A “Social Bitcoin” Could Sustain a Democratic Digital World

A multidimensional financial system could provide benefits for individuals, companies, and states. Instead of top-down control, which is destined to eventually fail in a hyperconnected world, a bottom-up creation of value can unleash creative potential and drive innovations. Multiple currency dimensions can represent different externalities and thus enable the design of incentives and feedback mechanisms that foster the ability of complex dynamical systems to self-organize and lead to a more resilient society and sustainable economy. Modern information and communication technologies play a crucial role in this process, as Web 2.0 and online social networks promote cooperation and collaboration on unprecedented scales. Within this contribution, we discuss how one dimension of a multidimensional currency system could represent socio-digital capital (Social Bitcoins) that can be generated in a bottom-up way by individuals who perform search and navigation tasks in a future version of the digital world. The incentive to mine Social Bitcoins could sustain digital diversity, which mitigates the risk of totalitarian control by powerful monopolies of information and can create new business opportunities needed in times where a large fraction of current jobs is estimated to disappear due to computerization.

Finance 4.0—A Socio-Ecological Finance System

This contribution develops the framework of a novel, socio-ecological finance system that enables the incentivization of environmentally friendly behavior, socially responsible production, resource recycling, sharing and more. We call this system Finance 4.0—where Finance 1.0 refers to a physical coin-based system, Finance 2.0 to a fiat currency system, Finance 3.0 to blockchain finance, while Finance 4.0 stands for a multi-dimensional, real-time feedback system that combines blockchain technology with the Internet of Things. Instead of “Finance 4.0,” we will also often use the abbreviation “FIN4.”In comparison with citizen scores such as the Chinese social credit score, the FIN4 approach is different in a variety of aspects: FIN4 is not aimed at punishment and control, but rather at helping to encourage, empower and coordinate sustainable and other favorable action. It is being built for local, temporary measurements and feedback, not for global surveillance and control. It seeks to protect the privacy of people rather than to keep information about everyone and every action forever. It is not focused on the individual in the sense of profiling and targeting, but on favorable interactions and our social and environmental goals. It offers a multi-dimensional choice of options instead of trying to determine every individual’s action through behavioral manipulation and control. It has a participatory opt-in nature, where people can co-create the incentive system in such a way that they can reach their goals more successfully. With multi-dimensional incentivization, it becomes possible to advance several goals simultaneously; thereby, many more people can benefit from the interactions they engage in, as multi-dimensional value exchange increases the solution space enormously.

From Fiat to Crypto: The Present and Future of Money

This chapter aims to offer readers an entry point to the deep discussion of this volume and the rationale for the “Finance 4.0” system described in later chapters. What is money, why is it designed this way, and what could it become in the crypto age? The chapter contains three parts. The first part describes in rough strokes the basic functions of money and how today’s fiat money system implements them. The second part offers a modest critique of the fiat money system, arguing that many problems take root in the intimate power relationship between “money and state.” The final part presents two cases that address some of the shortcomings. The first is Bitcoin that infamously pursues a state-independent, decentralized conception of money. The second is Finance 4.0, a system that proposes a participatory multi-dimensional money system with built-in incentives for sustainable behavior. If more readers feel empowered to enter the public debate for a better money system in the twenty-first century, this short introduction achieved its aim.

Qualified Money—A Better Financial System for the Future

Over millennia, people have seen the financial system collapse again and again. It is, therefore, time to re-invent money and the financial system altogether in order to make them fit for the complex world of today. Here, it is described how the idea for a new socio-ecological finance system came about. Three main innovations are proposed: (1) a particular combination of cash and electronic money, which promotes electronic transactions, while preserving privacy, where it is justified and needed; (2) money that has additional qualifiers such as reputation, which may depend on the geographic region, the exchange history, or other variables; (3) multidimensional money, which is better suited to manage complex systems such as our economy, and enables (the design of) self-organizing systems with favorable properties, e.g., economic systems that promote a co-evolutionary processes toward a circular economy.

An Interaction Support Processor to Promote Individual and Systemic Benefits

Individual choices, if not sufficiently well coordinated, can lead to bad outcomes, such as systemic instabilities or failures, or “tragedies of the commons.” It is, therefore, proposed to use digital assistants to support favorable interactions and avoid undesirable ones. The invention discussed here describes ways to perform these tasks in a decentralized way that also protects sensitive information. Such digital assistants offer better solutions based on local empowerment and coordination rather than on large-scale surveillance and control. In particular, it is suggested to introduce a multi-dimensional value exchange based on multiple new currencies that are linked to reputation values or sensor measurements, which may use the Internet of Things. This novel approach expands the solution space such that new opportunities for favorable interactions arise, which benefits the system and its components. Often, similar results would not be achievable with classical optimization approaches and conventional, one-dimensional value exchange only.