Percent-Based Money                                                                   

We symbolize Percs as '%'. Every unique user gets %100 upon account creation. As unique accounts are created, so too are Percs minted (100 units each). As accounts are deleted, so too are Percs sunk (100 units each). This means there will always be, and only be, 100 whole-units of Perc per person in the system, so every person is always worth exactly 100 percent on average. Because of this proportionate expansion and contraction, there is no currency-side inflation or deflation felt by the users of this currency.

We sink the currency by use of a central pool that doubles as a government fund made liquid by means of a voluntary tax (more on this later). Creating and destroying the currency in direct proportion to the actual number of people using it means the currency never loses its value as a monetary standard; purchase power and economic utility never inflates or deflates, making demand-side relatively static forever. Having proportionate, dynamically-scaling currency also means almost every other economic instrument becomes far more reliable and market valves become a lot simpler to maintain. This has all been thoroughly tested.

We strongly advise against allowing negative user balances in a system like this. We have tested negative balances and the most effective way to handle them seems to be with spending lock-outs where a user cannot spend any % until their balance becomes positive again, but it is orders of magnitude simpler to just never allow negative balances in the first place. This is crucial because if a user leaves the system with a negative balance, then the over-spent amount must be sunk in addition to the %100 that is normally sunk. For example, if a user dies with -%5, then %105 would have to be sunk to balance the average across the system. We completely stopped the possibility of negative balances from ever occuring by disallowing a user from spending more than half their balance in a 24-hour period. They can still go broke this way, but never negative.

Because everyone gets 100 whole units of this currency to start, and humans with good diets live around 100 years, this makes 1 unit of Perc approximate to 1 year of life. The saying that 'time is money' is literal for this experimental valuation system and this lets us treat Percs like units of time as well as a currency with %0.0001 equating to ~1 hour of time (or 52 minutes to be exact), and %0.00001 equating to 5.2 minutes. Percent is technically infinitely divisible, but for the sake of usability, we limited it to five digits of divisibility. So if a good or service is not worth %0.00001, the smallest divisible unit, that makes the good or service literally not worth five minutes of your time. There are lots of things that could be said about what follows from the collapsation between money and time, with obvious pop culture references like the movie In Time, but without saying anything too memetic, paying people with time also means that if you have over %200, then you own an entire second lifetime of wealth in this system.

The 1-Perc-to-1-year estimate is enforced further by initially splitting up an account's Percs between their wallet balance and their personal pool, where the wallet balance starts with %1.00000 and is like cash they can spend at any time, and their personal pool starts with the remaining %99.00000 and is like a bank account they must withdraw from before they can spend the cash. %1 is automatically sent, tax-free and fee-less, from their personal account to their wallet every year on the anniversary of their account creation, which we call citizenship, and since %1 is effectively worth one year of value/life, this functions as a UBI and obviates the need for almost any other kind of welfare program. If a citizen wants to withdraw more money from their pool than the alloted %1, they can withdraw however much they want, but the amount they withdraw is also the percentage that amount is taxed at. For example, if you want to withdraw %50, you also have to pay 50% tax on that %50, which is %25 that gets sent to the government account (pay attention to the positions of the percent-signs here). Since you are under no obligation to withdraw additional Percs from your pool, and this is the only place taxation is implemented, this makes taxation entirely voluntary in this system. If you want the full %100 without paying any taxes, you can wait the full 99 years. Spreading out the availibility of Percs over time keeps 1 Perc roughly equal to one year of life instead of 100 Percs availible instantly and the price of a loaf of bread hiking up to match it. We believe this is an optimal way to automate an economic foundation.

To mitigate abuse of the voluntary tax mechanic, you only get one pool withdrawal option per year, but the options stack if you don't use them. And while we have found this singular voluntary tax is enough to fund most projected government costs and programs, if it is still not enough then a government that adopts the Perc system could implement an additional voluntary tax in the following way: anyone who uses their withdrawal option will also have all of their transactions taxed at 10% for the entire first year following their withdrawal, 9% for the second year, 8% for the third, and so on until a decade has passed and their transactions finally return to zero tax. Again, this makes taxation fully opt-in while also highly incentivizing people to volunteer the tax since they gain access to far more money/influence/power by doing so.

My friend Cozmic suggested a tax-exemption mechanic, whereby designating some amount of Percs in your personal pool to be directly sent to the government account, you are also exempt from paying any tax up to the designated amount. We liked this idea so much we have added it to the system currently being tested.

For anyone screeching about government and control and potential abuse or corruption, I share your concerns, which is why this system is designed to be entirely automated without any human hands required to run it — if there are no humans involved then there are no humans to corrupt. Via the documentation on this webpage you are currently reading, and additional resources on our Discord server, the Perc system is also fully open-source. Even though it was designed with automation in mind, it is important to also note that this Perc system is still simple enough to be entirely managed by hand on paper, allowing anyone even mildly competant in math to easily verify the integrity of the system themselves. Here are three years of recorded transactions for the entire list of users, which I have manually tracked by hand for our Discord server. You can see notes for several different tests we've conducted as well as lots of other info, but the important bit for manually verifying the integrity of the system yourself is that every transaction round results in a perfect %100.00000 average amount. The way the amounts are displayed and the places the amounts are split between (like the personal pools) have changed over time as we conducted more tests, but the entire history of the system is there regardless.

The currency symbol for Percs is %, and thinking of your money as a percentage of a whole, a perfect relative tally of how you score compared to the average, gives you direct insight into how well you have managed yourself, your time, and your relations to others in the world. Since you are given a perfectly average sum of cash upon entrance into this system, it is like starting in the perfect middle of middle-class. Whether or not you increase or decrease your economic status from that middle position is then majoritarily due to individual merit; your successes or failures are yours alone. We expect traditional economic distributions to emerge in the Perc system, but the distributions will be scaled proportionately rather than disproportionately like we see everywhere else.

This is not a cryptocurrency, nor does it require the insane overhead of a cryptocurrency. The unfair initial distributions of cryptocurrencies, centralized early-adopter value curves, and inherent deflationary properties (in Proof-of-Work) or inflationary properties (in Proof-of-Stake) have horrific economic consequences, so we aren't trying to emulate that. Cryptographically securing Percs is substantially less computationally intensive than any PoW system, less even than a PoS system, so we are leapfroging those technologies entirely. Smart contracts are still possible with the Perc system but the distributed consensus mechanic required for this would function very differently than normal and we have not tested this yet.

The most serious potential problem I have seen with this kind of monetary system is what occurs when it is really successful — if %1 is truly enough as a UBI to sustain someone for an entire year, then no one would have to work for 100 years, until they ran out of money. The problem is not that no one has to work, the problem is that after 100 years the money runs out and then the first wave of individuals experience total financial collapse. If ancient Greeks were around today they would see that we have machines that can do the work of ten thousand men at a time and then they would wonder why we aren't all eating grapes and having orgies all day. Work isn't the problem, the Longevity escape velocity is, and even if it wasn't, the system would need to work for longer than 100 years at a time. The overly simple solution here is that if you want more money, you can go work for it, but I suspect that's a sub-optimal solution for the kinds of societies we'll have in the future. I leave it to others to worry about this.

Relativistic Units of Time                                                            

Percent-based systems are good for any relativistic framing, and this applies to time since time is relativistic. We do not use measurements of time that are relativistic in regular practice and this is problematic because it means the systems of time we do use are only applicable to one place — Earth. They don't work anywhere else, and further they doesn't maintain mathematical base consistency. Our current system goes from base 60 for seconds and minutes to base 24 for hours to base 7 for weeks to base 3.8-ish for weeks in months or base 52 for weeks in years, and then base 12 for months in years or base 365-ish for days in years. None of this is consistent or useful on any other planet.

If instead we used a percentage system (which could be base-10 or base-6 or whatever base you wanted) and counted cycles as parts out of a whole, then a percentage-metric accounting for the passage of time is perfectly universally consistent. A 100% year means a full orbit of a planet around its star, whether that planet be Earth, or Mars, or any other planet. You would no longer have to convert 365 days into its proportionate position in the orbit to find out how much is left for Mars, etcetera. Granted, 100% of an orbit for Earth is not the same objective amount of time for 100% of an orbit for Mars, but again we are not using a narrow objective measurement here, this is a flexible relativistic measurement. When giving time differences between planets, we give them as proportions anyways, i.e. we say one rotation on Earth is 24 hours compared to Jupiter which rotates once on its axis every 9 hours, 55 minutes and 29.69 seconds, making one day on Jupiter approximately 41.67% of an Earth day (a percentage).

Using a percent-based system for keeping track of time also happens to map nicely onto the system of time measurement we already have. If a full orbit of Earth is 100% of the year, then 1% of the year is 3.65 days, and 2% of the year is 7.3 days, about a week, which we would expect because there are 52 weeks in a year and that is pretty close to half of 100. This means weeks can be measured basically the same and days would pass three and a half or seven and a third's times per new 'week'. That may seem less obvious to keep track of than our current system, but look up and if three Suns pass and you want a day off work, call it the weekend and do what you want. Living your life based on how others keep an arbitrarily developed system of time that holds no actual relation to how the universe works is pathetic and you deserve to suffer if that's really the path your ineptitude has not found a way out of yet.

Anyways, 100% of a day means there are 100 units in a day instead of 86,400 seconds, 1,440 minutes, or 24 hours. This puts a single unit of the day, or one 'Percent-minute', at 14.4 normal minutes. This makes 1% of a day approximately a quarter of an hour. Measuring with 100.0 (factor of a thousand instead of a hundred) puts a single Percent-Minute at 1.44 normal minutes. Either way, this is a more human measurement as your body's internal clock follows these times more intuitively than the normal way we measure time. Measuring with 100.00 gives us Percent-seconds of 0.14 minutes or 8.4 seconds, and at 100.000 our Percent-seconds are 0.014 minutes or 0.84 seconds. The ideal way we determined from our initial tests, is to measure a day with 100.00 units since this gives us familiar and intuitive relations to our regular system as well as being displayed in a ##.##% format. It also means we can give a time as an overall measurement for advancement into the year. E.g., instead of saying this was being written on 2020/08/17 at 11:45:13 PM, we could just say 2020.63.01.98.97 or 63.01/98.97%.

I believe there is also an important psychological component to reframing days and years in terms of percentages since waking up at 11 AM just means you slept in for most people, but waking up instead to see that 46% of your day is already over motivates you to change your habits quite rapidly. The same with seeing how much of the year has elapsed as a percentage — 80% of your year being over motivates you to finish up projects, a kind of reverse-new-year's resolution.

Consistent Formatting & Unique Identifiers                                            

An identifier formatted as 5-5 characters, or 'NNNNN-NNNNN', gives 3,656 trillion permutations at base 36 (0-9 & A-Z). Larger bases give us even more perms. These IDs are sub-parsible if you want to include unique device identifiers or things lke that. For example, I could have an ID specifically for my phone — SNERX-SNAXX:PHONE.

If every individual person has 1 identifier, then we only exhaust ~8 billion IDs. This leaves plenty of room to add alien civilizations' citizens as uniquely identified in the same system. Your entire life fixed to 10 characters also means it is very easy to memorize. Normally random looking characters are hard for humans to remember, but people memorize their credit card number after having to enter it a few times a day, and the idea behind this system is that your public ID would be used for almost everything so it's the only number you would have to consistently enter on any paperwork or digital document. You will end up memorizing it.

If this is set up with standard two-key encryption, then the ID can be a pseudo-anonymous public address (possibly with fully anonymous private masks like how Monero sets up addresses) and only accessible with a private key that no other living soul has access to except yourself. With a proper API, API tokens and API hooking can be done to allow access to information granularly (like how EVE Online does it), e.g. if your doctor needed access to your medical records you could generate an API token that can read medical info stored on your account but nothing else.

All together, with percent-based time, ID, and balance, it could look like this:

                                 (Year) (%ofY) (Day%)
                                 002022 63.01% 98.97%
                                 A2C4E6G8I0 %12.34567
                                    (ID)     (Percs)

This is highly compact but there are probably better ways to display this info. However you do it, you are displaying a person's entire state of affairs in a in a very small character space. If you are traveling between planets you could even fit the destination planets' relative date and time underneath the origin planets'; there's lots of options with what can be done with this.

Relativistic Scoring and Ranking                                        

This system is so simple that I'm sure it's been done before, but I couldn't find any scoring system that worked this way online. The rank/score is out of 100 and decimal places are used to discriminate ranks/scores more granularly. This means your rank/score is also your percentile in the system.

The way I ended up making this work is to have the score at the end of the game be determined by calculating one-fifth the percentile difference between the players. So if a rank 40 plays against a rank 50 and wins, they gain 2 and lose 2, respectively. But this is always calculated from the higher-ranked player so if the rank 40 loses and the rank 50 wins, their ranks/scores only change by the smallest unit available, which would be 1 here. If they were ranked 40.455 and 50.982, then they lose 0.001 and gain 0.001, respectively. This incentivizes challenging people who are better than you so that you can move up faster. Since this keeps everyone ranked against each other, this is loosely like an ELO system. All scores must be unique however, so no two people can have the same score. For example, if two people end up with the score of 30, but one of them had 30 the round prior and the other only had 29, then the one with 29 has improved while the one with 30 idled, so 29 would move up to 30 and the one who already had 30 would be bumped down to 29.

Inactivity does not equally penalize everyone, since inactive players may rise up in the system if lots of other players around their rank lose a handful of matches. Inactivity would penalize the top ranked players the most since they can generally only go down from their positions. Positions in this percentile system are not static like they are in an ELO system.

If this system were applied to a site like lichess where hundreds of games conclude every minute, then the scores/rankings would be shifting so frequently that almost no one would keep their same rank after a couple minutes. However, if this system is applied to a site, server, or game that only concludes once a week or longer, then the ranks would be a lot more consistent.