SNERX.COM/PERCENT Last Updated 2022/8/6 • Read time 17min • Discord
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This page is about perfectly proportionate and relativistic systems, either in
economics, physics, games, or whatever. We have experimented with all of the systems
listed below and use them on our server or in games we play.
Percent-Based Money: Percs, which we symbolize as '%', is an experimental currency we
have developed for testing relative and perfectly proportional valuation systems. It
is a dynamically scaling currency, minting and sinking itself in direct proportion to
the number of users in the system, meaning this is a currency that experiences neither
inflation nor deflation. We are testing the use of this currency in our server and
several of the games we made.
In this proposed currency framework, every user gets 100 units of Percent upon account
creation (one account per unique person). As accounts are created, so too is Percent
minted (100 units each). As accounts are deleted, so too will Percent be sunk (100
units each). This means there will always be, and only be, 100 whole units of Percent
per person in the system. We sink the currency by use of a communal account that
doubles as a government funds pool made liquid by means of fees and a form of
pseudo-taxation. 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
meaning demand-side will be relatively static forever. In this system, every person on
average is always worth exactly 100 Percent.
The currency symbol for Percent 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, whether or not you increase or decrease your economic
status is no longer due majoritarily to extrinsic factors. This is a system where
individual merit is king, and your successes or failures are mostly yours alone. This
is like a fair capitalism that starts in the middle of middle-class (obviating the
need for a UBI). This does not mean everyone in this system will be rich, in fact we
expect traditional economic distributions to emerge, but the distributions will be
scaled proportionately rather than disproportionately like we see in everywhere else.
Because everyone gets 100 whole units of this currency to start, and humans with good
diets live around 100 years on average, this makes 1 unit of Percent approximate to 1
year of life. The saying that 'time is money' is literal for this experimental
valuation system. This lets us treat Percent like units of time as well as a currency
with %0.0001 equating to ~1 hour of time (or 52 minutes to be exact). There are lots
of things that could be said about what follows from this collapsation between money
and time, with obvious references to pop culture like the movie In Time, but without
saying anything else too specific, paying people with time also means that if you own
over %200, then you own an entire second lifetime of wealth in this system.
Proportionate, dynamically-scaling currency also means economic instruments become far
more reliable and market valves/pressure points become simpler to manipulate and
maintain. Space and time are measured in relative frames, implying reality itself
operates under a relative frame, yet we don't account for any regular system this way;
we believe Percent will help transition cultures into relativistic value frameworks.
Through a loan system or other mechanics, negative balances could be possible to
attain. The way these should be handled are with spending lock-outs where a user
cannot spend any % until their balance becomes positive again. 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.
Separation of church and state was a good start, but we should also separate money and
state. We predict that future money will not be issued by any centralized state power,
but a decentralized, distributed, cryptographically secure, private, permissionless,
open, and dynamically scalable protocol that was adopted by its resilience to attacks
from everyone who has tried to steal, break, or manipulate it. Since cryptocurrencies
comes close to this, we considered using one of them, but their unfair initial
distributions, centralized early adopter distributions, 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 really emulate them. Securing %
is substantially less computationally intensive than any PoW system, less even than a
PoS system, so we should be able to leapfrog those technologies entirely.
You could expand the use of Percent by creating artificial liquidity in a market and
force it to become an arbiter medium of exchange in those markets, for example, if 100
people stake %1 in a pool, that pool can become its own autonomous account tied to a
specific market or set of assets. 100 unique people staking money as a threshold
guarantees a minimal level of activity around some asset(s) and also garuntees the
perfect %100 balance per person in the system isn't disturbed. This autonomous account
can be a smart contract that automates sales or movements of some asset or functions
as a store of currency that accumulates over time - paying out the original stakers
plus interest after some threshold of accumulation; the potential uses are myriad. I
believe this also works as a game theory mechanic to deincentivize both market
splitting and market accumulation. It can also serve as a reputation system for a
store or market.
Percent, like cryptocurrency, is technically infinitely divisible, but for sake of
usability and efficiency of price-discovery Percent only has four digits of
divisibility on our server (making the smallest transactable unit 0.0001), and only
eight units of divisibility in the full version (since you don't need to divide time
down further than that). Also like cryptocurrencies, you can instantly exchange
Percent for Dollars or any other currency. Additionally, having wallet balances and
transaction values displayed as four-and-four character representations, the same way
timestamps, time measurements, user IDs, and many other values and tags we use for
projects on Snerx are displayed, it brings a uniformity to this world where the most
efficient, most streamlined, easily visually parsable standards and information are
the ones that get used. Through this we present a possible version of the future in
which people are not restricted by implicit cognitive bureaucracy and instead are
efficiently promoted to do real work, creative pursuits, and live dynamic lives
instead of being taught by tired economic systems that the most meaningful form of
existence is repetitive wageslaving.
Relativistic Scoring, Ranking, and Names: We needed a new kind of scoring system that
assigns points uniquely to players in a game so that no two players end up with the
same score after any round. If there were five people in the system, then the system
needs to assign points from 1-5, which is 15 points total between 5 people. If two
people are to end up with the same number of points after a round, then special
conditions determine who gets that final score; e.g. if two people would somehow end
up with a score of 3, but one of them had 3 the round prior and the other only had 2,
then the one with 2 has improved while the one with 3 idled, so 2 would move up to 3
and the one who already had 3 would be bumped down to 2. Similarly, if one had 3 the
round prior and the other had 4 the round prior, then 4 would be demoted down to 3 for
losing a point, and the one with 3 prior would move up to 4 to occupy the empty rank.
This is kind of like a normal scoring system mixed with an ELO-like system.
This system is so simple that I'm sure it's been done many times before, but we
couldn't find any major scoring system that works this way, so we just jerryrigged it
here for our own internal purposes.
Since this not only scores everyone but also keeps them ranked against each other,
this is like an ELO system where playing will always modify you or your opponent's
score (or both). But unlike ELO, all scores must be unique, no two people can have the
same score, and further the point limit must be dynamic, since the maximum score you
can get is the same as the number of people playing. This is unlike an ELO system and
more like traditional scoring in that the score cap is dynamic and not bound to 3,000.
The score cap is determined by the number of people in the system, i.e. if there are
ten people then the score cap is ten, if there are a million people, then the score
cap is a million.
The way we ended up making this work is to have every round of a game or every whole
game be worth 1 point by default. If you win you move up one rank, switching places
with the person above you. If you lose, you move down one rank, switching palces with
the person below you. Moving one at a time in a system with a million people would be
very slow and cumbersome. To add a little more dynamicism, you can score or jump up
to 100 ranks at a time. The way this is calculated is always from the higher ranked
player, where an oponent within one-hundreth of their rank only results in a gain or
loss of one point at a time, but an opponent within two-hundreths of their ranks
results in a gain or loss of two points at a time, and so on. So playing and losing to
an opponent that was more than nine-tenths below your rank would would result in you
getting shuffled down ninety places from your position and them getting shuffled up
ninety places from theirs. If the higher ranked player won in this example, they would
only move up one rank and the loser would only move down one. The extra points only
come from punching up, not down. This also incentivizes challenging people who are
better than you so that you can move up faster.
The scores you win from this scoring system thereby determines your rank against all
the other players. 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 only go down from their position. This means the top positions are not as
static as the ELO system. Additionally, a dynamic cap means your score/rank can be
used to easily identify your performance percentile since your percentile is just your
score/rank divided by the cap amount.
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 consistent enough that we could start using them as identifiers and
calling people by their score/rank instead of by their name. You may be asking what
use case this actually works for, and in most cases this is a bad idea, but for
internal use on the Snerx & Diogenesis discord or other internal games, this ends up
being quite useful and works decently for braging or taunting since a low-ranked
person can be called by their low rank.
Relativistic Units of Time: Given the contemporary forumlation of spacetime, time
decelerates as the expansion of space accelerates. This inverse relation allows for
interesting frameworks to be built around how we measure and give time.
Percent-based systems are good for any relativistic framing, and as mentioned in the
Heat Death section, this obviously applies to time itself since time is relativistic.
We do not however use measurements of time that are relativistic in regular practice,
and this is problematic because it means our system is only applicable to one place,
that place being Earth. It doesn't work anywhere else and further it 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 3.5-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 base-100 system and counted things 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
be Earth or any other planet, so you no longer have to convert 365 days into its
proportionate position in the orbit to find out how much is left for Mars. 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 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 of 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
pass three and a half or seven and a third's times per 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 and executed time system that
holds no actual relation to how the universe works is pathetic and you deserve to
suffer if this is 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 form 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. For example, 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 %63.019897.
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: As mentioned in the first section, we are
trying to develop an architecture for tracking things that utilizes a universal
formatting. This means currency, time, and even names or unique identifiers. Below are
the developmental notes stepping through the choice in formatting.
An identifier formatted as 1-2-3-4 numbers or 'N-NN-NNN-NNNN' allows for
1,000,000,000 permutations including full zeros. If we want to include more than
potentially 10 billion unique people, then one more, as a 4-3-4, 'NNNN-NNN-NNNN',
allows for 10,000,000,000 perms. If we wanted to be able to include unique device
identifiers and possible other intergalactic civilizations' citizens with potential
room for error or redundancy, a 3-4-5 format allows 100 billion perms, at base ten. If
we include A-F to get standard base 16 we can get a similar ~1.1 trillion perms with
only 10 characters instead of 12. At base 36 (0-9 & A-Z) we get 2.8 trillion perms
with only 8 characters. So a 4-4 format, or 'NNNN-NNNN' gets us almost 3 trillion
perms. This is what we settled for, but it should be noted that adding four more
symbols gives us base 40 with 6.5 trillion perms at this length.
If every individual person has 1 identifier (sub-parsible for unique identifiers for
their properties, devices, misc), then we only exhaust ~9 billion IDs. This leaves
plenty of room to add alien civilizations' citizens as uniquely identified in the same
system. Your entire life, or any permanent unique identifier, fixed to 8 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 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 as a standard two-key encryption system then the ID is a public
address that can be pseudo-anonymous (possibly with fully anonymous private masks like
how Monero sets up address distinctions) 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 ID, balance, and %-based time, it could look like these:
2020.63.01.98.97 2020 63.01 98.97
ID: A2C4 -- E6G8 OR A2C4-E6G8 123456
P%: 100,000.0000 %100.0000 123456
This is highly compact and even leaves room for other information. This makes it
possible to display an entire person's state of affairs, their current being, in a
16x3 character space. If you are traveling between planets, you can fit the
destination planets' relative date and time underneath the origin planets' for a 16x4
character space.