A non-anthropomorphic symbolization of economy.

A weightless primitive for tokenomics.

OpenTokenomics © 2022 – Version: alpha – Author: John. F. Robert

Introduction

This post is a preliminary to a White Paper publication, introducing the operative symbolization in exploration and development under the label OpenTokenomics eR&D.

Its alpha version introduces the use of prototypal forms to symbolize connectivity via transactions. It leads to their superposition via an innovative scheme that enables to conceive how transacting associates, a propaedeutic design to develop algebras operating on them. How transacting associates will be the object of a second linked post, Association in a Connective Present. Both are a first touch with the needs in terms of operative symbolization for identifying the asset of the implicit associative liquidity in any transaction, itself a precursor to sustain a decentralized capitalization. It is certainly an intrinsic aspect of the tokenized economy, not supportable by a cash coin, preceding any quantitative valuations for networking transactions.

These two posts will lead the reader across the core business of OpenTokenomics, namely operative symbolization. And from the perspective of the operative symbolization, the realm of OpenTokenomics eR&D is intrinsically interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary. Intrinsically, because the targeted operative symbolization, mining software engineering, is designed to play symbolizing with a universal quantification over its own implementation, to play an instantiating flow without ontology and phenomenality in primitives. For instance, the operative symbolization drops the phenomenal ontology of writing techniques, digitalized or not, allowing us to distinguish algebra from geometry. In fact, the universal quantification over the implementation prevents the use of an ontology to classify disciplines by their objects. See OpenTokenomics eR&D paradigm post for these interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary entry points.

Also, the exploratory initiative is envisioned as economic development. Therefore, OpenTokenomics has an entrepreneurship dimension. Typically, in such a context, we sketch a roadmap with milestones and timed deliveries to frame the project and iteratively evaluate the progression. This is a usual task if your deliveries stand under the classification in use in your civilization. That’s not the case here. To address the challenge, I propose as a roadmap elementary propaedeutic consideration driving people to the exploration, a tutorial communication helping them to design their thought to identify the deliveries and their order of precedence. See the roadmap post on the subject.

Enjoy this text!

About connectivity via transacting

Immersed in common sense, we can consider that we need resources to sustain a livelihood, resources of all kinds, from water to financial products, following the multiple environments of our existence. From this perspective, the economy is concerned with supplying and managing some of them, namely the assets. However, if we restrict our mind to what is the domain of economy, dropping by abstraction human business with beliefs in money, trust for rights in ownership, fears for life, the desire of power, moving with economy out of the boundary of our monetized societies, in an Amazonian community for instance, where pricing is inexistent, if we borrow methodologically such a path, what will remain under our focus?

The proposed answer is short: access to transacting.

Indeed, when we have money in our wallets, it will give us access to assets priced in a given currency, assuming the currency is circulating, assuming free ownership and access rights of purchasing and selling are sustained and protected by an authority. In our Modern democracies, such contextuality is addressed by the free market credo, politically sustained by state governances and worldwide organizations. However, when we go beyond the free market credo with its derived ideology of competition as the natural order, when we drop law of Nature as the foundation of an explanation, further when we drop the desire to host the world as an unknown calling for explanations, it remains the contextuality of access to transacting for any actor in the domain, human beings or not. We extend here the domain of economy beyond the exclusive realm of human business and not invoking nature as a regulating idea, but dropping any ontology and phenomenality, considering only connectivity via transacting whatever the implementations of the transactions are in terms of instantiated actors and executive processes.

Symbolically, such an approach is played with this formal expression

Y ← A . F ( X ) read as follows.

F is published to the access domain A enabling free access to exchange X for Y.

F could be implemented as a bakery, published on street A, enabling the exchange of money X for the bread Y. Or F can be implemented as a molecular receptor, published to a liquid solution A, enabling to exchange an atom X for an atom Y. Or F can be implemented as a written logical rule, published to the writing space A of a formal system, enabling exchange of the premise X for the consequent Y. Or F can be implemented as the perceptive-actualizing function ‘watching’, published in the domain of the visible A, enabling exchange of a look X for an image Y, and so on… All these examples receive the same operative symbolization, dropping any hypotheses on their phenomenal natures. The software engineer will recognize here the prototype, stateless (no ontological nature) and codeless (no phenomenality), associating 4 operants to share 3 operators, namely the assignment, the access and the call operators. This is a starting point for an operative symbolization of economy, playing our immersion in its realm as an access domain to transacting before considering a space-time box of resources for embodied and incorporated actors as ontological instances.

Such level and depth of abstraction are deeply rooted in the code literacy of a connected world, far beyond speculative variations reserved to an academic environment. In the open social workshop of a connected world, ecological trends have given a voice to non-human actors in politics and economics. Also, the economy is exploring beyond the boundary of a human business handling an alliance of control with a natural universe. For instance, permaculture trends witness the search for alliances of freedom with this multicolor alterity we named world; it goes far beyond the green forest garden. More inside the software engineering connecting us, a new domain is unfolded at the core of the usual economy, decentralized finance, incubating tokenization where numbers are dropped as the first regulator for accessing transactional exchanges. Instead, rights to access are being straightforwardly coded into circulating tokens, rights being enforced via crypto-secured automation opened to distributed governance. Legal regulations are already put in place to classify such tokens, most often to frame them in existing laws to avoid too much chaotic disruption.

And therefore, to address the potential of the tokenized economy, the abstraction introduced above is deeply relevant, because we are jointly concerned with distributed governance and flowing values symbolized by code, whatever their nature, their semantics, whatever the judgments of values are. A very elementary judgment of value could be X=$5 for Y being a ‘bread’ in the symbolization Y ← A . F ( X ) of the transaction. However, the latter symbolization illustrates that we don’t play transactions of any nature, i.e., with a universal quantifier over its implementations, with the arithmetic as algebra. Other algebras operating the prototypal forms of the transaction, non-quantitative, must be developed. It is the initial core business of OpenTokenomics.

To unlock the unexpected potential, our belief in numbers to objectify and to play the reflectors of the possible must be relinquished. They appear de facto very exotic. Indeed, the world never waited for being priced or measured to be reflected and implemented as a nature. These beliefs are deeply correlated with our paradigm of knowledge conceptualizing objectivity via measuring, a dominant credo since F=ma, quantifying and symbolizing as laws of Nature our imaginary of the perceived weight. In fact, economy, justice, spirituality, and most sciences share a common mass archetype as the archeological cradle of our anthropology. Printed in our body, we keep alive the perception of owning our own weight, which delivers objects owning properties for our enunciation. We are currently leaving this deep belief, unfolding the symbolization of the world incubated by coding techniques. In short, a connected world incubates a body factory in weightlessness. See posts in Software Mining for analysis and contribution to these aspects.

About Freedom

In a society of knowledge still dominated by the horizon of sciences, after centuries of mechanist views on our natural universe inherited from physics, we usually come to consider freedom as a reality emerging from complex evolutive systems, thinking freedom needs contextuality of the complexity to be potentially identified. This worldwide propagated culture by education is still so live that it pushes again some scientists to nurture beliefs in determinism. In such context, some activists are fighting for defending values of freedom against laws of the economy, reflecting here the pressure of a common scientific credo in quest of control, an ally of authoritarian regimes, followed by some democracies. This exclusive alliance of control driving our episteme, which restricts everywhere the horizon of the possible into ruling who controls who, generates very legitimate fears, even in the most established democracies.

To address this threatening challenge, we are going to open the horizon of the possible, revisiting freedom beyond the boundary of an anthropomorphic conception, initiating an operative symbolization designed as an alliance of free variability between an environment and the alterity of its inhabitants, the free variability of their implementations.

Our scientific heritage raises an immediate question: how will we derive morphology on phenomenal implementations for envisioning our engineering, for our action on the world? Conceptually simple! In a freely and openly interfaceable flow, there is a condition to sustain the implementation of a present: it is answered as asked. This is a very well-known implementation design for any developer: the implementation must be compliant with its prototypal form. If not, the flow apocalyptically collapses; it is the end of a persistent present, the end of times. This is a great heritage of code literacy. In the OpenTokenomics eR&D, the operative symbolization drops causality to play morphology on phenomena, a principle alienating freedom from its condition, an ideological principle reducing all alterities, including human beings, to objects of control. Most sciences are far to be driven by rationality on this epistemic point.

When we consider access to transacting as a generic and weightless primitive for the economy, freedom cannot first be evaluated as a vital value for humankind; we are not in an anthropomorphic approach of the economy. A world, an environment, as a publication domain for access to transactions holds under its unicity a variadic plurality of published identifiable accesses to transactions, a variadic plurality of freely designable publications, or a variadic bundle of options. In other words, the flow of transactions implements intrinsically the prototypal form of a variadic & recursive branching:

- variadic because the plurality of accesses is open in number;

- recursive because any transaction path along the flow returns the branching.

This symbolization is inherited from software engineering, which must search for the complicity of the flow to automate its artifact. Programming uses a symbolization for implemented actors, human beings and autonomously running computers, which are first hosted by an openly ramified and instantiating flow. It is the prototypal forms of such a recursive and variadic branching, opening access to transacting that OpenTokenomics eR&D has to symbolize. And therefore, when in OpenTokenomics we come to speak of free access to transactions, we formally refer by the term free to the variadic & recursive branching intrinsic to all domains of publication. We don’t first refer to a subjective and intersubjective conception of freedom for human beings equipped with the autonomy of the will, conditioning ethics for responsible actors who nurture intentionality. It’s a minimalistic approach by design. At the level of the prototypal forms, we don’t have to do any hypothesis on observed actors, we do not enter into a world by the door of observation, but through the path of an implementing flow.

And therefore, formalizing a ramified flow hosting any transaction goes with a recursive call of a variadic branching operator, goes with templating any function operator F in the symbolization Y ← A . F ( X ) as a switch containing ‘others’ to support the variadicity.

For the reader unfamiliar with the codified features in the programming languages, I just want to evoke here the maturity of the symbolization of our time. They are matured enough to play that we are, with all connected actors by transaction, immersed in a ramified flow opened in its implemented ontologies, instead of playing that we are boxed in the ontology of a space-time, believing that this ontology owns laws. A very different horizon for actualizing the possible!

For more about the operative symbolization, read the linked post Association in a Connective Present in OpenTokenomics.io