Abstract

This research paper introduces a novel game theory with an entirely new experimental financial primitive having the potential to fundamentally change the way we receive knowledge, access resources, utilize human capital and coordinate together online.

The goal is to directly transform human input into a form of liquid digital asset that can be traded, leveraged and/or collateralized.

The research below attempts to establish the non-technical basis for developing the foundations for achieving this new Human Standard. This includes a nearly incorruptible governance system built atop an elastic monetary policy, forming a unified incentive stack centered around human input as the core modality for value exchange. One that is betting on a highly interoperable ‘decentralized’ future as the common infrastructure for the next mainstream version of the internet.

The Game Theory’s framework and process, therefore, allows for the deployment of a social consensus layer acting as the main source of truth across any channel plugged into the open web digital economy, from decentralized browsers, dApps, networks, etc.

Printing the fiction

In any transaction between two individuals or a group of people, there is an exchange of value where each side gets something out of the exchange, even if it’s relatively fractional or entirely sentimental.

Value is simply the perception of benefit, contrary to what most assume is material.

This perception can vary in polarized degrees between people and may, or may not, be quantifiable. The only time there is no value exchange is when people are held captive, robbed or denied access to receive value. A critical aspect of value exchange is the ability to evaluate the fairness of any exchange, where each side is content with what they receive relative to what they give.

In the past, barter was the most natural way to exchange value, where both sides trade what they can forfeit — having less value — for things they need — having more value. These transactions and their perceived benefits were always relative to the immediate needs of every individual trade.

In modern society, barter among nations was gradually made illegal and replaced by a legal tender in government-issued currencies, what we call money.

Yet across history, time and time again, from the Shekel to the US dollar, the debasing of currencies contribute to catastrophic impacts on even the largest of civilizations.

Money in all its current forms is essentially a fiction that we’ve collectively agreed upon as a means to quantify the perception of benefits.

In principle, the idea of fiat money should have sufficed for a fairly distributed global economy of shared resources. This came with the promise to help ease the trade of goods and services while facilitating healthy economic growth amongst people everywhere.

But in reality, high degrees of corrupt agents were allowed to establish top-down hierarchies and centralized monopolies over the ages. They would then escape accountability due to the mystification of the fictional narrative behind money and its representative governing tools. This practice created a debt enslaved world economy hell-bent on maintaining ‘the powers that be’ without regard to the original intrinsic purpose of these systems.

With this comes a series of inevitable problems — from hyperinflation affecting the purchasing power of commodities to the disruption of alternative sustainable economic policies — that lead to an illogical financial inequality that is further polarizing in its extremes. Because the only legal way to exchange value was by owning these government-issued currencies — which can be printed endlessly, making them worthless — the entire economic system was broken. Yet the consequences of this particular fiction became very real.

When we think of finance, we usually associate this broad term with money management. But finance is a large set of tools that allow us to establish an unseen dynamic relationship of ‘trust’ with one another by constantly evolving how we universally transact.

Legacy tools that generate, manage, and store value have over time, also become inaccessible to the public. They were systematically mystified and dominated by banking institutions that further monopolized the markets and capitalized on the power of single-minded ideologies. By allowing them to control the inflow and outflow of complete value chains and control over supply and demand chains, a fair and inclusive model became, inevitably, impossible.

Finally, the ways in which these institutions store our data (value belongings) — whether on a paper ledger or in the cloud — follow the same principles of their centralized governance counterparts, with no chance of a holacracy.

Therefore, the real problem with our current global financial and economic-political system pivots around this core fundamental issue:

The privatized control of the flow of information (verifiable value).

Those who control public information control the main narrative, which controls the perception of value, in turn controlling the printers of fiction.

Today’s global financial markets are like ancient literature that’s only deciphered by self-selected “philosophers”, aka economists.

They were designed to enrich those with access to the system’s main control knobs, as it had always been intended. Those who have the most accurate information on a subject matter first get the biggest chunk of the pie, while the rest fight over the crumbs.

This has been the relationship between the general public and the hoarders of knowledge. Around 200 years ago, education was exclusively for the “elite”. Today, if you travel to distant parts of Japan, many in the eldest generation still can not read or write. History is tricky as we easily tend to forget how things came to be, especially in this age of radical disinformation, where the psychosis of those in power coerces them to maintain their version of the fiction through violence and war. Collecting taxes at the end of the barrel.

But there’s also an unavoidable evolution on the other side of the coin, where human beings naturally develop a need for progress towards a more harmonious state of existence. When a once mystified subject matter becomes public knowledge, it ascertains the right for change by mitigation to avoid similar future traps, thus eliminating its associated risks by adoption.

We currently seem to be at that very cusp of a new hybrid digital age: an inescapable fate that beckons to become an entirely new system for human value exchange. It’s a long rite of passage that shouldn’t have taken us this long to figure out. Yet the fight for true freedom can not be easily extinguished, and this will ultimately trickle down the years as a “what the heck moment”. It’s pretty much the same way we now look at the past and criticize all the “isms” that failed and are no longer suitable for our age.

But the light bulb was invented before the electrical grid and the train before railways. The demand for better inventions supersedes their infrastructure, and it’s our responsibility to end up building what is universally right for all.

This demand for an alternative narrative replacing the current financial system is growing strong and will keep expanding the more leverage is gained.

Because all is fiction, we must create the best ones.

An identity crises

There is a clear problem in the current structure of online identities. We’re riddled with the ‘sign up + sign in’ model: the “give me all your personal data” model so that “we can sell ad space for your attention” model.

In a way, this is another version of retail banking. They lure in their crowds with some false sense of “security” attached to a belonging narrative. While the banks take all of your hard-earned money, reinvesting them and making massive returns, they give you back 2% at best. For the ordinary working person, taking out a simple loan can result in a ridiculous amount of paperwork and risks. Additionally, the way in which current institutions and central banks measure and build credit score systems is horrendous, biased, and full of discrimination. They have intentionally dumbed down our ability for understanding the importance of self-custodianship.

These practices introduced a long line of bottlenecks, friction points and extreme inequality in accessing opportunities due to the rigid top-down legacy frameworks that have become almost impossible to improve anymore.

The system is gamified to be won by those who find the best loopholes. Not to protect and serve people.

Take a look at the most prominent tech and pharmaceutical behemoths. Almost all of them operate on corporate debt, taking endless liquidity from financial institutions with the safety net to get bailed out (by governments) when faced with an economic crisis, regardless of how corrupt or rogue they become. This has been the case for a really long time. These mega-corporations figured out ways to fly over regulations and then lobby those regulators against retail from easily accessing the same financial tools that generate them their wealth. In the shadows, some of these corporations monopolized every major industry via family-owned investment vehicles.

This over-financialization of our basic human needs has divided humanity at its core, creating imaginary borders with nations competing over resources to remain in power. Identity has now become a consumer product that can be purchased. Making it a social warfare tactic further dividing the individual person into many fake counterparts. It is easier to assume control of those narratives using the media as one grand virtue signaling and gaslighting machine, especially if there is an ever growing existential crises of individual identity in relation to collective obligation.

With people fighting over every difference, the universal moral compass of humanity is skewed towards a morally gray area of self-inflicted injustices, justified by some sort of mass Stockholm Syndrome.

It’s baffling to believe that we’ve agreed to such things as part of “Oh, it’s just reality”…

The beginning of the end

In comes the case for cryptographic based forms of money, powered by their various decentralized consensus mechanisms, initially created to form a dent in this broken system and pave the way for something different.

Every new generation wants to create a better fiction that suits their version of reality rather than their ancestors.

Whether it was governments throughout the ages or private companies, the core hook has always been rooted in identity; the double-edged sword that either cuts through the crowd to reach societal stature or goes into existential obscurity. The spectrum is wide, but it remains true that every single human being is seeking to create a better life for themselves and their loved ones.

Some achieve this by being selfish and manipulating their way towards financial success at the cost of everyone else. Others find the goodness of will that seeks only to enjoy the natural order of human interaction, which then finds the highest moral ground as a way for personal success and then integrates into communities with this shared mindset of collective justice.

There is a new kid on the block called Web 3.0, with a new type of narrative that takes a spin on the old fiction but makes it a bit more frictionless with the promise to become stateless. This concept has been rediscovering itself in many iterations since the web came to be. It attempts to eliminate the rules of the old guard by breaking down the need for centralized legacy systems. It does so by allowing us to achieve consensus while remaining free from Big Brother’s prying eyes, making it extremely difficult for deep bureaucracy to manipulate and control our data without proper due processes.

One of the main goals of decentralized consensus is to eradicate major false pretenses. Becoming a unique representation of every facet of the world we live in, at the palm of our hand and finally arriving at its ultimate prime: a stateless, unregulated, open source and free layer for human agency.

But far too many people are still currently fighting on your favorite web 2.0 social platforms over the very thing they promote to displace, still using them as the primary channels on which they argue around whose fiction is the most real. The laughable part is that no one is entirely sure what it’s all really about, and that’s okay.

Maybe we’re still at the discovery phase of greatness…

Some of those groups are clearly heading towards a technocratic dystopian metaverse, while some are too ‘grassroot’ that they end up selling infrastructure to ‘normies’. Even the most known founders in the space are arguing over what constitutes a decentralized network, i.e. selling speed in favor of security or selling security in favor of cost opportunity.

Yet the majority of their users care about neither security nor decentralization, nor anything other than scraping the red and green candles valued against the US dollar; the most violent fiction of them all. Like beggars at the temple’s doors, one can not blame the behavior of financially starved beings when given an extensive menu of ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes to choose from.

If people are not exploited by a corrupt society, they would have no reason to choose to do bad things. As the true nature of humanity is inherently good.

The rabbit hole is actually shallow…

This is the current state of our shared reality and a staggering number of people have accepted it as their norm without question. Until it’s not anymore, and we move on to something flashier.

Unfortunately, the lifetime of a single individual human being isn’t capable of witnessing the slow scale of progress climbing up the hill, so we tend to cling to whatever cognitive bias that helps us venture through our limited time on this planet. But a rare few are genuinely looking beyond the lens of limited perception, with the intention to create a better tomorrow.

Hypocritically, is this not the mission statement of every other organization?

Circling back to identity, we can now begin to comprehend why our personal image, our collective status and our reputation have been skewed mostly around power through numbers. It’s become a hard-wired aspect of everyday life. But when it comes to the digital paradigm, we can finally see some light at the end of that spreadsheet. Rightly so, the original narrative of the internet promised us complete freedom. Of thought, of anonymity, of privacy and eventually of true ownership. We ought to be able to freely choose how we would like to interact with the sheer diversity of value systems out there and then gain the same equal opportunity access to this version of the web and its shared ownership economy.

Satoshi’s pseudonym made it possible for us to all become anons again. Even if quintessentially a fringe experiment, the existence of an immutable and credibly neutral layer for the basis of our digital lives concedes in giving us room to think clearly and find solutions for the world’s most complex problems, without having to directly rip off the band-aid in one go.

All made possible by this thing called a decentralized digital wallet: a string of cryptographic symbols to prove your piece of the virtual pie.

There have been many attempts to improve decentralized networks in the past decade — with many successes, failures and trials — including features such as on-chain credit systems, decentralized finance tools and other methods to use inventory systems at the root of our digital footprint.

We are what we own…

But nothing so far has truly scaled to a point with the power to shatter the older illusions. Is it just more time that is needed? Is it due to infrastructure problems, or is it something entirely abstract that we keep on missing?

Choosing the right fiction

If everything is just an ideological narrative subtly conditioning our biases to connect with reality in the way which best fits our current view of personal identity — one that is tied up with the need to belong to the groups that represent our values — we can therefor in relation deduce some or all of the main reasons why the open web has not properly scaled so far:

• The lack of a unified space for neutral communication and coordination

• There is no global human agency organization acting as a support system

• A lack of understanding of how the world/society came to be this way

• The difference between moral relativism and objective absolutism

• How social injustices are the result of ‘ideological subversion’

• How the financial game is designed and who controls the cheat codes

• The demoralization of the populace due to ‘mean world syndrome’

• There are no major movements building the right kind of leverage yet

• The powers-that-be are willing to wage holy war to maintain their fiction

• Founders, builders and enthusiasts alike are missing in collective action

• There is not enough application demand but far too much infrastructure competition that makes it highly complex and further mystified

The future is predetermined by the character of those who shape it.

So how can we balance out theory with practical execution? What are the paths of least resistance for compelling, effective long term change?

Specifically, what is needed to overcome the limitations of cognitive bias without changing others? But instead leveraging the right incentive models to indirectly compel people to finally agree upon a mutually beneficial value exchange system with the least chance for corruptibility.

Most importantly, how do we achieve all of this without relying on race, age, social status, religious belonging or otherwise?

The solution is the problem…

By eliminating the roots of our differences out of the equation as a mode of operations, there should be no reason for people to argue over identity as an essential aspect for value exchange. Instead, they can choose to use their real-world identity to celebrate culture — a relative mythos that helps us understand the complex world we exist in together and derive meaning and purpose for our individual lives in relation to the unfolding world at large.

If we decide which fiction has the most value, then nothing in and of itself has any value. If nothing has any value without us, then we must be of the highest value.

Because individuals are so varied in character and different in their abilities, we can also conclude that true equality can only reside in the access channels that enable people to exchange value fairly based on their input.

This means that instead of further creating hive-minded collectives dependent on group biases, we ought to be able to capitalize on our uniqueness and our honed abilities in terms of productivity, creativity, innovation, etc. These case-specific channels must allow us to form personalized micro-economic environments while still giving us the chance to decide how we would like to participate in the macro-environment.

This is the sort of reasoning required to understand why Human Input is the only true form of non-fictive and genuinely sustainable value.

In the same way an author depicting a fictional character does not become that character but instead endows a sense of their own spirit into it, we as human beings decide what the agreed reality is in every instance. And if we are treated and valued according to our actions, we would never find our differences to be obstacles. Instead, we would transform everything into a healthy competitive advantage that properly challenges us towards sustained progress in a mutually respectful manner.

Those channels that enable humans to exchange value fairly, in turn, have to impartially and fundamentally be:

• Credibly neutral

• Transparent

• Censorship resistant

• Permissionless

• Minimally extractive

• Frictionless yet simple

• Immutable yet stateless

• Universally accessible

They also require the ability to become open source and flexible enough to quickly adapt to the constantly evolving needs of new generations without losing their inherent fundamentals, all while laying out a clear path of leadership via a porous upward mobility consensus mechanism.

The Human Standard

There have been many “standards” over time. But they have all failed so far to address the fundamental nature of human beings. Particularity within the macro environment, those standards do not consider the basic cycles of collective behavioral changes and their effects on our perception of value with money being such a rapidly changing medium for global transactions.

Here’s where it starts to get really confusing: cryptocurrencies are seeking to displace the very thing which they are dependent on in valuation (such as the US dollar or other already debased currencies), and have not yet found any viable means of attributing real world value to them.

Additionally, the typical bonding curve is the most concrete example of an indirect Ponzi. Because of the dismissal of any real-world attribution to the value of almost all currencies utilizing this mechanism, their appreciation in value is dependent on network effect alone. But unlike commodities, where a market prices itself based on real human needs (supply and demand), these bonding curves synthetically appreciate via the premise of entrants believing the upside still exists. These bonding curves allow for an unequal distribution of the supply, going mostly towards their creators, early adopters and/or the mega whales who can easily influence the market to their advantage.

This is also known as information asymmetry.

Yet the cost for late entrants in many cases is highly detrimental. Enforcing an even worse divide in the world’s financial inequality, furthering the narrative of ‘resource scarcity’ as yet another domineering force.

Digital assets are not scarce at all, because literally anyone can fork any decentralized network, and in a matter of seconds one can spin up any number of tokens on any of those networks that support them.

Those “who make it” do so at the expense of many others; a weird transfer of value from late entrants (exit liquidity) who have no idea how things work to those who are technically savvy, those who are early but patient or the lucky few who found some gold panning the virtual riverbeds.

Capitalism is great when you’re rich and horrible when you’re poor.

The entire world is heading towards a very dangerous crossroad, and crypto as a means for transacting value in everyday life is bound for failure if it does not pivot away from the scarcity model valued against debased currencies. Even stable coins so far have not proven to be a long-term sustainable model, as their pegs include worthless backing and non-transparent balance sheets governed by highly centralized entities.

People are clearly not yet ready to overcome the current form of money as they still believe they have power over the fiction. Being divided on almost every front, governments, political leaders, large financial institutions and corporations are taking advantage of this chaos to further assume control of our everyday lives. Attempting to leave us with no other viable option but for them to present us with their unjust broken solutions; CBDCs as an example, which can easily bring about the surveillance state, ending free markets as we have come to know them.

A store of value for humanity

The human standard argues the alternative net positive game theory as being universal and sustainable. As long as we have a healthy planet, the only constant is human reproduction, productivity, creativity and innovation.

As such, the proposed solution is a radically new financial primitive that progressively transforms Human Input into a unit of account which then acts as the main store of value for various digital economies aligned with the fundamentals of decentralization.

The net positive game theory enables a truly open peer-to-peer exchange mechanism via a series of protocols that automatically deduce the over all value of these units by accounting for a unique combination of parameters: measuring both on-chain and off-chain interactions. Ranging from the direct trade of digital goods and services (including their entire production value chains) to reputation, alongside a versatile form of borrow & lend marketplace with other key parameters that are automatically fed into the entire incentive stack via a consensus mechanism coined as “Proof of collaboration”, powered by a computational feed back loop called Compass.

Additionally, an elastic monetary policy is deployed that utilizes a new type of dynamic bonding curve with a buy back and make function that bakes into it a system controlled treasury that accrues value from multiple revenue streams and gradually redirects all its overflows back into the ecosystem instead of emissions or unsustainable rewards. This creates a long term value efficient financial primitive that is not solely dependent in valuation on other currently debased currencies, but instead becomes anti-fragile and adaptive enough to self-perpetuate Human Input into the equation up until we are all ready to give up on the old fiction and come back to reality.

Part Two constitutes a technical white paper that breaks down the existing web3 stack and rebuilds back from the bottom up to include the inner mechanics of this game theory to form The Human Standard.

---
Disclaimer:* All research, opinions and ideas are my own and are not in any form advice or solicitation for participation. This paper is intended as education material only.

Artwork: EthSaintLaurent*