We understand that there are lots of new licenses being proposed right now. The motivation behind those licenses is generally to protect a single company’s proprietary interest.

In contrast, we are creating the Cryptographic Autonomy License because we don’t believe that any existing license is written to match the structure of fully peer-to-peer cryptographic applications, which seek to uphold the interests of the users, like the ones that can be developed using the Holochain framework.

Creating a new license must be done with care and in consultation with both experts and the community. Thus, this post is the first of a number of blog posts that will lay out why we think a new license is necessary, how we propose it be structured, and how we intend to proceed throughout implementation.

Distributed Applications are Different

Most software and licenses assume a single point of execution for each software component. Each of these software components is considered an independent “work” that carries its own license. For example, many client-server applications have servers licensed differently than clients.

Distributed applications, on the other hand, are designed to be a single “work” run across many different computers. All of the different parts of the application framework must interoperate as a unified whole in order for the distributed framework to function. Maintaining uniformity is simple for proprietary software: simply create a license that forbids any changes to the code or protocol used in the distributed application. However, we believe that the underlying framework should be free and open source. The Cryptographic Autonomy License is designed to comply with the principles of the Open Source Definition while recognizing the importance of the interfaces between different parts of the distributed system. The interfaces, APIs, and performance of those APIs are recognized and protected as part of the license.

The Cryptographic Autonomy License is not just about an application framework. It is also about how the architecture of an app maximizes the autonomy of each user that participates. In a system like Holochain, the cryptographic keys that protect individual user data and allow the execution of user processes are held respectively by each user. It is a basic principle of the Holochain framework that users should by default be empowered to control their own identity, data, and processes. This is true even if parts of the system that host the data and processes are physically located on computers that they do not control.

Applications that do not respect this principle actually work against the decentralized nature of the Holochain framework. If there is a proprietary application that controls the creation and use of the cryptographic keys that allow for the processing of application user data, then that proprietary application becomes a point of centralization in the distributed autonomous system. The proprietary application doesn’t just control the user data, it also affects the functioning of the distributed system itself. Without access and real control over those keys, you, the user, do not have the “freedom to run the program as you wish for any purpose.”

We do intend to allow proprietary applications on Holochain, but we want the framework to default to empowering and respecting the freedom of individual users overall. It is in this context that we see the need for the Cryptographic Autonomy License.

How the Cryptographic Autonomy License Will Work

The next post in this series will lay out some of the specific legal structures that underlie the Cryptographic Autonomy License. At a high level, however, a few points are key:

1. The Cryptographic Autonomy License will be a strong reciprocal (“copyleft”) license so as to maintain user agency and freedom.
2. Unlike other current open source licenses, the Cryptographic Autonomy License will require software that implements a compatible API or publicly performs the API to also be open source.
3. The Cryptographic Autonomy License will strive to maximize compatibility. Despite the strong copyleft nature of the license, it will not require compatible software to itself be licensed under the Cryptographic Autonomy License; other open source licenses will also be acceptable.
4. The Cryptographic Autonomy License will also have a built-in mechanism for allowing exceptions for linked or co-compiled code, preserving a distinction between applications built on the framework itself and connected user applications.

No other open source license has this combination of elements, so once we have publicly developed the Cryptographic Autonomy License, we will be submitting it to the Open Source Initiative for recognition as an official Open Source License.

We believe that the Cryptographic Autonomy License will be of benefit beyond the Holochain community. We believe that it will also provide an answer for developers in other communities who are creating software that is framework-native but requires strong reciprocality.

We look forward to engaging in a constructive dialogue to help make that happen.

We hope the community of Holochain projects, developers, and supporters are as excited about this news as we are about sharing it. This is a big step forward, which in concert with the accomplishments that we have been sharing recently in our Holochain Dev Pulse, ensure, in quite distinctive ways, that we are prepared for the upcoming releases of Holo.

As a reminder, the milestones and releases that will be coming out are:

Promised in February

1. Holo Closed Alpha TestNet (not public, only Indiegogo Alpha/Beta backers)

Dates To Be Announced

1. HoloPorts Shipped (Indiegogo in 1st batch, HoloPort store in 2nd batch)
2. Holo Open Alpha TestNet
3. Holo Full Feature TestNet
4. Holo Beta MainNet

Again, a big thank you goes out to all our stakeholders for your continued commitment and invincible enthusiasm. We look forward to reading your thoughts and feedback regarding the Cryptographic Autonomy License in the coming weeks.

Thanks to Arthur Brock & Eric Harris-Braun for laying the groundwork, inspiration and vision, and to Van Lindberg for formulating the legal foundations. Some Rights Reserved.

— Holo Executive Director, Mary Camacho

The post Why We Need a New Open Source License appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Meanwhile, cryptocurrency players, who ostensibly set out to level the playing field of the digital economy, ended up delivering a hyper-capitalist gambling ring with precious few useful or usable apps — not to mention the fact that migrating away from petro-dollars doesn’t mean so much when your new accounting engine incentivizes the use of frankly obscene amounts of energy.

Crises of governance seem to belie both of these curiously blended public/private domains of activity. Where platforms like Uber and AirBnB govern hundreds of thousands without their input, decentralized networks have been repeatedly called out for putting too much faith in the infrastructure’s governance capacity itself, which has proven inadequate for mediating disputes and flagrant power inequities. What a great irony, as commentators have joined the promise of democracy to the potential of the Internet since its inception! All in all, burn-out from unstable “gigs”, exhaustion from the bipolarity of the volatile crypto-economy, and perhaps even anger with the stark injustices baked into both of these techno-capitalist parties weigh heavily on those of us paying (and giving  attention.

What Comes Next?

Recognizing these indignities feels surprisingly relieving. Perhaps “calling it” on the current versions of the sharing economy and the crypto-economy will embolden us to suss out, beyond this disillusionment, glimmers of what comes next. As we’re wont to build on the ashes of our dreams, we ask: what can we build now? The Commons Engine envisions healthy financial exchange that lends the power of networks to values and goals that serve its participants rather than just platform owners, designers, and first-comers (without compromising our glossy, refined computing experience!) Above all, we want the structures that come to replace centralized systems to better account for how we interact, and therefore, to better hold us to account.

Recognizing these indignities feels surprisingly relieving. Perhaps “calling it” on the current versions of the sharing economy and the crypto-economy will embolden us to suss out, beyond this disillusionment, glimmers of what comes next. As we’re wont to build on the ashes of our dreams, we ask: what can we build now? The Commons Engine envisions healthy financial exchange that lends the power of networks to values and goals that serve its participants rather than just platform owners, designers, and first-comers (without compromising our glossy, refined computing experience!) Above all, we want the structures that come to replace centralized systems to better account for how we interact, and therefore, to better hold us to account.

In this way, we envision countering rising monetary inequality with systems of deeper wealth, and redirecting social power away from profiteering institutions that do not honor deeply enough our relationships to the planet and to each other. The following convictions ground the Commons Engine. They focus its activities jointly on the problems of these trends, and on the affordances of Holochain’s post-blockchain digital ledger technology.

We actually want to coordinate action.

The sharing economy has taught us that peer-to-peer social engagement is its own virtue. For its part, the wild world of crypto shows us, with even greater vibrato than the stock market, that viral patterns of affect truly have the power to activate coordination among actors all around the globe. The excess capacity unleashed by social cooperation is not only necessary from a strategic perspective, but from the perspective of the good life. We understand rationally that we need each other, but we also want to relate to each other for its intrinsic value. We believe it’s possible to take the notion of a sharing economy much farther, into a realm where extractive platforms are replaced by open cooperatives, and digital commons can use sophisticated value accounting tools to create reciprocal relationships that more adequately honor contributors.

Massive accounting engines can help create new commons.

Imagine replacing extractive sharing economy platforms with a new type of cooperative model that uses crypto-accounting methods to create distributed networks of providers…of energy, food, housing, transportation…who knows what else? Holochain’s architecture is lightweight enough to process tens of thousands of transactions a minute. What’s more, a federation of exchangeable asset-backed currencies using the Holo/Holochain pattern could have sufficient force to propel mainstream economic activity into directly peer-to-peer means. Generally speaking, we imagine marketplaces that do not depend on debt-producing fiat currencies, but whose actors lend each other credit — thanks to trustworthy, nuanced reputation and accounting systems with relatively low overhead.

There are forms of wealth more valuable than financial capital.

Economic relations are relations between peers, but also reflect the collective’s relationship with the natural world. Could the rules of the game by which networks play take root in shared goals, like, say, reducing dependence on transported goods, preservation of natural capital, or livable conditions for all participants?We’d really like to know what happens on our planet when we change our mindset from growth, based in competition, to sufficiency based in cooperation.This could involve, say, spreading practice-oriented knowledge and the accounting tools for regenerative action; our first cohort of regenerative agriculturalists encourages farmers to work with their soil to together transform farmland into practice grounds for more deeply responsive land stewardship. A community solar-energy network would operate on similar principles, holding sustainable forms of energy as a key priority toward which to deploy increased technological efficiency.

Economic relations are relations between peers, but also reflect the collective’s relationship with the natural world. Could the rules of the game by which networks play take root in shared goals, like, say, reducing dependence on transported goods, preservation of natural capital, or livable conditions for all participants?We’d really like to know what happens on our planet when we change our mindset from growth, based in competition, to sufficiency based in cooperation.This could involve, say, spreading practice-oriented knowledge and the accounting tools for regenerative action; our first cohort of regenerative agriculturalists encourages farmers to work with their soil to together transform farmland into practice grounds for more deeply responsive land stewardship. A community solar-energy network would operate on similar principles, holding sustainable forms of energy as a key priority toward which to deploy increased technological efficiency.

Software governance can go beyond “trustless” consensus.

Commons Engine wants to greet our potential to agree to, and collectively set our sights on, enacting values that we hold in common. On that note, a vision of enhanced coordination clearly does amplify the need to rethink governance of emerging commons. One could even say governance is a constituent factor of turning more resource pools into commons! If software mediates and thus engineers our collective action, their governance is like an ongoing experiment in calling forth and implementing agreements that reflect a general will.

Holochain applications, run by its participants, make it easy to integrate models that govern code changes and versioning. The Commons Engine means to foster markets that honor the perspective of all stakeholders. This means, on the one hand, dropping the naive idea that the architecture of decentralized tech can foster relationships of trust on its own, and on the other, pursuing forms of crowdfunding that explicitly refuse the shady practices that have given ICOs a bad reputation.

An invitation to “next economy” forerunners

Think of the Commons Engine as a Holochain project incubator that specializes in bootstrapping all sorts of hApps (HC apps): asset-backed currencies, complex open value flow designs for the material and knowledge commons, and tools for democratic governance of organizations and common-pool resources.

The Commons Engine will aid in growing out the hApps ecosystem in a meaningful way — by spreading the meme of asset-backed and mutual-credit currencies where they are most needed. Among other monetary rebels, Holochain was cited by Brett Scott as one of a few initiatives poised to combine cryptocurrency with mutual credit — in reality a cross between the cryptocurrency crusaders, monetary theorists, and localists also represented on his list. Taking advantage of the full interoperability of Holochain-based currencies and applications, creators of regional, complementary, and cooperative currencies (and the media they rely on), can greatly expand and enhance the resilience and usability of the instruments they create.

We would be honored to receive your support.

Check out our website here, and follow along with our progress on Twitter as we gather the knowledge, tools, and relational practices to support a network of partners and projects that aim to see this vision through!

-With love from Jean M Russell, Ferananda Ibarra, and yours truly, Emaline Friedman. Thanks to Jean M Russell.

Originally published in Holo’s Medium page.

The post Introducing the Commons Engine Holochain in the world of deep wealth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Holo: The evolution of cloud computing

Holo Value Proposition

Holo is launching a peer-to-peer app hosting marketplace.

Today, application developers usually pay Amazon or some other big corporation to serve their app or website to visitors.

Holo enables anyone to compete with Amazon for this business by offering the spare computing capacity on their own laptop, desktop or other computer. When their computer hosts an application, the developer pays them instead of Amazon.

Just like Airbnb enables people to rent spare bedrooms to help pay their mortgage, Holo enables people to rent their computer’s spare storage and processing power to help pay for their internet access, or even their computer itself.

Holo does to spare computing capacity what Airbnb did for spare bedrooms

And there is actually a LOT of spare capacity out there. In fact, globally, the idle storage and processing power sitting unused in our laptops and desktops dwarfs even the infrastructure of the largest cloud computing company.

Holo will do to that enormous spare computing capacity what Airbnb did to spare bedrooms.

Except, with Holo, you won’t find yourself cleaning sheets all the time. Here, your computer does the work and you reap the reward.

Application hosting is the cash cow of the third most valuable company on earth

And this isn’t a small market. For instance, Amazon is the third most valuable company on the planet, and though their app hosting division, AWS, accounts for just 10% of their revenues, it generates more profit than the entire rest of the company… combined. In other words, AWS is the cash cow of Amazon. And they are just one of several gigantic companies in the space. So… yes, hosting is a big business — and getting bigger.

Why you should Participate

If you are trying to decide whether you want to participate in this ecosystem, we can make it even more blunt:

Holo might do to the cash cow of the third largest company on the planet, what Uber did to Taxis.

Except, unlike Uber, with Holo, 99% of the money goes straight to the people whose machines are doing the work. That’s right. In exchange for orchestrating all of this, we take just a 1% cut.

Sound familiar? It might. People have dreamed of this for years. It was even the plot of an HBO show last season. But two new innovations from Holo are enabling us to, as Forbes recently put it, “turn internet fiction into reality.” Those two innovations are Holochain and Holo Fuel.

Holochain

First, Holochain is a new way of running truly peer-to-peer applications that makes it so that my computer doesn’t necessarily have to “store” all of the content in an application in order to be able to serve that content. Instead, my machine can quickly retrieve anything I need right when I need it. It’s “just in time” content delivery. And when my computer then serves that content to a visitor, I get paid.

Folks around the globe have been building apps on Holochain Alpha (“the adventurer” release) since October. Holochain Beta is coming soon.

Holochain is live now and apps are actively being built and run on it. Holochain gives Holo a competitive advantage by giving it a collaborative advantage. And thanks to the care with which we designed Holochain, the World Economic Forum called Holochain one “of the most integral technology projects” in the blockchain space, pointing out that we “aren’t just putting lipstick on clones of existing projects” but have actually gone “back to the drawing board and created mission-driven roles for coders, entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, regulators and policymakers.” We’ve taken some of the most widely used technologies of the last two decades and combined them in a novel way. Holochain combines the efficient peer-to-peer data storage model (DHT) that bitTorrent uses with the tamper resistant logs (Hash Chains) that blockchains use and the agent centric approach (each agent has their own perspective and signs their own actions) that Git uses. We think of Holochain as an evolution of blockchain, because it solves so many of the problems that have plagued blockchain over the past decade, including scale, speed, cost, adaptability and composability.

One thing to note is that unlike Holo, Holochain itself is not a platform. It is a pattern. Like HTML. We are giving it away to the world for free. It is open source. It does not require web servers. Or miners. Or cryptocurrency. Every user of a particular app, runs that app, showing up as both user and host. Holo is making use of this “holochain” pattern and is reaping the efficiency and resilience benefits that result.

Holo fuel

Holo fuel. It isn’t actually fuel. It’s for fueling hosting.

Second, Holo fuel is a new crypto-accounting system that enables us to process transactions in parallel, rather than in sequence. That means that Holo can handle millions or billions of simultaneous transactions. Moreover, because Holo fuel is so efficient, we can process transactions for even very small amounts such as a payment of a penny. And though this might look foreign if you are only familiar with blockchain “token” based types of cryptocurrencies, it isn’t exactly untested. We’re applying a centuries old double-entry accounting system called Mutual Credit. And now we’re getting to use Holochain and cryptography to distribute, secure and extend the capabilities of this tried and true accounting system.

Holo Currency Pricing

We’ve been compared by others to Ethereum, the blockchain based computing network that is worth hundreds of billions of dollars at present. So we did some benchmark testing. We built and tested several applications so we could see how costly it was to perform computation on Ethereum vs. Holo.

The result: depending on the app, Holo is somewhere between one-hundred-thousand and one-million times more efficient than Ethereum. For more details, check out our benchmarking walk through.

So when we decided to pre-sell Hosting services on Holo with an Initial Community Offering, we wanted to accomplish two things:

First, put our money where our mouth is. Second, create a margin gap to enable a two-sided marketplace to emerge.

PUTTING OUR MONEY WHERE OUR MOUTH IS

We have drawn a line in the sand and are offering to host applications WITH OUR OWN COMPUTERS for 10,000 times cheaper than Ethereum.

This makes visceral just how much more elegant the design of Holo and Holochain are relative to Ethereum and Blockchain.

If computing services were cars, for the same amount of money that it would take to buy a Remote Control car on Ethereum, you could buy a real car on Holo. And that car would be a Lamborghini. That is what a 10,000 times price difference looks like ($40 vs $400,000).

CREATING A TWO-SIDED MARKET

Second, It also makes visible that we are UNDER-PROMISING what our network can deliver. We wanted to ensure that there was room for those who step up to participate in Holo as developers and hosts, to get rewarded for doing so. The gap between our “100,000 x” or “1,000,000 x” better benchmark performances and our “10,000 x” offer leaves room for Hosts to enter the market and underbid our price.

We expect that a competitive market will form, and because it will cost hosts five or fifteen or fifty times less than our price point to provide hosting, other hosts will be able to underbid us and win hosting contracts.

And when those hosts price their offerings competitively in order to attract more business, holders of Holo fuel will likely be able get two, or ten or twenty times as much computing power as even the price at which we were offering to provide it ourselves.

In other words, that same amount of Holo fuel that would have bought you an RC car on Ethereum, starts to deliver two, or five or ten Lamborghini’s worth of value (not that we’d spend our money stockpiling Lambo’s, but you get the point).

That creates a win-win-win. A win for hosts. A win for developers. A win for us.

Of course, it won’t exactly be a win for everybody.

Ethereum for instance. It probably won’t be a win for them. If a competitor enters the market and starts offering similar services for, let’s say 50,000 times cheaper than you are able to provide, what do you think will happen to demand for their services. And what would a drop in demand for ETH services do to their currency?

How HOT is related to Holo fuel

Because Holo isn’t live yet (our ICO is focused on funding the software development for it), we needed to raise funds through an existing, and established channel. Ethereum ERC20 tokens have been the standard way of running an ICO for the last year or two. The Holo Token or HOT is an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain and will be redeemable for Holo fuel once Holo goes live. This redemption will happen at a conversion rate of 1 HOT = 1 unit of Holo fuel (HOLO). Holders of HOT will need to redeem HOT for HOLO within 6 months of the launch of the network. You can think of it like a coupon that expires if you don’t redeem it in time.

Again, Holo fuel is the utility credit currency that application owners can use to pay for hosting services on the Holo network.

We estimate that the Holo network will go live sometime in Q3 of this year. In other words, we are aiming to launch Holo in July, August or September.

When a host provides hosting services for an app, that app’s owner pays for that hosting using Holo fuel. So if you have an application and want it hosted (served to non-peer visitors) via Holo, you need to buy Holo fuel from somebody so you can pay your hosts. The Initial Community Offering we are currently running is a pre-sale of the currency that will be used in our system. The purchase and redemption of ERC20 HoloTokens is how people are acquiring Holo fuel. After the close of the pre-sale, people will buy Holo fuel from others that have purchased it from us, earned it themselves through hosting etc. For more details, see our Green Paper. People with Holo will be able to use it themselves, or sell it to others who want hosting services, or, if they earned it through hosting, redeem it with the Holo organization in exchange for other currencies.

To be clear, Holochain applications do not need to use Holo when they are just interacting amongst peers (others who are also running the same application).

But not everyone is going to install Holochain on day one.

So how do you reach “the masses” when the masses have not yet installed the new empowering peer-to-peer apps of the future? You let them interact with those apps through a pattern they are familiar with: opening a browser and typing in a URL.

Holo hosts serve out websites to anyone with a browser, thus creating a bridge back to the “old” internet that everyone, even my grandparents are used to by now. (To be fair, Jerry, Jacqueline, George, and Algreta are fairly savvy when it comes to the internet, but I digress).

When a host creates this sort of bridge by hosting on behalf of an application, the app owner pays them, just like that app owner today might pay Amazon Web Services to host their app.

Some describe this hosting process as being similar to the mining that happens in Blockchain. However, whereas “mining” is an arms race to see who can waste the most electricity doing useless work in hopes of winning a lottery, hosting consists of serving applications or webpages on behalf of customers that are willing to pay for that hosting service. It is way more useful, way more cost effective and vastly more environmentally friendly. For instance, the HoloPorts that we have been making available through our top trending IndieGoGo campaign, use about as much electricity as a lightbulb.

Matt’s Snarky Takeaway

For those that don’t want to take the time to understand this evolution of cloud computing, no hard feelings. Seriously. We played with remote control cars when we were kids too. They were fun.

But you might want to ask yourself, “if these folks are on to something, and they do manage to cut the cost of distributed computing by 20,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 times…

do I really still want to be HODLing ETH?”

More info:

Holo Website

ICO Purchasing and Stats

Holochain Website

Holochain Code

More Technical Overview of Holo

Technical Walkthrough of Holochain

The post Holo: The evolution of cloud computing appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Holochain : The Blockchain picks up a Dimension

Jamie Klinger: Bitcoin’s central mechanism — the Blockchain — is a monumental achievement in computer science. And from that central achievement, many other cryptocurrencies have emerged attempting to improve the model in one way or another. Holochain has come along to further decentralize, maximize efficiency, and allow for all types of interfaces and applications to be built with it.

Holochain harnesses the parallelism of BitTorrent to power fully distributed apps.

Holochain is a data integrity engine for distributed apps

An Engine is “a machine with moving parts that converts power into motion.” (Source: Google)

Data Integrity is what blockchains and torrents have been doing. They make certain that the data on my computer is the same as the data on your computer. They make certain that the order of the data is exactly the same, otherwise there would be a malfunction.

Distributed Apps are apps that run locally on your personal device (as opposed to in the cloud).

https://www.pexels.com/u/lumariia/

A centralized app like Snapchat offers you a small file (the app) to download that sends data through centralized servers.

A decentralized app like TenX runs on a decentralized blockchain (Ethereum).

A distributed app would run locally on your personal device and would offer peer-to-peer connections.

So if Snapchat were a distributed app, you and your friends would all have the (d)app on your phone, and when you send a photo, it would be sent directly to your friends and only to your friends. No intermediary servers. No intermediary blockchain.

Another way of seeing distributed apps are as scripts (executed code) that hook into distributed databases, compiling data.

Holochain allows you to build interoperable apps for communication

https://www.pexels.com/u/gratisography/

If you want to build a Twitter clone on Holochain (which, incidentally, its core team has already started, and it’s called “Clutter”), you decide on the rules for message size, hashtags, and whatever other parameters are important to you. Maybe you decide that for your specific Twitter app, it is crucial to segregate posts by the person’s color preference, so in the creation of your app, you hold a sign-up requirement for people to share their favorite color.

Now, when you post a poll and people begin to respond, you can have their answers sorted automatically by the respondent’s favorite color.

Ok, so you made Twitter with color preferences, we’ll call it Color-Twitter. That’s not the most useful feature in my opinion, so I make a poll asking people to vote on a more useful parameter and gather statistical information. The group votes and they choose age. We then request to the creator of the app to add in this parameter to Color-Twitter. Here’s what happens next.

https://www.pexels.com/u/sebastian/

The app creator likes your idea

Congratulations! The app creator wants to integrate your update! They build the new functionality into the app, but since it is a distributed system, everybody who is using the platform needs to download the latest version.

The founder will run both versions (and hopefully many people will do the same to facilitate the transition) where the users who have upgraded will leave one final tweet saying, “I no longer post here. Find me as HonestlyJamieK on ColAge-Twitter, follow this link.”

Some users may choose to stay behind and continue using Color-Twitter. They will not be able to interact with ColAge-Twitter accounts. But it could be possible in the future that ColAge-Twitter accounts can interact on the old chains of users still running Color-Twitter. This is because the parameters for Color-Twitter have been met by all users, but the parameters of ColAge-Twitter have not been met by all users.

Color-Twitter can only exist as long as there are users running that specific app. If all of Color-Twitter users go offline and/or upgrade to ColAge-Twitter, it will no longer be accessible.

Users who have chosen to use ColAge Twitter are now required to register their age before being able to join..

Once Ceptr — a parent project encompassing Holochains and related tech that would further simplify interoperability — is integrated, it could be fully possible that if another application already holds the information required by this app, Color-Twitter could automatically make a request for access to this parameter. This can be looked at a little bit like an auto-fill feature. In other words, by filling out your age once, you might never have to fill it out again, you would only need to approve access to that information by a specific app that you downloaded.

https://www.pexels.com/u/pixabay/

The app creator does not like your idea

If the creator does not believe that this is the vision of their system, they can refuse to upgrade and remain with Color-Twitter.

Now, the same thing happens as before except that the founder of Color-Twitter is the one who is left behind. I can take the original app’s code, fork it, add the parameter of age, and launch it in holochain as my separate app. People can now use my app to broadcast tweets too if they choose.

Just like in the other example, if my new app follows all of the rules of the Color-Twitter, when someone broadcasts on the ColAge-Twitter app, they can (if they choose) simultaneously broadcast on the Color-Twitter app. As long as the rules of all the apps validation rules (color for Color-Twitter, color+age for ColAge Twitter) are met, you can broadcast across as many apps as you are running; the holochain-equivalent Facebook, Flickr, Slack, etc.

https://www.pexels.com/u/pixabay/

Distributed, not decentralized

Want to post on the Color-Twitter? I hope you’re prepared to share the network load. Holochain apps will be light enough to run on your cell phone and will be efficient enough to only be grabbing the information you request at any given time.

If the system was decentralized, we would require upgraded nodes for ColAge-Twitter to be able to run. With a distributed system, it is entirely individualized and is up to the user base to voluntarily follow along. However, if your dApp is financially sustainable and you want to provide your users with access without requiring them to maintain a shard* of the system, there will be an opportunity for dApp maintainers to run nodes/servers.

*Each app consists of a series of shards distribted across the userbase sharing the serverload, comparable to torrent functionality

https://www.pexels.com/u/kaiquestr/

Lyft & Uber vs La’Zooz & Holochain

La’Zooz was a blockchain-based ridesharing app. It functioned as a self contained system. The network was supported by its mobile app users running the app and earning tokens, who were supported financially by token purchasers, which worked by having drivers accept the tokens. They completely removed the middleman that is Uber. While that project itself has fallen to the wayside, the idea of it seemed completely obvious to anybody who has ever played with blockchain — and it won’t be going away.

Why pay a middleman when the system can be taken entirely out of the hands of a corporation? There actually are a number of very important reasons why Lyft and Uber need to exist today and why the blockchain isn’t ready for them just yet. There are legal challenges, security issues, insurance requirements, etc., that make a purely peer-to-peer system for ridesharing a bit out of reach. But in a few years, we can expect smart contracts to enter the equation and solve many of these problems.

Decentralized and/or Distributed reference systems are right around the corner. We can create parameters for verification of proper insurance, background checks, and any other requirements for potential drivers. This would function similarly to a smart contract, allowing for users to move through to the next level of verification once accepted through the former.

And once the Uber-clone is up and running, somebody can decide to fork it and generate an eco-friendly version which would only support drivers using electric cars. Eco-Uber might cost more, but it would offer a new parameter to its participants.

https://www.pexels.com/u/gratisography/

There Are Too Many Apps!

After Eco-Uber started, somebody created Red-Uber for red cars and Blue-Uber for blue cars. If the driver is subscribed to the Mass-Join-Drivers App, and fits the appropriate driver parameters, they can automatically (with permissions) becomes a driver for all of the latest apps.

For users, imagine someone now has a list of options to choose from (Red-Uber, Blue-Uber, etc) and it’s just too many unimportant choices for them. They don’t care about who drives them from point A to B, they just want to get there quickly.

Just like with Color-Twitter and ColAge-Twitter, if you as a broadcaster meet all of the requirements, you can broadcast to whomever you like, even multiple applications simultaneously.

So the user sends out their lift request to all of the appropriate driving apps. Once the first driver responds to the call, it will ping the user and then automatically cancel all of the other lift requests.

Holochain is like having access to all of the capabilities of all of the Internet apps simultaneously without needing an API, because the languages are entirely compatible. Holochain is the equivalent of having an IFTTT layer built underneath the entire Internet.

It is important to note that some of the deeper features described in this article will require self-describing protocols which have been built into Ceptr, a highly related but (currently) separate sister project.

The Ultimate Dashboard

Today, we are forced to settle for what Facebook’s algorithm decides to show us. Our capabilities for manipulating our feed are extremely limited. With Holochain, we are only limited to the parameters set by the applications. And if you and your friends don’t like those parameters, you can change them with a forked app!

And because the information exists on a layer on top of the app and isn’t held proprietarily, you can mix and match your feeds to your heart’s content. I might create dashboards for all different circumstances and be able to jump between them seamlessly. Everything dog-related from all of my app channels from users who have posted at least 10 times could be one of my dashboards. All pizza-related posts by users with a high reputation level who live within 10km of me could be another dashboard.

Because the information isn’t forced to sit uniquely in each application, the end user can create a customized experience with the parameters of their choosing. The possibilities for data mining and consensus building are endless. End the data-monopolies of Facebook and Google. If we choose to use Holochain, we choose how our information is shared and empower the commons to utilize it for collective growth and understanding.

Sources:

• CEPTR Home
  
• Holochains for Distributed Data Integrity
  
• Arthur Brock’s Personal Web Site | Arthur Brock 

Lead image: https://www.pexels.com/u/invisiblepower/

The post What is Holochain and why does it matter? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Jean Russel: This week’s #Holochats theme is #responsibility. In that context, I want to share the strategy for Holo’s ICO, and how it is designed to support responsible flows in the ecosystem. [For those interested in knowing more about generating flows, Herman Wagter and I wrote a book, Cultivating Flows.]

Starting Assumptions

We want to build a thriving ecosystem. To jump-start it, we are choosing to run an ICO together with a crowdfunding campaign in order to support three primary capacities in relationship to each other.

1. We want reliable and widely distributed hosting capacity, which we create by offering hosting devices in the crowdfunding campaign.
2. We want to engage developers in creating Holochain apps which can then use that hosting capacity. We generate developer engagement through educational and networking events offered in the crowdfunding campaign.
3. We want an economy that rewards developers and hosts who build and support applications that the world uses on the web. To do this, we are creating a currency through an ICO.

Accomplishing this meant we had to answer several questions: How do we carry out our ICO responsibly so the ecosystem can thrive? Who are we being responsible to? How do we run the ICO in ways that honor the ecosystem as a whole? How do we reward both our initial community creating the ecosystem and the participants in the ecosystem?

Solving for Aspirations

In our ICO, the crowd’s participation is just as important to us as the funding we’ll be generating. We aspire to be an ecosystem of distributed participants. That means:

• We want to make sure participation is widely distributed rather than ending up belonging to a few whales, which can often happen in an ICO.
• We need to have a way to prevent a big crypto whale from buying up the tokens by paying a premium gas fee to jump in line.

We aspire to be an ecosystem of flows, where people are rewarded reasonably for engaging in ways that increase the health of the ecosystem. That means:

• We want our team to rewarded for their time, talents, and commitment to growing this ecosystem.
• But we must do so responsibly, balancing that with the whole. Therefore we must select a reasonable proportion for the team and put limits on “cashing out” after the jump-start of Holo.

We aspire to reward those with early faith in the ecosystem we are building. That means:

• We can’t make speculation be the honeypot. We feel the best option is to get all participants to have some “skin in the game,” so to speak.

We aspire to raise enough funds to responsibly deliver on the promises, and the ideas put forth in our Green Paper (and other papers we created outlining the ecosystem). That means:

• At the very least, we need one at least million euros to deliver on those promises to do work this year. As it says in the Green Paper, if the ICO raises less than that, then we will return ICO funds to the participants and seek other avenues of funding.
• In order to have enough currency available for the ecosystem to flow people need to have Holo fuel to pay for hosting. In other words, the currency supply needs to relate to the size of the ecosystem. That is why the supply of the currency in our ICO is driven by the activity of backers (developers and hosts) in the crowdfunding campaign.

What that Means Strategically in ICO Design

Given our aspirations, how do we then design the shape, structure, flows, and opportunities of the ICO to fit those assumptions and aspirations?

• Reasonable Funding: a small-but-functional ecosystem would need to be 2.5 million euros, so that is the supply we will launch with on day one of our ICO, January 23, 2018.
• Supply Linked to Demand: After that, the supply of the ICO is calculated in proportion to the scale of the ecosystem. There is a supply formula we use to describe how each purchase in our crowdfunding campaign, whether a hosting device or a developer event, releases tokens in the ICO. We described this in our post, Attuning to the Crowd.
• Reserved Tokens: People who have participated in the crowdfunding through Indiegogo get first dibs on the tokens their purchase released in the ICO.

Reserved Tokens: Tactical Details

We want our existing participants to have access to the economy they are participating in. So when the ICO launches, we will notify participants (except those in restricted locations) that the tokens that they have released into the ICO through their purchase are reserved for them. We know it takes some time to receive and read the notification email, get whitelisted, and purchase your reserved tokens so we have implemented a three-day waiting period before reserved tokens are added to the ICO’s available supply. They are available for purchase exclusively to the person who released those tokens for 24 hours. After that, they are openly available for purchase. The tokens created by purchases from locations that are restricted from participating in the ICO will be available for anyone (in non-restricted areas) to purchase.

We are quite excited to watch the movement of supply in Holo’s ICO. You can see the daily supply too at https://ico.holo.host.

Once the sale starts, you will be able to see the amount of supply, how much has been sold, and what is being held in reserve on this chart.

To release more supply in our ICO, bring in more hosts and developers through Indiegogo. Create this ecosystem with us, responsibly.

The post Designing Ecosystem Flows for a Responsible ICO appeared first on P2P Foundation.