Millions of people contributed to make the technology you use. How can you track them down and assign value to each contribution?

Somehow, one should automatically be able to generate a connection with someone based on a decentralized identifier, like email.

Financial systems are generally locked down. How do I send money without relying on some singular centralized middleman?

• for first iteration, git log with email on each line
  • git log –format=$ae
  • maybe add –numstat to get number of lines changed
• package_value(email) = count(email)/∑_email2count(email2)
  • package specific, so should really be package_value[package](email)

• construct DAG of package dependencies, and rank them based on depth in that graph, with explicitly requested packages at level 1, and their direct dependencies at 2 and so on.
  • packages that appear multiple times get assigned the lowest number.
• system_value(package) = 1 / number_{ofpackagesatsamelevel} / 2^level(package)

system_value(email) = ∑_packagessystem_value(package)*package_value[package](email)

• can easily aggregate across multiple systems/environments

Each user declares a number of tokens as well as the amount of money they are willing to pay for them. Then, based on the value assignments they generated, assign tokens to contributors (emails). These are not blockchain tokens. "Consensus" is just whatever the user that created a token says about that token.

as seen here: https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Math_Trades and described here: https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/TradeMaximizer and implemented here: https://github.com/chrisokasaki/TradeMaximizer it is possible to facilitate circular trades based on individualized rankings. You can assign values to the tokens assigned to you based on the value assigned by the investor multiplied by the degree to which you trust that investor to pay up (based on distance in your social network and reports by others in your network that they paid up). These trades allow you to turn many different tokens into large numbers of a small set of tokens.

In the long term, it would be best to figure out how to operate based on these tokens alone, but in the short term you need USD$ to buy food and pay a mortgage. Once a contributor has obtained a large sum of tokens from a particular investor, they can return those tokens to them for money in one transaction, avoiding larger transaction fees.

To do even this smaller set of payments, a user and the contributor returning tokens must have some financial backend in common. It should be straightforward to support a blockchain-based cryptocurrency backend, but I think it wouldn't be too difficult to support older systems like Paypal which allow direct USD$ payouts.

A contributor with a large value in tokens should receive an email explaining how they can receive money for their past free culture contributions

Contributors working for non-free entities should be able to make minor contributions to free cultural works and slowly increase their income until they are able to migrate to working exclusively on free cultural works.

A core premise of this system is that you are paying for goods already rendered, to assure contributors that their future contributions will be compensated for free culture contributions. However it would be good if people can make dedications to non-free culture that pays out in the event that such things are released under free terms. Payouts to free culture works can be used to give a level of trust to token dedications for non-free works before they are freed.

many decentralized systems that use "gossip" systems. Abuses can be reported, and penalized in future investments.

Additionally, you own your contributions. With a system like this in place, plagiarism can incur monetary damages recoverable in court.

make this straightforward.

projects have maintainers that host code at a given URL. If someone tries to commit a bunch of code to mine contribution credit, the maintainers would not accept the commit as it devalues their own contributions. Similarly, if a maintainer tries to inflate their own contributions, then other contributors are less likely to contribute to that project, lowering the inherent value of that project (as in, worse project means fewer people invest in it).

Certainly, I can create arbitrary numbers of tokens and declare arbitrary value for them, but initially no one would trust them. Such manipulations are trackable through your social network, so such manipulations end up stealing more from your immediate connections and might lower the trust the rest of the network has for not just you, but your friends. In affect, you can steal, but mostly just from your friends, who will probably stop being your friends.

In fact a central feature of this system is that it is built on trust of existing social networks, instead of a trust-less, artificially scarce system like blockchain.