Retailism
by Jango – originally shared on jango.eth.limo
WHAT
A business framework where wealth is exchanged programmatically over time from newer participants to elder ones, and where investors and customers are treated as alike participants. The “bag”, or the debt, is passed incrementally, predictably, and ceremonially from one generation of voluntary participants to the next, without need to orient towards retail extraction. Nothing is free, but things reliably tend towards being free as a network grows over time.
WHY
Retailism is neither corporate capitalism, which defines generations through the passing of a bag along Series A, B, and C investors, eventually selling to retail who continues this cycle of amplifying narratives that pump and dump bags. Nor is it corporate non-profitism, which obfuscates risks and incentives altogether.
These are both increasingly fragile forms of production within internet-native markets since their requisite delineation between capital and labor becomes fuzzy – does an AI assist you or do you assist it? Does your crypto currency work for you or do you work for it? Do your social networks serve you or do you serve them? Hard to say, on the internet the act of investing and consuming are often intertwined, and tail-risks of a network’s failure are spread throughout it.
Retailism hints at a progression of the status quo that can outcompete within a broader capitalist marketplace of -isms by empowering the producer-consumer.
WHO
Devs and communities will choose a Retailist business structure when they prefer their outcome to be oriented towards maximizing the network’s self-propagation while minimizing the growth potential of any party with privileged access and exploitable liabilites. They’ll understand their work to have value while also understanding a network’s preference to work for itself once instigated.
WHEN
The Retailism framework is too fragile to exist if a rent-seeking feduciary facilitating the handling of money and the generational handoffs is required. It can only outcompete as an encoded contract between network participants enforced by a blockchain, a recent breakthrough.
It is now possible to encode this without any new code at all through onchain protocols like Juicebox.
HOW
For each network, the framework depends on only three variables:
1. Entry tax
- How much does the cost to enter the network change from one generation to the next, and how often are generations?
- This is encodable from the Juicebox protocol by kicking off the treasury with a $TOKEN issuance rate, and using a discount rate with funding cycles to consistently decrease the issuance rate of $TOKEN forever forward, tending toward zero in quantized chunks.
2. Exit tax
- How much is the tax for opting out of the system?
- This is encodable from the Juicebox protocol using a redemption rate, leaving those $TOKEN holders who stick around with proportionally more as others redeem their $TOKENs for a chunk of the treasury.
3. Dev tax
- How will the startup work be valued? How much boosting should the network start with, favoring whom, and for how long?
- This is encodable from the Juicebox protocol using a premint of $TOKENS, and a reserved rate to devs and $TOKEN stakers effective until a future date when it is auto-removed via a scheduled funding cycle reconfiguration.
Once in motion, there is only one access point to the $TOKEN-issuing public treasury. Network fees should be routed to this alongside any future investments.
If a liquidity pool with a better price than the current issuance rate exists, inbound payments should be routed to it instead. The issuance rate dampens upward hyperbolic price manipulation of this pool by setting a price ceiling, and the redemption rate dampens downward manipulation by setting a price floor that increases with each subsequent redemption. These ensure participants a window of opportunity for each generation, with a frame that can only progress upward over time.
The rules should be as permanent as the blockchain on which they are encoded, making the Retailist framework management-free and governance-free.
There are no perfect numbers for these variables – it is impossible to know a priori what fair market values are for any particular network. A Retailist strategy should become successful if and only if its initial configuration encourages devs to dev and networks to network in peace.