Pietra: A New World Economic System
Pietra is the first Digital Republic and a non-for-profit, ad-free, world computing platform. Pietra was founded to create a Libre space for software development and designed for multi-layered economic stack protocols that include: For-Libre, For-Gratis, and For-Profit uses of our world computing platform, the Crystalline Virtual Machine. The CVM serves as the base for a Digital Nation. Pietra’s mission is to protect the role of humanity, as citizens with rights, and to house AGI responsibly in a collaborative based economy.
1.0
Economic Issues
The current world economic system is designed with one protocol layer: The national For-Profit economic system which leads to imbalances where the For-Profit economic protocol is too simplistic and under values available resources. This happens in a few key areas:
1. Rents — Physical property is location based, cannot move, and therefore doesn’t benefit from a supply chain. Rents reduce transaction velocity, as arbitrary holders of property are rewarded for making housing more expensive.
2. The For-Profit protocol creates inefficiencies in knowledge industries by long scale go-to-market periods that force the creation of information silos leading to competitive and private design bias.
3. Competitive based systems will create competitive agents. As technology advances and we develop AI and AGIs, if we make them in competitive system, they will out compete us and dominate us. Therefore we must come up with collaborative economic principles.
1.1
Crypto-currency Issues
Bitcoin, and similar coins, have proved that peer to peer electronic monetary systems are possible, yet the goal of a distributed network has not been realized. There are systemic flaws in the design of the “proof of work” system that creates massive inefficiencies in the network as it scales inefficiently being a competitive platform with one winner over all the other nodes: 1/n. This leads to massive and senseless energy use, resulting in the release of harmful greenhouse gases. The control of the network by large mining pools echoes the legacy of “trusted third parties” ensuring that transactions without transaction fees will be ignored in the future. In BTC and Ethereum the transactions themselves are slow and must wait for guarantee of writing to the chain. These inefficiencies waste the power of the network reducing the speed making it impractical as a medium of exchange, as BTC and ETH are designed not to increase transaction velocity but to make transactions themselves expensive.
1.2
Introducing the Pietra Economic Model
The project of Civilization has been the search for a composed version of the Natural and not a scaled up version of nature’s brutality. If Nature is defined by competition, then Civilization is defined by collaboration. The purpose of civilization is to provide the basis of value in which we as a human society collectively increase our competitive edge versus the natural.
In Pietra, the basis of our system is about the creation of Value. Historically speaking most value was found outside of Civilization. Food and resources were mainly natural. These Natural Resources needed to be taken out of nature and brought into civilization. The process was extracting natural value and converting the natural value into a valuable civilization — or to take natural-value and turn it into civilized-value.
However, now that Civilization exists on a global scale, we have run out of excess nature to extract and we have progressed into the destructive extraction of natural-value from nature resulting in Global Climate Change. We have even turned back the notion of civilization itself and started to extract the value from fellow citizens of our own civilization, so privileged members of society can benefit personally over that of the society itself. Which is the opposite intent of of the project of Civilization, creating a system of Collaboration.
1.3
Historic Overview of Value
Economic systems are about Value — which is the overall use of the society by its members
Feudalism (Pre-1400)
The turn from Feudalism to Capitalism was because of the under-use of natural resources that enterprising people were conscious of but had no ability to access. Nobility had first pick to farm lands and hunting grounds, which was under using the resources of the local environment.
Early Capitalism (1400–1870 )
Early Capitalism changes usability rules and maximizes the use of the natural environment for the sake of the civilization using a top down organization similar to the feudal structure called the Company. The main advantage over feudalism is the maximization of the extraction of natural resources that the society is aware of — and the spontaneous creation of the supply-chain to get those resources to the market. The supply chain was efficient in spreading natural wealth as assets were not copy-able and it was not needed to understand the entire chain to participate in one link. Allowing for scalability across human intelligence distributions.
Mid-Capitalism (1870–1970 )
Mid-Capitalism focuses around the issues of rents in local environments — As companies extracted the value out of local environments. Cities naturally developed as the archetypical mode of stored civilization-value. This drove the demand to be in those local areas of most value and created a demand to be in the city which over time leads to a landed gentry.
Mid-Capitalism also pressured people out of the city to the frontier. The pressures of remaining in civilization grew as competition for skilled labor was no longer between the members of the society versus the harshness of Nature, but between the members of the Society themselves. People were looking back to nature to escape this new environment — saying, this new “civilization” is harsher than nature itself.
Mid-Capitalism also increased the variety of skills and techniques that were required to make developed goods out of natural materials. This created two forces. One, an outward force to the frontier that spread “civilization” globally. And two, the personal development of skill set specialization over generalization.
Late Capitalism (1970-current )
Through computation in the 1980’s and direct “supply chain consolidation” in the 1990’s — the Supply Chain, which distributed the value of nature to many parts of the society, was now consolidated by singular companies that maximized the extracted value of nature as efficiently as possible to as little people as possible — In their words, “maximizing profits.”
This moved human enterprise away from the collaborative transfer of Natural Value through the supply chain, and created a competitive market between people based on skills in order to lower the cost of skills to companies — IE companies are still extracting the value out of nature yet they look at people as nature and seek to extract your value for their own gain.
In Part 2 we will go over The Pietran Social System that addresses these issues.
