Hubcoin - Mapping Pico-Economies With Cryptocurrency - Part One

Prerequisites

10 years ago I wanted to create a virtual currency called Xcent. At that time I was running a moderately big network of websites in Romania, with an average traffic of 500.000 visitors / month. I didn't have the technology, nor the know-how to do such a thing and, after a few months of research and even a working implementation, I stopped. The implementation was nothing more than just a loyalty points layer on top of members actions.

3 years ago, based on the experience with a real life community of a few thousands of users, I wanted to create another currency, this time based on the crypto protocol known as Bitcoin. The initial name of the currency was CashConnect (the community was called Open Connect). Again, I felt the protocol was too restrictive at that time and I had to stop.

A couple of months ago I decided to close the co-working and event venue I ran for the last 2 and a half years and pursue other paths. One of these potential paths is leading towards a new crypto-currency, called Hubcoin. I think the explosion of the blockchain technology during the last 2 years, with advancements such as Ethereum, Graphene, Tendermint consensus engine and others are now much more affordable, in terms of general usability (curve of learning, speed of implementation, hardware and network requirements).

Pico-Economies versus Economies

The common theme for all my attempts to create a currency is the existence of a real-life community, being it online or offline. I have been fortunate enough to witness the birth, growth and, sometimes, decadence, of a few significant communities (some of them created exclusively as a result of my own efforts). From this position I observed a new type of interaction, which I call "pico-transaction".

These pico-transactions are too small to be mapped with fiat currency, but they are significant enough to impact the overall value of the community. They don't have enough predictability to generate forecasts and complex models, like in normal economies, but they do generate enough value to impact buying decisions, or, more specifically, belonging decisions. Belonging is a key concept in a pico-economy and a fundamental parameter in determining the value of Hubcoin, as a token.

Examples of pico-transactions:

on-the-spot consulting on various topics (from how the printer works up to how to use an API of a programming language)
on-the-spot partnerships based on complementary skills
role-based community management (from moderation of a forum, to filling in for somebody else at a meeting)

Pico-economies are naturally forming in co-working spaces, professional guilds, online communities or other contexts, in which people are constantly exchanging pico-transactions in a non-formalized way.

Hubcoin Goal

The goal of Hubcoin, as a crypto-currency is to map these pico-economies with a token which is:

fungible - can circulate between different pico-economies and can be exchanged for other fiat or crypto currencies
highly available across all devices spectrum - light clients (mobile, IOT) and stable network of nodes
decentralized - no middle-man between the issuer and the user
secure - resistent to various potential attacks, from DOS to sybil

Implementation

The key concepts used in defining a Hubcoin-mapped pico-economy are:

belonging
contribution
age

Belonging is a metric measuring the overall affinity of people for a certain community. It manifests by many actions, among which are:

how often and in what capacity members are renewing their commitment (membership, endorsements, etc)
how often members are referring other members who are renewing their commitment
how often and in what capacity members are using community's interfaces (see below abut the interfaces concept in a pico-economy)

Contribution is a metric measuring the overall value production by pico-transactions. It manifests in many ways, among which are:

how often and in what capacity members are interacting with other members
how often and in what capacity a member is contributing value using bi-directional interfaces

Age is a metric measuring the overall impact a pico-economy has, based on the duration of its existence.

The overall value of a Hubcoin is determined by a continuous process of evaluating and integrating these metrics.

Interfaces

Interfaces are bi-directional transactions which are mapped with Hubcoin. The root interface of any pico-economy is the special interface "membership". Access to all the other interfaces exposed by a pico-economy is conditioned by the implementation of the root interface.

Apart from having a certain amount of Hubcoin "attached" to it, an interface can generate value for the community or it can be just a way to consume value, in various forms, from outside the community. A publishing interface, through which a member can contribute content to the community blog, for example, is generating value for the community. A coffee-machine interface, through which a member can only buy coffee, is just a way to consume value, from outside the community. Ideally, even the interfaces which are allowing consuming from outside the community should generate value (by adding some margin to the value of the consumed object) but that's not always the case. Hubcoin should be agnostic to this process, leaving it to be established at each pico-economy level. Potential frauds or attempts to inflate the Hubcoins of a specific pico-economy should be easily mitigated by the Huboin protocol.

In the second part I will talk about Hubcoins and Hot Hubcoins, and will describe a more practical model of a Hubcoin-mapped pico-economy. Looking forward to hear your comments on this first part. Thank you.

Significant parts of these articles are taken from the Hubcoin whitepaper, which is a work in progress now, and are published with the intent of gathering feedback, suggestions and criticism. The official Hubcoin whitepaper could be available in the second half of February 2017.

Initially published on Steemit.com..

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Golos you may stay updated by following me @dragos.