension to it, by catering for the unproductive sector as well, and to use a different currency concept in order to achieve it's goal.
This is an awesome project. It yours? I think SMT's are about to add a whole new variable to this game. Great share. Thank you!
Hi @mental-extract - yes..and thanks for the compliment!
I was actually looking for a way in which to implement a constant-value concept I have been toying with for way more than a decade when it struck me that it could work in a system like this, with additional features like UBI, blockchain facilities and injecting purchasing power into the economy in a decentralized manner.
It can best work as a closed trading system, an example of which you can find here.
Agreed! Very cool. My pleasure.