Cypherpunks Guide to Forking Society

This concept of a distributed collective of individuals coming together online to create and build together is starting to manifest in many places on the internet. Some examples include MetaGame, 1Hive, MetaCartel, CryptoVoxels, and others. MetaGame has the goal of evolving beyond a digital coop to a fully functional decentralized society with physical “hubs” distributed across the globe.

In order to build a successful “digital nation state” that’s globally distributed, it all boils down to a “massive multiplayer online coordination problem” where the incentives and game-theory need to be aligned in a way that drives the system towards some “ideal state”.

Our present society is far from being in an ideal state and trying to fix those problems is like trying to re-write a centuries old codebase written by millions of devs most of which are dead. The best we can do is try to refactor bits and pieces of it to bring it up to modern standards, but at the end of the day it will always be built on an obselete foundation. The only way to escape it is to start from scratch.

The Octalysis Framework for Gamification

A really good example of people effectively creating their own societies from scratch is video games, specifically MMORPGs. Games do an incredible job at coordinating a ton of people in a complex, multidimensional, digital first environment, and they do this through intelligent game design and game theory. The players who perform the best are the ones who understand the “meta” (most-effective-tactic-available) of the game and can use their information asymmetry to their advantage.

In order to make the game fun, engaging and fair for all the players, game designers have to continuously tune the “balance” of the game so that the meta isn’t too overpowered. Otherwise, you end up with a game where most players are having a really bad time because the overpowered players have the game rigged in their favour.

Real life is also a game, and like all games there’s a meta, but the current meta of our society is one that optimizes for maximum profit and GDP at the expense of pretty much everything else. Unlike video games, we don’t have any mechanism to directly tune the balance of the game — even if we did the centralized nature of out society would lead to the people in power abusing it to give themselves an even bigger advantage. Therefore, any such system needs to be decentralized in order to work.

Web 1.0 (2000s) — Single player information sharing
Web 2.0 (2010s)— Multiplayer information sharing
Web 3.0 (2020s)— Multiplayer information + value sharing

The Internet made it easy to coordinate information at a global scale.
Ethereum makes it easy to coordinate value at a global scale.

Credit: Virgil Griffith #FREEVIRGIL

With the advent of Ethereum, we now have an unprecedented arena for playing cooperative games (if you’re going to click any link, this is the most important one). With Ethereum, real life can start operating like a video game where we have the tooling to directly encode and manipulate the incentive fabric.

Interoperable store of structured data can be built on https://ceramic.network

The purpose of MetaGame is to use these powerful tools to design an “MMORPG for real life”, an operating system for a decentralized digital society. Instead of trying to refactor the codebase of society to use Ethereum, we can just create a new one that’s designed from the ground up to be “crypto-native”, one that’s unified in the cloud but distributed across the world. Being relatively small and without legacy baggage makes it much more adaptable and agile than mainstream society — a “Game B” of sorts.

Over the past 12 months in MetaGame we’ve been figuring out the base “building blocks” we need to realize this vision. We have a strong culture of dog-fooding with everything we build; we are using the tools we create to better coordinate our ability to create the tools. It’s a game to build the game, hence “MetaGame”.

The nature of a decentralized organization brings with it a lot of unique challenges that you don’t see very often in traditional centralized / hierarchical organizations. Here’s some of common problems that they have to tackle:

• How to herd and coordinate people without a chain of command
• How to pool resources together in a trustless / decentralized way
• How to measure the impact of people’s contributions
• How to distribute resources fairly and efficiently
• How to allocate governance power and execute governance decisions

Here’s what we have so far in MetaGame to address these problems:

• An “XP” system to autonomously and retroactively measure the impact of contributions and track player progression (using SourceCred)
• Our own currency (SEED) being distributed based on players’ XP — a scarce resource backed by past contributions, not a promise of future work
• Fully decentralized governance and treasury dashboard controlled by SEED holders, Conviction Voting as a better mechanism for continuous decision making.
• A Wiki to document the what/when/why/how of MetaGame and onboard new players
• Two physical hubs (Spain + Colorado) where any MetaGame player with enough XP is free to live and work on MetaGame in exchange for 10% of the XP that they earn going to the player(s) that own the property
• Universal Player Profiles / Identity system (using 3Box/IDX)
• An autonomous SEED exchange for people to buy/sell SEEDs so active players can pay their rent from their earnings and passive supporters can accumulate SEEDs.
• Discord + Discourse + GitHub for communication + collaboration

Everything was built from day 1 by a chaotic conglomeration of a bunch of strangers on the Internet with a laptop, many of them being anon.

The XP Graph

The lifeblood of it all is the XP system which uses a modified version of the PageRank algorithm (used by Google to rank search results) to build a graph of all the interactions that happen within the game. Then, we can decide as a community what nodes create value for MetaGame and “mint XP” on them which gets back-propagated to everything and everyone that helped make it happen. Learn more about how it works here.

The result is an autonomous system that does a very good job at aligning long term incentives, one where the “meta” is to collaborate instead of compete and where the players that have the most impactful contributions get the most reward. The best part is that no one has to negotiate their compensation or argue about who’s being overpaid and underpaid, everyone just focuses on doing the best work because that’s directly correlated to how much XP and SEED you earn. This outcome-based approach also makes it extremely capital efficient since it’s only allocated retroactively to things that have had a proven impact instead of having to guesstimate it upfront and waste capital on things that didn’t actually generate value.

This post mostly serves as a high level overview of why and how a digital nation state could manifest and the existing progress we’ve made at MetaGame. There’s lots more to dive into for future posts:

• Playbook for low-maintenance permaculture based villages in remote locations around the world and the “digital passport” for travelling between them
• How to decouple from fiat currency while keeping the economy alive
• How to connect instances of these digital states together and model value flows / incentive alignment between them
• Standardizing and sharing as much of the tooling and learnings as possible: Full Open Source mentality
• At the same time, how we can diverge and experiment with different angles in parallel
• Deeper dive into the workings of SourceCred / XP System
• What a future society that runs on SourceCred looks like
• Deeper dive into the game theory / economics of the system and why it aligns the right incentives for the highest net positive outcome for all participants