Problem: it's difficult to grasp the stackerstan concept

[stanstacks]

There's a lot of reading to do in order to understand what Stackerstan is. This is a pretty high barrier to entry.

A short video is probably easier for some.

[bitkarrot]

Yea agreed.

[gsovereignty]

Here's a script proposal, I copied most of it from various places on the stackerstan website and slotted it all together:

Clips of stackerstan CLI, github, website

At the end of 2022, a new project called Stackerstan was posted in the Nostr telegram group.

It's a game-changer and incredibly powerful, but also very pre-alpha. This video is my attempt to solve a specific problem: "it's difficult for newcomers to grasp the stackerstan concept because it isn't explained well".

Existing companies, institutions, and decentralised organisations are deeply inefficient at solving problems. Competition drives us to do things faster, better, cheaper. What's becoming increasingly obvious is that faster, better, and cheaper means “less centralised”.

Stackerstan is a place where anyone can build anything in a truly decentralised and frictionless way that's fair to everyone involved. The Stackerstan protocol is centered on Bitcoin, and describes an entirely new way for humans to spontaneously organise into hyper-efficient and hyper-intelligent swarms, making existing companies, governments and Decentralised autonomous organisations, obsolete.

The structure that the protocol describes can be seen as a new form of intelligent life that interacts with the world and learns from it. Stackerstan adapts to its political and economic environment, finding the best strategy to accomplish its goals and generate revenue.

<1:30>

Animation

You can think of Stackerstan as an apex predator. Like Bitcoin, Stackerstan is a benevolent predator. It hunts valuable problems, and it kills them by creating products and services. What it creates is a perfect fit to the market, with up-to-the-minute accuracy. This predator feeds on the revenue generated by its creations, and uses this energy to keep learning how to hunt and kill more efficiently.

What makes Stackerstan different as an organisational paradigm is there are no "organisational mutexes". It allows people to work together on creating valuable products and services without requiring any upfront agreement on what to build or how to build it. It's completely non-custodial, it doesn't need a shared pot of money, and it doesn't need any funding. It's fair and neutral towards everyone involved, and no one has an unfair advantage over anyone else.

Stackerstan utilises a variety of existing technologies, protocols, and concepts that have all been validated in other projects but never combined in a single system.

Stackerstan is composed of simple rules that participants can follow to produced complex emergent properties.

<2:45>

The Identity Tree

Anyone who's not already a Participant can become a Participant by being added by an existing Participant. This creates a tree of Participants which can be severed if a bad actor sneaks in.

<2:55>

How work is done within Stackerstan

Stackerstan builds itself by following a continuous pattern of identifying "problems", and then applying the simplest possible solution to these problems. These solutions pile on top of each other, expanding the scope of what Stackerstan can do until it solves every problem in the market.

Any participant can log a problem in Stackerstan's problem tracker. There are rules about what type of problems are valid, these rules are defined in the protocol. Essentially, problems become broken down until they are small enough to be solved by a single person in something like 6 hours or less of working time.

Any participant can claim a problem and solve it. Right now, this probably means sending a patch to fix a bug or add a feature to the stackerstan implementation, but there are no limits to what can become a valid problem to solve. Stackerstan can be used to build new hardware like a privacy phone or next generation Bitcoin miner, it can run conferences, replace a city council to service local residents, or anything else.

<4:00>

How Shares are created

Participants need full transparency to see that Stackerstan is fair and neutral. This means that it actually needs to be fair, and not just for people who contribute today when the risks are high, but also to people who contribute in the future when the project has demonstrated that it works and generates revenue.

A participant who solves a problem can file an expense to indicate the relative value of their work.

An Expense is how a participant who solves a problem communicates to all the other participants how much time and effort they put into solving that problem, and how much they think that time and effort is worth in comparison to the time and effort that other participants have put into solving other problems.

An Expense is a request to be repaid the amount claimed when Stackerstan generates revenue. Expenses are paid by revenue in the order that the expense was filed. An expense of 200,000 sats puts the participant in the queue to be repaid 200,000 sats when Stackerstan generates revenue.

When Stackerstan has repaid greater than 50% of all expenses, it starts paying dividends in addition to repaying expenses. An expense is a request to be included in the distribution of dividends.

Shares are simply another name for approved expenses. An expense of 200,000 satoshi is also a request for 200,000 shares. Participants who have an approved expense therefor also have shares.

Participants who have shares can vote to approve or reject new expenses. If the expense is approved, the expense becomes shares that are given to the participant who solved the problem, who, in turn, can vote on all future expenses.

The only way for new shares to ever be created is by approving expenses for the work done to solve problems. The total number of shares in Stackerstan is always equal to the total amount of Satoshi in all approved expenses.

There are rules that participants should follow when voting on expenses, for example,

• The problem behind a solution should be in the critical path towards more participants joining stackerstan, or more revenue,
• The solution should be the simplest possible solution to the problem,
• The amount being claimed should not be unreasonable when compared to all other Expense claims.

Stackerstan was created at block 761151 with a single share to bootstrap the process. The creator of Stackerstan has not claimed any shares for their work, stating only that "it's not possible to be as pristine and neutral as Bitcoin because Stackerstan is an organisational structure while Bitcoin is property, but Bitcoin is the standard to judge against."

A small number of people have been working on Stackerstan since it was announced, and a small number of Expenses have been approved, creating a small number of shares in the process. I will be submitting an expense for creating the video you are watching right now, because it is solving a valid problem.

<5:50>

How revenue is distributed

Shareholders own all revenue generated by the products and services produced by stackerstan.

Stackerstan is non-custodial. Whenever someone pays for a product or service, they are sending or streaming sats directly to the shareholders.

There are two algorithms for deciding exactly how revenue is distributed to Shareholders.

The first algorithm is very simple: shareholders are paid out their initial expense value in the order that their expense was filed.

If Alice files an expense for 200,000 sats, and then Bob files his expense for 300,000 sats, incoming revenue goes to Alice until her 200,000 is paid back before Bob receives any revenue.

Once more than 50% of outstanding expenses have been repaid, a second algorithm for distributing revenue begins to stream dividends to whoever currently has received the least dividends in sats per share owned.

Both of these algorithms are used concurrently so that revenue benefits the newcomers as well as being fair to the early adopters.

<6:55>

Stackerstan is non-custodial

Stackerstan does not require a pot of money to do the things that legacy organisations use pots of money for, such as building a new line of Macbooks. Stackerstan can accomplish the same thing more effectively without a pot of money.

Stackerstan is completely non-custodial. It does not raise any money, and it does not store any money.

A shared pot of money is socially and technically expensive to defend. Money on the table adds organisational mutexes and creates toxic situations because people need to agree on how to spend it.

<7:20>

Skin in the game

Voting on things like approving expenses is done with a concept called Votepower. This is essentially a way to quantify a participant's skin in the game.

A participant’s shares cannot be transferred unless their Lead Time is 0.

When shares are first created by approving an expense, they have a lead time of 0.

A lead time of 0 means that the participant's shares can be immediately sold or transferred, but it also means that the shareholder has no Votepower, and so they don't have any say in what expenses can be approved or rejected.

A shareholder can increase their Lead Time by one unit every 2016 blocks. Their votepower is simply their number of shares, multiplied by their lead time.

Lead time can also be reduced. If a participant has previously increased their lead time but then decides they want to sell some shares, they can reverse it by reducing their lead time by one unit every 2016 blocks. Once their lead time is reduced to 0 they are able to transfer or sell their shares.

This means that a whale who is speculating on the short term price of shares doesn't have any power over the system, because they want to be able to sell their shares at any moment so they need a lead time of 0.

<8:50>

[gsovereignty]

@stanstacks if I get someone on fiverr or something to create an animation can I claim an expense?

[stanstacks]

@gazhayes yes you can claim that

[shaibearary]

Cool!

[jjohare]

@gazhayes can use an adpatation of your text in my open source book, with attribution and a link to here please?

[gsovereignty]

@jjohare sorry I only just saw that, sure no problem!