Introduction to VIVA, part 4 : How do you bootstrap a new economy?

Previously we discussed what the economy of VIVA would look like once it's fully operational.
What we didn't discuss is exactly what steps are required to get the economy operational.

As you probably remember, a primary goal of our platform is to give a regular, reliable income to all participants. Very similar in most ways to basic income, but there are significant differences.

Perhaps the most significant difference is that it is participatory income.

Afterall...
No one wants to subsidize the life of someone...
...who isn't living theirs!

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If you give every person an equal income, just by right of being human, there isn't a method of ensuring that only real people get this income.
People can and will fake identities in order to gain an ever bigger slice of an ever smaller pie.

@dantheman has been speaking in favor of a a blockchain based identity system as a way to get around this problem. But it misses the point.

You can and will get sybil attacks on the system, no matter how much you try to distribute the verification power, someone's going to exploit it.

The best way to get around this is to give people an income based on the subjective value that others assign to their activities.

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Behold the Artist!

I might be willing to pay $10,000 for a painting as a way of compensating the artist for the time and effort she spent in creating the work of art. Someone else might only be willing to pay $20 for the exact same work.

But what if 20,000 people agree it's worth $20?

Should the system compensate the artist...
$20 or 20,000 x $20?

This is where Steem and VIVA differ!

Both Steem and VIVA have subjective proof of work, but the way it is implemented is completely different.

This difference is a strength of VIVA and also a strength of Steem.
These two spins on subjective proof of work provide for two seperate systems that compliment one another.

Subjective proof of work is when people collectively decide on the value that something has based on subjective or personal criteria

We all value different things differently, that's just part of the human condition.

Steem

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There are a fixed amount of funds set aside each day. The distribution of this purse is set by voting. Each vote is weighted by the stake of the person voting. Money from votes is given directly to the recipient after roughly 24hrs and again at 30 days.

VIVA

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There isn't a "fixed purse", the amount of money scales up and down with demand. Each so called "vote" is worth a $1, no matter who gives the vote. This dollar is used to acquire stake in the liquidity pool. The pool pays a daily dividend to all holders for life, based on their relative stake in the pool.

In steem terms..
All rewards are autopowered up and all accounts are in power down mode...sorta

Going back to the example of an artist...

Steem

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I have a specific number of "votes" each day. The value of each vote is dependent upon my stake. I can only vote for a single person's content once, although I can change the weight or percentage of my vote for up to 24hrs.

VIVA

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I also have a specific number of "votes" each day. If I want to, I can upvote her as often as I have votes. Each time I upvote her, she gets exactly $1, the number of votes I have is dependent entirely upon my stake. I can vote them all on a single person, or I can spread it out however I choose.

In both cases, how much the artist gets is a number directly related to my stake and my perception of the person and their content or activity.

I've used the word "votes" until now, because that's the closest thing we have to this concept in the steemit community.
In reality these are just dollars. Dollars gifted to me by the pool and I can spend them however I want and they disappear if I don't spend them.

With VIVA your spendable funds count is reset everyday at midnight UTC. This is the opposite of steem where your votes accumulate over several days.

You get these funds every day based on the fact that you have a liquidity pool account.
These are yours to give/spend, but they are not coming out of your pocket.

The liquidity pool generates this as a type of income.
You can use it to...

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• Offset your daily living expenses
• Trade for services
• Give away
• You can even give it to yourself!

Altruism is a choice you get to make and it costs you nothing!

Eitherway, with VIVA these dollars are not immediately liquid once they reach the recipient.
They give the recipient a claim in the future earnings of the pool for life.
But it is this act of spending money that belongs to the pool that maintains your right to your dividend payment.

So in a nutshell...

With VIVA there are two kinds of daily income.

1. Gift Dollars, literally a gift from the pool and it's your decision how and where to spend them. These are credited to the recipient's pool account. Think pay it forward here.

2. Dividend payments which end up in your wallet and can be spent and moved around like cash, these are always liquid.

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Pool Earnings

The pool earns it's income by being the sole source of immediate liquidity for the mints which are companies that perform the act of actually printing money. The pool has a vested interest in increasing the purchasing power parity of VIVA in a controlled and gradual fashion.

Ideally the purchasing power parity of each VIVA coin grows at a rate of 10% annually, while vX maintains an interest rate that keeps pace with the inflation index of the coin it's pegged to. This provides long term stability. Future VIVA should always be worth more than current VIVA and the easiest way to earn more future VIVA is to put VIVA you don't need in the short term, directly into the liquidity pool.

Nevertheless, whether you spend your dollars or your dividends, you are in fact spending money.
This act of spending money is what drives the economy.

But where to spend it?
This is the problem that so many cryptos run into.
They imagine that if they build a coin, that suddenly people will flock to their door to use their coin because they have some compelling new feature.

The truth is businesses absolutely do not want the additional complexity and risk of dealing in a foreign exchange market and every crypto can be thought of as an alien currency with an associated forex risk.

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Businessess need a direct path to local fiat without any delay or any hassles!
So that's what we built first!

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VIVA has partnered with our bank to offer debit MasterCards from day one.
You can order one today if you like, just send $25 SBD to @tradeqwik and an email to [email protected] with the card holder name and the address where you would like it shipped to.

Every person with funds in the liquidity pool has the option of ordering a card.
There are no daily spending limits, it is loaded monthly with your vivacoin dividend payments from the previous month.

If you'd like to jump into the VIVA liquidity pool on day 1, just order a card and the account will be linked on launch day.

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Now we have an easy way to get money out of the system, but ideally...
We want businesses to accept VIVA directly.

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To facilitate that, we built a Tier 1 card card processor that will process traditional card transactions for merchants, clearing all transactions directly to VIVA.

This works great for the merchant because we completely eliminate the risk of chargebacks and fraud from the equation if they process all their transactions in vX. We also waive the normal fees and clear everything at the industry standard of MCX spot +1%.

All merchants are banked at a nationally chartered Class A bank, but transactions clear directly on the blockchain.

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The final piece of this puzzle is that the prices of all currencies are constantly fluctuating in relation to eachother, but purchasing power parity doesn't respond to price changes nearly as fast.

For instance in 2014 the MXNUSD rate was 12:1 now it's 20:1. This has major impacts for anyone trying to conduct international trade.

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VIVA needs to be able to gateway between the fiat and crypto worlds as quickly and cheaply as possible.
However it must also hold onto a great deal of fiat and crypto so that it doesn't have to acquire new fiat on the open market as often since these types of transactions can get expensive especially in small batches. A side effect of this is that we can allow gateway activity into bitcoin, litecoin, ripple, steem etc.

The most direct and efficient way of doing that, is to provide an exchange where all funds remain in coldstorage and final daily settlement occurs once a day.

In the case of fiat, these funds should be held in individual customer subaccounts sitting at a licensed and insured bank.
In the case of crypto, these funds should be in multi-signature cold storage.

So that's what we've built.

TradeQwik
Alpha testing beings next week!
Site is down temporarily while DNS is being migrated.

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No matter who you are, TradeQwik gives you two types of accounts.

1. A multicurrency money market savings account. The money market savings account pays a variable daily interest rate depending on the demand for each currency you hold there.

2. An optional margin trading account. The margin trading account allows you to margin trade with up to 100x leverage against all supported pairs.

In order to speed processing and order matching, TradeQwik charges no trading fees at all.
Just interest for open margin positions based on length of time held and this interest rate is based on volatility in an open, fair and competitive market.

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If you think of VIVA as an economic engine, TradeQwik is the transmission.
TradeQwik puts idle funds to work immediately and this turns the wheels that move the economy.

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TradeQwik is the first VIVA Crown Holder, and a trustee of the liquidity pool.
It provides savings, trading and gateway services between the internal and external economies.

By controlling the fee structure of TradeQwik, reducing costs and hassles for merchants, we are making it seamless for business to run their business.
This is how we bootstrap the VIVA economy!

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As time goes on, TradeQwik will affiliate directly with other exchanges and banks.
What you see now is just our first tentative baby steps into the real world.

TradeQwik alpha begins Monday morning.
During this time, we will be onboarding traders who would like to trade on our platform.

This will be a dry run, meaning we credit you with $100k in mixed assets to play with.
You don't need to deposit anything and deposits will not be enabled until the start of beta.

In order to encourage traders to try our platform during alpha and encourage constructive feedback, there will be also be a competition with a leader board.
The top daily gainer each day will win 1 Crown to be given away at VIVA launch.

The person with the highest total gains over the course of testing will also win an extra crown for each day they played.

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VIVA, vX and Steem are first class citizens on TradeQwik!
But what about the ICO?

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While we're conducting the alpha and beta testing for TradeQwik, we will also be doing the ICO for VIVA.

Our ICO will be handled in 4 rounds.

We are very long on steem and believe it still has enormous potential.
Round 1 will be right here on steemit and it will be a live auction.

At ICO there will be daily batches of 100 Crowns but each day we will release 10 less coins than the previous day.
So day 1 there are 100 Crowns, day 2 there are 90 Crowns, day 3 there are 80 crowns, etc.
This will continue until there are only 10 crowns a day. We have investors we're talking to about the extra crowns, these investors aren't part of the crypto community, but the VIVA round 1 will be over with as soon as the remaining Crowns in a round are sold.

It will be a live auction with carry over pricing.

In a carry over auction, there is no advantage to waiting for the next day to bid.
The previous day's close, is the next day's open.

Rounds 2, 3 and 4 will be handled differently, but round one is probably the most interesting to steemians.

Our ICO auction is in US Dollars, and you can settle in any currency accepted by @blocktrades but...
If you settle in steem (actual steem or steem dollars), we will discount the settlement price $1 for each steem you use!!!
At current rates you can bid $100 USD and settle up with just 100 steem!

This is our gift to the steemit community, but it also serves another purpose.

100% of funds from the ICO will be used to power up the @vivacoin account.
This money will remain powered up for at least 5 years and used to upvote the blogs of VIVA developers and their families which will be kept right here on steemit.

Upvoting of developer blogs is one way we fund the software development side of VIVA, in the meantime it will hopefully put some upward pressure on the price of steem.

FYI Round 1 pricing will be used to set the floor for round 2 which will be at least 2x the price of the final round 1 close price.

ICO starts Friday Nov 18th @ 01:00AM UTC!
See you there!