How to build a self-managed business: formulating the “laws of robotics” Hamster Marketplace
The idea of a decentralized marketplace for small and medium-sized manufacturers of gadgets and electronics, formulated by PlayPad children's tablet manufacturer Denis Bulavin, resembles a dream of a tired manufacturer, to whom the genie promised good luck in all undertakings:
Contracts with retailers are kept in tight fist?
This idea, which requires the decentralization of trust itself, without which transparent and reliable self-organization of thousands of unfamiliar actors is impossible, appeared as if it were not time: when the blockchain was invented. But one thing is to successfully drive and store small data packets. And the other thing is to embed a multi-level global business into the two-dimensional structure, including such powerful areas as logistics, support and payments, while retaining its ability to function. Will it be just as comfortable for you to live instead of a house on his life-size drawing? It turns out that the answer to the marketing request of the project, similar to the Hamster marketplace, is a fundamental technological solution, implying the need to create a completely new type of management mechanism. And cryptotechnologies are not enough here. But you still need to start with a sketch on paper.
')
Isaac Asimov
Well, first of all, he is one of our most beloved science fiction writers.
And secondly, when we sat down to write down the principles on which a truly decentralized distributed business management system should operate, it quickly became clear that we were writing our own laws of robotics. Only in our case, I want to believe, there is not just every chance of surviving the application of the theory in reality, but to contribute directly to this.
Automation and decentralization of the business management process can be implemented at various levels: from surface to deep, creating a fundamentally new form of company management.
The simplest thing you can imagine is managing a company according to the principle of a joint stock company, where shareholders - manufacturers represented on the marketplace - choose the company’s management once a year, and it manages it as an ordinary business for salary and bonuses. The blockchain in this case serves as a defense against corporate fraud with voting.
At the next level of immersion in the business architecture, the blockchain can provide a reliable infrastructure for reporting. According to the newest EU directives, entries in the blockchain can be accepted as valid official documents by inspection bodies. Moreover, they should be sufficient for shareholders of the company who want to be confident in the accuracy of the data provided in the reporting by the management.
If the two points listed above are not new to one degree or another, the management of the company's budgeting, distribution of funds directly through the blockchain has not been done by any other company in the world. The blockchain is even needed here not so much as a transaction mechanism (a legal business will still not soon be able to fully function at the expense of cryptocurrency), but as a mechanism for sending and recording orders to a regular bank. Orders in the form of smart contracts allow you to further automate, speed up the process on the one hand, and guarantee a new level of reliability - on the other.
Fourth, deep as a limb in the movie “The Beginning,” the level is direct control through the blockchain. The management of the marketplace in this case comes down to a kind of secretariat / brain trust accompanying the process of issuing proposals. And the proposals are accepted, becoming decisions, or are not accepted and remain in this limb forever by direct blockchain voting. This level is most interesting, therefore we will consider some of its principles in more detail.
The solution is the main building material of any process, any business, any system, any business. In fact, any organizational structure consists of the same solutions.
At the same time, the decision in the sense of “order”, “decree”, “order” is just one of the stages of the process, which in fact does not begin at all with the decision.
Stages of the decision:
Sounds hard? But this is only the main branch of the situation. In fact, side scenarios can be many. But just so, if we decompose the situation into components, the decision-making person in principle looks like. Simply, people make their own decisions through a centralized mechanism (unless, of course, we are not talking about the hero of the movie “Split”), so many stages of decision making are carried out immediately and imperceptibly.
In the decentralized decision-making mechanism, all problems should be broken down into the simplest possible discrete components. If the question is divided into two: paint the Kremlin green and exile 10,000 more people into the camps, then you need to divide it into two - otherwise it will be impossible to understand how the community would vote for which option the votes were actually given.
Therefore, complete decentralization does not mean a referendum every four, but thousands and millions of micro-votes, which make up the decision-making of a company.
However, this should not reduce the activity of the system participants to an endless flow of micromanagement. There are several measures, the combination of which reduces the managerial burden on each participant in the system to a level that is not just acceptable, but desired.
The combination of these five factors: detailing the problems, reasonableness of the system of checks and balances, customization of the degree of individual participation in solving problems, irreversibility of records in the blockchain, and the use of AI — make it possible to form a self-management mechanism as efficient, democratic, unobtrusive and yet truly decentralized. In a sense, we are talking about creating a collective mind, where each participant in the system is a neuron, and each discrete query is an electrical impulse.
It’s not so difficult to work out the principles of the decentralized control mechanism. It is difficult - it is to set it up, to create a perfectly balanced system from all sides, which would not have a single thread sticking out - not a single chain of actions that would terminate the unfinished one. For this you need:
Moreover, one neuronet should generate problem scenarios, and another one should help close the discovered holes and vulnerabilities. At the same time, an ideally balanced system will be protected not only from internal failures, based on accidental or deliberate exploitation of missing vulnerabilities - it must also be to some extent resistant to the outside. Probably, no algorithms will protect against nuclear war or mass executions, but, at a minimum, the system must be sufficiently stable to maintain controllability and independence in the event of local blackouts, the Internet, or attempts by hostile takeovers by other companies.
Because at that moment, when the system of decentralized marketplace management Hamster is fully configured, launched and the platform goes under the management of it, there will be no going back. It is impossible to turn the stuffing back - and you can't just erase the record from the blockchain.
But then, if the project succeeds, its result - the system of decentralized control on the blockchain and with AI elements - will be much larger and more significant than the marketplace itself. Because the application of such a mechanism would be almost more than the blockchain itself - from any associations of people to managing entire states. Fiction writers, futurists, crypto enthusiasts, and simply anarchists have always dreamed of working mechanisms of direct democracy, for example. But such a thing will never be created by the state or for the state - the “ stationary gangster ” has no motivation to completely give up power.
But from business, especially trade - such a decision may well come. And the Hamster Marketplace team has every chance to be among the first - if you support us in this.
Hamster Marketplace launches a crowdfunding campaign this fall.
The sale of tokens will allow financing both marketing expenses for promoting marketplace and promotion of sales on it, as well as all the necessary research and development to create an autonomously and reliably operating mechanism of decentralized self-government.
The tokens, in turn, will be part of the architecture of the site, which can be used to pay for the use of Hamster Marketplace’s own resources:
Right now, however, do not need to do anything. Just leave your mail on the ICO Hamster Marketplace website, so as not to miss the registration dates for participation in the ICO. You can also subscribe to our channel in Telegram or go to our telegram group to get first-hand information.
Contracts with retailers are kept in tight fist?
- And let's make your marketplace, online and for your audience
Tired of fighting with your elbows for the same shelves with the majors, selling 200 times more devices per month than you do in a year?
- So, we sell only niche electronics and gadgets
It is impossible to emerge from the streams of rubbish with Ali so cheap that it does not matter if it is trash?
- Then we will have only unique products, not “sort of, but 20 times cheaper”
Is Amazon’s commission more expensive than the margin in any of your dreams?
- So, the marketplace should work without profit, so that its services cost exactly as much as it cost to render them
But who will manage it then?
- Yes, we, vendors, manage and will
By the way, if you are a vendor, and find out your headache - please answer a few questions in this Google-form .
- So, we sell only niche electronics and gadgets
It is impossible to emerge from the streams of rubbish with Ali so cheap that it does not matter if it is trash?
- Then we will have only unique products, not “sort of, but 20 times cheaper”
Is Amazon’s commission more expensive than the margin in any of your dreams?
- So, the marketplace should work without profit, so that its services cost exactly as much as it cost to render them
But who will manage it then?
- Yes, we, vendors, manage and will
By the way, if you are a vendor, and find out your headache - please answer a few questions in this Google-form .
This idea, which requires the decentralization of trust itself, without which transparent and reliable self-organization of thousands of unfamiliar actors is impossible, appeared as if it were not time: when the blockchain was invented. But one thing is to successfully drive and store small data packets. And the other thing is to embed a multi-level global business into the two-dimensional structure, including such powerful areas as logistics, support and payments, while retaining its ability to function. Will it be just as comfortable for you to live instead of a house on his life-size drawing? It turns out that the answer to the marketing request of the project, similar to the Hamster marketplace, is a fundamental technological solution, implying the need to create a completely new type of management mechanism. And cryptotechnologies are not enough here. But you still need to start with a sketch on paper.
')
Isaac Asimov
But where is Isaac Asimov?
Well, first of all, he is one of our most beloved science fiction writers.
And secondly, when we sat down to write down the principles on which a truly decentralized distributed business management system should operate, it quickly became clear that we were writing our own laws of robotics. Only in our case, I want to believe, there is not just every chance of surviving the application of the theory in reality, but to contribute directly to this.
By the way, Isaac was an absolute determinist, if you remember his cycle “The Foundation”: that’s something, and he would have definitely approved the idea of a self-governing system without outside interference.
Start digging
Automation and decentralization of the business management process can be implemented at various levels: from surface to deep, creating a fundamentally new form of company management.
The simplest thing you can imagine is managing a company according to the principle of a joint stock company, where shareholders - manufacturers represented on the marketplace - choose the company’s management once a year, and it manages it as an ordinary business for salary and bonuses. The blockchain in this case serves as a defense against corporate fraud with voting.
At the next level of immersion in the business architecture, the blockchain can provide a reliable infrastructure for reporting. According to the newest EU directives, entries in the blockchain can be accepted as valid official documents by inspection bodies. Moreover, they should be sufficient for shareholders of the company who want to be confident in the accuracy of the data provided in the reporting by the management.
If the two points listed above are not new to one degree or another, the management of the company's budgeting, distribution of funds directly through the blockchain has not been done by any other company in the world. The blockchain is even needed here not so much as a transaction mechanism (a legal business will still not soon be able to fully function at the expense of cryptocurrency), but as a mechanism for sending and recording orders to a regular bank. Orders in the form of smart contracts allow you to further automate, speed up the process on the one hand, and guarantee a new level of reliability - on the other.
Fourth, deep as a limb in the movie “The Beginning,” the level is direct control through the blockchain. The management of the marketplace in this case comes down to a kind of secretariat / brain trust accompanying the process of issuing proposals. And the proposals are accepted, becoming decisions, or are not accepted and remain in this limb forever by direct blockchain voting. This level is most interesting, therefore we will consider some of its principles in more detail.
How decisions are made
The solution is the main building material of any process, any business, any system, any business. In fact, any organizational structure consists of the same solutions.
At the same time, the decision in the sense of “order”, “decree”, “order” is just one of the stages of the process, which in fact does not begin at all with the decision.
Stages of the decision:
- Identify the problem. The solution is the answer, but the answer needs a question. And the question - the reason to ask it. Solving a nonexistent problem is like multiplying by zero. Nevertheless, in any kind of human activity there are always amateurs and even professionals to parasitize on the lacunae of communication, creating the appearance of vigorous activity where there is nothing to do at all. Any participant in the decentralized management system or even an outsider can pose a problem if one of the participants approves the incoming message.
- Validation problems. In any system of direct democracy there will be a certain percentage of “uncertain” requests: “Walking along the corridor of the office, I saw that the walls were painted in two different colors. Is it a bug or a feature? ”Automation of the control process narrows the space for such“ creativity ”, because the machine needs an algorithm. And the algorithm requires a clear look at the problem, including the criteria for its presence and assessment of the risk factors involved. If the person who identified the problem did not do this, it falls on the shoulders of the community. Of course, the many thousands of participants do not need to check the “complaints and proposals box” together. The system can randomly distribute it to some part - for example, 1% of the participants, who in each case are a validation commission, deciding whether or not to take action. Thus, each specific participant in the system sees no more than 1% of incoming requests.
- Request formation. Well, there is a problem: the validation commission confirmed that you didn’t dream. You analyzed it, estimated the risks. It's time to decide what's next: what to do with this problem and why? In theory, the wish is formed at the stage of setting tasks. But this is not necessary - because it is a separate stage in the decision-making process, which means that in a decentralized system, it also inevitably passes through the collegial process. The problem is already shared, when any participant in the mechanism can:
- to clarify the identity of the problem (which department should solve it);
- to offer the desired level result: “And let's repaint! And let's move! And let's demand lower rents! ”
In the latter case, the quorum needed to make a decision may already be more significant: up to 5% of the participants in the system, depending on which departments were proposed as responsible for the decision. For example, it is unlikely that setting a task for the content department to correct a typo on the site page requires acceptance of more than 1% of the system’s participants or 2-3 votes in absolute terms. - The department assigned to this problem in most cases should have the right to accept the problem - either send it for revision in the form of calling at the right level - for example, the second, if re-validation of the fact of the problem is required, or at step 3 if revision of the goal is required by adding your comments.
- One of the departments of the decentralized system should be the department of arbitration, which, for example, would solve situations where the designated department infinitely bounces the problem back.
- The functions of arbitration should include both the possibility of forcibly assigning a problem, and taking the question of trust to the team of a particular department for a general vote.
Moreover, since we are talking about a distributed decentralized system, arbitration as a mechanism is not even obliged to have a permanent composition. Each time, the most trusted participants in the system who have agreed to perform their “jury functions” from time to time (and even the periodicity with which they agree to this) can be invited to it randomly, say. - Analysis of options. Any problem has at least two solutions, one of which is not to solve it. And if you decide - the number of ways this can multiply to infinity. When the problem is identified and the goal is indicated, the designated department proceeds to the analysis of how to solve it. For example, if the problem is “to buy a computer of a specific model,” it is the responsibility of the department to select the right offers and, quite possibly, even the bargaining process.
Multi-level problems, such as hiring an employee, can be broken down by departments (in this case, by personnel issues, or by a department that needs an employee) into intermediate steps with voting. For example, first defining the terms of reference. Then - coordination with the community of payment terms.
- Decision-making. The final element of the solution. The table is selected, the employee is found - the community must say "yes" or "no", "hire" or "refuse". The final solution is distinguished from the intermediate stages of problem acceptance by the “close task” option. If the voting member of the system believes that the solution for which he votes solves the problem identified in step 1, then he notes “close the task”. If more than 50% of those who voted in the same way as he noted the same checkbox, then, if they make a decision, the problem also automatically closes.
Sounds hard? But this is only the main branch of the situation. In fact, side scenarios can be many. But just so, if we decompose the situation into components, the decision-making person in principle looks like. Simply, people make their own decisions through a centralized mechanism (unless, of course, we are not talking about the hero of the movie “Split”), so many stages of decision making are carried out immediately and imperceptibly.
In the decentralized decision-making mechanism, all problems should be broken down into the simplest possible discrete components. If the question is divided into two: paint the Kremlin green and exile 10,000 more people into the camps, then you need to divide it into two - otherwise it will be impossible to understand how the community would vote for which option the votes were actually given.
Therefore, complete decentralization does not mean a referendum every four, but thousands and millions of micro-votes, which make up the decision-making of a company.
However, this should not reduce the activity of the system participants to an endless flow of micromanagement. There are several measures, the combination of which reduces the managerial burden on each participant in the system to a level that is not just acceptable, but desired.
- Different levels of problem solving require different degree of involvement of participants. The smallest tasks may require the approval of any two participants. If the system has, say, 10,000 participants with the right to vote, then this means that each participant will come across no more than one five thousandth of such minor issues.
- Different types of problem solving do not require the work of permanent teams. Different areas of work - the same arbitration - can be closed by a one-time selected team.
- Tasks that can be solved by algorithms - should be solved by algorithms. The principle of splitting any problem into the smallest possible steps allows us to clearly categorize any issue. And if it meets 100% of the criteria for the one for which there is already an approved protocol for the decision, then it is solved by the system automatically, without involving the participants.
- Rating systems, ratings and self-determination of participants will make the distribution of issues to a vote even more effective.
- And the system for determining the level of participation desired in management ensures that a decentralized management mechanism will never invite a participant to vote in a decision that he is not interested in. It should always be possible to determine the category or level of importance of the task for which the participant does not wish to skip voting. And absolutely indifferent participants can completely completely disable requests for participation in the vote, giving the fate of the project at the mercy of other participants.
- Plant to decide AI. Do not forget that the blockchain is not the most impressive invention of the last decade. Self-learning neural networks - a breakthrough is much more ambitious and meaningful. Should developers of the Hamster Marketplace decentralization system ignore it? Of course not. Each participant in the control system will have access to the neural network, which it will be able to delegate to the decision of certain categories of issues, setting up, for example, making decisions based on an analysis of their own decisions or on the basis of an analysis of the results of general voting.
The combination of these five factors: detailing the problems, reasonableness of the system of checks and balances, customization of the degree of individual participation in solving problems, irreversibility of records in the blockchain, and the use of AI — make it possible to form a self-management mechanism as efficient, democratic, unobtrusive and yet truly decentralized. In a sense, we are talking about creating a collective mind, where each participant in the system is a neuron, and each discrete query is an electrical impulse.
Testing, testing and testing again
It’s not so difficult to work out the principles of the decentralized control mechanism. It is difficult - it is to set it up, to create a perfectly balanced system from all sides, which would not have a single thread sticking out - not a single chain of actions that would terminate the unfinished one. For this you need:
- build a prototype system;
- drive through billions of combinations of possible development scenarios.
Moreover, one neuronet should generate problem scenarios, and another one should help close the discovered holes and vulnerabilities. At the same time, an ideally balanced system will be protected not only from internal failures, based on accidental or deliberate exploitation of missing vulnerabilities - it must also be to some extent resistant to the outside. Probably, no algorithms will protect against nuclear war or mass executions, but, at a minimum, the system must be sufficiently stable to maintain controllability and independence in the event of local blackouts, the Internet, or attempts by hostile takeovers by other companies.
Because at that moment, when the system of decentralized marketplace management Hamster is fully configured, launched and the platform goes under the management of it, there will be no going back. It is impossible to turn the stuffing back - and you can't just erase the record from the blockchain.
But then, if the project succeeds, its result - the system of decentralized control on the blockchain and with AI elements - will be much larger and more significant than the marketplace itself. Because the application of such a mechanism would be almost more than the blockchain itself - from any associations of people to managing entire states. Fiction writers, futurists, crypto enthusiasts, and simply anarchists have always dreamed of working mechanisms of direct democracy, for example. But such a thing will never be created by the state or for the state - the “ stationary gangster ” has no motivation to completely give up power.
But from business, especially trade - such a decision may well come. And the Hamster Marketplace team has every chance to be among the first - if you support us in this.
Crowdfunding for marketplace
- To finance the creation and marketplace as a working business that solves the problems of small and medium-sized manufacturers of niche gadgets and electronics;
- as well as to ensure the possibility of developing and testing the mechanisms of decentralized self-management of the platform by the manufacturers of the products represented therein,
Hamster Marketplace launches a crowdfunding campaign this fall.
The sale of tokens will allow financing both marketing expenses for promoting marketplace and promotion of sales on it, as well as all the necessary research and development to create an autonomously and reliably operating mechanism of decentralized self-government.
The tokens, in turn, will be part of the architecture of the site, which can be used to pay for the use of Hamster Marketplace’s own resources:
- vendors will be able to use them to pay for internal promotional and promotion tools, saving fiat money;
- buyers will have access to limited stocks, offers and early access to both the goods and the platform itself before it goes into the open beta.
Right now, however, do not need to do anything. Just leave your mail on the ICO Hamster Marketplace website, so as not to miss the registration dates for participation in the ICO. You can also subscribe to our channel in Telegram or go to our telegram group to get first-hand information.
PS If you are a vendor, please participate in our small research .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/338724/
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