[p2p-research] == Currency Based on CPU and Man Hours (for Digital Goods) ==

[marc fawzi]

~~

Digitally produced goods and services exist in a world of their own
that can be thought of as separate from our physical world in that
it's almost infinitely more efficient.

For example, building a house in Second Life takes dramatically less
in work energy than building a house in the physical world and the gap
makes the difference between abundance now and abundance in 200 years.

A house built in the physical world using a high degree of automation,
e.g. with robots and open architectural plans can be sold at the cost
of work energy it takes to build it (assuming it's made from renewable
materials and its production process meets the conditions for
sustainable abundance) but when will we have such high physical
production efficiency?

There is a lot that needs to happen in terms of dramatically
increasing production efficiencies for physical goods _before_ we need
an economy to sustain and enhance the abundance.

When it comes to digitally produced goods and services, we can start
with an example of why a new kind of economy and currency is needed.

If I can get 10 "cpu hours" a day from my PC, i.e. 10 X (1 gigaflops
processor running for 1 hour, as assessed by the Linpack benchmark
Rmax), and if it costs me less than 0.2 "man hour" a day on average to
maintain my PC (general PC maintenance) then I have 10 cpu hours and
e.g. 7.8 man hours a day (based on an 8 hour work day) to produce some
digital goods (e.g. open source music, open CAD designs, open Second
Life models, or open software etc) and if I invest in faster and/or
more efficient PC I will have more CPU hours and/or more man hours to
make more digital goods.

So given that I'm limited in my resources it's not sustainable for me
to give away the digital goods I produce or exchange them in
expectation of a potential return (in other digital goods) that may or
may not happen or that may happen only partially with a net loss to
myself.  If I don't get any return (in cpu hours or man hours or both)
I can not produce more digital goods, so my production will be limited
and that cannot lead to abundance.

I can sell both surplus cpu hours and surplus man hours I have in
return for cpu-hour tokens and man-hour tokens and I can also lend and
borrow both cpu-hour tokens and man-hour tokens. I can also invest
more man-hour tokens, i.e. hire someone with the tokens, or invest my
own man hours, and cpu-hour tokens, i.e. use someone else' machine (or
my own PC's cpu hours) to create more efficient production processes
for my digitally produced goods and services so that I get back more
than I put in when exchanging those digitally produced goods and
services for cpu hour tokens and man hour tokens. That's the only
profit that can be made and it drives the whole economy toward higher
and higher efficiency, i.e. otherwise, i get back roughly the same as
I put in in cpu hours and man hours.

~~

This model synopsis below is far less ambitious but far more effective
than the P2P Energy Economy that I've been working on. While it taught
me a lot as far as the principles of a sustainable economy, the P2P
Energy Economy, in attempting to apply itself to the physical world
outside of the computer, was aiming at a future when we have physical
abundance in essential resources.

For now, it seems that the only abundance we have is in computational
power and our own creative energy.

A lot of the ideas from the P2P Energy Economy are directly applicable
and will be reused but the model will become far less complex as it
changes trajectories from aiming to reinvent the world decades or
centuries ahead of the world naturally getting there (see prior
comment on the current "efficiency gap" between the digital world and
the physical world) to aiming at fixing the inequitable exchange model
for digitally produced goods and services.

One key difference between this model and the P2P Energy Economy
(besides the absence of smartgrid) is the existence of two currencies:
the cpu-hour token and the man-hour token. Like machine money and
human money.

Neither type of currency is meant to enable ownership. Both are meant
to enable production, not ownership.

So, I'll take the P2P Energy Model apart and compress it/remold it
into this new model that can be applied today to give us a sustainable
abundance economy in digitally produced goods and services.

Marc