Anything which alters its environment to increase production of itself is playing the game of increasing returns. – Kevin Kelly, Out of Control
I’ve been thinking for a while about introducing a currency into #PunkMoney, which would make it possible to account for value created between its users. Such a currency could, in theory, do a lot to help #PunkMoney scale, by encouraging participation through a positive feedback loop. After some weeks of thinking, I came up with a tentative solution which I’d like to develop here.
First of all, some groundwork. I’d like this currency to adhere to certain principles – explored elsewhere on this blog:
- It must be tied to a social gesture
Like a +1 vote or a retweet, it will be created through a simple and effortless social gesture. In #PunkMoney terms, this is likely to be a thanks tweet created ad hoc, or in reply to a specific promise. [1]
- It must be asymmetric, and therefore, abundance-based.
There should be no material cost associated with creating and awarding this currency to another user in the network. Its creation will not entail any further obligation or commitment from the issuer. [2]
- It must be karmic
By ‘karmic’, I mean the principle of increasing returns. Receiving this currency will make it more likely that you will, in turn, receive value back from other users. In this way, the currency will enable effort, attention and resources to flow to the people according to merit, as determined by the network’s users.
- It must be un-gameable
It should be impossible or impractical for any conspiring group to artificially award each other this currency, and divert the network’s value to themselves as a result.
- It must support gradients of value
It should be possible to award the currency conveniently in different amounts to different users, based on the perceived value they have delivered.
It might seem like I have defined a wish list for something so perfect it could not exist. Certainly, if this problem were to be approached from a narrow monetary perspective, it would be completely intractable. There is no way money could be created by a user without an obligation or commitment backing it. I am however using ‘currency’ in a broader sense, to describe a trusted symbol in a network which acknowledges and shapes the flow of value through it. [3]
The approach I’ll develop uses some simple secondary school maths. It’s meant to outline the bare structure of a system which could work. No doubt a mathematician with a grasp of network theory could devise a more refined version of what follows. (If you are one, I’d be grateful for some feedback.)
Thanks as social gesture
As mentioned, the basic gesture which we will use to create this currency will be a #PunkMoney thanks tweet. The ‘thank you’ note can be created in two ways: by replying to a promise with
@someone thanks #punkmoney
or by creating a new tweet from scratch, for example
@someone thanks for the beer #punkmoney
This new functionality has already been added to the tracker, so this building block is already in place. In the proposal that follows, thanks basically stands for any gesture from X to Y which constitutes an acknowledgement of value created by Y. We can represent this as an edge between two nodes:
X -> Y
The approach will in fact be agnostic to the type of gesture used, as long as it means the same. All my examples will rely on the #PunkMoney thank you gesture as this is the context the currency is being defined for.
Perspectivalism
A naive approach would be to simply count the number of thanks a person received over a given time period, and represent this as a karma score. The basic problem with this is that it is trivial to game: just tweet someone a lot of thanks to inflate their score.
The solution is to take a perspectival approach. [4] According to this way of looking at things, no user in the network has an intrinsic score or balance which is the same to all other users. Instead, Y’s karma will look different depending on where you stand in relation to Y in the #PunkMoney network.
Let’s assume the following graph of A’s basic network. We arbitrarily normalise A’s karma to 100, representing the total amount of karma which will be shared out to users as A sends thanks to others.
In this thanks graph, we can calculate a perspectival karma score for every user from A‘s point of view, using some simple maths. Since A has sent two thanks, each of them is worth 50% of his starting balance of 100. As a result, A will see Band C‘s karma as 50 respectively (50% of 100.) Since B has thanked D and E, their karma will be equal to the product of the ratios (times 100) down the branch to either user. We also want karma to decay with distance, so that after a certain number of hops through a branch it fades out, rather than continues indefinitely. To achieve this, we can divide the ratio for each hop by its distance from the origin of the calculation, A.
In this case, D’s karma from A’s perspective can be calculated as follows,
KA->D = (1 x KA->B) x (1/2 x KB->D) x 100
= (1 x 50%) x (1/2 x 50%) x 100
= 12.5
E’s karma from A’s perspective:
KA->E = (1 x KA->B) x (1/2 x KB->E)
= (1 x 50%) x (1/2 x 50%) x 100
= 12.5
Finally, F will have a karma score equivalent to:
KA->F = (1 x KA->B) x (1/2 x KB->F)
= (1 x 50%) x (1/2 x 100%) x 100
= 25
The defence against gaming is the subjectivity of a perspectival score. The karma a user has depends on the person who is looking at them, and their relationship to them. If a group of conspirators decided to award each other a lot of karma, they would form a closed loop. No other users would be connected to them, and hence, each conspirator’s karma would appear as zero to the rest of the network.
A different gaming strategy would be to first try and earn some thanks from other users in the network, and then to start artificially inflating the karma supply to some co-conspirators. On closer inspection, though, this is impossible because the supply of karma cannot be inflated: the more thanks a user create, the less karma each one confers. A user who wants to game the system could never give away more karma than they have in fact earned. Another way to put this is that total karma received is always equal or greater than karma awarded [5]:
kin <= kout
Karma
At the beginning of the post, I defined one of the principles this currency must adhere to as that of increasing returns. Receiving karma should make it more likely (in a non-trivial sense) that other users will want to provide value to them. Perhaps this value provision will take the form of fulfilling specific requests, or sending them new promises for things they might need.
To achieve this, we need the value of a person’s thanks to be proportional to the amount of karma they have. We’ve established that from A‘s perspective, F is the user with the highest karma score (50.) If our currency is karmic, and deserves to be called karma, it must be the case that when F thanks someone, it’s worth more to their karma score than when D or E (with 25 each) do.
This definition presents some issues. First of all, karma is perspectival, rather than an intrinsic property of a user. So a statement such as “F‘s thanks is worth more than E‘s thanks” needs to be qualified accordingly. There is no objective sense in which F‘s and E‘s thanks are worth anything: it’s only from the point of view of users connected to either F or E that those gestures mean something. However, to make sense of this statement we need a neutral way of comparing the value of Fand E‘s thanks. We can do this by assuming a neutral observer O, who is connected to both F and E in the same way.
Let’s add O to the graph in relation to F:
In this graph, the theoretical user O (he doesn’t actually need to exist to make this point) can be connected to both F and E in exactly the same way: via a singlethanks from either F and E, to him. That is, from A‘s point of view, the only factor which could create a difference in O‘s karma would be F and E‘s relationship to A, not to O.
Clearly, F‘s thanks to O is worth more to O than E‘s, from the perspective of A. Assuming F thanked O, O‘s karma from A‘s perspective is calculated as follows:
KA->O = (1 x KA->C) x (1/2 x KC->F) x (1/3 x KF->O) x 100
= (1 x 50%) x (1/2 x 100%) x (1/3 x 100%) x 100
= 8.25
In comparison, if E thanked O instead, his karma from A‘s perspective would be lower:
KA->O = (1 x KA->B) x (1/2 x KB->E) x (1/3 x KE->O) x 100
= (1 x 50%) x (1/2 x 50%) x (1/3 x 100%) x 100
= 4.12
In other words, from the perspective of a neutral observer, it would be better to receive a thanks from F, in order to win favour with A, than it would E. This is significant because it establishes that this currency is karmic: due to F‘s better position than E, his thank you has more value. It’s more likely that O will want to help F, as a result of his relationship to A, all else being equal. Value flows according to merit.
Weighted thanks
The final constraint we defined for this currency was the ability to express gradients of value. I’d like to be able to send a thanks to person A for putting me up in their home for a night worth a hundred times the thanks I’ll send B for retweeting my blog post. This is also no problem given the definition outlined above.
In practical terms, instead of requiring a #PunkMoney user to send a hundred thank you tweets, we’ll allow them to add a number to the thank you note, for example:
“@someone thanks for putting me up +50 #punkmoney”
Now all we have to do is divide up the user’s karma proportionately. A single thanks will be worth 1/50th of this one. The total value will be equal to 100. Assuming twothanks, where one is worth 1/50th of the other, we simply adjust the ratios accordingly:
KA->C = 50 x KA->B
KA->B + KA->C = 100
KA->B + KA->C = 100
50 x KA->B + KA->B = 100
KA->B = 100/51 = 1.96
KA->C = 100 – 1.96 = 98.04
KA->C = 100 – 1.96 = 98.04
Plugging these weighted ratios into the graph will allow us to take into account that A intended his thanks to B to be worth a great deal more, and to cause a greater impact on his karma score.
Conclusions
This defines the basic approach. As I mentioned before, it’s a bare structure which could probably be significantly improved upon, assuming its logic is sound. I’ve deliberately left out factors like time-decay, how to represent a user’s karma back to them, and the computational cost of calculating karma in a large, densely connected network. I’ll hopefully address those in a second post. In the meantime, I’d be grateful for feedback.
To summarise: the basic idea is to introduce a peer-to-peer accounting mechanism which is debt and commitment-free, but which helps to allocate value in a network efficiently, according to merit. If it worked, it might reasonably replace money in some situations. Karma would not have the full force of a monetary claim: having it only makes it more likely that a value will flow back to a user through incentives, but won’t guarantee it. Still, if it works the implications are good enough for #PunkMoney.
Notes
[1] See Splitting the Social Currency Atom for my take on social currencies, and a potential ambiguity in the way the term is used.
[2] The term asymmetric accounting was coined by Gregory Rader, to describe “systems that record and track the provision of value rather than the volume of money transacted.”
[3] See A Broader Definition of Currency for a discussion on expanding the concept of currency beyond money.
[4] First explored in a A Perspectival Trust Metric for Ripple. Thanks to Jordan Greenhall for pointing me in this direction.
[5] This is similar to the approach taken by PieTrust for resisting “reputation inflation.”
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento