The New Digital Economy and Timeline of Uploads
A Peer-to-Peer Digital Cash and Intellectual Property System
Donal Lumsden
IntroA large feature of any economy is currency or a medium of exchange. Currency is traditionally based on something of relative scarcity in order to maintain value. Gold has been used as a basis for currency due to its intrinsic value and scarcity. One criticism of gold backed currency is its inelasticity. Government currency offers elasticity at the price of potential corruption. Governments create artificial scarcity of their currency by limiting the supply in order to allow the currency to retain value. As a result, users of government currency must have faith that the government will keep the supply of currency low. Satoshi Nakamoto made an innovation for alternative, digital currencies by relating the introduction of new bitcoins to the scarce resource of computational processing through an intractable cryptographic problem. In this paper, another scarce resource is proposed for the basis of digital currency: innovation. Rather than basing digital currency on proofs of work, the author proposes basing digital currency on proofs of innovation.
Hypothesis for Current Intellectual Property PracticesThe author asserts the hypothesis that monetary compensation of an entity for generating intellectual property, represented as a file, is governed on average by the following equation:
VCS = N*e^(A*N)Where VCS represents monetary value for a “closed source” file
N is an integer representing the number of people exposed to the file
A is a constant > 0
The author asserts that this hypothesis is a logical conclusion of the ability of an entity to utilize an exploitive strategy in an intellectual property. The author proposes that if this equation is true, then this represents an unbalanced strategy when N>1. By definition, an unbalanced strategy is exploitable. A balanced strategy would be of the form:
VCS = N*e^(A)Creating a Constant Sum GameIt is important to note the type of game being played. A positive sum game can always be made into a constant sum game by adding an additional arbitrary player to the game whose loses equate to the net winnings of the other players. Conversely, a negative sum game (piracy) could be transformed to a constant sum game by adding an additional arbitrary player whose gains equate to the other players’ net losses.
Description of an Intellectual Property Game and Exploitive StrategyDescriptionThe object of the game is to have more value than your competitor at the end of the game;
2 entities (EA, EB) are in direct competition;
Each party has a file (FA, FB) with respective monetary values (VA, VB);
EA has a number of people (NA) exposed to the file (FA);
EB has a number of people (NB) exposed to the file (FB);
Once a person has been exposed to a file there is no way of proving the removal of the file from the person;
Public disclosure of a file (F) results in the loss of the associated closed source monetary value (V) for the controlling entity (E);Exploitive StrategyCompeting parties are allowed to pay people exposed to a file to publicly disclose the file without risk of legal recourse through the use of anonymous payment methods;
People can publicly disclose a message without risk through the use of anonymous internet access;
People are economically rational and make decisions based on the options with the highest expected value governed by the equation:
EV = Σ [Pr(i) * Incentive(i)]Expected Result of Proposed Strategy with Game: The more persons exposed to an entity’s file, the more likely the file will be publicly disclosed;
Equilibrium Between Competing StrategiesAn entity competing in an intellectual property game will often rely on a few types of incentive to prevent people from disclosing the entity’s intellectual property file. One form of incentive is a non-disclosure agreement, which is assigned a value of zero due to the use of anonymous internet access. Another form of incentive is royalty compensation, a percentage of the value (VCS) of the file (F). The main incentive considered in this strategy equilibrium is of the royalty form.
Assume an open source file has monetary value (VOS);
Assume a closed source file has value (VCS);
Each entity pays the people it exposes to the intellectual property file (F) with a royalty (R) less than or equal to VCS / N:
R ≤ VCS / N
Competing strategies will be in equilibrium when: VOS = R ≤ VCS / NThe proposed strategy is exploitive when:VOS ≥ R The New Digital EconomyThe use of original disclosure of an innovation as the basis for currency would transform a capitalist economy. The value of the currency in circulation will scale on a 1:1 ratio with the value of innovations disclosed by citizens of the economy. This solves the problem of an inelastic money supply, by allowing the value of outstanding coins in the system to grow proportionately to the growth of the economy. The use of original disclosure of innovation as the basis of currency gives this currency intrinsic value in the form of an open source database of information. Implementations of a novel intellectual capital and currency system are utilized to provide incentive for economic growth through innovation. This new intellectual capital system is designed with open source file sharing in mind, while retaining value for innovators through the network effect. Such a system should align with the future of manufacturing: distributed production by micro factories such as 3D printers.
The Nemesis Contract: A Smart Contract for UploadsA proposal of the Ethereum Project is the creation of a turing complete block chain, meaning any program could be coded and executed within a block chain. As a result, many types of contracts could be developed, along with many iterations of an essentially similar contract. The proposed Nemesis Contract produces a cryptographic currency specific to a file upload, and allocates a percentage of that currency X% to the uploader(s), and the rest (100-X)% to a network of seeders who provide access to the file and prevent file censorship.
Upload-Specific Crypto Currencies, A Variation on “Colored Coins”Inventors or uploaders submit files to a cryptographic ledger, forming a timeline of file uploads. Upon the upload of each file, an upload specific currency is generated. The number of upload specific coins generated per upload is fixed. X% of these upload specific coins will be transacted to the uploader(s) over time while (100-X)% will be transacted to seeding miners over time. The author is proposing a crypto currency backed by valuable files submitted by a network of uploaders.
Potential Method for Creating Value for Upload Specific CurrenciesTo provide incentive for users to both seed and upload files in exchange for an upload specific currency, that currency should have some scarcity. One way to drive scarcity is through advertising revenue. By hosting advertising slots in a region specific to an upload, and selling advertising rights through auctions in the upload specific currency, there will be demand for that upload specific currency as long as there is demand for upload specific advertising. Advertising auctions should be won through a process known as proof of burn. The winner of an advertising auction must “burn” an amount of upload specific currency. Permanently removing currency from circulation causes deflation that creates scarcity.
Randomly Generated, Randomly Mutating “Timeline of Uploads”The block chain for such a system becomes a randomly generated, randomly changing sequence of uploaded information. New uploads add information to the end of the timeline of uploads. Elimination of the seeding network for an upload results in the redaction of the complete file from the “Timeline of Uploads” leaving behind a hashed version of the uploaded file in the main block chain.
Vested Coins for UploaderOne potential contract would pay upload specific coins between the seeding network and the uploader in a 1:1 manner. Rather than giving 50% of all potential coins outstanding immediately, the uploader’s coins are vested over the life of the seeding process.
Seeding MinersSeeders are paid with inflation of upload specific currencies for the uploaded files that they seed. Seeders provide a decentralized network of storage and hosting. The value of such a network is related to its ability to survive an attack and its ability to provide the content to other users.
Proof of storage miners could be used with the main goal of preventing deletion of the upload, but then users who want to view content must separately negotiate a price for downloading the file at the mercy of the storage miners. Each uploaded file could have two networks: one based on proof of storage and one based on proof of retrieval. Proof of storage mining would be performed as “push” proofs and proof of retrieval mining would be performed as “pull” proofs. Redundancy of the seeding network is used as a way to value the price equilibrium of claim specific currencies.
Tradable “Future Royalty Credit” for Rights to Upload Specific Currency Inflation and VotingAs stated previously, each file upload should be associated with an upload specific currency that is paid to the uploader and upload specific mining network over time. It is quite possible, that an uploader would like to sell the rights for his/her future upload specific currency. This is possible by allocating a single tradable “future royalty credit” to the uploader’s address. Upload specific currency, which is paid out as inflation, goes to the wallet that has the “future royalty credit.” This credit could also be used to give control over the percentage of upload specific currency paid between the holder of the credit and the seeders.
With the Bitcoin Network, voting is done by consensus based on a one computational processing power unit / one vote ratio. This is different from the system described in this paper because the main mining network is based on the output of the human brain, rather than computers. As a result, voting cannot be based on a one processor / one vote method. The existence of the “future royalty credit” could be used to qualify who gets to vote and quantify how many votes each person gets. Voting could be performed on a one “future royalty credit” / one vote basis. Consensus could be achieved between the owners of the “future royalty credit” and the owners of the non claim specific currency.
ConclusionThe aforementioned system of currencies intends to directly monetize the creative process.
ReferencesJohn F. Nash Jr., “Ideal Money and the Motivation of Savings and Thrift.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je22xKQekCkKevin D. Bowers, Ari Juels, and Alina Oprea, “Proofs of Retrievability: Theory and Implementation.”
https://eprint.iacr.org/2008/175.pdfSatoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System.”
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdfVitalik Buterin, “Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform.”
http://www.ethereum.org/ethereum.html