A person in our social group asked a very interesting question:
Will companies be able to acquire other companies with NBR in copiosis, like how they do now with money except without a transfer? Or will it happen through some other way?
The short answer is a company can’t “acquire” another by “buying” it with NBR. NBR is non transferable, so one producer can’t acquire another’s assets that way. And there’s no reason to.
Mergers happen today because the system rewards them. In other words, shareholders demand ever increasing earnings per share (EPS) and at some point the only way for a company to do that in capitalism (expand) is through acquisitions. Another reason why mergers happen is to gain efficiencies through joining forces. Mergers also happen when a company wants to acquire another company’s assets.
There are no shareholders in Copiosis so there is no need to reward shareholders with ever-increasing dividends. But more importantly, there’s no need to acquire another company because for the most part, companies aren’t where the value is. In Copiosis the value is what the companies produce measured in Net Beneficial terms.
Let’s say company A is producing product X, which people love and, across all other algorithm measures, product X generates a lot of NBR. Of course, everyone involved in the production of X is being rewarded according to their contribution. Now let’s say company B wants to produce product X. Why wouldn’t the person (or persons) who created product X allow company B to produce product X?
In capitalism, there are a lot of good reasons why the owners of product X wouldn’t allow B to produce it. Chiefly: it would erode the owner’s profits!
In Copiosis, it’s different. In Copiosis the owners of product X continue to be rewarded NBR for their product no matter who produces it. Of course, those directly involved in X production are rewarded too, but if B wants to produce X and does so successfully, then product X owners still receive NBR for that production, so long as consumers continue to enjoy product X.
As the number of producers making X increases, of course, the algorithm begins to decrease the amount of NBR awarded for that product, until a kind of equilibrium of producers to production is met (among other variables). So we end up with a balance between all factors measured by the algorithm, well-rewarded producers, a satisfied consumer population and presumably, a better environment.
The best way for a company of producers to produce a product is to find the most efficient way to produce the product across all algorithm variables, increasing its size as it does so, to reach a state where the maximum number of producers is achieved without decreasing per-producer NBR. This is a conceptual threshold of course, because there are many different producer “types” needed to make something.
In the end, there is no need to really worry about this, unless you really want to. The goal of Copiosis is not to create a statistically perfect system. It’s to free humanity so it can solve problems we believe are impossible today, while focusing said humanity on what it most likes to do: whatever that is.