BUILDING 2050 ON RESPONSIBLE CRYPTOCURRENCIES

How can we support and build an economy of 2050?  We have thought about this a lot, and from countless prototypes in large scale regeneration and sustainability projects, we have learned that no matter how hard you try, the current solutions, however unsustainable, are the ones capable of attracting funding. It is simply baked into the system that companies and projects that have a track record are suitable for lending or issuing shares, and that with few exceptions, complex new realities are simply starved of capital.

We are talking about situations when multiple projects need to occur for a collective good to be generated. For example, we know that for decades the Baltic Sea has been studied from every angle and remains one of the most polluted seas in the world. And despite knowing the economic value of its regeneration, the current financial frameworks make it probably impossible. How do you structure investment and finance when the benefits happen in different pockets, all over the place and at different scales? How do you finance one bit, which is quite modest and value-less, unless many other things happen at the same time?

The VC (venture capital) market offers an alternative when value can be highly concentrated. Normal incubation typically works around this idea. Explore many, discard many, grow a few. But to have a systemic impact, like achieving a higher living condition, one cannot simply pick winners. This is not how nature works. Gregory Landau, in  Designing the Pathway to Regeneration, and Why We can’t Do That, says:

When moving towards regeneration you need to grow awareness over time. It’s essential. It doesn’t happen overnight. We can’t design the entire pathway to regeneration. Instead all members need to be engaged to invoke regeneration as the direction they are moving towards. This is a holistic context that only a common vision and desired future can bring about.

And that is why we are turning to responsible cryptocurrencies to provide the transition to be able to build the 2050 future now. Asking to see the track record of the future in order to invest in it, is entirely possible, but we must come backwards from that future.

When this future utility is co-created, we are able to collectively assign a value and use a new type of instrument that reflects the shared agreement, the actions to get to it, and the outcomes that resulted.  Say that we together figured out a way by which a 1ct per kilometer mobility service could be used to replace a good portion of 20-50cts per kilometer privately owned personal vehicle uses. This would be true only if a significant number of electric cars would need to be available to all in order to really make a difference in how we all move around.

However, under normal financial logic, the new initial investment, combined with the fact that everyone already has the cost of the private solution, and that all kinds of parking and fuel infrastructures support the existing model, will make it so that change is possible only ever so slowly. Meanwhile, we must continue building parking lots next to every building, roads and the lot. All of which, reinforces the choice of the past. But we know this is not the only way. For instance when mobile telephones appeared it was from the start a race to get users using and towers to transmit up and running at the same time. And so it is for almost any ‘utility’ where the value of a future is anticipated.

A currency can be a trade-exchange instrument, a store-of-value, and other couple things. It can be an agreement that captures “the shared agreement, the actions to get to it, and the outcomes that resulted” that we said above we must code in order to be able to walk from a future we have agreed upon. The technological breakthrough provided by Holochain is that this allows even a very distributed benefit to be pooled together in services that users can actually buy now. Even tiny micro-services like 30 min of work, or some maintenance activity, or a few minutes of energy, all can be combined to create a new economy where everyone participates – as consumers, producers and owners.

In what follows, we take much from  Arthur Brock Culture hacker, software architect, & targeted currencies geek, who is the creator of Holochain together with a worldwide team, and who will lead the currency creation Hackathon in Riga Nov 27-29. (Building bridges to the next economy & network society. http://ArtBrock.com, see originally published originally in Medium)