The P2P client program of the ideosphere looks like an online store, with the familiar item categories, pictures, descriptions, search field, message board and the like. Its selection is far greater, however, because it aggregates search results from all the ideosphere servers in the world like a giant P2P tracker. It's easy to tell what's good in the pirate world: look which file is on every server. The P2P software will provide the user a similar insight into legal ideosphere content. He/she can check the file collections of hundreds or thousands of ideo-servers: which great new files their admins discovered, enjoyed and host.
The server software embeds the author's unique ID into the file released on this network. This is to direct payments to the right author. There might be umpteen copies of a file circulating around the world, different works might get the same file name, or the same work might get renamed to various files names, none of this is a problem. Any time a payment is initiated from a file, it will go right to the author whose ID is embedded deep in that file. embedding an author ID into a file is possible only if it doesn't have one yet.
Money, commodities, bonds, real estate - everything can crash in value, or be taken by force or fraud as history shows us. The only sure asset in the world is a steady source of income. The "set in stone" unchangeability of author ID ensures that the most important asset you can have - your source of income - remains yours no matter what. What could a would-be thief do? Your work is out on the network in thousands of copies, all directing payments to your account. Is he going to chase after thousands of files? The server software prevents files with tampered IDs from being served anyway.
The software also embeds the last file hosting distributor's unique ID into the file at download time. The purpose is the same: to get the distributor's portion of the payment to the correct distributor, even if the payment happens a long time after the download. Upon releasing a product, the "credit ahead" feature credits two sales ahead of the ledger. Other than this credit, the only way to release currency in this system is to release intellectual property - that is, to add goods. This makes the "ideo" the stablest currency in the world.
As on some present-day sites, on product listings, next to the author's name the software displays a public "star" rating for a member's work (average of ratings from paying purchasers only, to deter rating abuse). In the ideosphere, the listing will also display the seller's title. This title is calculated mainly from the member's payments-to-wealth ratio. It is "beginner" at 0% (no payments sent ever for any work downloaded), and goes through increasing titles of nobility, the highest rank displayed at a 85% to 100% payments-to-wealth ratio. People who don't care about status quo can ignore their displayed title. However those who wanted to be royalty, now have the option. Unlike the old world, their titles will not constitute a burden or a sign of oppression to others but a financial benefit.
From software to a living ideosphere system
Not only are we a part of nature but so is everything we create. The better our creation, the more traits one finds in it from nature. (Wouldn't you love if your computer healed itself as smartly from various ills as the potted plant near it?). The most important characteristics of a living system is an ability to grow, an ability to react, the ability to learn, and the ability to reproduce. I touched on the ideosphere's growth briefly in an earlier post; growth is the easiest part. Even a desktop PC can grow. Just look at all the programs, expansions and peripherals yours grew.
To be truly functional, however, the ideosphere needs to be able to react to things that affect it, like attempts of fraud, or drastic changes in the connected old money economy. First, the system must sense something requiring a reaction is going on. A good mechanism for this is a pattern recognition routine which listens to the familiar daily hum of ideosphere traffic and flags sharply discordant events, like a member's transaction with 10000 times average amount or frequency. Stock exchanges already use such routines to watch the flow of trades. Next, a response has to be decided upon. For this purpose, the software will display all activity it flagged on the message board for the crowd for majority decision.
Unlikely as this seems, crowds beat the experts in intelligence. Take the simplest example: guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. "Experts" get within roughly 20% of the right number, while a crowd of disparate individuals - including biased and illiterate ones - comes within 2%. This is a huge benchmark. So we'll rely on the crowd's collective intelligence, the best intelligence one can find today, to determine what the ideosphere will react. The software's next challenge is the ability to learn. It will learn by using its pattern recognition routine to process the crowd's responses too. Does the crowd always approve flagged transactions with a certain common denominator? If it does, the flagging of those will gradually decrease to a minimum. Does the crowd consistently disapprove flagged transactions with a certain common denominator? If it does, the flagging of those will gradually increase. Here you go, a software that can learn and prioritize.
On to the mother of all challenges. How do we enable the ideosphere to reproduce? By allowing variations of the ideosphere system (which some members will inevitably invent) to be tied onto the main ideosphere, serving its full customer base. Like so many offshoots of a mother plant, some of these may offer new features of convenience, while others may introduce a wholly new type of merchandise or service. With the customers always patronizing whichever fulfills their needs the best, there may be soon a whole natural selection going on between these binary life forms - that is, ideosphere variations - who pleases the customers the best.
Et voila, the first P2P system with the living properties of a simple multi-cell organism. Fueled by the members' input, the ideosphere can react, learn, reproduce, mutate and compete between its mutations for the most crowd-pleasing variant to spread. This means, even if some of its aspects are not conceived the best initially, the system will be able to fix itself, becoming whatever each member truly wants his ideosphere to be in the multitude of variants likely to evolve. We just succeeded to reconcile democracy with natural selection and - well, whatever else you may expect from the ideosphere (without me even knowing it.)
Using old world currency and dealing with problem members
How will New Member Joe who has only, say, US dollars, pay for ideosphere goods? He can use PayPal or credit cards if both recipients take that, but it's simpler and cheaper to visit the Ideo Store where he can buy up to 1000 ideos to fill up his account. (1000 ideos is 1000 US dollars as of May 2010; plenty for books, CDs, videos, etc.) If Joe spent his first batch of ideos, he can refill his account to 1000 an unlimited number of times with further purchases. The Store, in turn, will put most of Joe's brought-in dollars up for sale for ideos. (Who will have ideos to buy those dollars? The members who Joe paid, obviously. It's a simple cycle.)
Ideosphere accounts have no ideo balance limit and the members can also freely sell their accumulated ideos for dollars or other currency. However the Ideo Store sells only as many ideos to raise a member's balance to 1000. For normal book, music and video shopping, having "only" 1000 ideos at a time is a non-issue. The conversion cap serves to limit the amount of outside currency in the ideosphere to only as much as the unobstructed flow of commerce requires. Anyone aspiring to descend on the ideosphere with a million dollars for monkey business would have to make 1000 visits to the Store to convert it - spend it - convert it - spend it… earning a star place on the board of transactions flagged for a closer community look. Remember, until the community approves a flagged transaction, it remains "pending" and is not completed.
Subsisting on nominal transaction fees, the Ideo Store is a financial institution with a 100% asset reserve. It is a temporary solution, created only to accommodate new members who do not possess ideos yet, having not released products in the community yet. Once successful ideosphere members begin selling significant accumulated ideo amounts and begin accepting old economy currency directly (when the first online payment service adds ideo support) if the Ideo Store becomes unneeded, it can be phased out and any eventual remaining profit on its books divided equally between all ideosphere members, since it's community property. For security purposes, the ideosphere P2P software will allow a member to post an ideo amount for sale only if the member's balance has it. It is a good reason why to buy ideos in the ideosphere, not in the outside world, which lacks this verification ability. All in all, the ideosphere will make the best possible attempt to protect its members from miscreants but there are no guarantees. As in life, the only thing that can really protect you is your own common sense. If some brand new, yet unrated deal looks too good to be true, it probably is. You can try it if you really want to, but you'll be doing it at your own risk.
This brings us to the last subject, how to deal with members who commit fraud or other abuses. To address this, any ideosphere member who was shorted (or who spotted nefarious activity) can start a new "issue thread" on the message board where everyone may add their views or opinions, and join the grand vote. Members have a "vote requested" button which is normally dark. If public input is needed for a new flagged transaction or issue thread, the software makes this button for a number of online members blink, including the member the issue thread was started about. Those who click the button are taken to the discussion and vote. For the grand vote, every negative vote lowers the alleged perpetrator's 1 to 5 star rating by 1/4, while each positive vote raises it by 1/4. If the rating hits zero (that's a big, angry majority! 20 people) the account will be deleted and its ideo balance either restituted to the shorted member/s with the rest going to the Ideo Store or returned to the person's PayPal or bank account given at signup (minus the transfer costs) - as the majority votes. The software will bar reregistration with that PayPal or bank account and record (but not ban yet) the IP. Only in a case of extreme distress which the community cannot overcome alone (e.g. a coordinated attack by thousands or a new type of fraud) the writers of the ideosphere software may be contacted to help by clicking their IDs embedded in the software. They retain the ability to pull thousands of accounts fast and issue program security updates. Let's hope such drastic measures will not be needed.
Because some people, especially outside the U.S. might not have a Paypal or bank account, it will be possible to register without providing one. However, this will cause a little "no outside account" warning icon to appear next to the member's name for either 6 months or until he/she conducts 500 ideos' worth of transactions without any complaints from others, whichever comes first. This way honest new members can prove themselves and become full members. So can returning banned members who wisened up. If the latter get themselves banned a second time, however, since they provided no outside account in the first place, their ideo balance goes back to whomever they shorted and the Ideo Store and an 8 month IP ban begins. If there is a third ban for a member with the same IP, the IP will stay banned for 3 solid years. A member's Paypal or bank account information on file can be changed after 6 months of membership. Thank you for reading this far.
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How it looks, what it does and why it does it
The P2P client program of the ideosphere looks like an online store, with the familiar item categories, pictures, descriptions, search field, message board and the like. Its selection is far greater, however, because it aggregates search results from all the ideosphere servers in the world like a giant P2P tracker. It's easy to tell what's good in the pirate world: look which file is on every server. The P2P software will provide the user a similar insight into legal ideosphere content. He/she can check the file collections of hundreds or thousands of ideo-servers: which great new files their admins discovered, enjoyed and host.
The server software embeds the author's unique ID into the file released on this network. This is to direct payments to the right author. There might be umpteen copies of a file circulating around the world, different works might get the same file name, or the same work might get renamed to various files names, none of this is a problem. Any time a payment is initiated from a file, it will go right to the author whose ID is embedded deep in that file. embedding an author ID into a file is possible only if it doesn't have one yet.
Money, commodities, bonds, real estate - everything can crash in value, or be taken by force or fraud as history shows us. The only sure asset in the world is a steady source of income. The "set in stone" unchangeability of author ID ensures that the most important asset you can have - your source of income - remains yours no matter what. What could a would-be thief do? Your work is out on the network in thousands of copies, all directing payments to your account. Is he going to chase after thousands of files? The server software prevents files with tampered IDs from being served anyway.
The software also embeds the last file hosting distributor's unique ID into the file at download time. The purpose is the same: to get the distributor's portion of the payment to the correct distributor, even if the payment happens a long time after the download. Upon releasing a product, the "credit ahead" feature credits two sales ahead of the ledger. Other than this credit, the only way to release currency in this system is to release intellectual property - that is, to add goods. This makes the "ideo" the stablest currency in the world.
As on some present-day sites, on product listings, next to the author's name the software displays a public "star" rating for a member's work (average of ratings from paying purchasers only, to deter rating abuse). In the ideosphere, the listing will also display the seller's title. This title is calculated mainly from the member's payments-to-wealth ratio. It is "beginner" at 0% (no payments sent ever for any work downloaded), and goes through increasing titles of nobility, the highest rank displayed at a 85% to 100% payments-to-wealth ratio. People who don't care about status quo can ignore their displayed title. However those who wanted to be royalty, now have the option. Unlike the old world, their titles will not constitute a burden or a sign of oppression to others but a financial benefit.
From software to a living ideosphere system
Not only are we a part of nature but so is everything we create. The better our creation, the more traits one finds in it from nature. (Wouldn't you love if your computer healed itself as smartly from various ills as the potted plant near it?). The most important characteristics of a living system is an ability to grow, an ability to react, the ability to learn, and the ability to reproduce. I touched on the ideosphere's growth briefly in an earlier post; growth is the easiest part. Even a desktop PC can grow. Just look at all the programs, expansions and peripherals yours grew.
To be truly functional, however, the ideosphere needs to be able to react to things that affect it, like attempts of fraud, or drastic changes in the connected old money economy. First, the system must sense something requiring a reaction is going on. A good mechanism for this is a pattern recognition routine which listens to the familiar daily hum of ideosphere traffic and flags sharply discordant events, like a member's transaction with 10000 times average amount or frequency. Stock exchanges already use such routines to watch the flow of trades. Next, a response has to be decided upon. For this purpose, the software will display all activity it flagged on the message board for the crowd for majority decision.
Unlikely as this seems, crowds beat the experts in intelligence. Take the simplest example: guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. "Experts" get within roughly 20% of the right number, while a crowd of disparate individuals - including biased and illiterate ones - comes within 2%. This is a huge benchmark. So we'll rely on the crowd's collective intelligence, the best intelligence one can find today, to determine what the ideosphere will react. The software's next challenge is the ability to learn. It will learn by using its pattern recognition routine to process the crowd's responses too. Does the crowd always approve flagged transactions with a certain common denominator? If it does, the flagging of those will gradually decrease to a minimum. Does the crowd consistently disapprove flagged transactions with a certain common denominator? If it does, the flagging of those will gradually increase. Here you go, a software that can learn and prioritize.
On to the mother of all challenges. How do we enable the ideosphere to reproduce? By allowing variations of the ideosphere system (which some members will inevitably invent) to be tied onto the main ideosphere, serving its full customer base. Like so many offshoots of a mother plant, some of these may offer new features of convenience, while others may introduce a wholly new type of merchandise or service. With the customers always patronizing whichever fulfills their needs the best, there may be soon a whole natural selection going on between these binary life forms - that is, ideosphere variations - who pleases the customers the best.
Et voila, the first P2P system with the living properties of a simple multi-cell organism. Fueled by the members' input, the ideosphere can react, learn, reproduce, mutate and compete between its mutations for the most crowd-pleasing variant to spread. This means, even if some of its aspects are not conceived the best initially, the system will be able to fix itself, becoming whatever each member truly wants his ideosphere to be in the multitude of variants likely to evolve. We just succeeded to reconcile democracy with natural selection and - well, whatever else you may expect from the ideosphere (without me even knowing it.)
Using old world currency and dealing with problem members
How will New Member Joe who has only, say, US dollars, pay for ideosphere goods? He can use PayPal or credit cards if both recipients take that, but it's simpler and cheaper to visit the Ideo Store where he can buy up to 1000 ideos to fill up his account. (1000 ideos is 1000 US dollars as of May 2010; plenty for books, CDs, videos, etc.) If Joe spent his first batch of ideos, he can refill his account to 1000 an unlimited number of times with further purchases. The Store, in turn, will put most of Joe's brought-in dollars up for sale for ideos. (Who will have ideos to buy those dollars? The members who Joe paid, obviously. It's a simple cycle.)
Ideosphere accounts have no ideo balance limit and the members can also freely sell their accumulated ideos for dollars or other currency. However the Ideo Store sells only as many ideos to raise a member's balance to 1000. For normal book, music and video shopping, having "only" 1000 ideos at a time is a non-issue. The conversion cap serves to limit the amount of outside currency in the ideosphere to only as much as the unobstructed flow of commerce requires. Anyone aspiring to descend on the ideosphere with a million dollars for monkey business would have to make 1000 visits to the Store to convert it - spend it - convert it - spend it… earning a star place on the board of transactions flagged for a closer community look. Remember, until the community approves a flagged transaction, it remains "pending" and is not completed.
Subsisting on nominal transaction fees, the Ideo Store is a financial institution with a 100% asset reserve. It is a temporary solution, created only to accommodate new members who do not possess ideos yet, having not released products in the community yet. Once successful ideosphere members begin selling significant accumulated ideo amounts and begin accepting old economy currency directly (when the first online payment service adds ideo support) if the Ideo Store becomes unneeded, it can be phased out and any eventual remaining profit on its books divided equally between all ideosphere members, since it's community property. For security purposes, the ideosphere P2P software will allow a member to post an ideo amount for sale only if the member's balance has it. It is a good reason why to buy ideos in the ideosphere, not in the outside world, which lacks this verification ability. All in all, the ideosphere will make the best possible attempt to protect its members from miscreants but there are no guarantees. As in life, the only thing that can really protect you is your own common sense. If some brand new, yet unrated deal looks too good to be true, it probably is. You can try it if you really want to, but you'll be doing it at your own risk.
This brings us to the last subject, how to deal with members who commit fraud or other abuses. To address this, any ideosphere member who was shorted (or who spotted nefarious activity) can start a new "issue thread" on the message board where everyone may add their views or opinions, and join the grand vote. Members have a "vote requested" button which is normally dark. If public input is needed for a new flagged transaction or issue thread, the software makes this button for a number of online members blink, including the member the issue thread was started about. Those who click the button are taken to the discussion and vote. For the grand vote, every negative vote lowers the alleged perpetrator's 1 to 5 star rating by 1/4, while each positive vote raises it by 1/4. If the rating hits zero (that's a big, angry majority! 20 people) the account will be deleted and its ideo balance either restituted to the shorted member/s with the rest going to the Ideo Store or returned to the person's PayPal or bank account given at signup (minus the transfer costs) - as the majority votes. The software will bar reregistration with that PayPal or bank account and record (but not ban yet) the IP. Only in a case of extreme distress which the community cannot overcome alone (e.g. a coordinated attack by thousands or a new type of fraud) the writers of the ideosphere software may be contacted to help by clicking their IDs embedded in the software. They retain the ability to pull thousands of accounts fast and issue program security updates. Let's hope such drastic measures will not be needed.
Because some people, especially outside the U.S. might not have a Paypal or bank account, it will be possible to register without providing one. However, this will cause a little "no outside account" warning icon to appear next to the member's name for either 6 months or until he/she conducts 500 ideos' worth of transactions without any complaints from others, whichever comes first. This way honest new members can prove themselves and become full members. So can returning banned members who wisened up. If the latter get themselves banned a second time, however, since they provided no outside account in the first place, their ideo balance goes back to whomever they shorted and the Ideo Store and an 8 month IP ban begins. If there is a third ban for a member with the same IP, the IP will stay banned for 3 solid years. A member's Paypal or bank account information on file can be changed after 6 months of membership. Thank you for reading this far.