While Oxford dictionary defines “economics” as “the branch of knowledge concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth,” a popular textbook on “Economics” defines it as “the study of how societies use scarce resources to produce valuable commodities and distribute them among different people.” What does this mean exactly? Although both of these definitions and their various offsprings assign an all encompassing meaning to Economics, they fail to define the four-corners within which the scope of economics lies. And, that’s precisely why some economists consider economics as an unfinished science.
To help us understand the basic principles of economics, Professor Greg Mankiw, a Harvard professor authored a popular economics textbook called “Principles of Economics,” that lists a set of ten principles defining the scope of economics. First two of those principles are foundational:
1. To get one thing, we usually have to give up something else, and,
2. Cost of something is what you give up to get it.
What if we knock off those fundamental principles of economics, and don’t give up anything to get something of value? Would it still be economics as we know it?
It all started with an experiment in incentivized sharing, (which we defined as Sharonomics). Sharonomics gradually became a community supported Prosperism movement that spread social good helping the impoverished merely by sharing one’s influence. Yes, no cash contribution, merely one’s INFLUENCE.
Serendipity made us realize that if we could reach out to the impoverished and hungry in every corner of the world helping them with real money, food, medicines, clothes and what not, without any of us actually spending any cash, we were not only spreading social good, but we were beating the conventional wisdom:
“You can’t give to anyone without taking from someone.”
That was the moment of our first radical breakthrough, generating funds without any charitable or non-charitable cash contributions from anyone.
Feeding the poor and hungry without any cash contribution!
Was that even possible in any possible permutation of conventional economic theories?
We realized, if we could raise liquid funds to help the impoverished across the globe, we could possibly scale it up to a platform that raises funds for sustainable technology startups. ZeroCash, the fourth generation of influence-based crowdfunding was born.
Here’s how we defined it:
“Decentralized, incentivized and equitable sharing and monetization of influence amongst peers for raising funds for novel projects without anyone actually having to pay anything for it in monetary terms.”
The Proof-Of-Concept
ZeroCash is no more a theoretical concept now. The minimal viable product (MVP) has been under rigorous testing since several months and has been generating decent ROIs. We learnt that even the worst market conditions produced at least a total ROI of >30%, although the best case scenarios returned as high as 90%. And, more importantly ZeroCash returns were without placing at risk the investors’ monetized influence.
Earning ~30% APR by merely delegating your influence and keeping your digital assets secure in your own wallet under your own control is something extraneous to any conventional theory of economics.
Security and Scalability
Having tested the MVP on a very small scale, we studied issues that may hamper the security and scalability of the platform. We didn’t find any show stopper. ZeroCash turned out to be highly scalable and capable of handling crowdfunding volumes that reach millions or billions, and even trillions that United Nations’ Agenda 2030 Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) require. There is an urgent need to fund SDGs’ accumulated trillions in funding gap if they at all have to be achieved by 2030.
The Ideal Money
We realized that since the new currency that decentralized ZeroCash platform generates was directly linked to equities it acquires in viable sustainability startups, it provided long term convertibility and parity so essential for a stable currency, and almost impossible to achieve with the current state-of-the-art.
Deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to:
a) decentralize and autonomously manage the dynamics of blockchain consensus algorithm,
b) influence monetization protocol, and,
c) the subtleties of currency creation and supply,
we discovered the possibility of designing the “Ideal Money” that economists have been striving since the signaling of the modern globalization wave with the fall of the Bretton Woods system and devaluation of dollar in 70s.
Although John Nash, the Nobel laureate, spent decades lecturing on his concept of Ideal Money, nothing came out of it, and Ideal Money still remains a hypothetical notion.
2018 saw a renewed interest in creating stable currencies in the hope of finding the Holy Grail of crypto, but most either failed or are destined to fail.
The currency that ZeroCash platform generates for funding the startups, is a radical departure from Nash’s definition of Ideal Money, and for that matter fundamentally different from all the remaining conventional or evolving concepts in economics of money.
Stay tuned for more disclosures on ZeroCash and Ideal Money.
Reference:
- Samuelson, Paul A., and William D. Nordhaus. 1998. Economics. Boston, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., Chapter 1, pages 3–7.
- Mankiw NG. Principles of Economics, 5th edition. South-Western Cengage Learning; 2011.
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