Can crypto currency learn from social animals?
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We all know the incentives are wrong, you stand to gain the most from crypto currency, and pretty much life in general, if you are a heartless selfish bastard. The curse of pump and dumps is rife where the initial boom and promises get cashed out leaving behind bag holders who bought into the dream. I couldn’t live with shattering people’s dreams, but then I’m not a bastard.
So I was wondering last night, has evolution found an answer (it’s had enough time) to the puzzle of cooperation in large numbers? Well yes, it has. Even the simplest things like Bacteria have quorum sensing mechanism to assist in mutually beneficial cooperation, quorum sensing is a token like voting system allowing bacteria to agree to carry out an activity, like glowing or releasing their poison payload when their concentration is high.
What about bees? Bees, when you think about it, are like nectar miners, the pop off and complete a work based task and get rewarded in nectar by the daisy chain. So why cooperate? Why not just scoff all the nectar themselves? Well, clearly it has been and advantage to survival.
A single bee can only eat so much at once, so coordination leads to efficiency, imagine the daisy rewards were variable, and you happen to stumble upon a large number of daisy ‘blocks’ with high rewards in a high concentration, if you coordinate with friends in a bee pool, do your waggle dance and tell them the location of the good stuff you can all work together in mining the concentrated resource and pool resources for the future development of the entire hive. Give some stored nectar in the form of honey to the hive development for the future and pass on knowledge.
What we need is a way to pool together, learn from each other, so the hive benefits, the future of our individual survival is dependant on the very hive that feeds us.
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I guess a small part of this is what you and lizhi were talking about Proof of Service.
One thing that helps the stability of the network is how many nodes are online.
I run a full node on a Raspberry Pi to help secure the network.
I do not get any direct benefit from this, other than it helps to secure the blockchain, which helps to protect my investment.
Wouldn’t it be grand if we could find a way by rewarding back for things like this within Feathercoin.
Granted it only costs me 2 cents a day in electricity to run this node, so I wouldn’t expect much, but it would be nice if the only way to earn FTC wasn’t POW, or proof of stake if we ever went down that path.
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It would be great to see interest developed for the people who are contributing, a sort of Proof of Good.
Perhaps for now we could develop a system whereby we have a single tipping address which divides money in and spits it out to multiple addresses. From that, the world is your lobster, you could include multipliers based upon the number of weeks an address has been on the ‘nice list’ so you end up with lion shares for the heroes of the community and offers incentive to users to do more. Eventually you’d look at decentralising the system, paid in interest, and have a voting system for inclusion, but I’m not sure how you would prevent abuse.
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Ants are cool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_self-organization_in_ants
Ant colonies are self-organized systems: complex collective behaviors arise as the product of interactions between many individuals each following a simple set of rules, not via top-down instruction from elite individuals or the queen. No one worker has universal knowledge of the colony’s needs; individual workers react only to their local environment. Because of this, ants are a popular source of inspiration for design in software engineering, robotics, industrial design, and other fields involving many simple parts working together to perform complex tasks
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It’s pie in the sky, but if you could automate the whole system, so if something is being neglected the incentive increases, until enough people are doing the task haha.
The most popular current model of self-organization in ants and other social insects is the response threshold model. A threshold for a particular task is the amount of stimulus, such as a pheromone or interactions with other workers, necessary to cause the worker to perform the associated task. A higher threshold requires a stronger stimulus, and thus translates into less preference for performing a specific task. Different workers have different thresholds for different tasks, allowing certain workers to function as specialists that preferentially perform one or more tasks.
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I like the idea of rewarding full nodes being online and I also like the idea of rewarding good work that is done by people in our community. Development, coordination, innovation, communication with the outside world etc etc.
