Stones And Grocers

How do I bid my stones on the proposal that Keith gets a loaf of bread? Do I have to do this every day? For each commodity that I need? And my stones are bound there until someone bakes me a loaf? -- KeithBraithwaite

The StoneSociety provides two ways to get you fed. One presumes you have an ongoing relationship with the grocer. The other doesn't. Let's consider the latter first, because it's more like what happens with cash today:

If you and the grocer are in the same society, and if he's amenable to the transaction, you can just use the standard Stone Service mechanism. You trade posssession of Stones for your bread at a price acceptable to the grocer; he uses your traded stones in some auction suitable to him and they're recycled to you at the start of the next term.

What if the grocer isn't in your society? Then he needs to find a way to make use of your stones before he trades with you. In order to facilitate this we need to set up a kind of StoneExchange, a marketplace that Officers of separate Societies use to trade eachothers' Stones. Of course the traded Stones are subject to recycling at the end of their respective Terms, and when a Stone is recycled then its value disappears from the market like over-ripe fruit. In effect, traded Stones have to be used before their use-by date, which will vary from society to society.

Now, if your grocer isn't a member of any StoneSociety, agricultural pricing models must be used to convert Stones to cash based on their period, the number Commissioned, and a cash assessment of the goods and services available from the Society where they originate. The StoneExchange would provide you with credit based on that. Either way you use the exchange to convert your Stones into something accceptable to the grocer, and he trades you a sandwich for it.

But there is a much more organic way to work the grocery business under a StoneSociety. As you've noted, using an auction to control ownership of a particular resource is antithetical to the aims of stone societies; they're about preventing the TragedyOfTheCommons, not facillitating it. Ownership can be effected temporarily under Stones, but it's not really the way the things work. A better way to look at them is in terms of resource flows.

Consider society as an organism. Resources flow in, are transformed, and flow out again. Organisms are chiefly concerned with these flows, not with particular elements. Look at a city: all those automobiles flowing around bearing physical resources, all that wiring bearing electricity and information flowing through it. It wouldn't matter whether anyone owned any of these resources if the flows stopped. Facilitating, regulating, and altering the flows is where the ongoing power of the society lies. TheRoadsMustRoll?.

Thinking this way, Auctions should be more a kind of resource-flow-piping - filters, valves, ingesters, transformers, governors, multiplexers and demultiplexers - and less standalone controls of individual resources. If Auctions work this way, the Society's Officers don't worry about owning particular resources - they worry about occupying resource flows.

Such Auctions will expose interfaces at their inputs and outputs, and determining bindings between these interfaces is what most bidding will be about. Commissioned Resources and Officers are the organs of this social organism. The Quantum of each Auction controls the flow between its inputs and outputs, and direct market forces control each Quantum. Your Grocer is no longer a middleman in this scheme; he's more a kind of distribution flow that you can directly affect by bidding to the Auctions that control it.

Let's not displace the corner proprietor just yet. A society will want sales and distribution outlets, which may be regulated as societies of their own - so your corner grocer will still make his living. Any Auction can become the site of such a voluntary little Society, so long as it continued to meet its commitments to its original Society. These little societies will grow in accord with their market utility like buds on a tree.

So the Grocer may run his own society/business, and Keith can still be his disinterested customer via a StoneExchange as above. But the more organic way has Keith and the grocer and everyone in the whole cycle of agriculture, distribution, consumption, sewage, and fertilization in a Society together, and Keith's Stones affecting not just his local market process, but every part of the food cycle - the distribution of the sewage, the packaging of containers, the husbandry of livestock, the kind of CFCs used in refrigerators, and so on. In this way a society can regulate itself without delegating any authority for doing so. This, I think, is what Stone Societies are really all about.

It's worth noting that modern businesses don't manage whole resource cycles, but just control a means of resource production. Stone Societies seem quite suitable for the market-control of whole resource cycles - a domain where only bureaucratic regulators have ever operated before.

And the default proposal is that I don't get one, which is what will happen unless I can convince a majority of the other stones? Ok, so maybe everyone is mutually altruistic (unlikely, on the face of it) and we all agree that we all eat, so why bother with the bidding? -- KeithBraithwaite

You occupy a flow. But that flow isn't isolated; it's part of a living cycle. Bidding affects that cycle in the same way that sensation affects any living cycle - as a controlling feedback. Without such feedback, numbness leads to inflexibility and unsustainability; an undesirable state. We see such numbness whenever we delegate authority.

I can't picture all that. Can somebody give a UserStory for how the above works as a cycle? -- RobMandeville

Meanwhile my neighbour wants to throw a party, she puts forward the proposal: Jos gets twenty loaves, ten bottles wine, three pounds assorted Italian sausage etc. etc. (She's a good person to like live next to). Unless she invites a majority of the stones then she probably doesn't get all that stuff. -- KeithBraithwaite

She could try to bid like that, but it's very inefficient. If she bids for a particular fish, she might eat today, or someone might outbid her and she goes hungry. If she bids for a flow via Parameterized Quanta (see the section on this in the reference doc) then she gets a fair share of what's available. If she bids to sustainably improve the means of production further up the cycle, she can increase and improve what's available. And if she can't be troubled with this she just visits her corner deli and uses the StoneExchange mechanisms to pay cash. -- PeterMerel