Protocols

[orthecreedence]

After beating my head over the How Basis works page I'm realizing the project suffers from being a monolith. It only works if everyone accepts every part of it. All or nothing.

While it may eventually be packaged that way, it needs modularity for initial acceptance, but also for focus.

The difficult issue with this is not just finding the boundaries of our distinct systems but devising a way for them to communicate, possibly across platforms, via secure protocols (and by secure, I mean it not just in the "haha sry NSA but I used rot13" secure, but secure as in the overall system is secure against bad actors).

Let's list out the pieces of Basis as they exist today (after almost two god damn years of reading, theorizing, hacking, and rewriting):

• A cost tracking transactional system (VF+)
  • Labor tracking
  • Raw and semi-raw material ("resource") classification and transformation management
  • Tracked resource cost management
  • Orders between agents
• Company management and governance system
• Cybernetic cost and price automation system
• Public marketplace (extension of the transactional system)
• Credit currency (printable by the system, freely transferable, used for purchase of consumer products or conversion to external currency)
• Investment currency system
• UBI currency (printable by the system, non-transferable, used only for purchase of internal consumer products)
• Property management
• Governance of global parameters
• Voting

That's just the pure socialist crap. If we want to include the transitional phase:

• Currency cost tracking
• Capital management and transfer system ("capital pools")
• External finance interface
• Dollar peg

Of the list above, these are the pieces that immediately strike me as being discrete:

• Public marketplace
• Voting
• Investment tokens
• Cybernetic pricing
• Company management and governance system
• External finance interface
• Dollar peg

Everything else seemingly locks together.

[orthecreedence]

I'm not so sure it needs compartmentalized units that interact via protocol. That seems like it would greatly increase overhead for no purpose. Anyone is free to use whatever pieces of the system they deem necessary for themselves, and as such I don't see a large immediate need to burden myself and the project with some overarching plan to modularize every little piece.

I was thinking about this last night: the good part of a monolith is that the good parts pay for the annoying parts. UBI and open access to property make using Basis as a transactional layer attractive. By themselves, all of these things would be either inconsequential or disincentivized. The system works because it's so woven together.

I think for now I'm going to keep this issue open, because I'd love more discussion on the matter, but I'm going to mark it wontfix until someone convinces me otherwise. Keep in mind, the payoff for doing this needs to outweigh the cost of implementing it pretty significantly (ie, I'm talking monetary payoff in business opportunity).

[orthecreedence]

Ok, here's a very, very first rough draft of a system graph (using dot). Keep in mind this includes things like bank interfacing, and some stuff that's not even in the paper (like #124).

Pulling this all apart with the interdependencies will be tricky, unless I'm needlessly complicating all of this (which happens sometimes). I'm inclined to not get sidetracked on this for now, but it's really helpful to see the high level components and how they depend on each other. Note that in dependency graphs in general, if A depends on B, then the format is usually A -> B, but in this case it's B -> A and I'm too lazy to fix it.

[orthecreedence]

Screw it, closing this. Still no ideas on this, and the entire point is that it's an ecosystem, not a set of discrete components.