Offer

(1) Offer is a protocol, but also an expression of intent among agents. It creates a new relationship and a new space for that relationship. An economic space is collaborative in nature. Since collaboration requires voluntary participation, such collaboration is mediated through offers. An offer is the mechanism by which Agents express to each other specific instructions to accomplish their intent. Like a protocol, an offer is a set of expressions — a performance script – that unambiguously and clearly encode a process to be reliably performed within the scope of a space. Unlike a protocol, these expressions are not determinate, and can be amended through an “Offer composition” (a.k.a. performance scripting) process, making the offer an offer network (and a performance a performance network). Offer is one of the key structures to multi-agent reflective network programming. The expressions in the offer must follow the economic space grammar, and may issue or invoke economic space rights; for example to issue other offers, create new spaces, new roles, new tasks, new rights or new objects, altering the state of the space.

(2) Offer is a social relation beyond “contract”: it is a very different way to create structure to organize volatility. Offer is more than a contract, because it adds and opens a time interval and an interpretant, moving us thus beyond the semiotics of e.g. Nick Szabo and Mark S. Miller (smart contract as an authoritarian concept). Offer moves us from contracts to the realm of metapragmatic, co-textual, optional, and social derivatives.

(3) Offer describes a potential exchange of rights. When the offer is matched tokens are created as the vehicles for transferring those rights.