"The Accounting Game"

[serapath]

Problem

Billions of people living on a planet develop their personal lifestyle preferences and all is good, but sometimes living life can cause conflicts with others and violence is sometimes used to try conflict resolution, which causes a lot of suffering.

Goal

Have billions of people - who can't possibly know each other personally beyond their personal communities - live on the same planet peacefully. If arbitrary lifestyle choices lead to conflicts, they should be resolvable without violence.

How to start thinking about solutions?

1. Individuals and groups can of course come up with arbitrary life style choices, which is awesome :-)
2. In a group where everyone knows each other people can always find custom ways to solve issues
3. What works in groups where people know each other, breaks down when there are too many people
4. History is filled with war and violence as the most primitive method of "conflict resolution".

In "the small", where people living in communities know each other, there is always space to come up with custom conflict resolution methods the community likes. If an individual doesn't like that method of conflict resolution, it can move to a different community or even live alone.

In "the large", where people and communities don't know each other personally anymore and can't keep track, the problem is different. Traditional social mechanisms of conflict resolution break down.

The best methods people invented and use today to avoid conflicts with other people without violence seems to be The Accounting Game.

The Ideas behind The Accounting Game

Every person can live however they want - alone or with their communities - and fine local rules to avoid conflict, but where people don't know each other, they use the concept of transaction.

Every person maintains a balance sheet and organizations of people also maintain balance sheets.
If people do not maintain their own balance sheets (e.g. employees), then employers and banks maintain a simplified balance sheet for them.

A transaction is consensus between two individuals/organizations to change their balance sheets in certain ways compatible with the rules of The Accounting Game. In times where there are no conflicts - life can go on in arbitrary ways - but in case of dissent, The Accounting Game defines the rules to deny transactions to protect oneself from unwanted changes without the use of violence.

Billions of people around the world are organized in organizations with employees and play the accounting game for 40h+ per week.

The promise of the game is - if everyone sticks to the rules - we have a mechanism without violence to resolve conflicts.

The Question

Is The Accounting Game we play today fair? Are the rules fair?

[serapath]

How to live a good life and peacefully co-exist with all the wonderful creatures on this planet, we had some thoughts about conflict resolution that were interesting to me.

Individuals or small groups or communities make all kinds of wonderful lifestyle choices and find inspiring ways how to live and work together. If there will ever be a conflict, they can probably come up with all kinds of creative methods how to resolve them peacefully and even share their best practices with others.
If it happens that some people cannot find a way to agree with the life style and rules of a community they might just leave and try something different somewhere else.
Where I struggled to find a good answer to how approach solving conflicts peacefully is when there is a planet with billions of people - "anonymously" many - so many, that people can't keep track and all the different lifestyle choices can lead to conflicts between groups that can't find ways to agree.
I keep thinking - it would be good to have a "lowest common denominator" - on how to solve conflicts without resorting to violence and war.

My personal feeling is - with all it's flaws - this "least common denominator" in todays world is The Accounting Game and the rules about what is allowed an what not. The idea seems to be, that the entire world keeps journals and a balance sheet (employers, banks and governments do it for the people who don't do it themselves). So in case of conflicts, the rules around accounting will be used to solve the conflict peacefully through a series of economic transactions. An economic transaction is a mechanism which can only happen if both sides consent. So instead of growing or building up potential for conflict, this potential can be reduced or resolved all the time through transactions as a "lowest common denominator" in order to avoid violent conflict.

I see many flaws with todays rules in The Accounting Game all the people play 40h+ every week, but as an idea to avoid violent conflict in "anonymously large groups" as a fallback in case people can't find other ways it makes sense to me.

I would really appreciate some input and feedback on this thought. I have the feeling, that many patchwork folks have quite different thoughts about it and i'd like to understand them better.

[serapath]

Isn't economy an "accounting game" to make sure everybody put's in equal effort + add some social welfare mechanisms to help people and give them a safety net?

• I can just give to people and everybody else gives and it can magically work
• But in reality - most ppl prefer accounting to keep track of whats going on and be able to deal and prevent systemic free riders

every transaction leads to a saldo in balances which needs to be cleared + accounted for eventual social welfare mechanisms ppl are willing to provide

I see accounting as a fallback mechanism that documents whats going on so once ppl start to feel unsure if everything is still ok, they can check the numbers

In my understanding, in abstract, the clearing happens when a supply chain is closed into a supply circle, where the closest such possible circle is a mutual exchange (goods/services for goods/services) each transaction partner wants and has aprox. equal value. If the transaction uses money, it's a one sided exchange and the "money" represent the open circle

[serapath]

1. either the receiver doesn't get money or the sender goes in the red when you transact
2. But you'd still need settlement to be done by a centralized 'bank'
3. but then of course you can federate the banks
4. and that's roughly the real world financial system

• what if each user published their own history as a ledger.
• As long as they never changed history, it would work right?
• we'd need something watching closely that people don't write a cheque, and then remove it from their log, but also there'd have to be interactions with other ledgers for each transaction with other histories

hypothetical design:

• Every user has a hypercore. The bank has a hypercore. All transactions will occur on hypercores.
• users write cheques to their hypercores.
• "The bank" syncs the hypercores of every user that keeps an account. As soon as the bank sees a cheque, it tries to process it
• if the details are all correct, and the cheque-author has the balance, the bank updates the balances in its internal DB, and publishes a confirmation on its hypercore

we do have to trust the bank, but if we had all activity and state written publicly, we could reduce that trust. so if the bank lies, it's easy to see. I think the 'dat-cheque' system has a single distinct advantage over existing payments (like stripe): it's totally async, and writes can occur offline

otherwise, my personal opinion is that payments on the internet need to improve via banking. What we really need is an API standard that all banks follow, with an address standard as well
=> so that I can ignore whoever you bank with and write code that says pay(tim, $5)

federated digital banks doesn't sound too hard. The banks themselves would need something like PoW for inter-bank transfers though right?... or? ...

[Romeo-dyer]

Hey can you teach me few coding skills ?? Internet Banking.