Amoveo White Paper 2

The point of this white paper is to show what all the other blockchains are getting wrong, to give a plausible explanation for why we think Amoveo might be able to beat them all. The core mistake that the blockchain community is making today is that they think cool features will make the money good. They think that being more fungible, or having better smart contracts, or better markets, or more scalability, will cause the money to be good. The blockchain community is mistaken in their understanding of what money even is.

What is money?

One way to see money, is as an extention of a historical process. Many people mistakenly think that money is about storing wealth efficiently, or making barter more efficient by solving the coincidence of wants. The hard reality is that money is more akin to slavery and serfdom.

The reason that slavery became such a successful institution historically is that societies with slavery were able to organize their population on a large scale. Societies that can organize outcompeted the societies that could not organize. Slavery allowed the upper class to control everyone else. The upper class could organize the people's labor, to coordinate on big projects. Like conquoring neighbors.

Eventually, serfdom was found to be a more efficient alternative to slavery. Serfdom comes with the benefit that laborers have a little more individual rights and individual property, which incentivized them to work a little harder. Societies with serfdom were able to produce better soldiers with better equipment. This allowed the serfdom societies to outcompete the slavery societies. The transition from slavery to serfdom in Europe relates to the collapse of Roman society, and its gradual replacement with feudal society.

Then, modern money replaced serfdom as the mechanism by which the upper class can exercise its power to coordinate people's labor. Money made laborers feel like they had more control over their own lives, since they choose who to work for. Laborers end up working even harder under a money system, than they would have as serfs. People in the upper class had access to a wider range of laborers under the money system. Money based societies could produce better soldiers with better equipment in comparison to serfdom based societies. The transition from serfdom to money in Europe relates to the Emancipation reform of 1861 in Russia, and the August Decrees of 1789 during the French revolution.

Money's primary purpose, the reason that societies with money outcompete those that lack money, is because money allows coordination on a large scale. With money, the upper class can coordinate society to do large scale violence and conquor neighbors. Money is currently more effective at this than slavery or serfdom.

How does money help the upper class coordinate the lower class?

Land owners usually want to have at least some leverage on their properties. That means, instead of needing to pay the entire price of their property up front when they purchase it, they can instead pay it little by little over time. People who want to purchase property appreciate this because the money they earn from the property can help pay for the cost of owning the property.

There are many ways to give the land owners the leverage that they want. There can be a tax on the land. There can be a tax on some activities done on the land. There can be a tax on the products or service that the land enables. A very flexible option is to have banks that make mortgage contracts with land owners, and then the banks pay a tax on money they earned from the mortgage, or the bank pays interest on a loan from the central bank. According to Henry George, the most efficient way to structure this leverage is with something he calls a Land Value Tax.

However you choose to give the land owners the leverage that they want, you end up creating a money-sink in the economy. Using the land requires paying some money as a tax. The tax takes the money out of circulation. As long as there is a constant stream of money leaving the economy, then there are necessarily going to be people who don't have enough money to make ends meet. That means there is a constant stream of people who need to do labor for money to survive. So, the people in the upper class have a constant endless stream of people willing to labor for them.

This leverage contract, what it is doing is splitting up the financial beneficiary of the land from the person who has physical control of the land. If you can physically control the land, without needing to financially own 100% of the land, then that makes it cheaper to get access to the land you need to start your business. This can only work if there is some third party who is willing to own the land, without having any physical control over it. In money systems, this third party is usually either the upper class, the government, or the central bank. In Amoveo, holders of VEO are in this position. When the people who have physical possession of the land pay their tax, that tax is paid to holders of VEO. Holding VEO is the same as being a partial owner in all the land that is registered in the Amoveo land registry.

What does cryptocurrency lack?

In order to be a good money, cryptocurrency needs to be able to produce a stream of labor for the upper class. The size of this stream of labor is proportional to the size of the money-sinks built into the economy. The money-sink needs to be enforceable by blockchain, and the participants in the money-sink need to do so voluntarily. In order to outcompete fiat money and gold, we need our money-sink to be even bigger than the one that could have been produced under the fiat or gold systems.

The only kind of mechanism that we know of that works this way is a land ownership mechanism. Land owners voluntarily want to participate in the money-sink, because it gives them more leverage. A land registry can be contained in a blockchain's consensus space.

What about land owners who don't want leverage?

The leverage is voluntary. When you purchase your land, you can decide to not have leverage by simultaniously purchasing enough VEO such that the tax you pay on your land is equal to the tax you get paid as a VEO owner. By choosing how much VEO they hold, every land owner can choose exactly the amount of leverage they have. This is similar to how in fiat money systems, banks can make mortgage contracts with property owners to optimize the leverage on an individual basis.

More about Amoveo

read more about Amoveo in our old white paper

Amoveo has lots of good tech. If a different blockchain had better tech, we could just copy their code.

But, tech and features are not the key battlegrounds. Rather, becoming the first blockchain land registry is the most important goal right now.