tyaga.org

I have been updating an earlier version of an accounting system from last year. The upcoming version will have built-in support for Prowl and the ocaup model. The user interface will be SMS, email and HTTP-based. 

Also planned for this quarter, the Prowl report structure will be revised to an HTML rather than plain-text representation, in order to use head-metadata tags for information such as encoding, language and record delimiters. The move to HTML representation is just one of the many changes planned for Prowl version 0.2. 

An aspect of Prowl record publication that was not explained in an earlier post concerns the authentication of transactors. When transactors do not belong to the same currency community, such as in ocaup inter-entity trade, the ability of a transactor to ‘publish’ a record in a certain domain implies membership in that domain, with the domain name being equivalent to the currency brand in Prowl. Thus, the authentication of brand membership is simplified, without requiring a centralized brand-membership registry or intensive authentication schemes. This publish-to-authenticate scheme is incorporated in the various PaCT sequences, which also includes reporter notarization to help deter fraudulent repudiation of published records.  

I have revised the hastily drafted game-design representation of tyaga’s goals. In reviewing the simplified “game rules”, I was reminded of the standards that underlie the success of the World Wide Web. The web standards, listed in order of importance by Tim Berners-Lee, include the URI, HTTP and HTML. In other words, the Web is primarily defined by the use of URIs, a standard that is easily taken for granted while HTTP and HTML receive more attention.

It was also no accident that URIs use the Domain Naming System, which was designed to be globally scalable and was already widely supported. For the same reasons, Prowl also specifies the use of domain names to simplify the implementation of the similarly crucial concept of Independent Currency Brands (ICBs). The use of separate registries would have added unnecessary complexity and led to collisions as more market entities establish independent currency brands.  

After the concept of ICB, the second-most important design aspect in Prowl relates to accounting models. Just as web and gopher clients offered interoperability in each other’s early protocol versions, Prowl is also designed to understand different market transaction requirements and effects on account balances. For example, would transactors have to be members of the same community to transact (mutual-credit, cc model)? Would the ‘buyer’ accrue debt which would have to be settled later (lender-borrower model)? By default, Prowl reporters are expected to support the cross-verification of OCAUP-based transactions, where the buyer entity’s unused expense and seller entity’s unused revenue budgets decrease by the same amount. The default notary support for OCAUP is similar to the default support for HTTP in web browsers.

The third-most important design aspect in Prowl relates to the representation of transaction information. Prowl specifies default published record syntax, report structure and query-response conventions. However, Prowl should support other representations as they emerge. As inter-regional trade in ledger-based currency grows, Prowl would need to support currency activity representations in different dialects. 

The game-design representation also shows tyaga’s infrastructure building blocks as a list of ‘game equipment’. Through Prowl standards and PaCT payment sequence, establishing and using independent currency brands should become simpler and more fun. 

I have just uploaded a heavily revised OCAUP document. The latest revision includes simple tables and attached illustrations. The main difficulty has been, and continues to be, finding appropriate terminology that adheres to common accounting language while purposely avoiding terms that might cause confusion with conventional interpretations.

At the moment, the most suitable terminology relates to ”budgets”. Ledger-based currency may be viewed as unused entity budgets that are periodically planned and dynamically reported as inter-entity transactions occur. OCAUP may be used to model and track how well an entity regulates against its self-determined limits. Entities that demonstrate effective self-regulation develop reputable currency brands, which should translate to better market access.  

The illustrated OCAUP currency activity and journal entry examples should help explain the “scoring rules/system” that tyaga is trying to establish. Speaking of scoring rules, I also drafted a game-design representation of tyaga’s information systems goals. The OCAUP document also has an attached table that compares mutual-credit accounting systems with OCAUP-based designs.