Repnet is a fundamentally different take on currency. Both dollar-style and bitcoin-style currencies see currency as tokens people own. For distributed systems theory reasons this means they both rely on the imposition of an objective view on economic ownership. This is a form of centralization, and produces problematic effects and centralized management. Repnet instead sees currency as relationships between people, like a graph of directed springs representing trust and promises, oscillating and breathing back and forth as economic activity occurs, through which automated chains of arbitrage can facilitate large-scale indirect reciprocity. This is more decentralized because it can more gracefully cope with partial disagreements, which is conducive to many nice properties.
Repnet-powered markets sound great and I think it's plausible, novel, and helpful. However, for now, I'm trying to gradually bootstrap this into existence by applying it to existing peer-to-peer systems, to let people more reliably form mutualistic relationships between their computers as an alternative to centralized corporate infrastructure.
My strategy is currently as follows:
- Develop a minimum viable set of repnet software components in the form of a prioritizing reverse-proxy. This would let you slap this software in front of existing peer-to-peer software, like IPFS, and participating computers would automagically start trading network-time with each other.
- Keep maximizing agency
- ???
- Jupiter converted into fully sentient nanobot swarm
Status
As of writing this, repnet is in an early phase. Schemes have been schemed out, long draft PDFs full of diagrams and sometimes even equations have been written, and code has started to take form.
Nevertheless, I'll try and put links to things here as I go. If you read a PDF or have any thoughts or decide to contribute or anything like that, it would probably make me happy!
| 8.5k words | v0.2.0 | rev dec/31/2022 | |
| (gitlab repo) | act mar/27/2023 |