Metacurrency grammars and Twollars

In the metacurrency world, one of the key things we need is a grammar to that allows us to specify what a transaction will look like for a particular currency. Yesterday Art & I had a wonderful conversation with Eiso and Mac from Twollars about how this might be accomplished in a mult-currency Twollars universe. Twollars is based on parsing tweets from the public timeline looking for a particular format that indicates that the tweet is supposed to be a transaction. Here's an example tweet that Twollars recognizes:

Give @artbrock 2 Twollars because he's brilliant

Grammatically this translates to:

Give [subject] [quantity] Twollars because [reason]

Twollars could become deeply multi-currency if instead of there being just that one hard-coded grammar, anybody could specify a grammar for the Twollars server to recognize as a transaction for their currency. All that's needed is to throw in a hash tag to specify the currency. Here's an example:

Twollars: #zippybucks Give @artbrock 2 because he's brilliant.

The meta-grammar here that the Twollars server could parse is:

Twollars: #[currency-name] [transaction]

And then the [transaction] part gets parsed by the currency specific grammar which is:

Give [subject] [quantity] because [reason]

Now there's one other thing that has to be added for this to work, and that is a notion of what state a transaction is transforming. I.e. what's the aggregate result of many transactions. In the case of the current Twollars, the state is the balances of tweeter and the tweetee, and the transformation rules are simple:

1) Tweetee balance is incremented by [quantity]
2) Tweeter balance is decremented by [quantity]

But this too should be up for grabs and specifiable by the currency creator. The way Twollars has started out, users are issued 50 Twollars to begin with. This means that the total amount of thanks that can circulate in the system is 50 times the number of users. Think about it. Does that really make sense? Not really because my capacity to be grateful and acknowledge value given to me isn't hard limited like that, which is not to say that it's infinite. Eiso and Mac have very good reasons for starting out Twollars as they did, so I'm not knocking that at all. I'm just pointing to the fact that in the multi-currency world we want communities to be able to specify the circulation properties of the currency as suites them best. So, lets imagine a different "thanks" currency where you can "give" different words of gratitude (or ingratitude for that matter) and instead of a balance in that currency, what you have is a count of those words given and received. Here are some sample transactions:

Twollars: #thx Thanks @zippy314 for his amazing...
Twollars: #thx Appreciates @fer_ananda for her....
Twollars: #thx Scolds @artbrock for ..

Now when specifying such a currency we need to give both it's grammar:

#thx = [action:Thanks,Scolds,Appreciates] [@] for [description:what]

and define what the states are, which for this currency are simply 6 numbers, the count of thanks/scolds/appreciates given and received, and also give the transformation rules which are just:
1) Tweeter [action word given count] increased by 1
2) Tweetee [action word recieved count] increased by 1

Of course the Twollars interface should hide almost all of the underlying details of the states and transformation rules, by giving us a simple AJAXy way of defining our little transaction grammars and choosing various state transform options, and it would all be really easy, fun and cool. From the sounds of it, you might see something like this on Twollars no too far in the future…

Here are some more examples of other such currencies that Art & I came up with:

A simple LETS currency:
#lets = [action:Pay] [@] $[qty:int] for [description:what]

State transform: qty adjusts Balances

Example:
Twollars: #lets Pay @artbrock $2 for currency consulting

A Kilowatt Hour currency:
#kwh = [action:Energize] [@] with [qty:int]kwh for [description:what]

State transform: qty adjusts Balance [where balance max = infinity & balance min = 0]

Example:
Twollars: #kwh Energize @artbrock with 2kwh for currency consulting

A LOL Cat acknowledgement currency:
#lolcat = [action:can haz cheezburgr, cant haz cheezburgr] [@] forze [description:stuff]

State transform: action adjusts Counts: e.g. 20 can haz. 0 cant haz

Example:
Twollars: #lolcat can haz cheezburgr @zippy314 forze cieling cat prayrz

A currency for rating political debates:
#DebateVote = [action:rates] @obama [rating] stars @mccain [rating] stars

State transform: rating adjusts Average

Example:
Twollars: #DebateVote rates @obama 4 start @mccain 1 stars