Easiest Test for Blockchain & Market Efficiency
Have you ever wondered about the intrinsic worth of a single U.S. penny? As in, how much does it cost to make a U.S. penny? What’s the value of the metal in that penny? And so on.
What if we told you that the answer to this question can unlock one of the easiest tests for measuring market efficiency?
That’s our core thesis here: you can learn whether markets are really efficient just by looking at a penny — one of the hundreds of bits of scrap metal you walk past every single day!
Problem: Pennies Are Expensive!
You’ve probably heard or suspected that it costs more to make a penny than the face value of the penny. The reason is that the metal that goes into pennies keeps getting more and more scarce, while simultaneously, the U.S. Government keeps inflating the money supply.
In the closing days of 2016, Time magazine author Kerry Close wrote a fascinating piece asking whether the penny was even worth the trouble of making it. She wrote:
The cost to produce the one-cent coin increased to 1.5 cents during 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported [behind its paywall]. In 2015, the penny cost 1.43 cents to make, while in 2014, its production value was 1.66 cents.
As Kerry Close points out, it’s not possible to solve this problem just by finding a cheaper metal alternative. No cheaper metal can bring the cost of making the penny below its face value.
Some pennies are collectible and have high worth. But for the majority of the more than 10 billion pennies produced each year, their highest value is the value of the metal in them.
CleanApp Reports with locations of individual 2.5 gram pennies are increasingly worth more than the face value of the coin that’s being reported for CleanApp.
With trillions of coins minted yearly all over the world, and many of them lost or tossed, there’s a clear need for CleanApp processes that can aggregate pennies for market re-supply, for reuse, or for melting these scarce resources and making something more useful out of them.
Solution: CleanApp Those Pennies!
The value proposition advanced above goes beyond just scrap metal. There are analytics gains as well. Please consider this fact with respect to U.S. pennies:
Pre-1982 pennies are 95% copper and 5% zinc. After 1982, the U.S. Mint changed the metal content to 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper.
Today’s price of copper is about $3/lb (453.6 grams). The price of zinc is about $1.25/lb. So imagine the earning potential of casual CleanApp Reporting of older pennies, mangled wires, and other scrap metals you come across on a daily basis.
By selectively targeting higher-value commodities, autonomous scrapping robots (#Trashformers) can introduce market liquidity, replentish supplies, and potentially lower prices.
If the price of a given commodity drops below the profitability line, you can train your CleanAppBot to CleanApp other commodities that may be more valuable then.
If you dispatch your CleanAppBot at night to go mining for pennies, you’re earning value with every coin that’s mined. The same is true for aluminum cans, loose screws and nails, glass, and so on.
Weighing in at 2.5g each, it would take only 180 pre-1982 pennies ($1.80) to mine $3.00 worth of copper.
The market gain from your Trashformer’s haul of 180 pre-1982 pennies isn’t 66% (= gain of $1.20 on “investment” of $1.80 = $3.00). That return for one night’s effort would already be significant. Instead, your actual return is potentially much bigger:
You decide what to do with your bounty of metal and crypto coins that your Trashformer/CleanAppBot mined for you. You can cash in on their face value of the metal coins, or on the scrap value of the metal coins gathered. You can redeem your #TrashCash for access to higher quality CleanApp Reports for tonight’s mining expedition, or you can trade your #TrashCash to someone else.
Whatever you decide to do, you realize that with this type of “crypto mining,” you’re doing something good for yourself, for “the market,” and for the environment. At the end of this transactional chain, everyone is better off.
Every penny that’s recycled offsets the environmental costs of mining, which are staggering.
Markets Are Built On Pennies
The key point here is that DataTech & Robotics now allow us to aggregate even the most mundane and frequent forms of waste, like the pennies lying on the ground.
Technologies like drones that were previously unthinkable, then unthinkably expensive, are now popular children’s toys — better and cheaper every month.
But these drones and robots don’t just materialize out of ether. They are extremely resource-hungry during their production & in their operational energy consumption.
The smartest thing that we can do today is to adopt resource use paradigms that require robots to offset their own environmental footprints (or tread marks, etc.) by performing CleanApp activity when idle.
As we continue to expand the operational envelopes of CleanAppBots, we should be thinking of ways to squeeze even more utility from our drones, Roombas, and Vestas especially during so-called idle states.
Along with cleaning, capturing and recycling scrap resources is the best use of excess robot capacity in industrial, home, and civic contexts.
This is the fastest and easiest way to build our new smart decentralized economies while reducing our individual and collective environmental footprint.
Why Count Pennies?
Our relationship with pennies is just one illustration of the way that CleanApp opens entirely new market horizons. Pennies allow us to follow a really straightforward transactional logic:
See → Report → Collect → Recycle → Earn = Smart
In reality, of course, there’s even more value in casual CleanApp Reporting and response processes than what we describe here. In a process where every transaction makes the subsequent transaction a little bit easier, gains rack up quickly.
Pennies → Dollars → #TrashCash
There are many levels of material gain that flow from even the most simple CleanApp report-response process of the sort described here.
CleanAppers are also paid to generate reports, they are paid to verify and optimize other CleanAppers’ reports, and CleanAppers are paid to respond to their own or others’ CleanApp Reports. The penny example is just a drop in the proverbial bucket of the transformative potential of CleanApp.
As a decentralized global data system, CleanApp gives unprecedented levels of clarity into actual economic behaviors and system-wide resource use dynamics.
#TrashCash → #NoTrash
CleanApp teaches us to recycle much better and smarter.
But in many cases, CleanApp can also teach us how to avoid the need for costly clean up and remediation work to begin with.
By harnessing both micro-level and global waste analytics, processes like CleanApp help us get smart about resource use in a way that no previous technology has ever been able to accomplish.
It’s not just about learning whether a particular commodity is being used rationally, or infusing more liquidity into global commodity markets so they can run at “peak efficiency.” CleanApp isn’t just about learning when to discontinue the €0.01 or €0.02 euro coin.
CleanApp is about a much smarter and more interconnected way of thinking about resources. Period.
CleanApp is Econ101: using our scarce resources in increasingly smarter ways.
Welcome to @CleanApp!
PS: Why Count Pennies?
One of CleanApp’s biggest challenges today is narrative: finding the easiest way to explain the complex market space and social space that our technology enables. We realize that global incident report marketplaces have obvious value for us, and that it’s our job to make it as obvious for you.
We’re telling our story in every way imaginable, including:
· Visual storytelling (graphics);
· Showing industry-specific use-cases;
· Videos;
· Whitepaper;
· Deep conceptual/theoretical work;
· Futurology;
· GitHub wiki;
[…]
That’s right! We even wrote a children’s story that tries to explain CleanApp to a five year old.
Must. Make. CleanApp. Clearer!
Despite these efforts, our supporters keep telling us to be clearer, to make our value and utility proposition even more obvious. Our supporters know best, so we’ll keep trying to give our audiences what they crave: simplicity.
Help. Us. Make. CleanApp!
Do you think this penny example is still too techy. If so, please share your critiques and feedback on how we can make the CleanApp story clearer on GitHub, Twitter, Telegram, or our site.
