Internal Token Economics

Markets in everything. Bottom-up economic logic for compute, storage, knowledge.

The Idea

Every resource has a price. Every action is a transaction. Markets discover fair allocation.

Not cryptocurrency - just PostgreSQL and accounting. Real costs flow in as tokens. Internal markets allocate.

Architecture

REAL WORLD          BOUNDARY            INTERNAL
----------          --------            --------
Server costs   -->  Monthly budget -->  Compute tokens
API limits     -->  Capacity       -->  LLM tokens
Attention      -->  Focus hours    -->  Work tokens

Token Types

COMPUTE - LLM calls, CPU, processing
STORAGE - Database, cache, files
QUALITY - Earned through good work (high confidence, reuse, verification)
MARKET - Prediction market activity

Quality as Currency

Good work earns: - High confidence extraction: bonus - Cache hit: bonus - Vocabulary reuse: bonus - Verified claim: bonus

Bad work costs: - Low confidence: penalty - Cache miss: cost - Redundant compute: full cost

The economy rewards truth-seeking behavior.

Philosophy

Mechanism design for personal infrastructure. Make the implicit explicit. Let prices guide allocation.

From Hurwicz: Design systems where self-interest produces good outcomes.

Applied: Projects “want” to minimize costs. Quality work earns tokens. Waste is penalized. Prices emerge from use.

Prediction Markets Measure Information - Prediction markets for price discovery
Budget Constraints Drive Emergence - Budget constraints drive emergence
Heuristics Machine - Heuristics machine (multi-user research commons)