financial

The 5 Pillars of The Inevitable Economy

by Dan Robles on January 24, 2012

The previous article identified a recurring trend in human history; each new stage of civilization resulted from the integration of tools invented in the prior stage. That is; the output of one tool becomes the input of another.

In general, this is what defines a “system”. One of the problems with systems is that if one major piece fails, the whole system falters.  Today we have computer systems, transportation systems, social systems and financial system that all behave in this way.

The financial system is built on five integrated pillars

Currency

A currency is a device that people use for both the storage and the exchange of value.  Currency serves as a proxy that represents the value of things that people produce it is not in itself a product.

Inventory

The accounting system keeps track of the things that people produce.  It is helpful to use a currency to represent the the storage and exchange of value from the things that people produce; but again, currency is only a representation of inventory.

Vetting

An economy must have a vetting mechanism that keeps the game fair otherwise nobody would play.  Today this includes a legal system, contracts, and institutions  - such as representative government – that defend the value of things that people produce.

Entrepreneurs

Classically, entrepreneurs are the merchant class who allocate land, labor, and money in various proportions and combinations as a means of organizing and matching the supply of things that people produce with the demand for what people produce.

Society

People define markets.  They supply the inventory that other people demand and they demand the inventory that other people supply.

Examples of financial system failures are legendary

The Enron Fiasco was an accounting system failure caused by a vetting mechanism failure. The housing bubble was a was a currency failure because CDOs effectively divorced the dollar from any meaningful representation of productivity.  The unemployment crisis is a social failure that limits the ability for people to supply the things that they demand.

The Inevitable Economy

So what if the functions of these same five pillars could be achieved and integrated in some other way? What if this is already happening?  Going through the list backwards to reflect a mirror image:

Society

People are reorganizing in new and different ways.  They increasingly use social media and mobile technology to supply and demand limitless information with which they then use to supply and demand many useful things of each other.

Entrepreneurs

Land, labor, and capital are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the age of non-scarce information – instead, entrepreneurs are allocation social, creative, and intellectual assets as a means of matching the supply and demand for the things that people need.

Vetting

Social contracts are playing an increasing role in keeping the game fair. It is not in the best interest for anyone to act with low integrity when they can be Googled in a matter of seconds.

Inventory

The knowledge asset inventory is forming in many applications and platforms – but it is not yet integrated. When this happens, an accounting system for social, creative, and intellectual assets will immediately emerge.

Finally, the currency

Any device that can represent human productivity better than today’s money will become that next currency.  This can only happen after the four pillars begin to integrate.

The currency is supported by the system. The system is NOT supported by the currency.  

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The Value Game Plays The Valley Game

by Dan Robles on February 26, 2011

(The following is a draft of the unveiling presentation for The Value Game at The Future of Money and Technology Summit in San Francisco on February 28th 2011)

Hello;

The Ingenesist Project is developing a new class of business methods that convert social value into financial value, and vice versa.  The premise is that when people cooperate to do useful things, they can also create an amazing amount of social value.

Historically, we have seen how each of the great eras of human civilization was derived from the prior era when the tools of that prior era became integrated.  Like when the wheel, wedge, and pulley integrated to become the printing press.  Great social transformation followed.

So it is that integration of tools that we are most interested in.

Today, we can see this drama playing out across the Globe as people integrate the tools that were created over the last 30 years. People are reorganizing and in doing so they are directly challenging the power of financial currency with equally powerful social currency.

So it is inevitable that a conversion factor between social currency and financial currency will arise.  And that, we believe, will mark the next economic era.

So we developed something called The Value Game that we believe will help build the social infrastructure for the creation, storage, and exchange of social value.

The Value Game is a new class of business methods designed to specifically create social value.  The rules of the Value Game are very simple.  The Game Starts and Ends with money but all of the new value created in the game is denominated in Social Currency.

A Value Game is created by assembling 3 or more communities around a single shared asset in such a way that their interaction with each other relative to the asset creates social value.  In this form, social value can then be more readily converted to a financial value.

To demonstrate this, we helped launch a new company called Social Flights.  The objectives of Social Flights are to aggregate a large fleet of Private Turbine powered Aircraft and deploy them to the Social Graph instead of the Hub and Spoke system used by the Commercial Airlines.

The Shared Asset is the jet.  Player 1 is the traveler community.  Player 2 is the community of private aircraft operators. ,  Player 3 is the community of entrepreneurs at the flight destination.  The True Value Calculation compares the true door-to-door cost of using Social Flights versus other alternatives such as commercial airlines.

For example, flying between two smaller cities like Bellingham Washington and Vail, Colorado.  A Commercial flight would take close to 14 hours traveling through two hubs.  A fully utilized private flight would cost about twice as much but can make the flight in 3 hours.  So right off the bat, the True Value Calculation issues a par value between alternatives.  So if your time is worth less than, say, 70 dollars per hour, you are better off taking commercial airlines.  But if your time is worth more than 70 dollars per hour – for whatever reason – then you should take the private flight.

Now, a hotel in Vail may say – wow, here is a group of 10 people staying 5 days. They can divert advertising budget and issue a 100 dollar “discount coupon” to everyone in the group. Now the par value of the private flight is reduced to 60 dollars per hour. Next, Ski slopes, restaurants, bars, and services will deploy Coupons against the airplane lowering the par value toward closer to middle class incomes and certainly well within the business class of a commercial airline.

Things will get really interesting as people start gaming the game. The more demographic information that the traveler provides, the greater the likelihood that more and more vendors will issue them a discount coupon – which they can even resell on Craigslist.

In effect, why would someone let Facebook sell their information when people can sell it their selves?  Why would vendors pay for advertising when they can find the perfect customers directly?  Why would a manufacturer pay a retailer when the community can sell it for them?   Here we see a great deal of financial value can also be articulated in a Value Game.

Theoretically, we could build a Value Game around any shared asset from zip cars, public infrastructure, energy production, education, natural resources, even the totality of human knowledge, etc.

But for now, let me introduce Allen Howell, Chairman of Social Flights who will discuss how this new business method is developing in practice.

Social Flights should be very interesting to many of the people here because it integrates several of the hottest properties in the Valley; Travel, Coupons, Gaming, and Social Media.  Each of these communities have seen astonishing valuations lately so it will be interesting to see what happens when they, in fact, become integrated.

So please welcome Allen and I can take questions while he sets up.

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May The Best Currency Win

February 10, 2011
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What do you think every dictator wishes that they had more of right now: guns, money, or social currency?

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Game Over

February 2, 2011
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The first law of Gaming: If you can’t win a game playing by the rules, stop playing the game, or change the rules. It would seem that Egyptians would add a corollary “Change the Rulers”.

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Don’t Blame The Bankers

November 23, 2010
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It is a completely different matter to exert the mental discipline to fully understand what makes a banker rational and what makes a banking system accountable, then to generalize this genius for applicability to ALL forms of Value, including but not limited to social value

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The Future of Social Currency

November 16, 2010
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The Branded Debit card has long been a staple of the vanity financial services industry.  Having your favorite football team, alma mater, or non-profit proudly displayed upon your purchasing prowess is a clever offshoot of those printed checks of days gone by.  Now, in the age of social media, YOU are the brand. Your product [...]

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The Investment Banker Vs. The Innovation Banker

September 22, 2010
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Together with the financial banking, these two system engage in the dance of the virtuous circle of innovation enterprise. Apart, they collapse into the swirling cesspool of eternal debt and infinite interest (pun intended).

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Social System Capitalism

July 6, 2010

Now, look at it the other way around. Suppose that you have a perfectly good financial system and you remove all of the people, does the financial system fall apart? Ridiculously, 100% yes it will fail, who will use money it if there is nobody here? The cows? Duh.

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Financial Currency vs. Social Currency

May 26, 2010

The difference between the current economic paradigm and the next will balance on the difference between financial currency and social currency. Let me explain:

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They Should Pass A Social Currency Option

March 23, 2010

Regardless of what you call it, all social currencies have a very unique characteristic that differentiates them from a financial currency. Social currencies reward high integrity and punish low integrity.

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Gowalla and Foursquare: Money is as Money Does

March 21, 2010

Money happens because people happen, not the other way around.
Wall Street has no idea what’s knocking at their door with the emergence of a new class of Social Media Applications that incorporate geolocation strategy.

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Social Currency And The Innovation Bank

February 13, 2010

If we consider the structure of conversations and compare that to both the structure of social networks AND the structure of our financial system, we see a huge opportunity to develop an alternate financial system that can capitalize and securitize knowledge assets in social media.

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The New Definition of Innovation

February 12, 2010

The existing definition of innovation is insufficient for use as a way to identify innovation in the present. There is no way to build an innovation economy upon a flawed definition and unpredictable value of innovative activity.

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Video: Tangible Knowledge; The Holy Grail of Social Media

January 22, 2010

What if knowledge assets were tangible? What if you owned your knowledge like a company owns a structure or specialized machinery? What if it could be quantified and qualified so that it resembles all other tangible assets? Easy answer…entrepreneurs will trade it, like money.

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Calculating The ROI of Social Media

January 18, 2010

This video introduces a new way of looking at social media valuation. People find value in social media otherwise they would not do it. How is that value expressed as a financial instrument? If you engage your clients in the same currency that they are trading among themselves, the greater the likelihood you will realize the value of the new media phenomenon.

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Social Currency; History Matters

November 3, 2009

History often provides clarity in the present. I was searching the term “Social Currency” and I found these two posts on a forum from all the way back in 2001. The authors are quite explicit in their expectations of social currency in their present and deep into the future.

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Banks In The Present

October 28, 2009

I see a lot of articles asking the question why people are not absolutely livid about what is happening to them. The degree at which their wealth is being transferred away from them and the debt being shod on their grandchildren is astonishing.

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It’s Time for a Reputation Based Currency

October 6, 2009

Many people know that the events that inspired what now has become The Ingenesist Project originated with my personal observation and experience of the Mexican Peso Crisis as a visiting professor. Very few people in America realize the implications of a real financial crisis and associated currency collapse. Unfortunately, many people in the World have – perhaps we should listen to their ideas.

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Building a Better Entrepreneur; Google 10^100

September 27, 2009

Google 10^100 award voting is Launched. There are two sectors that we believe would have the greatest impact on the greatest amount of people; building a better banking system and funding social entrepreneurs. You can’t have one without the other – if Google funds these two sectors in concert, the outcome would be incredible.

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The Value of Social Currency

July 9, 2009

Roughly 10% of the US gross Domestic Product can be attributed directly to the process of evaluating or examining transactions. The ability to foresee the result of specific knowledge assets deployed to specific business conditions is the Holy Grail of entrepreneurs.

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Web 3.0; An Elephant Never Forgets

December 18, 2008

The opportunity for America reminds me of the elephant that is convinced since birth that the slender rope tying him to the fence post is stronger than he.  When the elephant grows up, he still believes the rope is stronger even though the elephant now has gained the strength to pull the whole building down.  [...]

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The Great Convergence

December 8, 2008

Hey Kids, It’s 3D: The objective of this article is to discuss the Great Convergence of computer enabled society. Social media must not be allowed to converge to a single apex – rather, it must converge to 3 distinct and tangible dimensions. The factors of production for the industrial economy are land, labor, and capital.  [...]

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Social Media; The Opportunity of a Century

December 1, 2008

The Perfect Storm: We are at an historic time in human history; one that may never repeat itself again. The current financial crisis may provide just enough disruption for a completely new economic paradigm to emerge; the Innovation Economy.  We cannot squander this moment arguing over common logon for our Twitter and Facebook profiles; a [...]

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Tangible Knowledge; Options and Contingencies

November 19, 2008

In order for knowledge to become a tangible asset, we need to come to grips with the fact that human knowledge is fluid and mobile, whereas a condo or a piece of machinery is static.  A machine can’t walk away if it does not like their management. With knowledge assets, the typical “Return on Investment” [...]

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