“Note: The Dev Log will return next week and we’ll be looking at testing time in truffle + testrpc. I’m on vacation this week. Enjoy this brief history post in its stead.”

This week is the three year anniversary of the concept behind Catallax. Every year my family and I take a retreat into the east Texas woods to relax and rejuvenate. This place is great and there is a ton of child care so that parents can reconnect and have some time to step away from the children.

Three years ago I had a really great confluence of influencers. We had just found out that our third child was on the way and I was deep in the weeds with Piketty, Fukuyama, and wrestling them through the lenses of Alexander.

I had been thinking for a long time about how money fell short of all that I thought it could be. I distinctly remember drawing a dollar with arrows over it going both directions in the early 2000s. I was introduced to Kevin Phillips’ History of the American Rich and I banged my head against the problem a good bit, but never came up with much.

In 2009 I discovered Gesell and his natural money concept. That discovery really clicked a few things into place and there was something about the 0% interest assumptions that I knew was going to be important. I wrote a piece of fan fiction about one of the big cell phone makers launching a natural money to fix the economic crisis. It never really went anywhere.

It wasn't until June of 2014 that Bitcoin and the Blockchain came into the picture and clicked all the pieces into place.

Lessig's mayday PAC was flailing and the prospect of never being able to fix money in politics led to a deeper question of how can we fix money. Piketty showing the data of capital concentration magnified many of the principles that I'd been ruminating on since I'd read Phillips a decade and a half earlier. On a morning walk, a number of ideas were elevated into RAM out of the cold storage of my brain. Bitcoin's idea of a public ledger of all transactions was a key piece in the puzzle. Before seeing and understanding that this was a tech that could actually live in the world Catallax would not have been possible.

It wasn't until later that year that I got into the meat of the Bitcoin tech and realized that all the pieces I needed were already there, but the summer of 2014 caused me to start writing the pattern language found in my book Immortality.

I tried to soft launch in 2015 with a talk at the Texas Bitcoin Conference and flying to NYC to demo at the Singularity Institute's Exponential Finance. The feedback was ok, but not what I wanted. In that same season, a colleague brought a business opportunity to me that was too good to pass up. We bought a company in an unrelated field and we've been fighting the good fight trying to apply new technologies to the world of organ donation for the last two years. It has been a fun ride and we are starting to see enough light at the end of the tunnel that I can start to hand some of my responsibilities over to new employees.

I haven't been completely idle. As I've been crisscrossing the country installing software at organ centers I've been piecing together the book Immortality that lays out why I think we need this new kind of money. "Why?" Was the biggest question I received when I had tried to launch previously. Somewhere around early 2016 Robert Pirsig helped me answer that question in his amazing book Lila. I hope that if you have the “Why?” question and that the intersection of moral philosophy and economics piques your interest that will check out Immortality and that it will answers that question.

During the last two years, ethereum has really matured and now seems to be the platform that I needed all along. Now we are here in the summer of 2017 and people are paying me to write solidity contracts. The pieces of the puzzle for how Catallax can be a real thing now are starting to fall in place and the last few hurdles of regulatory compliance are being arranged. Please follow us on twitter, medium, rss, Facebook, or Reddit and come along for the ride.

Let's fix money.

Happy Birthday, Catallax!

If this is interesting to you and you'd like to see where we are going with Catallax, please pick up my book Immortality.

Donations always accepted at:

BTC: 1AAfkhg1NEQwGmwW36dwDZjSAvNLtKECas

ETH and Tokens: 0x148311c647ec8a584d896c04f6492b5d9cb3a9b0

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In 2014 Lawrence Lessig asked the Mayday PAC to help him fix ‘money in politics.’ At one point during the crowdfunded campaign, when it looked like it would not meet its goal, I asked myself the following question:

‘If we can’t fix money in politics, can we fix money?’

The exploration of this question led to my formulation of the democratic hypercapitalism framework, this site, and a speculative manuscript that I called ‘Art and Democratic Hypercapitalism.’ The initial feedback that I received led to a couple of issues:

Someone suggested that what I was really talking about was catallaxy and not capitalism so the name changed from hypercapitalism to hypercatallaxy.
People kept asking why I wanted to do something like this. What was the deep why that the what of hypercatallaxy answered. This led me to go back to the drawing board and answer this question.

The result of the second question put the entire venture into dormancy while I pursued some other business opportunities and spent my spare time trying to answer the question of ‘Why?’

I finally have my answer and it is available today in my book Immortality. The subtitle of the book is ‘An Economics and Moral Framework Toward Immortality.’ It is a study of the intersection of the moral quandary that our postmodern world finds itself in and the vast potential of the results of current scientific inquiry.

It turns out that the answer to why we need to change the kind of money we use is because it is good and right to do so. By doing so now, we can speed the oncoming reality of much longer lives. It may be too late for us to participate in this reality, but it may not be too late for our grandchildren. I try to pitch a vision of the future that is highly anti-fragile to the volatility that we face as a human race and propose a moral framework, a form of money, and a political structure to support this vision. The book mixes and extrapolates a number of ideas from Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence), Christopher Alexander(A Pattern Language and The Nature of Order), Nassim Taleb (Anti-Fragile and Fooled by Randomness), and Eliezer Yudkowsky(Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and Rationality: AI to Zombies).

The book can be purchased in physical form on Amazon here.

On kindle here(free for Kindle Unlimited Users).

And on the web here.

You can comment and ask questions on github here.

And you can view the source and history of the book on github here.

If you find something interesting and would like to help further the research please consider supporting my Patreon here.

My hope is to build out a set of smart contracts that implement the ideas in the book, publish a set of ongoing blog posts, and a podcast series where I explore these ideas with others in the community.

I take pull requests, so if you have some suggestions or corrections, please fork and submit pull requests.