My first and last official business thread. [Metric Reserve]

[wizardwatson]

It seems very cool, it seems very promising. I'm just trying to get more.... concrete.

You write, "In the future you may see little risk in putting $100 into it."

How do I actually put it in, though? I mean, I actually have a hundred dollar bill in my pocket right now. And, let me look.... yep, a five, too. Do I just "consider" the hundred and part of the five as earmarked as my reserve for Metric? I mean, I haven't mailed the money to anyone. It's still in my pocket. Is that a problem, or is that how the system's designed?

Yes, that's exactly what you do. You "consider it earmarked" and you broadcast that fact to the network. I haven't quite figured out how metric will exist legally, but essentially you are contracting with your peers that any money you enter as "reserves" is part of the network.

Now of course if you enter $103.14 as you have, well, that's also your balance. You haven't transferred any either, so you are a zero. You are holding as much in reserves as your balance is. If you spent your balance your reserve doesn't change.

Example: Say you connected to me and thus were on the network and could make payments. Currently you have $103.14 in reserve and the other two people have $5. If you then buy a $100 worth of website consulation services from me, then my network balance would be $105, and yours would be $3.14. But my reserve balance is still $5 and yours is still $103.14. If you then leave the network without transferring those reserves, well then I made a mistake connecting to you as you just defrauded not only me, but anyone I've subsequently made payments to. But the "money", the network balance (rather than reserve balance) will fly around the network. Hence, everyone keeping average. Tomorrow I might pay you $100 for some gold thingies.

You also wrote: "Currently "just_dollars" has three members. wizardwatson (me), poopeater69 (an old friend of mine), and helmuth_hubener. Currently only me and poopeater69 are connected. Therefore, we can pay each other because there is a path of connections between us. If you were connected to me you could pay me or poopeater69."

OK. How could I pay you? I understand the commands, but... after I run the command, it seems that in real life, you do not have any more money than before. And my money is still just as much in my pocket as it was before. In order to *actually* pay you, wouldn't I have to put the money in an envelope, stamp it, and mail it to you?

Just like a bank deposit, a reserve deposit increases your balance. Once connected you can spend that balance with the "pay $X" command on another users account.

The basic 3 primary actions/commands are these

modify add [amount]
modify subtract [amount]
pay [amount]

The first two commands work when on your account and affect reserve and network balance. The last when your on someone else's and it only affects network balance.

So:

"modify add" +reserve (you) +network (you) MAKE A DEPOSIT
"modify subtract" -reserve (you) -network (you) MAKE A WITHDRAWAL
"pay" -network (you) +network (other) MAKE A PAYMENT TO SOMEONE ELSE

One more final important question. You wrote: "Me and poopeater only have $5 in reserve registered. You claim to have $103.14. If you connect, the graph process algo (which runs every 15 minutes) is going to tell you to give me or poopeater69 about $65.43 so that you only retain $37.71 (the average for the network). Depending on how the graph algorithm structures the tree in this iteration it may tell you to give all of it to me (and then next iteration I will give have what you gave me to poopeater) or it may suggest you give $32 to each of us."

Why would I want to do this? What am I paying you guys for? I don't know about you, but when I give $32 to someone, it is generally because I am getting something in return, like an oil change. What is the advantage to me to lose $65.43?

Thanks for your answers! And thanks for doing this! It clearly was a ton of work.

I'm super grateful you are asking these questions. It's the only way I'm going to improve the communication. I've been staring at it from the inside, so things that are obvious to me, might be completely obscure and I'm not realizing. This last question is another example.

First point is you're confusing reserve transfers with balance transfers. When I said "give" I should have clarified I meant "transfer reserves". There is another set of commands we haven't gotten into yet. When you transfer reserves it does not affect your network balance. You still have $103.14, you are only transferring $65.43 in "reserves".

I showed above that "modify" is how you modify your own reserve balance. But there are commands that deal with transferring reserves with your connections. One kind is for user defined transfers, and the other is for system suggested transfers.

They are:

(commands for user defined transfers):

transfer request [amount]
transfer cancel [amount]
transfer deny [amount]
transfer authorize [amount]

(commands for system defined transfers):

suggested request [amount]
suggested cancel [amount]
suggested deny [amount]
suggested authorize [amount]

So, when you transfer that $65.43 in the scenario I described it would be because the system suggested you do that. And to initiate that process you would do a "suggested request $65.43" on my account (or whoever it tells you) and I would do a "suggested authorize $65.43" AFTER I RECEIVE THE MONEY on your account.

This last part is also part of your question. Actual transfer of currencies is outside the scope of metric reserve. You can do it however you want. Paypal, mail it, barter, lie, or whatever. This is a process that takes place between you and who you are connected to. But it isn't a payment. It's just reserves. We are all holding reserves for the integrity of the system.

Now that I've clarified that you aren't "paying" this money, but in fact can still spend all your balance, there's still the point of "but I don't know you".

This is an important point, and a very blunt fact about how metric reserve operates. Just like reserves aren't meant to move at the speed of light, your connections are also meant to remain stable. Think of your facebook friends or twitter followers. For most people they are roughly the same this month as they were last month. Metric will be the same way, which does create a "setup problem" in the early stages. In the early stages, in order for the connections to be "ubiquitous" and everyone be on the same network, some connections with people we don't know well will have to be forced.

But the graphing process is very explicit and it's designed to not only tell you how the sets of users are split between "trees" but it can be geographically "designed" essentially for more optimal connectedness.

In its general use in the future I don't see people randomly connecting with people on the internet. That would be dangerous and it should be made clear, anyone doing that is likely trying to siphon reserves. But in the early stages, I envision the connection network being built with specific intent with a community of users who understand what it's aiming at (*cough* *rpf* *cough*). Currently that community consists of 1 guy in a political forum.

The good news is there's no need to use real money to build the network and test it. We can connect and create a user base before actually using it. And I've ran algorithms to determine how soon a network becomes "ubiquitous" and its not very large. Once a social graph gets around 10,000 people even RANDOMLY connecting with an average connection count of only around 6 people, most of those networks solve to be a single tree. Furthermore, it isn't even necessary as we slowly build the geographical connection network, as the metric graph process tells you every 15 minutes if anyone's off the main tree. Right now it's telling me that 2 of the 3 users in the "just_dollars" network are on one tree, and there's one orphan (you). So it's already telling me who needs to be connected. Do you see?

So envision this. We all simply claim we have $5 and start connecting. Grow the tree first, figure out who are connections are going to be, get to know and trust them as far as reserve transferring, get the kinks worked out in the application before we ever go live.

Thanks again for taking time to write up questions. I know as a prolific poster myself, how much time we spend writing these things.