openBarter is the engine of a barter market of fungible values. It is organized as a central limit order book (CLOB), accepting orders from owners and producing movements between them. But it allows cyclic exchange between up to 64 partners, wrapping exchange cycles in atomic transactions. Each fungible value has a pecular quality and quantity. A value is only measured by a quantity independantly of any monetary reference.
Barter orders are expressed by defining the value provided and the value required in exchange. The ratio:
measures the will to exchange as would do a price. This ratio ω is used to perform competition between possible exchange cycles formed by pending orders of the order book.
openBarter uses postgreSQL, the linux of databases. A special extension of this database allows fast execution of the primitives of the engine. The model only use four tables on a single database. It implements different kinds of orders (barter and quote (both limit or best)).
A demonstrator will be available soon.
Historic monetary crisis came with empiric barter to maintain a minimum economic activity. But the ecological crisis requires a worldwide economy that cannot be acheived with this form of empiric practice. Electronic barter markets are necessary to maintain the fragile equilibrium, for the time we will count any resource as scrupulously as we do now with money. Ecological regulation cannot be threatened by a potentail financial collapse.
They show that the fluidity and opportunities of both cooperation and profit are far better than with a regular CLOB. Non-bilateral cycles increase cooperation for low book volume while increasing competition for higher volumes. A threasold of fluidity is observed when the volume of the book increases depending on the diversity of qualities of the market. This threasold is reached with barter before a regular CLOB because a single ordre contains both offer and demand while a CLOB reprensents them separatly. Experiments are presented on this page.
The barter market accepts exchange orders of the form:
submitted by the owner of the value proposed. The quantity of the expected value is a minimum for barter LIMIT, or expected to be the best of the market for barter BEST.
The market finds potential exchange cycles with two partners or more and performs a competition between them. Agreements are formed from the best cycle found, defining a set of movements where each partner provides a quantity to an other and receives at the same time a value of the quality required by it's order. By allowing more than two partners in a cycle the double coincidence of wants is not any more a problem.
The dimension of the ω of an order depends on qualities exchanged. Compare such ratios would not make any sense when these qualities are different. For a cycle formed by several orders where quality offered and required match, we compute an Ω as the product of ω of orders of a cycle. Since Ω a dimensionless quantity, compare these values can have a meaning. When Ω is lower than 1, the common will to exchange is not sufficient to find an agreement between partners due to minimum quantities required. When Ω is 1 it is easy to find an agreement than match minimum ratio ω required by maximizing the flow of values through the cycle within limits defined by available quantities. When Ω is greater than 1 the excess (Ω-1) can be fairly shared for the benefit of partners to compute exchanged quantities forming the cycle.
Details of openBarter can be found in this paper.
The latest version 0.8.0 is stable.
The latest release can be dowload from this page.
You can fork the project on github
It has also been released on PGXN
Olivier Chaussavoine < olivier DOT chaussavoine AT gmail.com >
openBarter - The maximum common wealth for the minimum collective effort - Copyright (C) 2008->2013 olivier Chaussavoine
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see gnu licences.
olivier dot chaussavoine at gmail.com