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Draft Narratives

Ideas from a workshop documented here.

First designed in 2008 prior to the availability of the enabling technologies for implementation, ERA (Earth Reserve Assurance) is an algorithmic anchor for digital currencies, which opens a novel investment market that plays a productive role both in calibrating the value of currencies while incentivizing the long term assurance of primary commodities and ecosystem integrity.

Decentralized digital currencies have opened the monetary space to creative reconfiguration. However, core problems persist. Value is unstable, energy consumption is unchecked, and projects that attempt to account for the effects of human industry on the earth's ecology have problems coping with the complexity of the real world.

ERA flips this problem on its head, providing long term stability, while reshaping core incentive mechanisms.
ERA is competitively and independently verifiable.
ERA is effective across scales, communities, and bio-regions

One more time: ERA provides a stable anchor for value, opens a novel speculative market, and solves some of the deepest monetary problems.

Bitcoin also hit the world in 2008. This was no coincidence, it was also responding to crisis. Now, just as then, people are looking for novel investment markets, reliable methods to store value, and ways to re-imagine a fundamentally flawed monetary system. Digital currencies elegantly solve the ledger problem. ERA elegantly solves the worth problem.

Ideas from the weekly ERA call on 2022-01-19

We discussed some 'initial perceptions' of the general domain we're in that can be usefully addressed in our ERA communications.

We agreed that both the NFT (which has a 1-year history) and the Green Bond (15-year history) investment instruments attract three types of reactions in 'the market', each of which we can expect to carry through as default preconceptions of the ERA NFTd. Our ERA communication should address all three directly.

  1. Value Investor Interest: fundamental analysis with a view to comprehensive long-term social, political, economic and/or ecological goals;
  2. Financial Athlete Interest: speculative technical analysis for purely financial gain, on multiple time scales;
  3. Critical Thinker Interest: audit analysis, ranging from constructive criticism to mocking dismissiveness (it's a scam, it's all hype, it has zero intrinsic value).

Compare these two views of Green Bonds:

(I think we should approach both the WB and Fancy. FWIW, I have done work under contract for 6 different divisions of the WB. ~joseph)

Participants in the discussion will notice that below I re-framed the third item from the negative role which we discussed, into a positive role. This is not due to any shallow 'feel-good' bias; rather it is to avoid defensiveness no matter how harshly a critic expresses a point, and rather listen to and reflect upon what each critic is intending to express. There's no advantage to becoming bothered by or ignoring critics. Instead we need to ensure that our design and documentation genuinely 'resolve' any identified real or perceived weakness. This does not mean the critic will agree with our resolution -- and some 'critters' only operate in a single mode as trolls. Similarly, we should try to ensure that when we speak of other approaches that we consider unworkable, we do not come across as trolls against them. Instead we should very respectfully explain why our design differs, perhaps to try to articular the kind of problem their solution solves, versus the kind of problem ours solves.

It's useful for us to perceive and communicate our use of the NFT as a useful technical method among several ways to instantiate digital ERA Deposit Receipts with the required attributes. We should launch initially with more than one method. The most critical requirement for the success of ERA is the durability of its record keeping and the ease in which the documents of each Project can be examined and updated, and most importantly be readable 200 years or more from today.

Here are three methods:

  1. ERA NFTd on any distributed ledger -- I suggest we implement with all three: BTC; ETH; IOT;
  2. ERA CQLd or SQLd deposit receipt in CQL or SQL in a database with at least 2-point redundancy, access controls, backups, modern interfaces, an immutable ownership provenance;
  3. ERA 3Dd non-electronic instantiation as a 3D-printed "credit-card" with embossed ascii characters expressing the DWDS record identifier of the deposit receipt and current owner.

More on the "credit card" idea: For the non-electronic storage of an ERA deposit receipt, I have mapped out for consideration a Xalgorithms function that 3D-prints a credit-card-sized plastic card with embossed ascii characters (suitable for human-eye verification) expressing a DWDS record identifier. This identifier must contain all the DWDS identifier components, and the version ancestry lists its ownership history:

  • URI: Context identity (An item is recognizable by its situation.);
  • CID: Expression identity (An item is recognizable by its minutiae.);
  • UUID: Inception identity (An item is recognizable by its instantiation.); and
  • SemVer: Provenance identity (An item is recognizable by its ancestry.) Here is a 100% "open hardware" 3D printer firm we could experiment with: https://www.prusa3d.com/page/about-us_77/ https://github.com/prusa3d There are surely others that are also 100% open hardware.

More on the scam/hype problem: We have to not interpret this as mere naysaying. Consider, for example, the actual level and character of fraud in an airline tickets (see https://www.iata.org/contentassets/8a1d401955164c868258e7875edd5d5a/iata_whitepaper_fraud_july2020_digital_en.pdf ) or train tickets, or cheques. There are scams with very conventional instruments.

The launch of ERA in March can be in a simulated market, like the initial launch of NetTrade. The prize can be a workshop training session with the Xalgorithms team.

Team: What other ideas do you have for expedient technologies?

Updated by Joseph Potvin over 2 years ago · 17 revisions