Bonding Curves are about as complex as high school physics math. The problem is that unlike high school physics where there is one set of energy conservation laws in nature that all physical systems more or less abide by, the “bonding curve” style logics allow you to construct your own invariants. In fact whether we think of it this way or not, some sort of conservation law will likely get embedded in the mana vs cred vs money conversion equations.
In my talk I mention that uniswap is a proof in life of such a system. Here is some material (using data from the ETH/DAI uniswap and a cadCAD model of the smart contract mechanisms) from @markusbkoch who you met in a previous SourceCred office hours:
Video Demo: LinkedIn
Community Forum: LinkedIn
Notebook Viewer: LinkedIn
Tweetstorm: LinkedIn
Personally, I believe that constructing custom “energy conservation” type laws is how we will make messy web of composable smart contracts even remotely interpretable. Like so many things they start of complex, but as we come to understand them, I expect people to be able to put them to good use in both design and analysis of crypto-economic systems.
We (my co-author was @zixuanzh who you have also met) mapped out the mathematical framework for this kind of thing in late 2017, and published it in early 2018. Since then I’ve seen a steady rise in designs which can be explained in terms of these kinds of Lyapunov-like “value functions”, even if people don’t realize it. That said, its a cross-application of methods from systems theory, so I don’t expect to get particular mainstream. At least not any time soon.
Let also add that I am not really a proponent of tokens as “money” but i do see the explosion of tokens as a correction to the reduction of ‘value’ to one dimension of money. I think highly heterogenous tokens (in the back end of systems) will help our technological systems respect the fact that value is a highly contextual concept, and requires more degrees of freedom than merely say “something is worth a different of money to different people at different times”. I am very curious to see how the tensions between the need for more degrees of freedom and the limits on people’s attention will play out. I suspect we’ll see people getting involved closely with some ‘communities’ and caring to participate in processes that require attention to something tokenized (even if they don’t see the concept of tokens directly) but for vast majority of the things they interact with they will not.
Sometime I should write a whole post just on how I see individual versus community level self-actualization playing out. In my opinion we need both, and while they may be in tension, the ability for a disagreeing individual to choose between fighting for what they believe an organization should do and leaving to find an organization that fits their value system better plays a big role in it. I think there is a lot to explore here, and I actually think it also becomes relevant to SourceCred as it relates to the interplay between individuals and collectives.