Percent %

Percent Systems -- Updated 2022/1/3

Back to Snerx -- Contact us on our official Discord. ______________________________________________________________________________________ :: Perfectly Proportionate & Relativistic Economics ::

Percent, 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. We are testing the use of this currency in our server and Snuff.

In this proposed currency framework, every user gets 100 units of Percent upon account creation (one account per unique person). This means there will always be 100 whole units of Percent per person. As accounts are created, so too is Percent minted. As accounts are deleted, so too will Percent be sunk. We sink the currency by use of a communal sink that doubles as a government funds pool made liquid by means of fees and a form of pseudo-taxation we invented. 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. 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 to extrinsic environmental or social or governmental factors putting pressure on individuals or strains on entire communities. This is a system where individual merit is king, and your successes or failures are yours alone. This is not a socialist system, it's capitalism that starts in the middle of middle-class, a fair capitalism in the way its ideal framework is described as being. This obviously does not mean everyone in this system will be rich, in fact we expect traditional economic distributions to emerge, the difference being that they are scaled in relative proportions rather than the disproportionate distributions of wealth we have seen in every system before (Gini coefficient).

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.

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 we call Percent. 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 other things that could be said about what follows from this collapsation between money and time with obvious references to pop culture in things 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 extra lifetime of wealth in this system.

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. Incurring a negative balance is possible by spending more than you have in a single transaction. If a user dies 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 amount across the system.

Separation of church and state was a good start, but we're also going to separate money and state. We strongly predict for our future that money would not be issued by any centralized state power, but a decentralized, distributed, cryptographically secure, private, permissionless, open, and dynamically scalable protocol that was adopted not by general rhetorical consensus but by its resilience to attacks from everyone who has tried to steal, break, or manipulate it. Since these kinds of currency already exist as cryptocurrencies, Percent may attempt to piggyback off them at first, 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 might be able to leapfrog those technologies entirely.

There is potential in expanding the use of Percent to create liquidity of itself in any market and force itself to become an arbiter medium of exchange in those markets, possibly a way to garuntee some liquidity of those markets as well. 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 market splitting and even market accumulation. It can also serve as a possible reputation system for a store or market. Additionally, this is a way to force % to be adopted as a mainstream currency very rapidly in the regular world for daily transactions since you can create liquidity of % anywhere at any time for any reason so long as other people with % are interested in the same.

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 six 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.

:: 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 your ID, balance, and the %-based time and date like the one described on /physics, 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.