# Draft Narratives

**Ideas from a workshop [documented here](https://www.figma.com/file/HofePRI3QdIetlykXzpxnn/ERA-Narrative?node-id=0%3A1)**.

Bitcoin hit the world in 2008. This was no coincidence, it was 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.

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.

**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. Participants in the discussion will notice that below I re-framed the third item from the negative role which we discussed, intto a positive role. This is not due to any shallow 'feel-good' bias; rather it is to try always 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 any critic. We only need to ensure that our design and documentation genuinely 'resolve' the identified weakness. This does not mean the critic will agree -- 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 other approaches, rather we respectfully explain why our design differs.)

1. _Value Investor_ Interest: fundamental analysis with a view to comprehensive long-term social, political, economic and/or ecological goals;

1. _Financial Athlete_ Interest:  speculative technical analysis for purely financial gain, on multiple time scales;

1. _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:

* World Bank 10-Year Retrospective: https://www.worldbank.org/en/events/2018/11/16/from-evolution-to-revolution-10-years-of-green-bonds

* Tariq Fancy, BlackRock’s first global chief investment officer for sustainable investing (2018-2019): https://medium.com/@sosofancy/the-secret-diary-of-a-sustainable-investor-part-3-3c238cb0dcbf

(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)

It's useful for us to perceive and communicate our use of the NFT as one 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. During the discussion we asked Bill to consider some earlier methods, perhaps from the 1980s or 90s, which might be usefully reframed for an IPFS network scenario.

Regarding scam/hype problem, we have to recognize that these do not represent mere naysaying. Consider the actual level and character of fraeud the ERA Deposit Receipt is a special purpose instrument that functions like an airline (see https://www.iata.org/contentassets/8a1d401955164c868258e7875edd5d5a/iata_whitepaper_fraud_july2020_digital_en.pdf ) or train ticket, or a cheque, named for a particular individual, and equally suited to electronic and printed media

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.