You've been able to articulate this better than anyone I've spoken with yet! Great work. I love digging deep into this and really appreciate your time and feedback. We're always looking for people to tear this apart and convince us this isn't worth pursuing. Hasn't happened yet
For anyone else in the crowd: we could use your help with all the negative feedback you can muster!!
This sounds interesting; I'm-a take a crack at wrapping my brain around it. Let me know how I'm doing.
There's three-ish types of participant in this market: consumers, producers and delegates (some/all of whom might also be consumers/producers themselves).
Three-ish sounds about right - I'm not exactly sure how many separate categories there would be in the functioning system and yes, there will be overlap. I'll attempt to break down even further the attributes of each participant to help explain to myself and everyone else.
Consumers = Global population (everyone eats, everyone always will).
I believe the consumer will be motivated by at least two things (please, let me know if you can spot any additional motivations):
A) costs less than what they pay now.
B) higher quality than what they're consuming now. (In my mind this includes products grown without pesticides, has an exponential decrease in food miles + associated positive benefits for the environment,
Producers = People with space (for a grow system) AND/OR knowledge (essentially a transposition of growing more efficiently into an information technology - an asset that can be 'injected' into the system) Producers would operate a node, or nodes, of the platform. I've been envisioning that these nodes would communicate with each other and utilize machine learning to always improve upon their efficiency. Ideally, these would evolve to be autonomous systems that would pay dividends.
Delegates = Transaction confirmation specialistsConfirming your comment below - yes, these will operate just as delegates do today on the BTS to confirm transactions. HOWEVER, What I haven't been able to wrap my mind around is how to separately (or collectively) confirm transactions of the food itself. Perhaps the accounting of the food could operate as a bitAsset???
I also believe there will be:
Quality Specialist/Inspectors (much like you mention below) These people will be hired human labor that would validate food quality from a decentralized and virtual perspective.
Producers build/print/purchase/lease the equipment to grow food, which they then sell on the open market. In some ways, this is similar to how BitAssets are created / asks are posted in the BTS ecosystem now.
Exactly.
Perhaps producers are even required to "back" their real produce with digital assets as well, as a means of promising quality to the consumers (similarly to how shorts are required to post collateral to prove their eligibility for a loan?), and of course the transaction fees would be payable in FarmShares as well.
Great idea!
[sidebar: I bet producers would also compete on having the highest quality grade given by inspectors (for which there would be a secondary market). There might also be opportunities for insurance DACs for dealing with cases where food is of worse-than-advertised quality, inedible upon delivery, etc.]
I hadn't thought of that. This brings a whole new concept to the mix I'd really like to explore further. If people are selecting/ordering their food through some sort of portal (could be VR, iPhone/Android app, web portal, etc.) There must certainly be an insurance for the consumer to trust the producer, and the logistics DAC for the utmost quality.
Consumers, meanwhile, place orders (bids) on the market, specifying the maximum price and minimum quality* that they are willing to accept. Logistics would be tricky, especially depending on how anonymous the consumer wants to remain, but I bet there are creative ways to solve that problem**
Yeah definitely - we'll be focusing on robots for this, there most definitely exists the option for drones; but I also think ground-dwelling robotics provide a plethora of creative design opportunities and have a hunch these will be sorted out before the FAA regulations on the drone industry. (... I' thinking something like
sphere / ollie with a verifiable sealed container that rolls down the sidewalk)
* "quality" would be slightly complex to calculate, as the inspector's reputation would also have to be considered and could affect the maximum price/quantity that would be accepted for sale, similarly to how a claims adjuster's reputation affects the amount of claims that he can authorize to be paid out in an insurance DAC.
We believe quality may be vision system based. There will undoubtedly be certain decisions to be made via human cognition, but those decision-making 'assets of knowledge' - will have the ability to tap into the system and explore the plant matter for inspection / validation. I REALLY see VR being a massive opportunity for this.
i.e. The vision system would detect "X" defect and notify an inspector, hired by the DAC. The [trained/certified/reputable] inspector would then strap on their VR hardware and check the plants themselves to confirm / modify the status of the plants and broadcast to the network.
** opportunity to develop a logistics DAC with autonomous drones that deliver food to stealth [mailing] addresses? Perhaps the delivery is handed off to several drones along the way — like an IRL TOR..
Yes - I believe startups will form in this space to specifically target the logistics challenge. This is something I find super intriguing. I really like your notion of a physical TOR system, that is awesome!
And then delegates would secure the network in much the same way that BTS delegates do today.
Yes - again, I'm not sure yet if a separate transaction blockchain is needed for the value exchange of the BTS (or similar) vs. the transaction of the food itself.
There's still two things I'm not entirely certain about.
The first one is, "Why not just grow your own food and sell it for e.g., BitUSD?" Although, I could see some value in having a dedicated currency, especially if it is more efficient to use that over BitAssets to cover the operating costs of the market and equipment. And for sure, buying food would require a very different wallet (or at least, a very different GUI) than what you would use to buy BitGLD and such, so some kind of custom software would be beneficial.
The other thing I'm still not 100% sure I understand is how the producers' equipment is wired into the network — or indeed if that is even necessary. If I want to run my own offline aquaponics farm and sell my produce on the FoodChain (jej), I've got the FarmShares to burn, and I've got a credible inspector to vouch for the quality of my goods, why shouldn't I be able to participate in the DAC?
Or, perhaps put another way, why do I need ASICs to mine Bitcoin when I've got a perfectly good server farm at my disposal?
Not that the hardware aspect of it isn't awesome to contemplate; I just see that as something that would be separate from the DAC.
Spot on! I do think there will be separation at the choice of the producer. In fact, setting up a network right now for selling food via bitUSD would be an awesome MVP for Future Tech Farm - what do you guys think?
I'm not at all certain a dedicated currency would even be needed. The more thinking I do and the more the BitShares ecosystem develops, the more it makes sense to just use bitUSD (or equivalent).
The concept behind having the producers connected to the network is to take advantage of the collective breakthroughs in efficiencies of production. Let's say you and I are both running the exact same hardware system let's assume we're able to control every variable input for the growth process (temps, C02 concentration, light cycles, etc, etc.). You then discover a particular nutrient recipe that increases your yields by 10% and, if implemented by the rest of the network for that specific crop - would increase the worldwide efficiency by 2%. This "injection of knowledge" into the network would be rewarded proportionately by dividends, or perhaps your producer payrate would increase. Otherwise, one would be more than welcome to have a stand alone system that isn't connected to the network, they would just lose on opportunities to increase their own operating efficiencies or profited off of improving the efficiency of the network.
Thoughts?
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(1 of whom frequents these forums - I'll let him chime in if he'd like to be known)
