I’m Michael Lustig, an entrepreneur, hacker and I love thinking about how to solve real problems; I’m joining Steemit because for the first time in history, I truly feel like technology can help make the world a better place.

Hello Steem!! I am Michael Lustig and I am passionate about technology, self improvement, and in a sea of negativity and noise, trying to find real problems and figuring out ways to solve them. I have been thinking a lot over the past few months about what I feel isn’t working in society and how I think we could put together a system to help “right the ship” while ensuring that corruption, greed, and deception were ridded completely from the set of methodologies through which motivation and voting power are achieved. I think traditionally, society over the past few hundred years has thought of money as something that is called the dollar. The thinking has been that the dollar may be exchanged for goods and services, and used to pay your taxes, and used to determine penalties for misbehavior, and the more work you do, the more money you earn. The thoughts that we don’t think about are the following: “What is money?” “Why do we use the dollar?”, “Who determines the value of the dollar?” While each of these questions comes with volumes and volumes of research and analysis attached to them, the short answer to the last question is that the market determines the value for the dollar, and transitively work done to earn dollars. The advent of the Blockchain and the subsequent boom of cryptocurrencies has shed light on the fact that value for work and goods can be expressed in many different forms. While there are certainly bad actors in the cryptocurrency space, I believe projects such as Steemit, Cardano, and similar are truly looking for how to extract real, tangible benefits from the revolutionary technology of decentralized ledgers and digital scarcity. However, we can continue to improve exponentially upon the concepts of rewarding curation with value and voting stake. The “Proof of Brain” concept upon which Steemit is based is tremendous and has obviously been well received in the decentralization of social media, knowledge sharing, and movement creation, and we can continue to improve upon all of these concepts to truly make the world a more positive, peaceful, and prosperous place.

The cryptocurrency revolution has clearly demonstrated that we, as individuals, do not need to rely on some small collection of centralized agencies - namely our respective country’s government along with the multibillion dollar corporations - to determine the |avenue, mechanism| through which we exchange value. I believe that then begs the question as to why we must continue to run this rat race. Why must sit in someone else’s office building and create gadgets and gizmos that some upper management believes will extract the most dollars out of their potential customer’s hands? How is this making the world a better place to live for the masses? Why must we do this for a majority of our lives? Why must we play the game by these rules? If it is not the case that the current game is structured in a way to maximize the prosperity, freedom, ability for creative expression and innovation of its players all while maximizing the positive productivity of its constituents, that we must necessarily create new rules by which to play the game? I know I’m certainly not alone in expressing this sentiment. A majority of you are probably familiar with the following excerpt from the Declaration of Independence, but I will include them below as I feel they ring truer today than ever before:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

I am not claiming that the American government, or a majority of governments globally for that matter, are intentionally attempting to subdue the rights of its governed. However, in a time where we have the capability of wiping civilizations off the face of the planet with nuclear weapons, the level of moral evaluation demonstrated on a daily basis simply is not up to par. Without getting too much into politics, we have a president that engages in grade-school style quarrels with leaders of countries with the same capabilities for destruction, albeit in likely orders of magnitude smaller than do we. I do claim however, that there is absolute room for improvement in how this game is being played. Honesty, truth, morality, justice, and transparency (just to name a few) are no longer values held in high esteem. My idea it to place those values, and values similar both in motivation and magnitude, at the highest point in the value hierarchy in order to reorient what we strive for.

Such as proposal will necessarily require in-built fail safes and ways of measuring against corruption, along with way of adjusting should net positive evaluations diminish to some significant degree following any change. The cryptocurrency revolution along with ideas such as the shared benefit of the positive growth of the system have demonstrated ideas such as this are not only possible, they are currently being used, built, and improved upon. In this post [LINK POST HERE] I have outlined a rough draft of how this idea could potentially be implemented. I have come to Steem as from it, I have seen wonderful discussions about real issues, and it appears that a majority of the user base here is truly interested in not only addressing, but solving real world issues. It no longer seems unfeasible to create such systems. It is obvious that exorbitant efforts must be put forth in order to push things in a more peaceful, prosperous and innovative direction, but lucky for us, this is the most bountiful time in the existence of human history in terms of the technology, the awareness, and the free exchange of information that has ever existed. We can, together, make living as beautiful as it can be, and I look forward to being on the journey with all of you.

I hope you’ve found this introduction interesting and I really look forward to discussing and debating ideas and working on real solutions with tangibly positive outcomes and

My idea borrows a lot of the qualities of what make Steem great but also go into a little more detail about how we can rate characteristics and behaviors of each other, not only in the digital world, but also in the real world. Imagine if you could up vote and down vote, while also attributing various positive traits to certain behaviors. (Yes - I know this sounds a lot like Black Mirror, but keep reading and bear with me!) We could then paint a picture of what an ideal worker for some arbitrary category would look like. Anyway, since this is my introduction, I don’t want to get bogged down in too much detail but if your’e interested, I’d love for you to check out this post I’ve made and let me know your thoughts and what I can improve, think more about, what parts are terrible, and what ideas that you think are worth exploring more, both individually, and as a group attempting to make the world a better place.

Link to Steem post: https://steemit.com/life/@halfjew22/proposal-for-extracting-value-from-positive-behaviors-and-its-imagined-societal-impact
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lustigdev
Facebook page (in the process of converting from Android application to general positive software creation page): https://www.facebook.com/BeYourBestSpreadPositivity/