I created an open source barter facilitator application and I am wondering if it is the future of commerce
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Not really, no. Assuming that all currencies are going down the toilet and your software is supposed to sidestep it in some manner, then all you're really introducing is basically an exchange for a new system of currencies. You end up in the same place in the theoretical future where barter is the main method of trading.
On the other hand, if you're doing this just for fun, then there's nothing wrong with that, and introducing it that way might get you a better reception. But this is not the future of trade, just a niche tool that some might find useful, which is perfectly fine.
The software allows barter to be the international main method of barter, does that explain it better for you.
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I think it isn't necessary to grow beyond that size though. We can live in smaller communities without growing past a certain size. We don't all have to live together, that's what I think a lot of people miss.
Eh, why would there need to be capitalist villages if everybody had what they needed? I don't buy that there couldn't be luxury either, we have the ability and technology for that now in any scenario or economic system, I'm not a marxist or believe the idea that each according to their need etc but someone who sees the potential for maximum luxury , comfort, connection etc in the scenarios I envision. I would happily do the work if it meant living in a world without hierarchy, money, enforced trade or barter etc and I think many others would too.
No, it really doesn't require some dream technology, just a mental shift, besides renewables are all that's needed. We shouldn't be relying on fission nor fusion, both are costly to build in myriad ways and one seems a huge pipe dream which we don't need.
Edit: There already is abundant housing, it's just in the hands of a few who have been convinced by the system that holding on to it and keeping others out of it is the best thing to do.
Completely agree about mass transit between cities, but honestly I just think we need walkable cities that are also accessible to wheelchairs etc. Something like the ideas the venus project came up with, or arcologies.
I think smaller communities would be great for many reasons. But I think scale is a key to our current level of productivity. And I think it's required for building certain complicated technologies, like industrial farm equipment or computer chips. And without industrial farm equipment, farmers are less productive, so your village of 300 people might need to be mostly farmers. I think this is what was required in the past, but with the industrial revolution it opened up so people could specialize in other things.
There wouldn't need to be capitalist villages, I think that some would inevitably form. Maybe many people are okay to just do a job and get rewarded the same as everyone else, but others might prefer something closer to the current system. And assuming no one is preventing them from existing, how do you prevent someone from deciding that they would be better off in a capitalist village where they might get paid more than in the sharing village?
Maybe you're right that nuclear power is a red herring. Say we rely on solar panels or windmills. I think these are also complicated to build and require some rare materials. Who would volunteer to go to a remote copper mine if they could instead stay at home and work on something else for the same reward?
And maybe people are passionate about that sort of thing, so it'd be okay. But surely there are some jobs that are important but not as appealing. Who would clean the sewers or do something a bit dangerous like fix power lines or maybe washing windows? And I'd bet that many people might still go to 8+ years of medical school to become a doctor, but would people still do that for some less appealing careers?
So I feel like you need to offer some extra reward to incentivize people to do jobs that they wouldn't want to do. Part of why I say this is because I'm counting down the days until I can have a vacation, and eventually retire. My job is "okay" but I'd rather work on fun hobby projects, but I don't think anyone would ever pay me for them. One viable option is for me to work my normal job to make money to buy food, but then take time off to work on fun stuff that I enjoy, but no one wants to pay me for (or trade me for food).
So assuming you offer some reward to people for the less fun jobs, how do you prevent them leaving for capitalist villages which would presumably always reward them more? This is the key issue IMO. Unless getting rid of capitalism results in huge savings by not needing to advertise, compete, etc.
I mention dream technology because I feel like that can help with some of the scale issues. Maybe with unlimited power and 3D printers, a small village could produce everything they need, so you don't need to worry about struggling just to produce everything you need for survival.
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the highest possible value for a product
How do you calculate this?
the amount of people who has the product - the amount of people who want the product
As demand increases, the value increases, but at some point when demand exceeds supply (which is common), the opposite happens: the magnitude of the value starts to decrease (though that value is now negative).
For example, two sellers sell a product, and four people want it. Let maximum value be
v_m. Value is calculated to bev_m / (2 - 4)=-v_m / 2. If two more people want it suddenly (so 6 now), it becomesv_m / (2 - 6)=-v_m / 4, which has a lower magnitude despite the higher demand and static supply. This is contrary to how supply and demand actually work, where value generally increases as demand increases (if supply remains static).Maybe value means something differently to me than it does to you though. Ideally supply would always equal demand (which makes your denominator 0, breaking the equation entirely since that would be undefined), but that would be really difficult to control.
The highest possible value for a product, say like we were in a world where there is only one of everything, then everything would be equal value, which is one, for example: one carrot for one apple, and the people who has the product - the people who wants the product is supply - demand in simpler terms and the software gets those numbers by looking in the database and counting the supply of a product and counting the demand of a product.
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I'm trying to politely explain that if you want people to care more about your software, then you should go to more effort to explain it. If you just dump your source code online with minimal explanation, not as many people will care as if you explain what you're trying to solve, how your thing works, and maybe alternatives that you considered, future features you'd like to address. Going through the source is the hardest part that many people might not want to bother doing. But most people might read a brief description and watch a short video, even if they aren't all that interested in your idea at first. Even if they are skeptical of the need for a barter system, they can still appreciate the work you put in, and offer advice on the technical side, to help you with this and future projects.
I did skim your source and it looks like it's mostly wrappers around a database. Some ideas, if you wanted to write about it:
- what are the different options that I user has? It looks like they can say "I want X" or "I have Y", then what happens next? I shouldn't need to read your source code to understand what your software does.
- I saw something about connecting to your database over TOR, I don't quite understand that. If there's an exchange of real good, what is the benefit of TOR? Don't you have to break anonymity to trade real goods?
- how is your database hosted? If this is for a "currencies have collapsed" type of scenario, instead of relying on TOR, it might make sense to rely on a decentralized database that exists on everyone's phones.
- security concerns: it looks like people can write to the database. Does that mean someone could also erase all the entries? How can you prevent abuse like that?
Security concerns: I don't necessarily see that as abuse, anyone can record all records of something and if something gets wrongfully deleted someone can add it back in. There may be times when someone needs to delete a certain record, for example: when someone is bartering something in exchange to harm someone.
Database hosting: anyone can host the database because I have the files in the repository.
TOR: the benefit of TOR is to prevent some entity from tracking exchanges and it keeps people anonymous and with bartering real life goods you don't necessarily need to break anonymity, there can be intermediaries to keep things anonymous.
What happens next: when a person sees the record and they have what the other person wants, the first person can contact the person who has the record and negotiate the trade. -
Wow, it's disheartening to see some people here think everything will always be based on trades/transactions and seem to not be able to imagine a sharing future. Sad.
The 1st thing is not exactly that sad and it opens up opportunities that everyone can enter and I can imagine a sharing future.
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I think smaller communities would be great for many reasons. But I think scale is a key to our current level of productivity. And I think it's required for building certain complicated technologies, like industrial farm equipment or computer chips. And without industrial farm equipment, farmers are less productive, so your village of 300 people might need to be mostly farmers. I think this is what was required in the past, but with the industrial revolution it opened up so people could specialize in other things.
There wouldn't need to be capitalist villages, I think that some would inevitably form. Maybe many people are okay to just do a job and get rewarded the same as everyone else, but others might prefer something closer to the current system. And assuming no one is preventing them from existing, how do you prevent someone from deciding that they would be better off in a capitalist village where they might get paid more than in the sharing village?
Maybe you're right that nuclear power is a red herring. Say we rely on solar panels or windmills. I think these are also complicated to build and require some rare materials. Who would volunteer to go to a remote copper mine if they could instead stay at home and work on something else for the same reward?
And maybe people are passionate about that sort of thing, so it'd be okay. But surely there are some jobs that are important but not as appealing. Who would clean the sewers or do something a bit dangerous like fix power lines or maybe washing windows? And I'd bet that many people might still go to 8+ years of medical school to become a doctor, but would people still do that for some less appealing careers?
So I feel like you need to offer some extra reward to incentivize people to do jobs that they wouldn't want to do. Part of why I say this is because I'm counting down the days until I can have a vacation, and eventually retire. My job is "okay" but I'd rather work on fun hobby projects, but I don't think anyone would ever pay me for them. One viable option is for me to work my normal job to make money to buy food, but then take time off to work on fun stuff that I enjoy, but no one wants to pay me for (or trade me for food).
So assuming you offer some reward to people for the less fun jobs, how do you prevent them leaving for capitalist villages which would presumably always reward them more? This is the key issue IMO. Unless getting rid of capitalism results in huge savings by not needing to advertise, compete, etc.
I mention dream technology because I feel like that can help with some of the scale issues. Maybe with unlimited power and 3D printers, a small village could produce everything they need, so you don't need to worry about struggling just to produce everything you need for survival.
The technology already exists to create food or other things at scale though without much manual labour so I disagree with that assertion.
As for how to stop capitalist villages, well that's primarily done through a mixture of education, cooperation and showing there's no advantage to capitalism. Capitalism requires a state or some kind of force in order to enforce property rights, if I can go to that village and either take objects or ideas, capitalism loses since it cannot enforce its rights on me, nor its will once I go to a non capitalist village and thus it would have no power to keep its secrets, ideas or designs. It's also done through education in that those who know more are less likely to be taken advantage of by others, especially if things like critical analysis etc are taught. Showing how well cooperation works instead of competition can be another protection against it. Also, a capitalist village will still have exploited workers. Why would they stay there when they could move somewhere where they're not exploited?
So firstly, there isn't necessarily a need to go to a copper mine, there's copper in lots of things and we could set up recycling programs to extract it from things that wouldn't be necessary under such a system, mass produced stuff, for example, things that broke and thus got thrown away etc etc. If there was a need to mine copper this could be done in part with technology, some kind of drones or other machines. Lastly, I'm sure there would be some people that wouldn't mind doing labour if it meant less in the future, people thinking only short term and only about themselves is how this current mess of a world happened, after all.
Again, non appealing jobs can be done via technology and we can redesign systems so that labour would be at a minimum, a lot of automated/semi-automated recycling plants could be used, sewers could lead into recycling facilities and places for growing plants etc. So with those things manual labour could be massively reduced, or at least the parts people would 'need' incentives for (though I don't think they necessarily would if it wasn't constant and they thought long term and collectively).
You assume capitalism always offers more, it doesn't necessarily and even if it does at the beginning over time it would merely exploit more and more people until they got fed up enough to leave, more people would do that currently if there was any place to go where they didn't have to be exploited and could live a happy life with all they needed but there isn't really anywhere like that currently.
I agree that we could very much use 3D printers etc and smaller power grids to create self-sustaining cities etc, using all kinds of renewable power since solar and wind aren't the only types.
Hope this helps!
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The technology already exists to create food or other things at scale though without much manual labour so I disagree with that assertion.
As for how to stop capitalist villages, well that's primarily done through a mixture of education, cooperation and showing there's no advantage to capitalism. Capitalism requires a state or some kind of force in order to enforce property rights, if I can go to that village and either take objects or ideas, capitalism loses since it cannot enforce its rights on me, nor its will once I go to a non capitalist village and thus it would have no power to keep its secrets, ideas or designs. It's also done through education in that those who know more are less likely to be taken advantage of by others, especially if things like critical analysis etc are taught. Showing how well cooperation works instead of competition can be another protection against it. Also, a capitalist village will still have exploited workers. Why would they stay there when they could move somewhere where they're not exploited?
So firstly, there isn't necessarily a need to go to a copper mine, there's copper in lots of things and we could set up recycling programs to extract it from things that wouldn't be necessary under such a system, mass produced stuff, for example, things that broke and thus got thrown away etc etc. If there was a need to mine copper this could be done in part with technology, some kind of drones or other machines. Lastly, I'm sure there would be some people that wouldn't mind doing labour if it meant less in the future, people thinking only short term and only about themselves is how this current mess of a world happened, after all.
Again, non appealing jobs can be done via technology and we can redesign systems so that labour would be at a minimum, a lot of automated/semi-automated recycling plants could be used, sewers could lead into recycling facilities and places for growing plants etc. So with those things manual labour could be massively reduced, or at least the parts people would 'need' incentives for (though I don't think they necessarily would if it wasn't constant and they thought long term and collectively).
You assume capitalism always offers more, it doesn't necessarily and even if it does at the beginning over time it would merely exploit more and more people until they got fed up enough to leave, more people would do that currently if there was any place to go where they didn't have to be exploited and could live a happy life with all they needed but there isn't really anywhere like that currently.
I agree that we could very much use 3D printers etc and smaller power grids to create self-sustaining cities etc, using all kinds of renewable power since solar and wind aren't the only types.
Hope this helps!
The technology already exists to create food or other things at scale though without much manual labour so I disagree with that assertion.
It exists now, but it is complicated to produce and maintain, let alone develop from scratch. I don't think it can be done by a village of 300 people, even if they have access to all the information they could need and education and all that. Even if they had all the knowledge needed, the infrastructure required to produce it is large and expensive. Maybe a village could specialize in producing tractors, but I don't think they could also make their own cell phones. And they only need so many tractors for themselves, so what would they do next? Either sell the additional tractors they build to another village, or change their production lines to make something else-- though they may need more tractors suddenly in the future.
A lot of what you're saying relies on efficient recycling and automation. Once we have this, then sure maybe a sharing utopia would be possible. But I'm not convinced that we're close to that. A lot of companies are trying to develop self driving cars, a lot of money stands to be made from that over paying truck drivers/taxis/etc. But it's hard. Japan is investing a lot in automation because of their aging population causing future labour shortages. We're making progress but it takes a lot of time, and it's not clear if it will ever be completely possible. So currently it is basically "dream technology".
You assume capitalism always offers more, it doesn’t necessarily and even if it does at the beginning over time it would merely exploit more and more people until they got fed up enough to leave, more people would do that currently if there was any place to go where they didn’t have to be exploited and could live a happy life with all they needed but there isn’t really anywhere like that currently.
Have you read about the history of the Soviet Union? The number of people fleeing from East to West was significant enough to build a wall to keep them in. Fleeing in the other direction was almost unheard of. I don't think simply "giving up capitalism" is all that we need to create a better life, I think there still needs to be some way of deciding how to allocate resources that are used for different things. Historically it seems like the answer to that is either having a centralized government make the decisions, or having a capitalist free market do it. Both can be corrupted, make bad decisions, and result in shortages of food and other essentials. Both can cause some polarization of wealth. I don't think there's a third option of "everyone just be better", since once you reach a certain point, it only takes a few people taking advantage of a system to ruin it. I would happily just "be better", but I don't have enough faith in others to do the same. I'd only have to observe a few people taking advantage before deciding that the system is doomed and I'd be better off in a different economic system.
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Hello my name is Daniel Hanrahan and I created a barter facilitator application and do you think it is the future of commerce: https://github.com/Daniel-Hanrahan-Tools-and-Games/Barter_Facilitator
Sincerely,
Daniel HanrahanYou might be interested to learn some history of societies without state-issued currency. The book "Debt: The First 5000 years" by David Graeber has lots to say about pre-modern systems of account. I'm aware there are some criticisms of the book so I don't want present it as absolute truth - but it is an interesting on read, and it cites lots of anthropological studies.
One of the points of the book - and I see there are also other anthropologists who take this view - is there is no evidence that there has ever been a barter economy. Economics curriculum typically talks about prehistoric barter as an introduction; but it looks like the barter story may have been made up by Adam Smith. Smith's "Wealth of Nations" is highly insightful, and even predicts problems with capitalism that we currently face. But he probably didn't have the anthropological background to write authoritatively about economies of prehistoric societies.
Graeber does claim that there have been times when barter has been a stop-gap when there is a problem with money supply. So that's a case where something like your app might come in,
When barter has appeared, it wasn’t as part of a purely barter economy, and money didn’t emerge from it—rather, it emerged from money. After Rome fell, for instance, Europeans used barter as a substitute for the Roman currency people had gotten used to. “In most of the cases we know about, [barter] takes place between people who are familiar with the use of money, but for one reason or another, don’t have a lot of it around.
These were temporary situations. The fall of Rome probably seemed like the end of the world to some people at the time. But new societal structures and currencies filled the gaps.
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I understand what you are trying to say but however though every single currency or mostly every single currency is going to become worthless like the Weimar mark or the Zimbabwean dollar. I am basing that on both what I see on the news and what is happening to people all around me.
I am basing that on both what I see on the news and what is happening to people all around me.
what news sources are you consuming?
because if you're getting the message from the news that economic collapse is imminent and all currencies are going to be worthless and we will need to fall back to a barter-based economy...that is a function of choices you've made in your news diet, much more than it has anything to do with anything actually happening in the real world.
and what specifically is happening to people around you that you're referring to? do you have a pen-pal in Weimar-era Germany who you're communicating with through a time portal? or are you talking with other people who have the same news diet as you do and forming a self-reinforcing worldview?
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The technology already exists to create food or other things at scale though without much manual labour so I disagree with that assertion.
It exists now, but it is complicated to produce and maintain, let alone develop from scratch. I don't think it can be done by a village of 300 people, even if they have access to all the information they could need and education and all that. Even if they had all the knowledge needed, the infrastructure required to produce it is large and expensive. Maybe a village could specialize in producing tractors, but I don't think they could also make their own cell phones. And they only need so many tractors for themselves, so what would they do next? Either sell the additional tractors they build to another village, or change their production lines to make something else-- though they may need more tractors suddenly in the future.
A lot of what you're saying relies on efficient recycling and automation. Once we have this, then sure maybe a sharing utopia would be possible. But I'm not convinced that we're close to that. A lot of companies are trying to develop self driving cars, a lot of money stands to be made from that over paying truck drivers/taxis/etc. But it's hard. Japan is investing a lot in automation because of their aging population causing future labour shortages. We're making progress but it takes a lot of time, and it's not clear if it will ever be completely possible. So currently it is basically "dream technology".
You assume capitalism always offers more, it doesn’t necessarily and even if it does at the beginning over time it would merely exploit more and more people until they got fed up enough to leave, more people would do that currently if there was any place to go where they didn’t have to be exploited and could live a happy life with all they needed but there isn’t really anywhere like that currently.
Have you read about the history of the Soviet Union? The number of people fleeing from East to West was significant enough to build a wall to keep them in. Fleeing in the other direction was almost unheard of. I don't think simply "giving up capitalism" is all that we need to create a better life, I think there still needs to be some way of deciding how to allocate resources that are used for different things. Historically it seems like the answer to that is either having a centralized government make the decisions, or having a capitalist free market do it. Both can be corrupted, make bad decisions, and result in shortages of food and other essentials. Both can cause some polarization of wealth. I don't think there's a third option of "everyone just be better", since once you reach a certain point, it only takes a few people taking advantage of a system to ruin it. I would happily just "be better", but I don't have enough faith in others to do the same. I'd only have to observe a few people taking advantage before deciding that the system is doomed and I'd be better off in a different economic system.
I don't see the point in discussing this any more. You seem utterly convinced that things cannot work any other way, and are comparing a statist history to a non statist future.
Hope that things get better for you.
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Hello my name is Daniel Hanrahan and I created a barter facilitator application and do you think it is the future of commerce: https://github.com/Daniel-Hanrahan-Tools-and-Games/Barter_Facilitator
Sincerely,
Daniel Hanrahansure is a lot of weird negging going on in this thread
cool app idea, i am going to try and compile
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sure is a lot of weird negging going on in this thread
cool app idea, i am going to try and compile
Thank you
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You might be interested to learn some history of societies without state-issued currency. The book "Debt: The First 5000 years" by David Graeber has lots to say about pre-modern systems of account. I'm aware there are some criticisms of the book so I don't want present it as absolute truth - but it is an interesting on read, and it cites lots of anthropological studies.
One of the points of the book - and I see there are also other anthropologists who take this view - is there is no evidence that there has ever been a barter economy. Economics curriculum typically talks about prehistoric barter as an introduction; but it looks like the barter story may have been made up by Adam Smith. Smith's "Wealth of Nations" is highly insightful, and even predicts problems with capitalism that we currently face. But he probably didn't have the anthropological background to write authoritatively about economies of prehistoric societies.
Graeber does claim that there have been times when barter has been a stop-gap when there is a problem with money supply. So that's a case where something like your app might come in,
When barter has appeared, it wasn’t as part of a purely barter economy, and money didn’t emerge from it—rather, it emerged from money. After Rome fell, for instance, Europeans used barter as a substitute for the Roman currency people had gotten used to. “In most of the cases we know about, [barter] takes place between people who are familiar with the use of money, but for one reason or another, don’t have a lot of it around.
These were temporary situations. The fall of Rome probably seemed like the end of the world to some people at the time. But new societal structures and currencies filled the gaps.
Yes but however though from 476 to 1476 approximately in europe around 95% of people used barter because they did not have any currency at all and pre-1543 Japan had a barter system to some extent.
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I am basing that on both what I see on the news and what is happening to people all around me.
what news sources are you consuming?
because if you're getting the message from the news that economic collapse is imminent and all currencies are going to be worthless and we will need to fall back to a barter-based economy...that is a function of choices you've made in your news diet, much more than it has anything to do with anything actually happening in the real world.
and what specifically is happening to people around you that you're referring to? do you have a pen-pal in Weimar-era Germany who you're communicating with through a time portal? or are you talking with other people who have the same news diet as you do and forming a self-reinforcing worldview?
I am seeing the value of my money go down and down in real time, I am seeing and hearing in my neighborhood that homelessness is going up and up. The news sources I use is philosophical gamer, Robert Kiyosaki and heresy financial. Those are just some of my sources.
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The technology already exists to create food or other things at scale though without much manual labour so I disagree with that assertion.
It exists now, but it is complicated to produce and maintain, let alone develop from scratch. I don't think it can be done by a village of 300 people, even if they have access to all the information they could need and education and all that. Even if they had all the knowledge needed, the infrastructure required to produce it is large and expensive. Maybe a village could specialize in producing tractors, but I don't think they could also make their own cell phones. And they only need so many tractors for themselves, so what would they do next? Either sell the additional tractors they build to another village, or change their production lines to make something else-- though they may need more tractors suddenly in the future.
A lot of what you're saying relies on efficient recycling and automation. Once we have this, then sure maybe a sharing utopia would be possible. But I'm not convinced that we're close to that. A lot of companies are trying to develop self driving cars, a lot of money stands to be made from that over paying truck drivers/taxis/etc. But it's hard. Japan is investing a lot in automation because of their aging population causing future labour shortages. We're making progress but it takes a lot of time, and it's not clear if it will ever be completely possible. So currently it is basically "dream technology".
You assume capitalism always offers more, it doesn’t necessarily and even if it does at the beginning over time it would merely exploit more and more people until they got fed up enough to leave, more people would do that currently if there was any place to go where they didn’t have to be exploited and could live a happy life with all they needed but there isn’t really anywhere like that currently.
Have you read about the history of the Soviet Union? The number of people fleeing from East to West was significant enough to build a wall to keep them in. Fleeing in the other direction was almost unheard of. I don't think simply "giving up capitalism" is all that we need to create a better life, I think there still needs to be some way of deciding how to allocate resources that are used for different things. Historically it seems like the answer to that is either having a centralized government make the decisions, or having a capitalist free market do it. Both can be corrupted, make bad decisions, and result in shortages of food and other essentials. Both can cause some polarization of wealth. I don't think there's a third option of "everyone just be better", since once you reach a certain point, it only takes a few people taking advantage of a system to ruin it. I would happily just "be better", but I don't have enough faith in others to do the same. I'd only have to observe a few people taking advantage before deciding that the system is doomed and I'd be better off in a different economic system.
I don't think it can be done by a village of 300 people
These things take an order of magnitude more companies today to build. Not only could 300 people not build the board inside one of the machines used for manufacturing, but 300 companies of hundreds to thousands of employees couldn't either. Each component is usually created by one company that specializes in that specific component and only that component because of how complex these things are to manufacture individually.
For that to work, you'd need villages to specialize in what they produce and export, but then this leads to a completely different kind of society than what you two are discussing here.
