The Decentralized Internet as the First Step Toward Post-Money Economy

I have been following the decentralization of the internet since about 2016. After the initial excitement, I started to get disappointed once I noticed some signs of a short-sighted direction. I was particularly fed up with the general belief that our main and only problem in the world is centralized currencies and solving this will change everything.

Fast forward 6 years later we have 10,000+ currencies and counting. Nothing really changed for the better more than 10 years after the first inception of blockchain and crypto. That is a period long enough over which many other technologies made a life-changing breakthrough. Think of clouds, smartphones, and digital payments in general. It was becoming clear that crypto is more like gambling and stock markets rather than a game-changer. Clearly, this was a bubble.

It Started With Questioning Reality

So I started trusting my guts and expanding my critical thinking. We are nearing such levels of automation that allow us to spend a large amount of time experimenting and re-thinking common concepts. This hints that the whole construct of money is wearing off as a store of value and a tool for exchange but mostly as a driving force in life. And in fact, money nowadays is very different from what it used to be just 5 years ago. Money lost credibility both in fiat and crypto form. The new oil now is data, not money.

Discovering The Real Power Of The Decentralized Internet

I generally read and watch a lot of sci-fi stuff. A lot of them speculate on post-money society.

Just recently I found out about IPFS and its concept of decentralized storage. What got me interested though was that it allows for decentralized apps to be hosted as well. It was the fairest model I have seen to date borrowed from torrents. Anyone who uses your app agrees to host it for a certain period. If the user likes it so much that wants to support you there is an option to pin it to the local node and host it forever. I was fascinated. I immediately connected the dots with my recently acquired knowledge on how to build WebAssembly apps in Go and run them directly in the browser. This is a miracle in itself breaking away from a 10-year monopoly of Javascript on the front-end but let’s leave it for another time. The experiment was on. I tweaked my own copy of go-ipfs and got it to work fairly quickly.

Fast forward 3 months later and we have a working post-money economy simulator running on IPFS. We are now ready to test real-time global demand and supply without a monetary system in place!

Leaving prejudices aside and questioning everything

Cyber Stasis is an economic simulator in the form of a free fictional game. The interface is a futuristic dashboard that coordinates global real-time demand and supply. The model is based on gift economy and tests the hypothesis of having a market system without any type of exchange be it barters or money. The market system provides a feedback loop between production and consumption and is oriented toward efficiency of distribution. Everything that we measure with money can be measured by a ratio between supply and demand. There is no private property and a concept of wealth. The goal of the system is to make sure that all needs are met to the best extent possible. There is a personal reputation index that measures your contributions to society but it does not give any privileges. The goal of the game is to become the most useful member of society.

Try the post-money economy simulator here:

https://github.com/stateless-minds/cyber-stasis