The Next Economic Paradigm

Month: December 2015

Introducing Quant

What is Quant?

Quant is a digital token that represent human productivity. The total number of Quant that can be mined is 223.3 Trillion corresponding to the approximate dollar value of outstanding human productivity existing on December 15, 2015. This is the amount of future productivity that everyone in the world has committed to each other in the form of global debt obligations.

The flaw

What people may not fully understand is that human productivity is not stored in banks, corporate boardrooms, and governments – these institutions only maintain and control the ledger of future productivity, they are not the actual source of the productivity.

Rather, human productivity is stored and sourced in the combined education, experiences, talents, skills, health, community, passions, professions, careers, as well as works of engineering, artistic expression, and scientific achievements of humans. These are the actual stores and sources of human productivity.

Unfortunately for most people, it is very hard to see this distinction without a proper reference. Introducing Quant provides that reference unit of account.

Fixing the Flaw

Curiosumé represents a person’s talents, interests, and skills (i.e., future productivity) in a form of cryptography. In essence, fabricating smart keys that can open and close social contracts on blockchain. As a result, knowledge assets may become visible to an accounting system under the explicit control of the owner. Once built, Curiosumé will mine Quant from the “proofs-of-work” performed by real people solving real puzzles that maintain a real network. The Network will be able to allocate Quant using algorithms measuring fault tolerant network dynamics, thereby decentralizing production.

Building Curiosumé

The Ingenesist Project (TIP) has created the Quant Token on the Bitshares Blockchain.  TIP has issued to itself Q10,000,000 to be allocated to the development of Curiosumé.   All participants in the initial phase will be given a donation of Q100 per hour for helping build and disseminate Curiosumé to the public domain. Future levels, if founded, will re-value the earlier round on a ratio of 10:1

Introducing Quant as the internal token of the Curiosumé network will allow people to articulate knowledge assets in true decentralized corporations.

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Disclaimer: Quant is not a currency nor is it meant to represent value or security in any entity.  Quant is akin to a game token where the challenge is to solve a puzzle to a public domain ledger. There will be leaderboards, level-ups, and player interaction similar to any role-play game. Quant may be sourced and sunk only within the intended open-source game that it portrays.  The whole “Global Debt” thing is part of the backstory, not some sort of political aspiration or commentary.  C’mon, this is supposed to be fun.  

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Zertify Zillow Zestimates On Blockchain

Big Problem with Zillow Zestimates:

Perhaps the best example of metadata being imposed upon an unwary public is the “Zillow Zestimate”.  Zillow.com is a real estate website that aggregates public information and boldly publishes the value of your personal property while quietly disclaiming that invalidity of their own valuation.  In all fairness, RedFin.com and Trulia.com also provide similarly structured valuations of your most valuable asset with no physical verification. The slightest misrepresentation could cost the homeowner tens of thousands of dollars for which there is absolutely no recourse.

According to Homevisor.com: if your house (or a house you are looking to buy) has a Zestimate of $300,000 – there is almost a 25% chance that the house will sell for less than $240,000 or more than $360,000. That is a pretty wide margin of error. 

There must be a way to Zertify Zilliow Zestimates on blockchain

Implications:

The result is that responsible homeowners who have conscientiously maintained and improved their property at great expense of time and money may be punished in a market while those who neglected their properties may be overly rewarded.  Neither the buyer nor the seller has any way of inspecting comparable homes used by Zillow.  This causes market distortion that affects the buyer, the seller, and the community at large.

Root Cause:

Zillow, Trulia, and RedFin all scan from public data sources.  The problem is that there is no trusted public ledger where owners can register valuable improvements and amenities that may dramatically impact the value – and which lower the risk of owning a particular property.  If such a trusted ledger did exist, it is certain that data scrapers such as Zillow, Trulia, and RedFin would be happy to scrape the data at no marginal cost.

Solution:

An organization such as the National Society of Professional Engineers has sufficient authority to provide a blockchain based ledger where a licensed professional engineer could physically review major components of a property including structural, plumbing, electrical, envelope, energy efficiency, HVAC, Solar Installations, mold, corrosion, critical slope, tree liabilities, view amenities, etc., and formulate an annual cost of ownership statement (ACOS) over a standard period of time.  The licensed engineer will register the ACOS, along with recent remodeling permits filed with the city, on the NSPE blockchain where it may be accessed by Zillow, Redfin, Trulia, MLS, banks, insurance, and the public, etc.

Value Proposition:

The ACOS and the Professional Engineering condition assessment could be provided to owners for a flat fee or subscription fee with a ROI greater than 10:1. This means that viability threshold for engineering assessment is defined as adding more than 10,000 dollars to the average sales price of the property for every 1000 dollars that the homeowner spends on the engineering report.  Owners that don’t meet this minimum threshold would not benefit from an ACOS and could not be listed on the NSPE Registry.

Size of market:

Assuming that there are about 100 million private homes in the US.  The percentage of under-valued homes that would benefit from a 10:1 PE registry are characterized at over +1 standard deviation on a bell curve distribution and higher.  This is roughly equivalent to 14% of 100 million, or approximately 14 million properties.  If each of those spends a minimum of  $1000 dollars for assessments, the value of the market would exceed $1.4B dollars. According to Homevisor.com estimates, the market would bear an engineering cost of $6000 yielding a $60,000 ROI, or roughly a $10B dollar market.

Conclusion:

Such a blockchain would safeguard the health and welfare of people and property while increasing  the visibility of professional engineers as a public financial institution with real financial impact.  The NSPE data would reduce volatility in banking and insurance ledgers so that pricing becomes more efficient. Real Estate professionals, renovation contractors, and real estate appraisers would also benefit from the registry by delivering the right product to the right client at the right time. It will increase the demand for a retail professional engineering sector to defend the technical best interest of society.  It will signal high integrity rather than low integrity to the preventive maintenance market.  Most importantly, the homeowners who maintain their property and those who will buy those properties benefit from fair market assessment of property values at a far greater utility than the typical point-of-sale home inspection.

Notes:

  • The ideas presented here are the sole creation of the author and not meant to reflect the intentions or interests of the National Society of Professional Engineers, Zillow, or any other referenced entity. 
  • Zertify takes its name from a portmanteau between the word certify and the statistical z-test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-test
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