How do you model land, forests, water sources (like wells) in hREA?

Oh no, please! I love reading your replies… It’s just a discussion, after all. Don’t take things, especially my utter-fast (and might I say, a bit nasty) remarks (of yesterday) personally… [You see, when one is too delved into some subject, one (I mean, “I”) can often forget to be humble…]

I think quite the opposite; for if we don’t address these issues beforehand and rather keep going the course we’re (I mean, they’re) going, only to realize that too much time and effort has been wasted, that would be worse than wasting a few days addressing these issues before diving into the years-long actual development (of these REA modules or whatever)…


Anyway, getting back to reading Coarse’s Penguin…

https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=4061&context=fss_papers

First impressions haven’t been so good…

Anyway, let me see what else there is on this subject… Till then, bye.


cc @TiberiusB:

While researching more about commons-based peer-production, :

This suggests that peer
production will thrive where projects have three characteristics. First, they
must be modular. That is, they must be divisible into components, or
modules, each of which can be produced independently of the production of
the others. This enables production to be incremental and asynchronous,
pooling the efforts of different people, with different capabilities, who are
available at different times. Second, the granularity of the modules is
important and refers to the sizes of the project’s modules. For a peer
production process to pool successfully a relatively large number of
contributors, the modules should be predominately fine-grained, or small in
size. This allows the project to capture contributions from large numbers of
contributors whose motivation levels will not sustain anything more than
small efforts toward the project. Novels, for example, at least those that
look like our current conception of a novel, are likely to prove resistant to
peer production.18 In addition, a project will likely be more efficient if it can
accommodate variously sized contributions. Heterogeneous granularity will
allow people with different levels of motivation to collaborate by making
smaller- or larger-grained contributions, consistent with their levels of
motivation. Third, and finally, a successful peer production enterprise must
have low-cost integration, which includes both quality control over the
modules and a mechanism for integrating the contributions into the finished
product. If a project cannot defend itself from incompetent or malicious
contributions and integrate the competent modules into a finished product at
sufficiently low cost, integration will either fail or the integrator will be
forced to appropriate the residual value of the common project-usually
leading to a dissipation of the motivations to contribute ex ante.

Why then does everyone think it can be applied to real-estate? [Forests, wells, whatever you call them…]


Oh, you have no idea how deep I’ve delved into this stuff, how much pain and suffering I’ve put myself through searching for answers and peeling off layer after layer and still when you think you must be close another entire world opens up and you feel like you’re back at the beginning again lol.

I suspect many others who are involved in this group of projects have delved very deep too, which is why I’m currently “giving it a go” - as some wise person said to me the other day, they realise these times are fleeting, things change, make the most of it as nothing ever lasts.

OK, well that is indeed where our views do digress as what I saw was a few straw man fallacies placed against seemingly every aspect of development when after a simple process of searching to check the background of the person shows they have a lot of experience in the areas of expertise they are discussing/proposing, along with a more moderate view of the fact that any software can be used for any purpose and perhaps that’s OK because it’s better to have it available for those who want to use it for good.

That is of course only the perspective I have, and perhaps the only reason I am voicing it is because I believe as you say there is value in having these conversations, I like the fact there’s others ready and willing to question authority of all kinds, I did however feel it could’ve been more constructive and I’m looking for ways to do that myself as I do feel in other situations people may not be so accommodating and fear losing valuable potential collaborations if at every point people are questioned as to whether they are creating projects just so the people in control can have more control, or something like that. I dunno, maybe I’m just worrying too much and avoiding sorting some other stuff out that I should be focusing on lol!

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I never said that; and would never say that… Their (i.e., the Sensorica people, REA guys, the Holo team, etc) genuine desire to change the world for the better, is truly unquestionable!

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Because it already is. Why do you think it can’t? [edit: I see you are altering answers so shall wait a while…;)]

All you’re doing is taking “something” and modularising its ownership and use.

Seems like, the whole base upon which your (Sensorica’s, REA-style forest-management, etc) foundation is built upon is fragile! You are all being blind to what is in fact the core problem that needs tackling: that being, externalities! [Or rather, positive externalities in our case; for instance, the benefits that a man enjoys from the passing-by of a beautiful woman…; haha! My favourite example!]

That’s what even Coase is talking about; that Friedman (the Sr.) talked about in his own original works.

Basically, it doesn’t make any economical sense to establish a market (or rather, a shop) whereby the cost of maintaining it (i.e., the market) exceed the benefits the establisher may draw from doing so… That’s the reason why private-restrooms are free; it just doesn’t make any economical sense to do otherwise.

But to develop an entirely new theory all from observing the (beautiful, enlightening, sublime, mesmerizing, divine) examples of free private-restrooms and Wikipedia is what I regard as silly…

One can successfully develop (and people have developed) a theory that explains that the earth is flat; indeed, at near light speed, thanks to length-contraction, you’d see Earth as flat. But the reason we don’t adopt these theories is that they’re so narrow; the best case would be “one theory that explains everything”. [The economical counterpart of which, mainly the Mises’ axiom, and the more mainstream Utility theory, Coase entirely dismisses…; if the whole structure (of your thesis, and of REA-style commons-management) is based on his ideas then it’s bound to collapse!]


Basically, my take (would be publishing some concrete, consistent, praxeological derivation someday…; basically, my idea around these subjects, or what I call Hourglass Economics, are that pay-what-you-want business model and tokenized real-world assets (such as art, musical pieces, and even scientific theories) can internalize those positive-externalities that exist in some industries) on digital commons is two folds:

  • They’re worth exactly what they’re worth today; i.e., that Wikipedia really is a cheap platform; note that it’s “cheap” solely because there’re such a huge supply of people willing to publish and edit and maintain Wikipedia posts, and so many alternatives if Wikipedia even turns-off its servers (i.e., competition), that the price of using it is essentially zero. [Should have been obvious as hell!]
  • We’ve failed to privatize these industries…

And there seems no reason why that shouldn’t be able to internalize (at least some of the) usually-lost benefits of doing open-source development…

For instance, imagine if Linux were a open (but private) organization; anyone can submit pull-requests, but it’s up to the board to decide which ones to pull/merge and which to not; those who make it earn some of the shares of the company; the company (Linux, in this case) can issue any number of pay-what-you-want tokens (or charity tokens), and any esteemed company/individual/organization that somewhere makes use of Linux (as even Microsoft does) would want to buy some of those charity tokens, the revenue generated through which would go to the shareholders, i.e., the many (thousands of) developers whole little contributions made it all possible…

Same with Wikipedia…

Thanks to Holochain, a Holopedia may want to leverage this approach; and in doing so it will be all too automated and decentralized (thanks to the Holochain-way)… It might wanna leverage some hREA modules in doing so (for example, wiki-contributors become agents, and article views become events that cause some resources (earned via donations or whatever) to be transferred to the author who wrote it, and so on)… [cc @pospi]


Basically, these are all just business models that can capture some of the lost profits due to positive-externality that exists in these industries (especially open-source development). I don’t see any reason for a full-blown “commons-based-peer-production” even here (in the Open Source industry).


What’s your (cc. @TiberiusB) take on tokenized NFTs for Open-Source as a better way of contributing in these industries (so called commons), and as a business-model for privatizing it?

@The-A-Man I am struggling to see your argument here, I am hoping you can help so yet again I am delving deeper…

With respect, all your arguments and objections have been based on your own experiences and the readings of things that happened in the past. The future has not been created yet, and by creating theories and testing them out we evolve. A business does not start with a product but a customer. When developing new ways of working and collaborating I see it as perfectly valid to theorise on a few potential pain points that could prove valuable in order to develop these and gain customers, which then starts to build a new system. The only other option is to live in the past, and that’s not why we’re here - at least it’s not why I am anyway lol!

As for your favourite example, I don’t find that necessary either, it’s that kind of stuff that also deters people from joining in.

I’ve found a lot more abundance by focusing on the good than the bad, I do think you have good observations and value and obviously have done a lot of thinking and research and you have a lot of knowledge, I’m not sure you’re leveraging it as well as you could be with your current perspective, but I’m also fine with the fact that I could be wrong and you should totally continue to totally trash other peoples efforts.

Basically, if I make a nice time-lapse video of Fungi growing from the soil, anyone can copy-paste it and share it whichever way they want; [and, as a libertarian, I give no damn to copyrights, licenses, and trademarks; so they’re out of the question]; thanks to the-pirate-bay, they can watch it even if I did not originally intended to have them watch it… All this is due to the fact that digital files are easily reproducible and transferable… Same exists with open-source as well; I can fork your public repo at no cost! So one can say that positive-externalities exist in the industry of software; what’s the confusing part there?

They don’t exist with, let’s say, water-bottles. They are rivalrous resources, which implies that they also be excludable ones (mostly); that means, I can prevent you from drinking from that water-bottle unless you pay me 10 bucks… I can’t do that with software… Simple enough!

Yet another straw man. I too can easily pick examples of things that seem as if they will be the outcomes.

From what I can see throughout my 18 years in commons-based peer production and what projects like this are doing is creating frameworks which enable CBPP to work in a number of different situations, so taking a forest and the bits of that where people are interested in contributing and consuming value and building systems that can accommodate a wide range of those based on the context of the forest in question.

Not just one fun guy with a time lapse video :wink:

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But you see, what they (the Benkler, Coase, and their techno-descendants) are saying (as I’ve read from by brief research on the subject) is that, for some reason (all of which I find quite silly), such a Commons-Based Peer-Production approach should not only be a last-resort for industries exhibiting positive-externalities, but rather a superior one, superior even than a privatized market approach; thanks to the way it incentivizes contributors (through social, not just monetary benefits) and the clever ways in which it reduces management-costs (the ones I addressed in the toilet case). I find that take absolutely wrong; I don’t know if they (people on this thread) share the same opinion; I guess they do, which is why they’d advocate for using this approach for other domains (such as forests) for which exists better ones (mainly, privatization)…

And to the privatization critiques, trust me or not, Windows gave me more utility than Linux ever did; and to billions of people around the globe. In fact, Windows contributed more to the society at large than Linux ever did. That said, their approach (i.e., keeping it close-sourced) to do so (i.e., privatize the software industry) was a very dumb and naïve one; there’s no doubt that there’s no hope for close-source in the future. However, the core idea, i.e., privatization (or, internalization of +ve externalities) is still worth pursuing. Those few open-source Gods (Torvalds, etc) have done a great disservice to the society in promoting selfless contribution and negligence to profits; that’s the reason why many many potential people (like @stephenpurkiss) failed to contribute as much as they would have had the industry been properly privatized and they been rightly rewarded.

What’s “wrong” about being able to leverage the commons in order to leverage your value as you wish. You don’t have to contribute, you don’t have to leverage the commons.

My experience is I have, I’ve made lots of money out of doing it, chosen precisely what I want to be involved in and what I don’t want, I haven’t had to answer to anyone but myself, I’ve traveled the world, met thousands of amazing people, learned a hell of a lot about myself, gone through life transformations, gained a lot of respect for many people from many cultures, and there’s even a little bit of my code running on 1 in every 50 content managed websites in the world, and I’ve had random people come up to me and thank me for being me. And I have done relatively little in the world compared to many who I see contribute day and night.

Some things in life you can’t know before you do them. It was not in the big scheme of things that long ago when timezones were developed as a result of the growth of trains because before that it was sun time and ships were ok with that but trains were a bit of a nightmare to co-ordinated so they brought in train time and for many years they had two clocks next to each other and even people like wordsworth said “it’s as if the sun doesn’t exist any more” yet here we are now, couldn’t imagine life without time zones.

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The commons-approach is gonna be less efficient than a, let’s say, pay-what-you-want or tokenized NFT approach… It’s bound to misallocate resources (that being developers), and result in a great many inefficiencies, especially in unchartered territories.


Like, for open-source, it’s understandable. They would be underproducing, and would for the most part be overtaken (in terms of market-share) by private solutions that have figured out better ways to profit off of their works (like a Holo-Wikepedia that issues charity-tokens)… But for forests, the implications are unimaginable! They’d end up destroying potential value, and most importantly, never realizing that they ever did so in the process (see the calculation problem); I mean, I’m sure nobody here regrets not having flying-cars, right…; we could have had them, if it weren’t for privatized GitHub; haha!

Bitcoins are private-property; the network as a whole may be nondominium; but then so is the free-market, in that noone owns it; and so is verbal-language, in that noone developed it officially (it evolved peer-to-peer)… That’s just cooperation, that’s all. Cooperation isn’t either private or public, it’s simply mutual (and optionally, non-coerced).

Oh, I think you misunderstood me… I meant that “complexity” is not one of the big reasons to dismiss a commons-based peer-production system… Allocation is the major one; how would you make sure such a society does not end up producing golden toilets and wooden jewellery?

Or, in our case, how would you make sure people are using the forest in the most optimal way? [Without a market, which does so through private ownership of the said capital and thereby generating prices; it’s the only solution that at least tends towards optimal efficiency in resource allocation]

Commons-based Peer Production doesn’t even address it, and doesn’t have to, knowing that it initially developed from an industry where the resource (that being freelancing contributors) are somewhat abundant; but the forest and the resources contained in it are not abundant!

I guess what you call peer-production, I call social-platforms; what you call commons-based, I call externalities-suffering; and what you call incentives, I call tokenized-charity-style business models.

One can argue that both are the same things, and I guess that’d be right.

But me using the word “+ve externality suffering” means that I’d never advocate such a business-model (or what you call peer-production) in a domain that doesn’t suffer such externalities. And land clearly doesn’t.

Oh wow, now you’re really showing your naivety! First, it’s GNU/Linux :wink: We wouldn’t be having this conversation now if it weren’t for GNU/Linux. Without knowing what the world would look like without Windows, I can happily say it contributed a lot - of insecure systems, dodgy business practices and ethics, and held technology and human advancement back. Even they have had to admit that Open Source is a better way of developing technology.

What utter trash. I have experienced so much because I’ve had the freedom to choose what I want to do and how much I want to be rewarded for doing that. Take today for example, I have a long list of stuff I was going to be doing however I’ve spent the day communicating with someone who seems to think they know it all, they know what is best for me, and for everyone else too.

I’ll let you into a little secret… you know sh*t my friend, and it shows.

Was simplifying things down only for you; but to no use, apparently.


And I was talking about the common man; I mean, it takes money to promote personal-computing at the scale Microsoft did, back in the days… But you wouldn’t admit it; you’re under the influence of the documentary “Who is Bill Gates” that you mentioned that day, and believe a conspiracy theory that he has some “secret agendas”! What nonsense!


Sure! Moreover, Windows containers were a flop; your GNU/Linux is immortal; and would go down the history as “the greatest free-lunch-ever”! Okay? Rest in peace!


If that were the case, I wouldn’t be here, asking questions… In fact, @TiberiusB’s links and hints that he threw had only broadened my knowledge, if anything. And I’m hoping I can clear some more doubts regarding its applicability in the domains of real-estate. Nothing’s wrong with that? Moreover, if I know nothing, why even worry that my criticism (if any) would deter anyone from exploring these paths? And if my questions really are that dumb, then you can all choose to ignore them, and I wouldn’t bother you all ever again! I’ll be fine with that too…


My argument was that: take another example: you aren’t an artist painting some artwork because, quite frankly speaking, there’s no money in that industry! You’d be broke, you’d suffer poverty and much more if you were to go down that road (in the average case). But if that weren’t the case, if we (the society) had some way to reward artists more than it does now then there would be an upsurge in art-creation and we’d experience another renaissance. That’s the art of privatization & capitalization! Because open-source rewarded just moral, personal, and social gains for contributions, it didn’t go as far as it could have gone had they figured out a more economical way of privatizing it.

The very possibility of pulling resources out of the public and the private regime opens the door for large scale commons-based peer production. In my opinion, this is desirable because it leads to a better allocation of resources in society, more sharing, lower redundancy and fewer externalities.

What would an NRP (REA) algorithm even try to maximize? Universal happiness? “Stakeholder” satisfaction?

And I’m guessing you use the term “stakeholders” in a different sense than the corporate “stakeholders/shareholders”, in that the stakeholders includes everyone, right? And stakes are not transferrable for money, right?

And what does a forest even “produce”? Timber? Rubber? Wildlife-documentaries? It could be anything. And, assuming the majority of stakeholders decide democratically what it is that they wish to maximize (or whatever its REA equivalent of “maximizing-profits” is), how’d they know that they’re maximizing the right things? The way I see it, commons-based peer-production systems are closed systems (in that they don’t depend on outside charity, etc), and are thus self-sustaining? Then that just means you’ve done away with prices, without which can arise no rational decisions, hence no rational allocation!


Found some (partially satisfying) answers from your Quora post; will post it in case anyone is looking for them;

The “value accounting system” captures different types of contributions from contributors to a project ($, material, time, social capital, etc…) and amalgamates them into a dynamic pie share of (fluid) equity, using the “value equation”, which is a social contract that defines the rules of value accounting (how contribution are evaluated and mixed together). This equity is called fluid, because everyone’s share is diluted as soon as someone else adds more value to the project. The equity distribution for a project stabilizes when the project reaches maturity, i.e. when development (design, R&D…) has stopped, when a product has emerged and it is now exchanged on the market.
In the “value network” model equity is not only split between co-founders, but among all participants to the project. There is no clear formal status of founder, which is to recognize the fact that later contributions are as important as the initial idea, and that an idea or an initial initiative can’t go too far without the makers and shakers that will come later.
In the “value network” model, the “value accounting system” is strongly coupled to a “role system”. The “role system” is emergent. The topology of roles within the organization shows different types of activities, how important they are, who is doing what… The role played in a project (technical - R&D, or non technical - writing, etc…) is a modulator in the “value equation”, and therefore affects equity.
In the “value network” model, the “value accounting system” is strongly coupled to a “reputation system”. Reputation has many dimensions. Some of these dimensions can directly impact the ability of contributors to extract value from the system, i.e. act as modulators in the “value equation”, which has a direct impact on equity. Thus reputation acts as a modulator of behavior by affecting equity.
Equity is calculated from contributions, taking into consideration all the modulators, by a “value equation”. The “value equation” is a in fact social contract, and is designed to match the philosophy of the group that implements it.There is no magical solution, only some general guidelines to follow. The “value equation”, which is part of a “value accounting system” must be carefully designed and implemented in context.

Figuring out the “value-equation” (as in your terminology) for something like a forest or land is not only hard, it’s impossible; especially a prior. Everyone has subjective opinions, most of which they do not even know until they are presented with the choice; or as Ford would say:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses .

Free-markets, unlike democratically setting the “value-equation”, lets everyone make their own subjective preferences, and letting them express them through prices and voluntary trade, thereby making use of insurmountable knowledge, and all that in a decentralized “peer-to-peer” way, hence “maximizing utility for everyone” without ever having to explicitly set the value-equation to be such.


And of course,

A forest is not Wikipedia; PERIOD!