This drawing was done with markers on paper. Birds and snakes are connected in mythology. Their meaning is sometimes interpreted in terms of death, rebirth, and regeneration. An eagle with a snake was featured in William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Here's an image of that from the public domain.
A Mystical Vision
If you read this blog, you probably know that I invented the @rstory token a few years ago while working for an LLC, and that I recently bought Rstory from this company to develop it further privately. But what you may not know is that this invention was not the product of any rational process. Instead, it was the product of a mystical vision.
This vision came to me over the course of several days while I was in the throes of what I would later learn was a manic episode. In this, I saw a new kind of cryptocurrency become popular. The value of this new token wasn't predicated on artificial scarcity. Instead, it's value was based on gratitude, coupled with a shared accountability mechanism that incentivized all of its users to use it ethically.
This was a novel prospect. It seemed worth pursuing. Unfortunately, my mystical vision was sketchy on implementation details. The project went nowhere. Recently, a new possible use case for it came up, prompting me to secure full ownership of the Rstory token and brand. This use case, which involves city government, doesn't appear to be panning out. So now, I've got a useless token and I'm revisiting the mystical vision from whence it sprung for ideas about how to proceed.
Shared Accountability
The vision showed a monetary scheme wherein all network participants were responsible for ensuring that everyone in the network acted ethically. If someone used the token in furtherance of terrorism, for example, the offending party would be warned to stop their offensive activity. If they didn't stop, and if others within the network couldn't make them stop, then new tokens would be issued. These new tokens would be used to flood the market, driving the price of everybody's tokens down to near-zero. So the actions of one bad actor could trigger the destruction of value across the network.
This value destruction would be temporary. It would be a single event producing shared consequences for the network which failed to ensure that all of its participants upheld shared values. Imagine what would happen if dollars lost ninety-nine percent of their value whenever someone got caught using dollars in schemes that violated human rights. Imagine the social pressure that would be exerted to keep people from acting unethically.
The idea of 'programmable money' is becoming popular in some circles. Members of the global elite would like it to be possible for the value of an individual's money to be destroyed by the control regime while everybody else's money remains unaffected. This would make it very easy for the powers that be to engage in unethical persecution of unpopular individuals. Any monetary network that allows an authority to exercise fine-grained control over a network participant's funds creates problematic incentives.
The token network in my vision aligns incentives differently. With a hyperinflation event as the single tool available to regulate the network, all stakeholders are incentivized to make the use of this tool unnecessary. This motivates stakeholders to take responsibility for holding each other accountable to shared values before situations reach a point that warrants triggering the hyperinflation event.
Other Notable Details
My vision contained other notable details. The name Rstory seemed like an important part of it. So did a bunch of associated impressions. The slow beating of a drum. A primal color scheme. At one point, after many days without sleep, a complete Rstory ballad even came to me. I forgot this immediately upon regaining my psychological equilibrium, but this song is out there somewhere.
Even if it goes nowhere, attempting to reconcile such mysticism with the fact-based, technical world of crypto is a fun exercise. If nothing else, it makes it easier to see that money is not an individualistic concept. It's inherently social, and entirely the product of social reality. Maybe there's a place in the world for a crypto token built on this obvious truth.