A gift economy is defined:A gift economy, gift culture or gift exchange is a mode of exchange where valuables are not sold, but rather given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards.[1] In contrast to a barter economy or a market economy, social norms and custom govern gift exchange, rather than an explicit exchange of goods or services for money or some other commodity.[2]
Since crowd funds, crowd sales, and similar mechanisms have legal issues a way around that is to form a gift economy and gift culture. This thread is about how a gift economy can be formed around Bitshares so that reputation and generosity combined with smart contract technical functionality can result in a system which resists fraud while providing rewards for those who give.
Gift economies are built around the concept of the non-market exchange. An example of one of the first P2P apps to make use of a gift economy can be found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiFTDescription:
A gift is the transfer of a good without an explicit specification of a quid
pro quo. The good can be a tangible thing or money, but it also can be
intangible, as in the form of time, attention, information or knowledge. A
present is a gift and so may be the attention that one person ‘gives’ another,
or the time that a person donates to an art institute as a volunteer. Usually
a gift entails reciprocity: the giver expects something in return for the gift
given. Friends expect friendly gestures in return for their friendly gestures;
donors expect some form of appreciation or another; and those who
give presents at Christmas expect to receive presents in return. The key to
understanding the phenomenon of the gift is the nature of the reciprocity
involved.
BitTorrent is also a gift economy if it's set up so that the more you share the more you can receive from others. There is no promise, no guarantee, nothing more than the value of reciprocity enforced by social cultural conditioning and source code. So it is possible to establish a social contract which tracks the donations a person makes to certain projects and then give them a reputation rating according to that reputation of being a "giver". The opposite reputation would be that of a "taker". Givers could be encouraged to give by being rewarded unexpectedly by other givers in the form of gifts.
Psychological details:The psychology behind it is the psychology of the variable ratio reward schedule. This mechanism would socially condition all participants into becoming "givers" over time rather than "takers" because the consequences of being a giver would reveal that "givers" have a higher probability of winning.
In sociology, social capital is the expected collective or economic benefits derived from the preferential treatment and cooperation between individuals and groups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capitalTechnical mechanisms of enforcement:Reciprocity could also be enforced in smart contracts which reward "givers" more than "takers" anonymously. Smart contracts could figure out how to regulate in favor of promoting reciprocity without any "investors" or promises made by any human beings. Just as in Bitcoin miners just expect that the reward schedule is determined by math, with smart contracts it could be something similar but the reward could be designed to go to whoever donated the most to specific charities, entities, or groups of individuals.
If it is a charity it would require that developers of DACs form non-profits from now own. Invictus could become an NGO. The NGO would be staffed by volunteers but those volunteers could be given gifts, perks, discounts, vouchers, etc so that it becomes a coveted role.
I was encouraged to think about this by Stan, Bytemaster, and by the individuals in the community who have been concerned about the actions of the SEC. Rather than let the SEC dictate free speech it would be better to simply stop thinking of DACs as "corporations", to stop having "crowd sales" "crowd funds" or anything like this, and to accept that all donations as well as the possible rewards in consequences are gifts. This means not every donation would result in a gift reward but since it's good for anyone's reputation to return a favor to a friend it would end up resulting in positive outcomes in situations where everyone is honest.
DACs probably could best be called decentralized autonomous cooperatives. The organizations which build them could be non-profits or NGOs. The individuals who participate in them could be "friends" and the network a F2F network with decentralized identity and reputation for security.