Bitcoin is an idea developed by Satoshi Nakamoto for an independent, fully de-centralized P2P currency. Technical details of how it is generated are described in a White Paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/bitcoin-p2p-cryptocurrency-now-in-public-beta/2010/06/16/ I have argued (elsewhere) that bitcoin is a deflationary currency. As the user base increases, and the difficulty to… Continue reading
Date archives "March 2011"
Dmytri Kleiner on the Price and Value of Free Culture
From a recent ‘Transmediale’ panel discussion: “In recent years, the free culture movement has been very much focused on the development of alternative rights and licensing systems. The development of appropriate economic benchmarks outside traditional business models are only now starting to gain traction: crowdsourcing, micro-funding and shared economy – these are the new watchwords… Continue reading
Humanizing the cosmos, a critique and counter-critique
I asked our friend Eric Hunting, who is involved in open source space efforts, to comment on an article in the Monthly Review (by Peter Dickens), which you can find here. As you can read, Eric was not happy with it: “He is not using the term ‘humanization’ in any positive context. He is characterizing… Continue reading
Network Growth and Decay Model
via http://blog.futureforwardinstitute.com/2011/03/28/network-growth-and-decay-model What Is It? This exploratory model is based off of Wilensky, U. (2005). NetLogo Preferential Attachment model. Wilensky’s model produces the initial network. Future Forward Institute added the functionality to decay the network. In some networks, a few “hubs” have lots of connections, while everybody else only has a few. This model shows… Continue reading
New Open Source Ecology custom search engine and widget
The OSE custom search engine is now available at: http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/OSE_custom_search_engine It allows you to search the OSE wiki (http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/), discussion forum (http://openfarmtech.org/forum/), blog (http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/), and also includes an option to search related sites, like P2P Foundation’s wiki and blog, the Open Manufacturing group, the RepRap wiki and forum, The Household Cyclopedia, open hardware and permaculture… Continue reading
Bill St. Arnaud’s call for a National Public Internet
Excerpted from Bill St. Arnaud: “As many of you may have seen recently in the press Facebook is making special arrangements with a number of cell phone companies to offer free access to Facebook. Many cell phone companies are also offering special data packages that only include access to Facebook and Twitter. As well once… Continue reading
Cooperation is always political
Collaborations are never outside the political. There is no post-political collaboration. Indeed, when collaborations are working well it is not because everyone is free and there are no rules, norms or pressures, but precisely the opposite. It occurs when these devices are strongest; when there are strong regulatory mechanisms for making decisions between competing alternatives…. Continue reading
P2P Funded project: Understanding Today’s Economic Transformation
You can help us develop this project by donating here: http://rockethub.com/projects/1349-understanding-today-s-economic-transformation we have a limited time to raise these funds, thank you for your consideration. Do you want to understand what is driving our evolving economy in a way that you can use today? It is no longer news that the old economy is collapsing… Continue reading
The Pirate Party’s solution for the global job crisis: valuing the swarm economy
The job market is never going back to lifetime employments. Industry-critical work such as free software or Wikipedia is not counted as value at all. Today’s economic model has failed at reflecting real value and at promoting industry-critical fundamentals. Job policy and economic policy is based on this faulty model. Excerpted from Rick Falkvinge :… Continue reading
How to distinguish civic society from the private sector?
We have to remember that historically, civil society actually meant the private sector, but this was a private sector consisting of propertied individuals and some powerful institutions such as the Church; most people, slaves, women, non-propertied workers and farmers, where not part of civil society. This only changed when, through many decades of popular struggles,… Continue reading
New report by David Bollier: The Future of Work
* Report: The Future of Work. What It Means for Individuals, Businesses, Markets and Government. David Bollier. Aspen Institute, 2010. Excerpted from David Bollier: “This familiar model (of Taylorism) is now being radically revamped in the networked environment, at least for jobs that require some levels of independent human judgment. The Taylorite schemes of top-down… Continue reading
Four years of Open Source Ecology at the Factor E Farm: a 4-year status report
See the 4-minute video with a summary progress report on the project and their ‘Global Village Construction Set’ (GVCS): 4 Years of Factor e Farm in 4 Minutes from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo. The ‘Crash Course‘ summarizes developments for newcomers and laypeople interested in supporting the project. Founder Marcin Jakubowski adds: “We’re now moving… Continue reading
The Decline of the Commons? Not Really.
Michel alerted me to this post provocatively entitled ‘The Decline of the Commons, 1760 to 2000, as Plotted by Google‘. It looks as an interesting search engine Google have developed that looks though millions of books for words and gives you a graph of their use over time. So the post author put in the… Continue reading
Book of the Week: The Divine Right of Capital
* Book: The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy. By Marjorie Kelly. Berrett-Koehler, 2001. The key thesis of this classic is: the corporation is a feudal structure ; Gideon Rosenblatt, who provides summaries for each chapter here, calls it “one of those mind-opening books that deserves to be read by a large audience”… Continue reading
Documentary on DIY, Do-It-Together Britain
This documentary on people who are rebuilding their lives in autonomous ways, do it yourself and do it together, was previously not available on YouTube, and is well worth watching. From the Guardian’s intro: “As our jobs become more specialised fewer of us possess the practical skills to look after basic human needs like shelter,… Continue reading
Critical Studies in Peer Production: an update before the launch
Last year, a project was started to build a scientific and theoretical journal to publish studies on peer production and P2P Theory. The Journal has adopted an innovative open peer review process. The very first interesting item, already published before the launch, t is a very interesting debate on Actor-Network-Theory, see here. Editor Mathieu O’Neill… Continue reading