Introduction
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu explains that if you want to conquer an enemy that is stronger than you, you must split its force and attack a segment of the force at a time until your enemy lose the war in your favor. That way, your victory is assured while keeping a maximum of your resources, making you stronger for the next war.
In the modern world, we can classify the world power in two groups: the banked and the unbanked. In today's economy, the banks represents a social network of businesses and people making it easy to do business with others even when the physical reach is hard. You can send a wire transfer from Canada to a business in Germany and hire that business from the internet to execute a task for you.
In the unbanked world, people and businesses are not as easily connected together. The results are that it is hard to do business with someone from the unbanked world because there is no easy way to provide a payment to that entity.
According to the Metcalfe's law, the value of a social network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. Therefore, the banked world has a significant advantage in business and trade.
Within the banked world, people and businesses are competing in order to provide products and services to others and get rewarded when doing so, by earning currency.
Like in The Art of War, these entities are at war in order to win the business of others. This document will explain what this problem is, what environment it creates and how I want to fix that problem.
If we fix it successfully, the results will be that we will no longer have a separated world, the banked and unbanked, but a single connected social network of businesses and people. We will unify the world and annihilate the war present within our ranks without any physical casualty.
The problem
When people compete to acquire business, they spend a significant amount of time trying to explain how they are different than others. While a significant amount of people do this by explaining how their products and services are superior and build up a reputation with their clients in order to earn currency, others create a brand of separation that explains to their targeted customers how they are rightful and how their competitors are evil.
Then, competitors that want to attract a business segment unify these people together by marketing what their common enemy is.
As the amount of competitors grow, they all create smaller and smaller groups of very targeted individuals that heavily loves something but grows to hate everything else.
While this marketing tactic works very well in business, it creates a huge side effect in the economy: it separates people. Certain group of people doesn't want to do business with others anymore because of these marketed ideologies. These reasons have no rational or logical fundamental.
This reduces the value of the connected banking system since not every member of its social network is willing to hire or be employed by every other member. It creates separated sub social networks and divides its value.
The solution I propose
In order to fix this problem, I believe that we must open the information about the markets to everyone, reduce competition and increase synergy.
The technical problems
Before people had computers at their disposition, opening the information about the markets was not an easy task because even if someone had all the data about all the trades in the world, his ability to process it and act accordingly would be slower than the speed at which new data arrives and modify the previous data, rendering his processing unusable.
Now a days, we have powerful computers at our disposal. While a lot of people have gaming machines with powerful GPU cards that can execute machine learning algorithms to help them evolve with the addition of new data in the economy, most people lack the ability to write the code of these algorithms themselves and can't easily retrieve the economy's data while it is still valid.
We also have connected marketplaces that let people express their opinions on different subjects (social networks). We also have other marketplaces that enable people to trade value very quickly (stock markets). However, most of these platforms are owned by groups of people that advantage themselves in these markets at the expense of everyone else. For this reason, a person that has no connection on these marketplaces have a disadvantage when using them: their opinion on subjects might be altered by propaganda advertisements or their ability to execute trades on securities might be manipulated.
Fixing the technical problems
I believe that the solution is to create a network of databases that will be created and hosted directly by the contributors of that network: the people that build the databases are the ones making them accessible on the internet.
That network must have an easy-to-use interface that will enable everyone to easily contribute and use. It must also contain a query language to make it easy to retrieve data from p2p databases, process it and create new data that can be stored in another database (to be used in another algorithm).
Using the interface system, we must be able to create 2D and 3D applications, using our scripting language. It could be possible to write a standard 2D application or a 3D video game that uses OpenGL and interact with our decentralized databases.
Since not everyone can write scripts, we must create decentralized marketplaces that enables people to buy and sell applications and algorithms for our cryptocurrency.
We also need a way to pay people instantly without relying on a party outside the network. If we use the current banking system, they could decide to ban us in order to slow our scale, if they find out that we are building a competing business social network to theirs.
For that reason, we need to create our own cryptocurrency. The initial units will be used to pay the initial contributors. While we spend the initial units building the initial peer-to-peer platform, we need to create something of value inside the network, to make external entities want to trade their product/service production to acquire our currency and pay for the value they need.
Almost every business have a common denominator when it comes to what they need: advertisements. Therefore, we will create a decentralized advertising platform where advertisers will be invited by our contributors. They will then be able to create content to promote their businesses and accept our cryptocurrency as a method of payment for their products/services. The advertising price will be driven by how people in their advertisement segment like their ads: the more they like it, the less expensive it will be, encouraging businesses to create very targeted ads that people will like.
At the same time, this initial advertisement marketplace will create volume on the trade of products/services for our cryptocurrency, providing its value. Contributors will now be able to pay for goods and services using the cryptocurrency they earned while businesses will be able to use the cryptocurrency they earned when selling their production to our contributors to pay for products/services they need on our network.
Then, we will ask what contributors want to buy with their earnings, analyze their needs using the query language we created to retrieve data from our network of peer-to-peer databases and then create propositions to the community. Once people vote and accept a proposition, the contributors will separate the tasks needed to contact the additional businesses we want on our network to explain how they can use our platform to sell their production to us.
If we need more contributors to execute more tasks, we will advertise the positions in our social media. Other contributors will join the network, execute tasks to help the network grow and receive payment in our cryptocurrency.
Contributors are owners
While each contributor receives payment in cryptocurrency for their work, they will also receive shares in the revenues of the software they helped develop, document and/or market.
90% of the shares of each application will be given in pro-rata of the cryptocurrency revenue each person earned while working on that project versus the total cost of the project.
10% of the shares of each software will be given to the network. Those shares will be owned by everyone that owns our cryptocurrency, and will be invested in projects to make the network grow. For each cryptocurrency a person owns, he will be able to apply 1 vote on which project he wants the network to work on next.
Synergy between contributors
Like I initially explained at the beginning of this document, the goal is to make sure contributors cooperate together in order to increase the value of its network instead of competing.
Therefore, we will create mechanism for everyone to analyze the business processes (BPM) of the public enterprises of our network and its applications and find ways to increase their sales or reduce their expenses.
When someone finds a way to make an entity more profitable, we will be able to prove it using mechanism on the network. Those exact mechanisms will be explained in later documents.
Then, the shareholders of that application or enterprise will internally vote to acquire the knowledge to implement the modification. The acquisition will be done in vesting share options of the entity, and the whole network will be able to vote if the acquisition was deceitful and therefore null the options, or see that its good and generate the new shares to the inventor.
That way, people will want to make the current ecosystem better all the time without having to create competing enterprises from scratch.
Initial phase
I am currently finishing the last steps to provide a working first version of the software that will handle the database network and its cryptocurrency. You can follow its development on github.
After finishing the first version of the software, I will provide a documentation explaining how developers can contribute to its core code repository, including the contributor's guidelines.
I'll also show visual representation of how the software architecture works, including its struct relationships and data flows.
I'll document the format of the files we use and the documentation regarding the local REST API each peer of our network hosts.
I'll also document the scripting language and its virtual machine I built for this project and how it works to create new scripting language with its own grammar and how it can communicates with the network's software.
During that time, I'd like to retrieve help from the community to create our brand image, create our website and create then market our principles on social networks.
Incorporated enterprises
To successfully grow this network, I incorporated 2 corporations that will provide very different services between the outside world and the economy inside our network.
Steve Care Software Inc.
This corporation is incorporated in the province of Quebec, in Canada. It will be used to create holding companies for people interested in funding a venture that acquires existing businesses using fiat currency, connecting the acquired enterprises to our network so that it can trade its production for our cryptocurrency, then spend it on value it needs within our network. Then, make the stock of that holding company tradable within its original founders and accredited investors.
We will also write applications inside our network to be able to manage holding companies like these and their day-to-day operations, so the businesses are managed by hiring people on our network that will execute tasks that are voted by the stock holders of those enterprises. The stock holders stay in control of their holding incorporation at all times.
Then, enable merging of enterprises inside our network in order to become public entities, file with the governing regulators and make the stock of those ventures tradable for everyone.
These processes needs to communicate with a lot of external entities from our network. We will need to create legal contracts and execute tasks outside our network. This is why we created a legal incorporation to execute this job for the network members.
Initially, I will sell option contracts on the Steve Care Software Inc incorporation. Contributors of the network and accredited investors will be able to acquire options that will give them a discount on the future stock purchase of the company, when we will file to become a public company.
The fiat money will be used to fund the initial activity of Steve Care Software Inc. It will also be used to create the initial holding companies that will purchase existing enterprises and connect them to the network.
At the end of each quarter, the shareholder's of Steve Care Software Inc will vote on its next budget and balance its cryptocurrency and fiat holdings. If the corporation needs to pay dividends to its shareholders, the dividends will be paid in cryptocurrency on the network.
XMN Blockchain Services Ltd.
This corporation is incorporated in Canada. It will provide a software development and strategy service to enterprises that wants to connect themselves to our network. We will be able to sign contracts using this legal entity, negotiate contracts with enterprises that the network wants to deal with and communicate between the external clients and the contributors of our network.
XMN Blockchain Services Ltd. is a service company. Therefore, its value is its employees, not a product we build. Its revenues are directly linked with the time of its employees being sold in order to connect clients with the network.
For that reasons, the employees of XMN Blockchain Services Ltd. will own and operate the company. Each employee will receive compensation in both stock options and salary. The salaries will be paid in both cryptocurrency and fiat. The books of the company will be regularly balanced using the fiat it receives from his customer and acquiring the cryptocurrency it needs in order to pay its employees.
At the end of each year, the shareholders (also employees or previous employees) will vote to decide how much dividends the company pay. The dividends are paid in cryptocurrency on the network.
Fiat marketplace
Both Steve Care Software Inc and XMN Blockchain Services Ltd. will have revenue in cryptocurrency and fiat currency. The companies will trade fiat for cryptocurrency regularly, enabling contributors of the network to exchange their cryptocurrency for fiat currency if they needs to.
Contributors
If you want to be a contributor, please email me at [[email protected]]([email protected]). Send me the kind of tasks you want to help us with and send me your LinkedIn or a resume. Also provide me with your normal fee for work, and the amount of hours per week you think you could work on our network. While we pay in our cryptocurrency, the amount of cyptocurrency you would receive for your work will be related to your normal salary.
At last, tell me in the email where you are located and on which timezone you can work. This will be used to create teams of contributors with matching timezones.
In the next week, Ill take the time to organize our work using different software in order to manage the contribution of everyone, then will email people to begin working on this project together.
Conclusion
This is the first document that explains in generality how the network will work. In the future, I will post more documentation explaining how each part individually work.
*Note I thought it was an interesting new project and decided to share the piece here with the consent of the author, Steve Rodrigue.
