[p2p-research] Fwd: Follow up

[marc fawzi]

Just sharing some notes on the current problems in the P2P Energy Economy
model

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: marc fawzi <marc.fawzi at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 9:23 PM
Subject: Follow up
To: James Edwards <bluecollargreenie at gmail.com>



Hi James,

I'm sorry to have dropped the ball on our discussion re: energy flow based
currency...

I went to Arizona where we had no Internet and learned all about solar power


Then I became homeless for a while, lost my girlfriend, etc

And now I'm back to work thanks to a sudden and unexpected turn of events

The problems with the P2P Energy Economy as of v3.00.00 boil down to this:

Issue 1:

"it's hard to see how individual energy producers would have any substantial
surplus if they had tiny solar generators and it's even harder to see how
there could be a flow of energy from peers with surplus to peers with
deficit if everyone had a surplus. This is the basic and universal issue (or
two issues,) IMO. For each given type of product (e.g. energy, milk, cars,
etc) we can't have everyone be a producer because the "flow of energy" is
the "economy of life" and without a deficit on one side and a surplus on the
other there is no flow (or movement) of energy (and no flow of energy equal
no life, literally.)

So in order to have both the maximum surplus of the thing being produced and
the maximum flow of that thing from the surplus side to the deficit side,
the production tends towards centralization (within each geographic or
virtual market)"

Issue 2:

The very act of paying someone (for a non-scarce resource) and expecting
some service back creates a master-slave (or more mildly a 'customer-server'
relationship) relationship... and this is a type of hierarchy basically. I'm
having an issue with the idea of a hierarchy even though it's established in
nature and even if we use the kind of renewable hierarchies that I describe
(in passing) in the P2P Energy Economy. I'm studying two game theoretical
models, the Prisoners Dilemma game and the Snowdrift (or Hawk-Dove) game in
the context of hierarchies, latices with limited set of neighbor-to-neighbor
interactions per element and networks with random interactions. I haven't
had enough time with all that has been happening to produce any insight as
far as the best type of system from a moral and evolutionary perspective but
I know the P2P Energy Economy sections concerned with organization are
lacking.

If you have anything to share on your end, as far as your work goes, please
feel free to do so.


-- 

Marc Fawzi
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Marc-Fawzi/605919256
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcfawzi
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