An interview with John Wise (CEO of Loci) describing his mission to expand and monetize intellectual thought via an exchange for intellectual property (likened to “eBay for ideas”), and his efforts to found new fields: “ethical economics” ("ethanomics") and “economics engineering.” He explains making intellectual property liquid and using asset-backed cryptocurrencies—backed by IP—to create real purchasing power and financial products. The piece emphasizes designing economic systems with engineered redundancies, failure modes, and aligned incentives.
What is your why?
My why? My why is to dramatically improve or expand the exponential growth of intellectual thought globally.
Walk me through that.
Sure.
Passion projects that right now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Loki is an exchange, think the ebay for intellectual property or intellectual thought itself. Right. So through our system, things don't actually need to be patentable in order to be liquid and have value. Right. I've always had a problem with that old adage that an idea is worthless. It's the execution that matters.
We spoke earlier about a second passion project that you have.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd like to try to inspire a couple of new fields. Right. So one of the first fields that I really want to do is this thing called ethical engineering or, sorry, ethical economics. Ethanomics for short.
Ethical economics, yes.
And then the other side of it is a field which I'm calling economics engineering. For the longest time, economists, finance people, they focused on how to eke the best or the most out of any economic structure, any economic model, any finance. The problem with that is that you're essentially trying to figure out how to divvy up the pie in slightly smaller and smaller increments. Right? And then worse yet, you get into things like mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, and now you're taking a pie that was cut so small and you're leveraging it to offer it to somebody else without actually creating a new pie. Right. What I find really intriguing is that with blockchain and cryptocurrency, now we're designing new economic systems. And just like designing or building a plane, a car, or anything else, I want to know that that economics model, that is my basis, everything that my value, my determination of value, that that has redundancies in it, right? That it's airworthy, that it has precautions, that it has stop gaps and failure opportunities, right? That things are thought of. Economics is thought of as an engineering perspective, right? How do we do the mechanical design or the engineering for how this thing can work, regardless of people being involved? How does this work? How does it fail properly without hurting too many people? How do we mitigate risk? How do we leverage risk to go forward? Right? So it's all about engineering for my favorite thing, which is mutually aligned incentives. The trouble that we have thus far is one fundamental flaw with crypto that we're finally starting to fix. Purchasing power, real value. Like what does it mean in the real world? This is where asset backed currencies come in, asset backed cryptocurrencies, right? Because we had this network, we had this network of kind of economic perpetual motion where contribution to the network, contribution to the civilization, society ends up getting value back that value then is used to buy the consumption of things right Production equals and determines the value for consumption that makes sense but if there's no outside recognition then there's no purchasing power and there's no leverage Right so you had to figure out or I had to figure out how we were going to bridge the gaps the way that we did that was a couple of fairly simple ways in my eyes but these asset backed cryptocurrencies means that if a bank recognizes the asset already as a collateralized opportunity whether it's a physical property or in our case intellectual property IP is a recognized asset if you back all of the currency, all of it with intellectual property now you can use the coin itself as collateral which means savings accounts, mortgages, annuities, plays, buying groceries Right Well I appreciate that.
Absolutely appreciate the time thank you once again.
