Manifest Pluralism
Contextualized Value Systems
“In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it.” (MacKenzie, 1868)
Intentional Protocol Design
Why do you create? What does life mean to all of us? How can we incentivize positivity together? Building a crypto-economic system always begins with some kind of purpose, i.e. answering a question, solving a problem, fulfilling a need. Such considerations beget hierarchical designs with emergent properties, i.e. inter-dimensional relationships.
Overall, we hope to bring everyone together and create a better world. My intention for this article is to explain how Bidio designed and created a multi-dimensional protocol for exchanging tokenized actions.
Background + Motivation
Quantum theory and philosophy of mind have always been part of the Bidio ethos. Our CTO Trevor Overman considers quantum mechanics a hobby, and the logo was inspired by Giulio Tononi’s book, “Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul.” In fact, our team was formed after a deep conversation about quantum consciousness. Attempting to verbally represent Schrodinger’s equation, we concluded that “energy is the imaginary now.”
If we had to choose another word for multi-dimensionality, it would most definitely be pluralism. That’s why our team built a decentralized marketplace for any contextualized action with relative meaning or value. Ultimately, our collective knowledge will provide a greater understanding of truth.
Design Goals
When designing a mechanism, there should always be a clear set of goals or desired outcomes. These can represent a shared purpose, challenge or vision for the community. For example, Bidio’s mission is to facilitate coordination and unify the world!
- Participants use viewToken free of charge (watching / uploading) while maintaining their self-sovereignty
- Creators decide who is currently winning each context-specific auction
- Multi-dimensional markets imply complete transparency and control, enabling programmatic exchanges that never compromise integrity
Emergent Market Intelligence
Before discussing how multi-dimensional tokenization will help us gain better understanding of truth, let’s attempt to define the concept of intelligence. According to Wikipedia, intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills toward adaptive behavior. In other words, it is the capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, problem solving, etc.
Information as Income
Recently, Vitalik Buterin tweeted about his qualms with monetization: “Maybe we should just accept that certain kinds of work should be done for social capital, and not money…” From Bidio’s perspective, crypto means everything is money, even social capital.
Collectively, how do people spend time and energy? Does the world pay attention to what really matters? It’s hard to know without all the information. Our society has developed privately-controlled monetization systems, a.k.a. “walled gardens,” that determine who gets paid, how much and why. Our team hopes to spark conversation about decentralized systems which sustainably function as public utilities. Glen Weyl, author of Radical Markets, probably said it best in his reply to Vitalik:
“Why don’t we encourage capitalists to give away their capital before we encourage workers to give away their work?” — Glen Weyl
With a critical mass of participation and proper governance, our multi-dimensional market would greatly improve accountability and significantly reduce information asymmetry. The viewToken protocol empowers anyone to get sponsored without compromising integrity. By really staking our attention, we can better coordinate around the shared vision of the global community.
Purposeful Sponsorship
Bidio’s combinatorial governance model actually relies on the network directing value to worthy creators, who upload positive contributions. By intentionally placing bids in a context which matches their purpose, sponsors gain recognition by showing support. When viewers choose to engage, the protocol mints new multi-dimensional viewTokens, and the only way to make a difference is to get support from both viewers and sponsors.
What is a Token?
If you are familiar with cryptocurrency (i.e. bitcoin), you’ve probably heard of tokens. However, not many understand what that word represents. In actuality, each token is just data structure with a balance or unique metadata (NFTs), along with some transfer functions. If you believe in Moore’s Law, you will understand why Bidio argues that all discrete information will eventually be tokenized. Our system very simply and strongly tranches out info streams into layers of meaningful tokens, a.k.a. dimensions.
Although the Bidio team is primarily focused on tokenizing actions, e.g. watching, clicking and sharing, others might build ways to reward specific events detected by machine-learning algorithms. Liquidity providers need to reward all kinds of positivity. We believe tokenizing a sofa would be pointless because that physical object is a token itself. Figuratively speaking, we’d rather you create “moveToken,” representing the act of delivering the couch where it needs to go. Overall, this multi-dimensional system for incentivized actions will effectively align the incentives of all participants: viewers, creators and sponsors (market makers).
Manifest Pluralism
According to the pluralist view, the concept of value has many definitions. Each individual perspective is unique, and they choose to act based on their knowledge. We all know time and energy are valuable, and essentially, our mission is to align the incentives of all participants. That’s why our multi-dimensional system tokenizes actions to represent meaningful signals, leveling the playing field.
Society and culture will continue to evolve, and we must coordinate around shared goals to drive progress through creativity. In the multi-market, every asset or linear combination of assets is a binary market. This maintains a stronger position with regard to buyers and sellers.
Base Layer of Tokenization
Many developers have realized they can design tokens with multiple IDs referring to dimension-specific rules. For example, if you wanted to build a system of tokenized hashtags, you need to establish a mapping of contract addresses to the strings representing each dimension of the overall network of curation markets. To learn more, check out ERC-888:
mapping (address => mapping (string => uint)) balances;Generally, a higher degree of abstraction provides more intentionality to the protocol designer. The above structure utilizes a nested mapping with strings referring to dimension-specific rules. Our position is that interoperability means creators utilizing one data structure inherited by every smart contract. This approach will give rise to an emergent, universal protocol with greater maneuverability in terms of making transactions.
MultiMarket Potential
“Gestalt” means the organized whole is perceived as different from the sum of its parts. For example, consider these groups of variables with coefficients:
[1a,1b,1c]=[4d]
[1a] = [1d], [1b]=[1d], [1c]=[1d] | [3d]
The following notation represents gestalt interactions which simultaneously involve multiple assets:
- a/d
- a,b,c/d
- a,b,c/d,e
“Any contingent truth is made true by the pattern of instantiation of fundamental properties and relations by particular things…” (Lewis, 1994)
Circular Hierarchy
Using the best-system analysis of laws, token designers need to find the balance of simplicity, strength and fitness. In worlds like ours, the fundamental properties are local qualities. Everything else supervenes on the spatiotemporal arrangement of qualities throughout past, present and future. Ultimately, there is N-dimensional potential for liquidity exchanges with all other tokens, according to each specific protocol design.
Think of words as virtual machines running on some kind of interpreter. Do they exist? What are they made of? Any meaningful string of characters might be a semi-autonomous informational structure, in the same category as software. Words are just memes that we can pronounce. Many of these ‘cultural items’ are installed through repetition in the process of evolution.
As Daniel Dennett said, “Competence without comprehension… Words not only help us to comprehend; they also permit transmission of information that we don’t comprehend.” Although someone might believe they are paying attention because that experience is worthwhile, it’s valuable just because it is occurring. In our complex reality, attention pays.
Check out Bidio’s open-source technology:
github.com/ExperienceNovo/bidio
Solidity Contracts:
viewToken
MultiMarket
