Cryptoeconomics working sessions 2 at NYU/Stern

NETWORK DERIVATIVES, SYNTHETIC INDEXES, DISTRIBUTED VALUE FORMS

We will do our second series of Cryptoeconomics working sessions at NYU/Stern on Wed 9/26 (sessions 1 materials from May 2018 here). Almost everybody from our crypto-finance-economics group will be there, which normally means that something interesting is bound to happen. You can register here.

And here is what we are going to do:

We think we are discovering a new distributed value form and value calculus which are different to the capitalist commodity form and calculation of value. If this is true, it means reorganization and reproduction of economic space itself.

Some background: We have been working on an organization and a token which draws on frontier approaches to finance and valuation, accentuating liquid, derivative exposures. This approach has enabled us to innovate in a number of significant ways:

· to identify what is distinctive about tokens that give them money-like attributes and asset-like attributes. Those distinctive features — the conceptual space between ‘money’ and ‘equities’ — open up possibilities for new ways of thinking about economies and value.

· to program distributed economies conceived as processes of value production and organized in networked, fluid offer-based relations (that can create also persistence and consistency to the relationship, i.e. “organization”) rather than just as a system of trading and record keeping.

· to value ‘production’, conceived in ideas of social contribution, rather than ‘profit’, and to explore the measurement of the value of production in new ways.

· to explore innovations in financial contracts and contemporary portfolio theory (derivatives, volatility, securitization) so as to manage risks in a strategic and calculated way.

The event at NYU/Stern is designed to share our vision and concrete progress in developing new value forms, but most of all to invite some of the best finance theorists and cryptotoken and cryptoeconomics thinkers we know to work with us on engineering new economic space.

Presentations will be short and to the point so as to keep the focus on joint discussion and work.

We did some work to prepare the sessions — the text is called Economics back into Cryptoeconomics. It is a little long, I know, but I think it is still a substantial contribution to the cryptoeconomics field right now. The sessions at NYU will build on that (we use it as a starting point), so it would be useful to read it beforehand. If you make through it, and are still interested in participating in the sessions, send us a message, thanks!

ENGINEERING NEW ECONOMIC SPACE

NETWORK DERIVATIVES, SYNTHETIC INDEXES, DISTRIBUTED VALUE FORMS

Cryptoeconomics working sessions II at NYU/Stern Business School

Wednesday 9/26/2018

Session 1: Fundamental value and synthetic indexes

10:00 am — 11:00 am

The Economic Space Agency project is to create new (post-capitalist) economic space and tools for people to start operating and exploring this space. ECSA’s commitment to token buyers and indeed all agents within new economic space is that our token issuance will remain in direct proportion to trends in the value of produced output. There can be no guarantee that ECSA tokens will trade at this price, but there can be a guarantee that we can produce an internal unit of account that complies with this goal. A standard approach in the cryptoeconomics literature is that value relates to the classical identity MV = PQ. In the ECSA context, where we are creating an economy (series of interactions in distributed value productions) rather than only a trading platform, we believe we can measure each M, V, P and Q in novel ways that are specific to the ECSA mode of organization and data collection. This session concentrates on our take on the MV = PQ, or on how to attach into programmable organizations their own units of account (their own values, their own measurements and performance metrics of that value) and how to create derivative instruments (tokens) on these indices, which, trading against each other, reveal a value graph that encodes how new value forms can be measured and transacted relative to each other without going through “money”.

For background see:
Economics back into Cryptoeconomics

Session 2: The Big Put

11:15am — 12:15pm

The ECSA token system can be framed as a put option on capitalist value calculation: people buying the ECSA token are purchasing access and relation to new value forms and thus a difference to capitalist calculation of value. ECSA is offering the right for agents to part with/sell out of capitalist calculus of value. We call it a put option as a statement of our long position as a difference to valuing and calculating just “profit” — the value of a put option rises as the value of the underlying asset (capitalist value, or more precisely, capitalist perspective on value, how it is created and captured) declines. In this session we explain the ‘big put’ as an exploration of how to organize the production of value and how calculate value in ways different from those that define capitalism.

Lunch

12:30pm — 1:30pm

Session 3: The long position and the hedge

1:30pm — 2:30pm

The ‘big put’ is ECSA’s long position. But it must be a calculated and hedged risk. In this session we present some of the ways in which token design is building in a range of calculated hedges. These hedges must be carefully designed so that, as far as possible, only the intentional risks are those to which we have the greatest exposure. This is partly about which risks are collectivised and which are individual, how we ‘insure’ our exposure to fiat and others. Central here are a proposal to securitize part of ECSA revenue/value increase, both to give ECSA a currency hedge and an exposure to a different part of the capital market, and strategies to trade volatility.

Session 4: The ECSA Tech Stack

2:30pm — 4:00pm

What are the technological design attributes that we believe are able to support the agendas discussed above? In this session we go through the design of the ECSA Tech Stack (see below) so as to explain our technological developments that make The Big Put a robust proposal.

For us cryptoeconomics operates on the Value Expression and Creation layer, designing and engineering networked value productions, distributions and measurements.

This session will be an introduction to the lower levels of the Stack: Gravity post-blockchain computational architecture (a secure, scalable, distributed computing runtime), Space organizational programming language and development environment, and Economic Space as the economic interoperability grammar encoded in protocols of decentralized exchange, synthetic indexes, network derivatives.

SOME SHORT VIDEOS
-The ECSA Tech Stack in 30sec (video)
-Gravity and the history of computing: Small Talk, Self, Xerox Parc, ocap, Mark Miller, stateful multiagent programming language…(video)
-On Gravity 1: Balancing privacy with the utility of aggregating data (video)
-On Gravity 2: Informational integrity of network derivatives (video)
-On Gravity 3: What becomes possible: decentralized exchange, stable unit of account, bridging of different value forms (video)
-On Space 1: Programming organization (video)
-On Space 2: Token architectures in programmable economy (video)
-On Space 3: Economy is a game (video)

We will do also one more technical evening on the lower levels of the stack while in NYC to go through in more detail the Organizational Expression Layer (Space) and the Runtime/Execution Layer (Gravity). The technical session is organized together with CoinFund and takes place on Friday 9/28 5pm-7pm. If you are interested in the technical evening, more info here. We are hoping it to do an informal, intensive session with those deeply interested in distributed computing and programmable organization.