In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto published a revolutionary white paper that described a simple peer-to-peer electronic cash system that would later become Bitcoin. In the decade since the launch of the digital currency, the nascent blockchain technology behind Bitcoin has been heralded as having the same radical potential as the printing press or the Internet, in particular presenting extraordinary challenges to traditional banking. Yet the paper contains no reference to existing political ideas, monetary or economic knowledge. Why?

THE WHITE PAPER, with an introduction by James Bridle, situates Bitcoin within an obscure historical movement of decentralisation, powered by the ideologies of encryption, showing how blockchain is part of a wider project to redraw the maps of political possibility. Crypto-economist Jaya Klara Brekke’s guide analyses Nakamoto’s canonical text as the Rosetta Stone that reveals the far-reaching implications of decentralisation.

In this discussion held at Foyles on 4 February 2019, Jaya sits down with Ben Vickers and Paul Mason to discuss how Nakamoto’s White Paper can serve as a compass for the rapidly shifting terrain of contemporary techno-politics.

Visit Ignota Books for more information about THE WHITE PAPER.

The post Podcast of the Day: The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto – Jaya Klara Brekke, Ben Vickers and Paul Mason in conversation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Written by Hank Sohota. Originally posted on Good Audience on 28th January 2019.

A viable, sustainable and scalable P2P sociopolitical economy, which embraces digital and data sovereignty for all agents, is about to emerge. One in which, as a consequence, money and intermediaries — social, political and economic — will no longer play the central, and therefore controlling, role they play today.

Let us start where Bitcoin started

Whatever socially and politically legitimised ‘flavour’ of money operates within a given community, nation or civilisation, it fundamentally shapes the economic, social, and political potential — and therefore possibilities — within those domains.

The Problem with Money

Money — by its very nature a social construct, as it fundamentally relies on people’s confidence in it — has three defining core functions. These are:

1. a store of value (i.e. sufficiently stable in value — and particularly, in people’s confidence in it — over time), which enables it to be …
2. a medium of exchange (i.e. also sufficiently saleable across scales and space), all of which enables it to be …
3. a unit of account

However, in order for money to work at scale, standardisation is also required which, in reality, inevitably means centralisation. Unfortunately, this intrinsically undermines the hardness of money (i.e. it’s ‘uninflatability’*), and the level of confidence people can have in its core functions, because decision-making shifts into the hands of the few. One cannot have sound money without reliable and consistent long-term hardness, as well as confidence-maintaining monetary policy. Regrettably, the few — or in the bygone case of a monarchy, an individual — have a long history of abusing their fiduciary responsibilities on both counts.

So, in order to solve the ‘hardness of money’ and the ‘level of confidence’ problems, we need to solve the centralisation problem, which — applied more broadly — asks:

How do we coordinate, cooperate and collaborate across space and time, at scale, without the need for intermediaries, representatives, executives or organisation-owners?

Arguably, this articulates, for some, the holy grail of anarchy (which should not be assumed to be synonymous with lawlessness, chaos or disorder).

Limitations of Bitcoin and Ethereum

Bitcoin is an attempt at solving the ‘centralisation of hard money’ problem which in the bigger picture is a good place to start. However, it does this by using a distributed ledger of hashchain blocks (giving it immutability), hard coding hardness (giving it uninflatability), and constructing a single network-wide timeline through a decentralised but not fully distributed Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism (giving it ‘uncensorability’*). This provides a form of ‘trustlessness’ by trusting the network rather than any individual entity or actor. Due to its significant practical and philosophical limitations, this approach provides only a partial and impractical solution because it is not distributed enough, not fast enough, not cost effective enough, and not scalable enough. Furthermore, it could push climate change too far in the wrong direction to be worth it, due to its electrical power consumption needs. Unless of course, conversely, it turns out to be a boon for renewable forms of generating electricity by increasing the financial incentives for it, perhaps even leading to green energy infrastructure which otherwise would not be funded. Nonetheless, these shortcomings will still apply even if all the near-to-medium term solutions work out as proposed. Even so, the four key features of Bitcoin*, in its current form, namely, immutability, uninflatability, uncensorability and unconfiscatability, are an historic achievement.

Ethereum, although not necessarily trying to solve the same problem — and not necessarily doing a good job of it — is fundamentally based on the same underlying ledger technology as Bitcoin and so suffers from the same or similar limitations, even before we include its ‘centralisation of power’ issues, its shortcomings as a cryptocurrency relative to Bitcoin, the complications and disadvantages of smart contracts, and its attempt to move to a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism*. What Ethereum has done is enable the launching of several thousand Altcoins, none of which seem to make much sense, and nor do their fundamentals give one confidence that they will ever achieve their stated goals. Given that this has taken place in a new asset class and an unregulated market, no one should be surprised by the emergence of a FOMO-FUD wild west, or the role played in it by market makers.

Mutual Self-sovereignty — the foundational core construct of a fair and just sociopolitical economy

In my view, economics should have a strong focus on thrivability in human social systems — viable, sustainable and inclusive thrivability, at scale.

Although I over-simplify, I believe that at the heart of thrivability lies a dialectic in human social systems, that of group solidarity vs. individual sovereignty (cf. the political philosophy divide of left vs. right). Both aspects of this dialectic provide tremendous benefits for the group and the individual, namely, social cohesion leading to better survival odds, but this comes at a price, namely, acquiescence, conformity and homogeneity.

However, I would suggest that solidarity and sovereignty are two sides of the same coin – they mutually and dynamically ‘co-form’ and ‘in-form’ each other, and so co-evolve symbiotically. They constitute a ‘dialectical singularity’ which is brought into ‘harmony’ through mutual self-sovereignty (cf. Yin-Yang; i.e. black and white dynamically interacting with each other at the same time, without either diminishing in identity or the two combining to become a ‘middle’ grey). In this dynamic, both social cohesion and individual sovereignty are both ‘strong and fluid’, at the same time — a concept often referenced in Daoist philosophy using the metaphor of water. I believe it is this perpetual dynamic which leads to the anti-fragility of a human social system. I further believe, it leads to the perpetual emergence of one’s sense of self and one’s sense of identity.

The mutual self-sovereignty challenge

Even solving the centralisation problem — of hard money or more broadly — would not be enough. We need to go further and address ‘the mutual self-sovereignty’ challenge, which can be thought of as:

Not only do I need a viable option of not having to participate in any particular socially mediated ‘game’ played by a particular set of rules, I also need to be able to, easily and permissionlessly, change the rules of the game (i.e. create a forked version — preferably not a sh*tty/scammy one) and invite others to play, or — just as easily and permissionlessly — be able to invent an entirely new game.

Furthermore, and equally importantly, in all such games the rules (i.e voluntary and mutually enabling constraints) must be enforceable and policed in an emergent and self-organising manner by the participants — governance of the people, by the people, for the people — and the rules must respect relativity (i.e. multiple relativistic timelines) — global consensus should not be necessary. Otherwise, we inexorably end up back at the centralisation problem.

All of which means that Bitcoin and Ethereum — specifically their underpinning blockchain technology — are not going to take us where we need to go, in order to address our most pressing global and local challenges. This is because they are not sufficiently workable and do not go far enough although they will have been critical and essential catalysts. Even those who were initially inspired by the distributed ledger technology (DLT) of Bitcoin, as a means of addressing the challenges of enabling a radically new peer-to-peer (P2P) sociopolitical economy — which motivated some in the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities — are now having to recognise, and to concede, these limitations. Hence, the sense of malaise and disillusionment among the Ethereum and Ethereum-esque developers who are not in it for the money.

Holochain and the Post-monetary Economy

Holochain, on the other hand, will take us where we need to get to. It is the first technology, in human history, which genuinely addresses the mutual self-sovereignty challenge, completely and at any scale — in fact, it is inversely scalable, its efficiency and efficacy improve as network size increases — and as an integral component of the MetaCurrency and Ceptr projects, it also pre-dates both Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Holochain provides a bio-mimicry inspired, software-based, enabling social technology — a pattern, if you will — from which can emerge anarchy — life without mass intermediation as a necessity. Thus empowering us to move to a post-monetary epoch with, for example, a multitude of asset-backed mutual credit (crypto)currencies — which on Holochain are natively inter-operable — using a much broader definition of currency (i.e. a formal symbol system for shaping, enabling, and measuring flows — e.g. of value, promises or reputation). A much more enlightened interpretation of Hayekian thinking, I would suggest, than the neo-liberalism version.

A value flow, of any kind, must first be acknowledged and recognised before it can be managed for the better — making visible only GDP-related flows has been a disaster for humanity and the planet, if not potentially catastrophic. Then, and only then, can we begin the work of reinforcing or amplifying interrelated positive flows and mitigating — hopefully eliminating — interrelated negative flows, in an emergent and self-organising way. Thus we can form the basis on which more meaningful, and more humane, wealth and prosperity can be created for the many, perhaps even, for all.

Mass Disintermediation

Despite its long history, for most people, the economic and sociopolitical revolution Holochain will induce will seem like it happened overnight. This is because it is an open source software solution taking place in a digitalised world. It can be deployed at speed, at scale, and at zero marginal cost, using the full range of computational device types from a Raspberry Pi, to a smartphone, to a tablet, or a laptop — even a server — using software development languages and tools which produce secure, compact and fast web and native apps.

The first hApp (Holochain dApp) to be built — using Rust and WASM — is Holo, an hApp for hosting hApps which includes the first ever mutual credit cryptocurrency called Holo Fuel, to reimburse Holo hosts — who with Holo, host hApps using the spare computation and storage capacity on their own devices. This enables hApps to be accessed using a standard browser — such as Holochain favoured Mozilla’s Firefox — through the web, without any change in the user experience. However, even this hosting can be avoided, since any device running Holochain is natively both a user and a host. Holo’s purpose then is to provide a bridge between the current server-based web and the potential longer term server-less — because it is peer-to-peer — Holochain alternative. Ultimately, it should be possible to integrate mesh networkingtoo, which would mean a genuinely and fully distributed internet and web.

Furthermore, Holochain’s data integrity model supports mutual self-sovereignty by having an agent-centric orientation, using sourcechains (think, agent owned hashchains), digital signatures, and validatingdistributed hash tables (think, BitTorrent and GitHub), rather than a data-centric orientation. Thus fully returning value realisation and ownership, as well as privacy and confidentiality, to those actually creating the value locallyrather than intermediaries, representatives, executives or organisation-owners, seeking to extract and monetise it.

The Ultimate Question

Once workable, practical and ubiquitous, mutual self-sovereignty — as a movement — will redefine every dimension of our lives — social, political, economic, artistic and cultural. Most profoundly, it will completely change the nature of the stories we tell ourselves and each other in order to navigate our lives, both intra and inter generationally. In doing so, along with the societal implications of advanced, model-free, deep reinforcement learning AI — not to mention Ceptr and Ceptr-based AI — we will ultimately re-conceive and therefore redefine what we believe it truly means to be human — in the 21st century.

Disclosure: I am financially and philosophically invested in Ceptr/Holochain/Holo. I have never invested in Bitcoin, any alt-coin or crypto asset.

Photo by Freddie Collins on Unsplash

Thanks for reading.

You can share this article using these links: 
Facebook | Twitter | Reddit | LinkedIn | Telegram |Email.

Further reading:

Ceptr/Holochain/Holo Whitepapers

Antonopoulos, M. (2016). The Internet of Money: A collection of talks by Andreas M. Antonopoulos: Volume 1. Merkle Bloom.

Antonopoulos, M. (2017). The Internet of Money Volume Two: A collection of talks by Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Merkle Bloom.

Ammous, S. (2018). The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking. John Wiley & Sons.

* Special thanks to Tone Vays and Murad Mahmudov for so freely sharing their intellectual musings with the public.

The post Beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum — a fairer and more just post-monetary sociopolitical economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In a joint report for the Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning (MERL) Technology conference this fall, researchers who studied 43 blockchain use cases came to the conclusion that all underdelivered on claims.

And, when they reached out to several blockchain providers about project results, the silence was deafening. “Not one was willing to share data,” the researchers said in their blog post.[

In their research, Christine Murphy, a social researcher at Social Solutions International and John Burg and Jean Paul Pétraud, fellows at the U.S. Agency for International Development, found a proliferation of press releases, white papers and persuasively written articles touting the many attributes of the distributed ledger technology (DLT).

“However, we found no documentation or evidence of the results blockchain was purported to have achieved in these claims. We also did not find lessons learned or practical insights, as are available for other technologies in development,” the researchers reported.

“Despite all the hype about how blockchain will bring unheralded transparency to processes and operations in low-trust environments, the industry is itself opaque. From this, we determined the lack of evidence supporting value claims of blockchain in the international development space is a critical gap for potential adopters,” they added.

Blockchain pilots and proofs-of-concept, however, are not without value, the researchers noted; in the end, the real value of blockchain deployments may not be technology itself, “but rather as an impetus to question what we do, why we do it, and how we could do it better.”

The scathing evaluation of blockchain by the research trio was backed to some extent by industry analysts, who said the marketing hype around it has created unrealistic expectations, especially as enterprise use is not yet fully baked.

Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, said while the report’s findings came as no surprise to her, it lacked balance. The researchers did not bother to ask why projects had not delivered on goals, such as improving transactional efficiency, transparency and privacy, she said.

“Back in early 2018, we’d already said… 99% of enterprise projects are dead end; 99% don’t need the technology; they don’t get out of the lab. They’re a result of CEOs fear of missing out – the FOMO phenomenon,” Litan said. “Having said all that, it’s a very valuable technology. People started trying to use it before it was ready for prime time. That’s true in the cryptocurrency world and in the enterprise blockchain world.”

Gartner gauges the maturation of new technology through a “Hype Cycle,” a graphic-based lifecycle that follows five phases: from the Technology Trigger, when proof-of-concept stories and media interest emerges, to the Plateau of Productivity, when mainstream adoption occurs – if the technology is more than niche.

Among those five Hype Cycles is the Trough of Disillusionment, when interest wanes as pilots and proofs-of-concepts fail to deliver and technology providers either work out the kinks and improve the technology to the satisfaction of users, or ultimately fail and die out.

Enterprise blockchain technology that’s centrally administered like a traditional database yet still part of a peer-to-peer architecture that immutably stores encrypted transactions is headed into the Trough of Disillusionment, Litan said.

“Blockchain winter has come,” Litan said.

Earlier this year, a Gartner CIO survey revealed on average that only 3.3% of companies worldwide had actually deployed blockchain in a production environment.

In a blog post, Litan listed eight hurdles needed for blockchain to advance and meet the goals stated by technology providers hawking it as a cure-all for virtually any international, transactional network need – from fee-less, cross-border payments to supply chain tracking.

Read the full article at Computerworld

Photo by jjjj56cp

The post Trough of Disillusionment: Blockchain winter has come 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.

In this concept note, prepared as background for our article for the World Economic Forum, we explain how approaches to blockchain and cryptocurrency need to be grounded in a clear appreciation of the relationship between technology and society. That clarity is important not just for discussions on blockchains and cryptocurrencies, but for all software technology, as it becomes so powerful in our lives. We will therefore develop a lens, called “integral technology,” to assess the positive and negative aspects of any technology and apply this to recent innovation on the field of distributed ledgers.

Deepmind’s AI interpretation of Escher’s famous hands

When we hear people comment on blockchain and cryptographic currency being good or bad, we are often hearing different assumptions about the relationship between technology and society. So first, let us review the various ways that people look at that. The Oxford English dictionary defines technology as “The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes…” That is different to how the word is typically used to refer to the “artefacts” – or things – of technology, such as the arrow head, the mobile handset, blockchain, or nuclear missile. By describing both “application” and “practical purposes” the dictionary suggests that technology is best understood as a system of intentions and outcomes. That system involves people, knowledge, contexts and the transformations that are involved in creating those artefacts. These are what we identify as the five aspects of any technological system, which is what we will mean when we refer to a technology in this concept note. The power of this systems perspective on technology is that it invites us to consider further the wider context of politics, financing, iterative redesign processes, the side effects and finally the values that shape technologies. Which is what we will do now.

Is Technology Something to Love or Fear?

We humans attach a great deal of importance to technology because it seems to be able to meet many of our needs and desires. It brings aspects of our imagination into physical reality in ways that then reshape our lives and what we might imagine next. This utility of technology makes selling it very possible, but also means there is less emphasis given to the costs and consequences of those desires being met in those ways.

Given its centrality in civilisation, a range of perspectives on our relationship to technology have arisen.Some optimists believe any negative consequences are worth the benefit, and that the march of technology is synonymous with the march of human progress. This view is called “technological optimism”. Others believe that technology takes humans further from their natural state, isolating them from the world, and causing numerous new problems which often require further technological solutions. These “technological pessimists” can point to a range of dangerous situations such as nuclear waste, climate change and antibiotic resistance, to then question the hubris that humanity may have exhibited in thinking our technology meant we can exert influence on nature without an eventual response of equivalent impact on ourselves. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that modern technologies have a quality of seeking to dominate nature rather than work with it, in ways that stem from – and contribute to – the illusion that humans are separate agents acting on nature.

Some of these optimists and pessimists don’t think that we humans have much influence on what is happening. Such “technological determinism” is the view that technology can be understood as having a logic of its own and develops as an unfolding of consciousness in ways that we, our entrepreneurs or our politicians, will not, in principle, control. Current debates about the merits or risks of blockchains and cryptocurrencies often echo these perspectives. Some argue it will change, or even save, the world. Others argue that it will collapse the financial basis of our nation states. Still others argue that whatever our view, it IS the future – as if it cannot be stopped.

Counter-posed to these views on technology has been the “technological neutralist” view which suggests that technology is neither inherently good or bad for humanity and therefore needs responsible management to maximise its intended benefits and minimise its unintended drawbacks. That view is the most widespread in the field of Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies. Sociologists have revealed as pure fiction the apolitical view of technology development as flowing from basic science, to applied science, development, and commercialization.  Instead, a variety of relevant stakeholder groups compete to influence a new technology and they determine how it becomes stabilised as an element of society.

Therefore, despite the pervasiveness of “great man” stories in our culture, technological innovation is not the result of heroes introducing new ‘technologies’ and release them into ‘society,’ starting a series of (un)expected impacts. Rather, innovation is a complex process of “co-construction” in which technology and society, to the degree that they could even be conceived separately of one another, negotiate the role of new technological artefacts, alter technology through resistance, and construct social and technological concepts and practices.

We share this perspective on technology. It invites us to see how innovation is a social process that we can choose to engage in to achieve public goals. We are not, however, “technology neutralists”, for a few reasons. First, we do not believe that all technologies have the same level of negative or positive potential prior to their human control. That is because all kinds of different phenomena exist under the one banner “technology”. For instance, while nuclear fission constantly produces poisons which require millennia of custody, smart decision-making algorithms only impact the world insofar as their decisions are acted upon. Second, we do not assume humanity to be the autonomous agent in our relationship with technology. Rather, we are influenced by the technologies that shape the society we are born into. Canadian philosopher of technology, Professor Andrew Feenberg explains this situation as humans and technology existing in an entangled hierarchy. “Neither society nor technology can be understood in isolation from each other because neither has a stable identity or form” he explains.

For us, “technological constructivism” is the perspective that technology and society influence each other in complex ways that cannot be predicted and therefore require constant vigilance by representatives from all stakeholders who are directly and indirectly affected. The implication of this perspective for innovation in blockchain and cryptographic currencies is that the intentions of innovators and financiers are important to know and influence, and that wider stakeholder participation in shaping the direction and governance of the technology is essential. This is the approach that we base our view of developments in software in general and blockchains, in particular.

The Technological State of the World

Humanity faces many dilemmas today. Some of these are brought about by our technology, some are not, and we may hope many can be solved by a sensible use of technology in future. Climate change is the result of our rapid use of technologies to burn fossil fuels and tear up forests. Malnutrition is the result of a wide array of factors, which are difficult to blame on technology, though its persistence despite the “green revolution” would make technological optimism a questionable position today.

One field of technology which may be exceptional with regard to regulation and the lack of it is Artificial Intelligence (AI), which describes the ability of computers to perceive their environment and determine an appropriate course of action. Narrow forms of AI are already in use. They often confer a tremendous advantage to those who use it well, and its use by the victorious Trump campaign, and the victorious Leave campaign (of the Brexit referendum) are raising huge questions about the justice of using people’s own data to manipulate their voting intention. AI systems tend to be very complicated and sometimes produce unexpected results. But because they save labour, for example by automatically judging loan applications or driving vehicles, there is commercial pressure to simply accept the automated decisions to reduce the costs. As AI is applied to more and more areas of trade, finance, military and critical infrastructure, the risks and ethical questions proliferate.

There are more intense concerns being expressed recently about more general forms of AI that include capabilities for software to be self-authoring. That does not mean consciousness, nor mimicking consciousness, but that overtime the software could develop itself beyond our understanding or control. It could ‘escape’ from a laboratory setting, or within specific applications, and disrupt the world through all our internet-connected systems. Astro-physicist Stephen Hawking said “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.” Some even fear that, a rogue AI might only be disabled by killing the whole internet. Combined with the resilience of blockchains, which cannot be switched off at any one place, this possibility is a step closer. This potential existential danger invites a new seriousness about software regulation. But our concern in this concept note is more with the way machines in the service of powerful organisations are already shaping certain aspects of our lives with little accountability and that the field of AI is almost completely unregulated.

Introducing the Concept of Integral Technology

Given these problems, it is self-evident that humanity needs a better approach to technology. How might we frame that approach? Concepts of ethics, responsibility and sustainability have all been widely discussed in relation to technology. Given our systems view of technology, we find Integral Theory to provide a simple prompt for considering its implications for society. It invites us to question internal and external impacts of any system and its embeddedness in wider systems. We are going to propose that humanity needs to develop a more consciously integral approach to the development and implementation of technology. Key to this concept is that technologies need to be more internally and externally coherent. Internal coherence describes how their design does not undermine the intention for their creation. External coherence describes how their design does not undermine the social and political system that they depend upon and which holds technologies and their protagonists to account, as well as the wider environment upon which we all depend. As that social and political system would be undermined by increasing inequality, so the effects of technology on equality are important to its integral character.

To aid future discussion, here we outline six initial characteristics of such integral technologies.

1) Meaningful Purpose: The technology system is the result of people seeking to provide solutions to significant human needs and desires, rather than exploit people for personal gain. A positive example is the development of technologies for cataract operations that can be offered affordably for the poor. A negative example is the development of financial algorithms to front run stock market trading.
2) Stakeholder Accountability: A diversity of stakeholder opinions are solicited and used during technological development and implementation in an effort to avoid unexpected and negative externalities. A positive example is the cryptocurrency Faircoin for which everything is decided through an assembly; a negative example is bitcoin, in which computer mining stakeholders approve or veto new features based on their interests in maintaining power and profit.
3) Intended Safety: A technology does not cause harm when used in the intended ways, and those using it in unintended ways are made aware of known risks. A positive example is the indications and contra-indications on pharmaceutical labels; a negative example is when pesticides are marketed to be used just before the rice or grain harvesting to increase the yield, when that increases likelihood of toxic residues.
4) Optimal Availability: As much of the knowledge about the technology as safely possible is kept in the public domain, in order to reduce power differentials and maximise the benefits of the technology when other uses for the technology are found. A positive example is open source software which allows anyone with the right skills to deploy it for any purpose they choose; a negative example is the ingredients of cigarettes which are not published and make it harder for affected parties to build a case against the manufacturers.
5) Avoiding Externalities: The way in which the artefacts of the technology affect the world around them are considered at an early stage and actively addressed. A positive example is the design of products to use a circular flow of materials from the Earth and back to the Earth. A negative example is how addiction to computer games may be contributing to obesity in the young while the games companies continue to pursue similar goals.
6) Managing Externalities: Subsystems for mitigating known negative externalities are developed at the same time as the technology and launched alongside it. A positive example is the system of regulations that mandate regular physical inspections of aircraft. A negative example is government migrating social service administration to the internet and not ensuring the poorest have the computer access, skills and support they need to use the new system.

Integral Blockchain and Post-Blockchain Technologies

In the past year Bitcoin has been criticised for the huge amounts of energy it consumes to secure the blockchain. At the time of writing, some compare the consumption to that of Switzerland. Such consumption is not a necessary feature of securing blockchains, but the initial design choice of the inventor, with a system called “proof of work” being used to issue new digital tokens. Other systems like Ethereum also use “proof of work” and are similarly reliant on the computer-mining companies for whether this climate-toxic code is replaced. Sadly the “proof of work” systems of these leading technologies remain. Whereas some proponents of these technologies argue that they are not so environmentally bad, due to servers being located in cold places near renewable energy sources where energy is wasted, these are somewhat defensive post-hoc excuses. Clearly the environmental appropriateness of their code was not one of the design parameters in the minds of the designers.

In the case of Ethereum, the speculation in the price of Ether affects the price of Gas which is used to process transactions. That means that as the price balloons, the system loses its attractiveness for supporting activities that are high volume and low cost. It also transfers funds from the many who would use the system to the few who speculate on digital token value or own the computer-miners.

We contend that systems which are not internally coherent will eventually experience a disintegration of their intended or espoused purpose. In addition, systems which are not externally coherent will eventually experience a disintegration in their public support and their environmental basis. The situation with Bitcoin is probably unsolvable, and its carbon footprint may lead to significant regulator intervention in time. Ethereum has a wider set of aims and so despite the continual delays in moving substantially away from Proof of Work, it may still be able to address the barriers to progress presented by the short-term interests of those controlling the mining computers. However, there is no doubt that this form of governance-by-hash-power is currently an impediment to Ethereum becoming a more integral technology.

Given these difficulties, we would like to point out some lesser-known projects, which we regard as showing exemplary integral traits.

Providing the same smart contract functionality as Ethereum, the new Yetta blockchain is intended to be sustainable by design, with the low energy requirements of its codebase being moderated further by automated rewards for those nodes using renewable energy. It will also enable automated philanthropy to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Also dissatisfied with how both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake consensus algorithms reward those who already have the most, Faircoin developed a ‘proof-of-cooperation’ algorithm. More than that, there is an open assembly in which the price of the coin is determined every month. This also is an attempt to stabilise the price of the coin and deter speculators and the erratic price movements which arise from their profiteering. They hold that a medium of exchange is not supposed to be a vent from which value can be extracted from the economy.

One post-blockchain project, Holochain, is currently raising capital in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). The communications team has made many criticisms of conventional blockchains. For example they have massive data redundancy built in, which causes such a problem for scaling that the original intention of these projects is now being compromised with such innovations as the Lightning networks. Another being that since blockchain tokens are assets without liabilities, they cannot have a stable value and thus constitute a poor medium of exchange. Holo tokens therefore are issued as liabilities, which means they have a purpose and a more stable value as long as the project lives.

“If someone tells you they’re building a “decentralized” system, and it runs a consensus algorithm configured to give the people with wealth or power more wealth and power, you may as well call bullshit and walk away. That is what nobody seems willing to see about blockchain.” – Art Brock

Another project called LocalPay, which we both work on, seeks to build a payment system for existing solidarity economy networks. Its protagonists believe that payments infrastructure is too critical and too political to be put only in the hands of monopolists and rent-seekers. Instead, infrastructure which is held in common, equally available to all, is the basis of a fairer society. They too, understand money as credit, with somebody always underwriting its value.

While none of these technologies is perfect, they are Integral Blockchains and post-Blockchains as they seek to be internally and externally coherent. The internal coherence of a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) means that the code and business model does not undermine the intention for their creation. External coherence of a DLT means that their code and business model does not undermine the social and political system that they depend upon and which holds the technologies and their protagonists to account, as well as the wider environmental system upon which we all depend. As that social and political system is undermined by increasing inequality, so the effect of a DLT on equality is important to its integral character. The four projects we highlighted all seek to integrate these considerations into their codebase and business model, rather than bolt on social or environmental considerations at a later time.

The Need for

Concerns about technology are growing. Warnings over unregulated nanotechnology and artificial intelligence are now widespread. Warnings about the socially and politically damaging effects of social media are growing. There’s a wider problem with how technology is financed and implemented in a free market system that means technology companies’ first duty is to deliver short term profits to shareholders. This means many technologies are developed in a hurry and much software is rushed to market before it is even finished. Many costs and negative impacts are hard to pin directly on the manufacturers, and thus sometimes nobody is accountable. The history of technology is one where resistance to development from society leads to stabilisation around control and access to technology. Recently we have had massive diffusion of new electronics such as the mobile phone and social media, while the systems for affected stakeholders to hold these technological systems to account do not yet exist in the ways they have done in other sectors.

The law is supposed to provide for unanticipated victims of technology and thus incentivise providers to take precautions. This clearly isn’t working nearly well enough perhaps because of the difficulty and expense of using the law and perhaps because some consequences are very hard to prove to the satisfaction of a jury. You may recall the decades of failing to prosecute tobacco companies because the link between cigarettes and lung cancer could not be proven easily. So if the law were better to favour the victims, then technology companies would do more to research and mitigate the secondary effects.

We will not be surprised if legal action will begin to be taken against platforms like Facebook on behalf of millions of claimants for a range of concerns. That might involve teenagers with clinical depression that has been correlated with social media usage, or relatives of those who then committed suicide. Companies like Facebook may point to their internal systems to address such risks, and whether that is sufficient may be debated in court sometime in the future. Such legal action may bankrupt some firms, or trigger changes. But to achieve a wider shift to more integral technologies there will need to be a shift in philosophy that the law alone will not be able to compel.

It is time for a new era of wisdom in the way we make and deploy our tools. A move from the knowledge of making things to the wisdom of making things – what we call an era of “technosophy”. In the field of digital technologies, this means the urgent development of new forms of deliberative governance, that uses both soft and hard forms of regulation. The forms that this will take need to be developed, but there are many examples from other sectors, where technical standards are agreed internationally and incorporate into national law. That would need to be done in ways that shape not stifle digital innovation, but also enable stakeholders to alert regulators to risk-laden projects, such as those using AI.

One idea might be to introduce a requirement that before software technologies can be deployed by large organisations (over 200 employees OR over 50 million USD turnover, with subsidiaries analysed as part of their parent companies), the software needs to be certified by an independent agency as not presenting a risk to the public. Such certifications could be based on new multi-stakeholder standards that would establish management systems for responsible software development. Any change of the software code that would be deployed by a large firm would need to be notified to the certifier of the underlying software before release, with a self-declared risk assessment, based on guidance provided by the standards organisation. Systems would need to be established for determining whether particular software types and uses pose heightened risks and require more oversight. For this approach to work it would have to be worldwide, so as to avoid firms moving to jurisdictions that avoid these regulations. Therefore, there is a rationale for an international treaty on software safety to be negotiated rapidly with significant resources marshalled to help these regulations to be appropriately implemented globally.

In developing this idea, we know that many protagonists in software innovation may be appalled. There is a strong anti-authoritarian mood amongst many computing enthusiasts. But it is time to realise that some technology optimists are becoming the new authoritarians, by enabling the diffusion of technologies that have wide effects on people worldwide without them having any influence on that process other than one role – if they can be a consumer. The challenge today is not whether there should be more regulation of software development and deployment or not, but how this should be done to reduce the risks and promote the widest human benefit. We offer the concept of Integral Technology as one way of helping that debate (and not as a template for regulation).

Unfortunately, in the hype and the reality around Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) we don’t see many ideas and initiatives thinking beyond the initial value proposition and promised returns to investors. Some technologies like Bitcoin seem to us to have betrayed all the aims of the founder and early adopters, yet claims of internal and external incoherence are met with very questionable objections by their near fanatical adherents. The various projects to promote social or environmental good appear to be marginal to the main thrust of this sector, and many add such concerns on top of existing code and governance structures that are not aligned with the project goals.  On the other hand, incumbent banks and their regulators have often express dismissive or negative views of DLT technologies which suggest they do not understand the problems with existing bank power and practice, or the potential of DLTs. In some countries outright bans on DLTs or cryptocurrencies are not the result of wide stakeholder consultation on questions such as what and for whom systems of value exchange should be for.

Therefore, we believe a technosophical approach to blockchain and cryptographic currencies is currently absent and needs cultivation. It is why we urgently need more international multi-stakeholder processes to deliberate on standards for the future of software technologies in general. In the field of blockchain, one event that may help is the United Nations’ half day high level discussions on blockchain, taking place at the World Investment Forum in October. Whether wider political and environmental conditions will give humanity the time and space to come together to develop and implement an appropriate regulatory environment for the future of software is currently unknown, but it is worth attempting.

We provide a background to blockchain and cryptocurrency innovation in our free online course on Money and Society.

We also offer a Certificate in Sustainable Exchange, which involves a residential course in London (next April).

Our academic research on these topics includes a paper recently published on local currencies for promoting SME financing, a paper on thwarting a monopolisation of the complementary currency field and a paper on our theory of money, published by the United Nations.

Professor Bendell is the Chair of the Organising Committee of the Blockchains for Sustainable Development sessions at the World Investment Forum 2018 at the UN.

We produced this concept note on the IFLAS blog for rapid sharing. To reference this Concept Note:
Bendell, J. and M. Slater (2018) Integral Technology in Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Beyond, Institute for Leadership and Sustainability, University of Cumbria.

The image used in this post is a reworking of Escher’s drawing that reflects the entanglement of author and authored. The image was reworked by Google AI project Deepmind, in its “dream” state, to produce the image you see. Deepmind is learning to identify the contents of images. This technology will be used to save lives, sell stuff and to kill with impunity. Reworking Escher’s hands in a rather bizarre fashion reflects our perspective of “technological constructivism” and our belief that the potential of AI to soon achieve (with human action and inaction) autonomous general super intelligence (amongst other dilemma, particularly climate change) means that we need a “technosophical” approach that more wisely assesses and governs technology systems.

Send comments to drjbendell at gmail

Photo by Daniel Kulinski

The post Integral Technology in Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Beyond – a concept note for discussion appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As the decentralisation movement grows, I consider the characteristics of decentralisation, what decentralisation is a tactic for, why and what work still needs to happen to re-decentralize the digital world.

Decentralisation has gone mainstream

Between Tim Berners-Lee raising the call to arms to re-decentralize the web, Mozilla, Internet Archive and other institutions pledging support, to the incredible financial success of blockchain and cryptocurrency projects — decentralisation is increasingly sexy.

(If you haven’t seen the hype, some of the mainstream coverage includes the New Yorker covering ‘the mission’ in 2013 to the Guardian calling decentralisation ‘the next big step’ earlier this month and Make Use Of wondering if blockchains are the answer).

Yet, what does decentralisation actually mean? Does it only apply to technology or is governance more important? Who gets to call themselves decentralised and does it matter?

The number of times I’ve heard ‘it’s decentralised’ as a reason to use or move to a particular application or platform recently, is impressive. All kinds of crypto/blockchain companies are branding themselves as ‘decentralised’ — every day there’s a new decentralised social network, decentralised file storage solution, decentralised identity app, decentralised syncing, contract management, health data sharing, dating service, avocado delivery — all decentralised! As if decentralisation is something wonderful and worthwhile in and of itself. Yet, when I ask ‘why does that matter?’ or ‘how are you decentralised?’ the answers tend to be very different and even inconsistent with the actual business proposition people are working on. How did we get here and what’s beyond the hype?

Decentralisation means different things to different people. When Francis and I picked Redecentralize to name our decentralisation-promoting side project 6 years ago, it was precisely because we cared about a number of things: privacy, competition and resilience. It wasn’t just about one solution (such as encryption) that we wanted to promote, it was a set of values: freedom, autonomy, collaboration, experimentation. Those values were tied up to the original spirit of the open web and net — the sense of freedom and possibility that we wanted to remind people of, and protect.

As decentralisation becomes more popular, those values and goals are getting lost as the community fractures into various roles. We need a way to distinguish and assess decentralisation meaningfully.

First, what does decentralisation actually mean?

At its most basic level, it is a distinction between a centralised hub and spoke model and a distributed connected network:

I drew this myself. You’re welcome.

Some people distinguish between ‘decentralised’ and ‘distributed’ — I’m talking about the general idea of decentralisation that encompasses distributed, federated and decentralised systems. This post is about the characteristics of decentralisation and the outcomes and implications of those characteristics rather than the specific configuration. (For more discussion on types of decentralisation, Vitalik wrote a great post on ‘the meaning of decentralisation’ last year).

While the diagrams are a simplification, they do immediately suggest certain characteristics. The centralised system on the left obviously has one much more important or powerful node — the middle one. All the other nodes depend on it to reach each other. It will know about all communication in the network. It’s a central point of failure and a central point of control. If you contrast this with the diagram on the right — which nodes are more important there? It’s hard to tell. Most nodes have multiple routes to other nodes. It seems like a more resilient system, but it’s harder to know how you can quickly make sure all nodes have the same information at once.

What we need is a more formal way to assess if something counts as ‘decentralised’.

Characterististics of decentralisation

The key characteristic I propose is that a system is decentralised to the extent it distributes power. Specifically, the distribution of control, knowledge and capability between many users. What does this look like?

Control is about ensuring user choice — adapting to user preferences and giving users decision making power. It’s fundamentally about autonomy. Decentralised control looks like end-users having a choice between service providers and not being forced into accepting terms and conditions that exploit them due to a lack of alternatives (see Facebook). This also looks like users having the freedom to adapt and customise the products and services they use to their specific needs. It looks like being able to opt out of targeted advertising or choosing to store your data locally. It looks like having applications that don’t require an internet connection to work.

Knowledge is about access to data and information. Knowledge distribution avoids information asymmetry and helps people recognise dependencies and the consequences of their choices. Decentralised knowledge looks like users having local copies of their data, being able to export data or choose to store the authoritative copy of their data locally. It looks like users understanding how the services they use actually work and their business models (for example whether it is advertising based, personalised advertising, selling your profile and preferences to external advertisers, something else etc). It looks like users being able to have private conversations and share photos securely with end-to-end encryption where the content of communication cannot be accessed or deleted by external organisations. It can look like the company providing the service not knowing or storing the metadata of who contacts who and when.

Capability is about infrastructure — the storage, processing and computation power needed to run systems and services. In a centralised model these are either all in the same place or in a small number of places controlled by one company. This creates a central point of failure both in the event of natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, earthquakes) and attacks (whether virtual such as data breaches, data taps, denial of services attacks, or physical destruction and manipulation). Centralisation often means that people’s data, which we rely on and want to protect (such as our conversations, photos and work), can be compromised or even lost. Privacy can be easier to compromise in central systems. A decentralised approach tends to be more resilient, but also offers greater control and knowledge distribution. It looks like apps which work offline, users being able to communicate, collaborate or share data across devices without mobile networks or wifi through peer-to-peer networks or user data federating across a network (e.g. mastodon.social).

Why decentralise?

Importantly, decentralisation in and of itself is neither good or bad. It depends on the context and what is being decentralised. Decentralisation can bring new capabilities, privacy and flexibility or surveillance, inefficiency and waste. How and why it is done, matters.

Not all things need decentralising. Unlike some, I don’t think code should be law. I like the law. It has been iterated on and developed and tested over thousands of years by millions of people. I would trust British Law above even a dozen smart contract developers. (Disclaimer: I’ve worked in tech for over 10 years, but never in law).

Institutions have value and not all expertise can or should be replaced by an immutable list and algorithmic consensus. However, in many other aspects, we desperately need to redecentralise and serve people, not corporations, much better. Even so, simply decentralising in some fashion does not magically bring about utopia. Much of the rhetoric of blockchain and other ‘decentralisation’ startups offer no plausible way from where we are today to the autonomous secure empowered world of decentralisation via their service or application. Let’s be intentional and clear about what changes we want to realise and what exactly it might take to get there. If you’re not building all of it, then be clear on what else will need to happen. We will most likely succeed as an ecosystem, not as one ‘killer app’.

This brings me back to how and why decentralisation is done, matters. And for me, the meaning and value of decentralisation is closely related to the purpose and expected outcomes of it. That means understanding the problem, articulating an alternative and roadmap for how we get there and testing the roadmap and showing it’s better by tracking the impact.

Everybody in the decentralisation space needs to do this.

Understanding the problem

Centralised systems lead to increasingly monotonous and unaccountable power. Over time this encourages exploitation and disinterest in user needs. Take Facebook for example, a platform that on the face of it is designed to help people digitally connect with their friends and family — share photos, talk, organise events and keep in touch. If my needs were a genuine priority then I should be able to share and showcase my photos from flickr or talk to my friends using my favourite app (such as telegram, signal or wire) — which would be most convenient for me. If Facebook cared about connecting people, it would not have dropped xmpp support — an open instant messaging protocol that allowed people to choose their own interface (mine was pidgin!) and from one place and talk to anyone using gchat, facebook, AIM, msn or jabber. Instead, Facebook’s interface and functionality is optimised around keeping me scrolling and in-app as long as possible since their business model depends on selling my attention.

Amazon has become a near monopoly for buying things online with their brand recognition, efficiencies of scale and great customer service. As real-world bookshops close down and everyone else sells on amazon marketplace, few have the infrastructure, supply chains, funds or brand to be able to compete any more. When there are no alternatives, why be cheaper? Why have great customer service? Users have little choice or control and Bezos (the owner of Amazon) is the richest person on the planet. Instead of thousands of independent flourishing businesses, we have one very very very rich man.

Centralisation makes it easy to undermine privacy and use personal information in ways individuals cannot control. As the Snowden revelations showed us, Governments tap network cables and can curtail freedom of speech. Digital monopolies now hold unbelievable amounts of data on us which can be used to manipulate us into spending money, but potentially also to impersonate, blackmail or silence.

An alternative

Keeping power accountable requires alternative competing sources of power which are independent. This could be government, assuming government is there to represent the interests of the many above the few. It could be alternative companies and services. It could be many people choosing together.

An alternative, decentralised world is one of:

• Choice, diversity and competition — where many different business models and structures co-exist beyond the ‘winner takes all’ surveillance capitalism model (which depends on closed networks which don’t integrate or talk to each other). Centralised models, especially with data selling / advertising business models, have been deeply explored and within any new vertical often one or two winners take all and price out new competitors. This is uninspiring compared to the wealth of innovation that might be possible with local organisations tailoring their offering to particular sectors, cultures, interests and preferences. The same open source software can be provided in different configurations and alternative service standards to fit different user needs, budget and cultural context. It’s a world where providing ethical and environmentally friendly products and delivery services is possible and discoverable.
• Resilience — where our valuable data and services are persistent and safe from companies being bought, new management decisions, natural disaster or hacking. No more losing your journal or portfolio gallery when a company is bought up by a monopoly.
• Autonomy and privacy — where we control what kinds of terms and conditions we’re willing to agree to. A world where people can opt out of data sharing or choose to pay for their social network — choosing security and no adverts while still being able to communicate with friends using different providers. A world where end-to-end encryption works seamlessly.

How do we make it happen?

We all can contribute!

At Redecentralize.org we’re encouraging viable alternatives that work together (‘small pieces loosely joined’). This means ensuring that decentralised products and services are usable and work well with other privacy preserving user centered services and products. A key goal of redecentralize is to promote decentralised projects and platforms and bring people working in this space together through events and discussion forums.

Secondly, open protocols and regulation that incentivises or enforces their use is vital. The beginnings of this already exist in the data portability requirements of GDPR. Open protocols allow for collaboration between different and competing products and services, giving the user maximum flexibility and control without losing access to others in their network. The forced exclusion of closed proprietary protocols over network type services (such as social networks or marketplaces like amazon, airbnb, uber) has led to monopolies and lack of innovation and should be consigned to history.

Lastly we all have a role to play to disrupt the surveillance capitalism business model by choosing with our wallets and spending money on respectful software. A promising path may be to have payment built into how things work (cryptocurrency style) so that when you use IPFS and help store content you collect Filecoin you can then spend on the applications and services you value.

Conclusion

Decentralisation in and of itself, is unlikely to achieve all the outcomes that many people in the decentralisation movement care about. Yet it does offer a powerful way to tackle the problems of digital monopolies, growing inequality and loss of autonomy in our societies. Decentralisation incentivises power to be distributed across users. It’s an alternative infrastructure and way of being that creates space for autonomy, collaboration and local control. So, let’s be explicit about the change we want to see and test the impact.

Decentralised governance (knowledge and control in this model) is vital and must be considered alongside infrastructure and capacity. Let’s assess projects on all three characteristics of decentralisation and treat technology as a powerful tool to get us to a better world, but by no means the only intervention needed!

Can I get involved?

Yes of course. Join the discussion list and come chat on the #redecentralize matrix channel. We’re about to start fundraising —shout if you’d like to sponsor our work or come contribute!

Photo by Thomas Hawk

The post There’s more to decentralisation than blockchains and bitcoin appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In the meantime, the token economy has exploded, and despite its many faults and weaknesses, it has brought open and contributive accounting to the mainstream as a practice, via programmable tokens that are divided up exactly as the open source communities decide. We have moved from an economy based on capitalist enterprises, which extracted all the surplus value from the developers, to an eco-system in which contributory competency networks, prepare white papers, crowdfund through tokens, and distribute the value much more widely amongst the contributors.

While much remains to be done, this is a major milestone in showing a possible future of or work and reward systems. The two following extracts bring testimonies about how the ‘developer working class’ is looking at these advances.

The question now is, can other sections of workers, those that do not belong to the aristocracy of labor that do software work, also learn and benefit from these new systems, and a second question is, We will be working on these very questions this summer and publish a report about it.

(excerpted from): How App Tokens Changed the Life of the Developer Working Class

Richard Burton: A month of work for the protocol (Ethereum) has completely changed my life. I am free to travel the world and work on whatever I want. It is hard to overstate the mental freedom afforded by having a cash buffer and not having to work all the time to make ends meet. It has had a profound effect on my mental health and freed me up to do the best work of my life. The people who built this protocol took a chance on me and I am incredibly grateful.

Vitalik and his team gave birth to a protocol that over 7,000 people committed to. They effectively held an IPO for their protocol at the start of the project. Since then, thousands more have got involved by trading Ether, writing code, and helping the protocol to flourish.

– “Bitcoin is not just a protocol or money, it’s a new business model for Open Source Software. Prior to Bitcoin, you had to raise money, write software, distribute your product, build a business model, and work towards liquidity. Angels, VCs, salespeople and bankers guided you the entire way, through a maze of tolls and controls.”

Naval Ravikant saw this coming months before the Ether sale. The coins that protocols distribute to contributors are like shares in a company. The key difference is that these shares are not locked up by startup founders and venture capitalists.

There are a thousand nightmarish stories about startup employees not being able to afford to exercise their stock options and missing out on millions of dollars. Alex MacCaw and I wrote about this problem in 2013 after seeing many of our friends go through the stressful process of trying to borrow money to buy the stock they had earnt.

The current stock option system is totally broken. It forces people to stay at companies longer than they want to in the hope that a liquidity event is just around the corner.

App Coins are totally different from stock options. I was paid for my month’s work and I was rewarded for my belief in the protocol at an early stage. There was no cliff, no vesting schedule, no liquidation preferences, no VC ratchets, no exercise window, just coins. I helped the Ethereum team when they had no money and they rewarded me for that.

The moment I decided to move on to a freelance job, I was free to do so. I didn’t have to stick around in the hope that I would make some huge pile of money in the future.

This model is going to completely change the war for talent. If you’re a smart engineer, you can go and join a rocketship startup and work crazy hours. Alternatively, you can head over to Thailand, live cheaply, and work for App Coins.

Protocol creators need your help: They need people to write clear documentation, teachers to help people learn, designers to work on the user interfaces, customer support staff to handle the swelling inboxes, investors to raise capital, and a whole range of other talent to help them build a successful protocol. It doesn’t matter if you don’t write code—you can still contribute.

Protocols will follow the startup power law: millions will be started and only a few hundred will change the world forever.

In the future, billions of people will be working for a protocol. They will define themselves by the protocols they work for and how much they can contribute.

Protocolism might be the solution we need. It harnesses human ingenuity and distributes the benefits far and wide. It can help us build an economy for the 99%.

When a startup succeeds, a handful of people get insanely wealthy. When a protocol succeeds, thousands of people profit. In the future, the great protocols could lift millions of people out of poverty.

(excerpted from): Decentralization as a Means for Developers and other Stakeholders to Take Back Control from Centralized Platforms

Chris Dixon: Let’s look at the problems with centralized platforms. Centralized platforms follow a predictable life cycle. When they start out, they do everything they can to recruit users and 3rd-party complements like developers, businesses, and media organizations. They do this to make their services more valuable, as platforms (by definition) are systems with multi-sided network effects. As platforms move up the adoption S-curve, their power over users and 3rd parties steadily grows.

When they hit the top of the S-curve, their relationships with network participants change from positive-sum to zero-sum. The easiest way to continue growing lies in extracting data from users and competing with complements over audiences and profits. Historical examples of this are Microsoft vs Netscape, Google vs Yelp, Facebook vs Zynga, and Twitter vs its 3rd-party clients. Operating systems like iOS and Android have behaved better, although still take a healthy 30% tax, reject apps for seemingly arbitrary reasons, and subsume the functionality of 3rd-party apps at will.

For 3rd parties, this transition from cooperation to competition feels like a bait-and-switch. Over time, the best entrepreneurs, developers, and investors have become wary of building on top of centralized platforms. We now have decades of evidence that doing so will end in disappointment. In addition, users give up privacy, control of their data, and become vulnerable to security breaches. These problems with centralized platforms will likely become even more pronounced in the future.

Cryptonetworks are networks built on top of the internet that 1) use consensus mechanisms such as blockchains to maintain and update state, 2) use cryptocurrencies (coins/tokens) to incentivize consensus participants (miners/validators) and other network participants. Some cryptonetworks, such as Ethereum, are general programming platforms that can be used for almost any purpose. Other cryptonetworks are special purpose, for example Bitcoin is intended primarily for storing value, Golem for performing computations, and Filecoin for decentralized file storage.

Early internet protocols were technical specifications created by working groups or non-profit organizations that relied on the alignment of interests in the internet community to gain adoption. This method worked well during the very early stages of the internet but since the early 1990s very few new protocols have gained widespread adoption. Cryptonetworks fix these problems by providing economics incentives to developers, maintainers, and other network participants in the form of tokens. They are also much more technically robust. For example, they are able to keep state and do arbitrary transformations on that state, something past protocols could never do.

Cryptonetworks use multiple mechanisms to ensure that they stay neutral as they grow, preventing the bait-and-switch of centralized platforms. First, the contract between cryptonetworks and their participants is enforced in open source code. Second, they are kept in check through mechanisms for “voice” and “exit.” Participants are given voice through community governance, both “on chain” (via the protocol) and “off chain” (via the social structures around the protocol). Participants can exit either by leaving the network and selling their coins, or in the extreme case by forking the protocol.

In short, cryptonetworks align network participants to work together toward a common goal — the growth of the network and the appreciation of the token. This alignment is one of the main reasons Bitcoin continues to defy skeptics and flourish, even while new cryptonetworks like Ethereum have grown alongside it.

Photo by Marco Verch

The post Tokens as a Labor Model appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Together with Faircoin, the Holochain, the SolarCoin and the Heyerdal Mangrove Coin, this should be on the radar as a potential commons-based currency of the future.

Theoretical Underpinnings of the Duniter G1 project

(source)

A cryptocurrency system

“Duniter uses the crypto-currency concept introduced by Bitcoin, which is to use cryptographic tools such as signatures to create digital currencies. Duniter fits this definition, but it has completely different inspirations than Bitcoin — the Web of Trust and Universal Dividend — to do better than Bitcoin. Actually, Duniter has a reference to a theory called Relative Money Theory. This theory demonstrates that a currency which aims to respect each individual’s economic liberties MUST implement the Universal Dividend (a.k.a. Basic Income), which is the only way to avoid both spatial and temporal asymmetry toward money issuance.”

A space-time asymmetry

Space-time asymmetry refers to the relative access of individuals to newly created money. Concretely, all existing currencies (c. 2015) are both spatially and temporally asymmetrical for their users. Let’s take Bitcoin as an example to understand why.

Spatial-asymmetry

When new Bitcoins are created, only some Bitcoin users (the miners) are given new Bitcoins, while everyone else get nothing. We believe this is the first injustice.

However, some might say:

“but miners used their electricity and time to get it!”

… we would answer that their work shouldn’t have been rewarded by newly created Bitcoins. New Bitcoins should be distributed to the whole Bitcoin community. Miners should be rewared another way, but not by money issuance. Of course, Bitcoin can’t create money through Basic Income since Bitcoin users are not strongly identified, and one might benefit from money creation multiple times if he owned several wallets. Duniter gets rid of this problem completely by identifying its users and giving the same amount [of Basic Income] to everyone.

Temporal-asymmetry

Bitcoin has an absolute limit of 21 million BTC (its unit of currency), which means ever fewer bitcoins will be created over time until 0 are being generated. So, once the first adopters have mined every bitcoin, how will future joiners get Bitcoins? The answer — just like Euros or Dollars: to get money you have to work for the ones who already own it. We believe this is the second injustice. Every member of a monetary community should be equal with regard to earning money, and get the same relative amount of money over time, even if he is a late adopter. Duniter aims to fix this by making the Universal Dividend (a.k.a. UD) grow by the time according to precise rules, thus making members equal toward money issuance on a half-lifespan.

A solution

Bitcoin has taught us that it is possible to create a currency system allowing one to both create digital money and to exchange it without a central authority. What we need to change is the way money is issued so we finally have a symmetrical system. We need Bitcoin + Universal Dividend. But Universal Dividend implies that the community consists of only identified people. This is where the Web of Trust (WoT) comes into place. This concept, introduced by cryptography with the OpenPGP format, allows us to identify people in a decentralized manner. It works as follows: each person creates a personal identity that is linked to its cyptographic certificate. The identity must be confirmed by others members who use their own cryptographic key. It is that simple: people choose who is part of the community and who is not, not a central authority.

Duniter however won’t use OpenPGP for its cryptographic features: Elliptic Curves will be used instead for the conciseness of its generated keys and its pratical advantages. This requires that we specify our own Web of Trust mechanisms, but we think it is worth the effort.

The Blockchain

Bitcoin’s blockchain mechanism is important for two main reasons: synchronization and security. Duniter will benefit from these two features. However, Duniter’s blockchain is slightly different: it not only stores transactions, but community activity for defining the WoT. It also has a different Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism made possible by the WoT definition, providing a much more energy-efficient way to compute the blockchain.

Web of Trust

The Web of Trust is to be written in our shared public ledger, the blockchain, in just the same way Bitcoin’s transactions are written in Bitcoin’s blockchain, but for us it is the identity of people. Thus, the blockchain constitutes a space-time referential, where space is represented by individuals and time, provided by blockchain units, is the blocks. What we finally have is wot(t): the community at an instant, t.

Transactions

But that’s not all: the blockchain is also the place where transactions, the flow of money, are sequentially stored and define money ownership. In this area, Duniter looks quite a bit like Bitcoin: transactions take inputs (a.k.a. sources) and generate outputs. A transaction is a flow of money.

However, in Duniter inputs may be:

• money from another transaction [Bitcoin-like]
• money from a Universal Dividend [Duniter-specific]

As you can see, no generation transaction (where a miner earns Bitcoins for solving a block) exists in Duniter. This kind of transaction is replaced by Universal Dividend input. Outputs, on their hand, are always public keys, and not necessarily WoT members’ public keys: a company may also have a public key. This lead us to an important fact: companies are also able to use the currency.

Do note carefully that, even if they may participate, companies won’t be able to create money. Only individuals will be able to do it. This is a very important point.

Proof of Work

Like any P2P crypto-currency system, Duniter has a way to synchronize its peers when writing to the ledger (the blockchain). However, Duniter benefits from a different environment than other altcoins: an identified Web of Trust. This little difference has a tremendous impact: while Bitcoin has to make a global challenge using CPU resources to avoid just a few people from hijacking the blockchain, Duniter has the ability to rely on its members to write the blockchain. This allows us to both avoid the energy-wasting problem introduced by PoW and easily prevent the 51% attack in Duniter. Concretely, Duniter has a personalized challenge difficulty for each of its members that gets harder for the member who succeeds in writing a block, while it gets easier – until a given minimum – for the others. This mechanism ensures a rotation in the blockchain’s writing, while keeping the advantage of PoW for synchronizing the peers.

It can be noted too that, since a block does not provide extra money creation, members won’t be encouraged to compete to write the next block.

To summarize

Duniter’s blockchain can be compared to Bitcoin’s blockchain: a great book tracing the history of each membership inside the Community along with the transactions of its users. With the blockchain, we have the fundamental referential of the Relative Money Theory members (humans), and the flow of money through the transactions generated by the currency’s users.

A free economy

The goal of all this is to allow people to participate in a free economy thanks to a free currency. What is a free economy?

Relative Money Theory defines it through 4 economic freedoms:

1. The freedom to choose your currency system: because money should not be imposed
2. The freedom to access resources: because we all should have access to economic & monetary resources
3. The freedom to estimate and produce value: because value is a purely relative to each individual
4. The freedom to trade with the money: because we should not be limited by the avaible money supply

Those 4 economic freedoms should be understood together, not exclusively. Plus, “freedom” has to be understood as “non-nuisance”. So here, freedom does not mean the right to take all of a resource (like water source in a desert) so no more is available to the others. Now you get it, this is the goal: free economy through free currency.” (https://duniter.org/en/theoretical/)

Duniter and the Basic Income

From an interview with developer Gael by Tyler Prochazka:

How much of a basic income does Duniter include for each member ?

Duniter issues around 10 percent of new money each year. This new money is shared to all the members. The rhythm can be faster: for example, we can issue every day 0.026 percent of new money, and at the end of the year, it will be a growth of 10 percent.

Ten percent is not a number chosen randomly. It respects the symmetry in time. If a new user join the Duniter network in 35 years, he will start to issue the Universal Dividend at the same speed as we did before. Ten percent is calibrated so that in half a human life, 40 years, you create the same share of the monetary mass as every members did before. One should not be privileged and create a bigger share of money during his life just because he joined Duniter earlier or later.

What are the reasons Duniter is utilizing a basic income and how did the team first get introduced to the basic income concept?

I think most of the team discovered Basic Income before reading about the Relative Theory of Money. One of the biggest debate within basic income community is “how much should we give to individuals?”

The Relative Theory of Money demonstrate that to consider individuals equals and free, a money has to be issued symmetrically between individuals, in space and time. It means that it has to be issued by a Basic Income called Universal Dividend.

Yoland Bresson (an early advocate and participant in the Basic Income Earth Network), who wrote the preface of the Relative Theory of Money, is the author of the theory of “Time-Value”. Interesting enough, both theories, applied to the euro-zone, result in almost the same Universal Basic Income amount.

Another interesting thing is the Theorem of equivalence between a Libre Money and a Universal Basic Income. This demonstration states that a Universal Dividend, based on money issuance, is strictly equivalent to a Universal Basic Income based on a tax with a lower issuance rate of money. Basically, issuing 10 percent of new money each year is strictly the same as issuing three percent of new money and taxing seven percent of every accounts. But the Occam’s razor principle states that the simpler a system is, the better. The Universal Dividend is really simple: no taxation is required, no administration is necessary to check for the redistribution. It is only about issuing new money. And it is strictly equivalent to a Universal Basic Income!” (http://basicincome.org/news/2017/01/interview-time-digital-basic-income/)

Photo by Dusk/黃昏少年

The post Theoretical Underpinnings of the Duniter G1 project appeared first on P2P Foundation.

What the attainment of 1:1 signifies is a practical example of a successful deployment of a large-scale, cutting-edge technological venture connected to cooperativist organisations in the real world. It is at the forefront of connecting a desire for autonomy, with the advances offered by blockchain technology and digital currency. Moreover, it is precisely these radical principles that have lead to positive results: slow and realistic growth, basic anti-speculative measures in the management of the coin to avoid counter-productive fluctuations, and a focus on practical use in economic cooperative networks. This means on the one hand the necessity of asserting a different conception of success compared to the dubious benchmarks of today’s malfunctioning world, but also an acceptance of acting within the world as we find it, not as we might like it to be. This is the actual way to successfully change the world.

It is possible that the FairCoop project has found a way (I hesitate to use the term “third way” as that has been heavily tainted by Blairism in the UK at least) between the volatile anarcho-capitalist ‘disrupt everything and to hell with the consequences’ philosophy, and the governmental ‘protect the economic status quo at all costs’ attitude.

A utopian faith cannot be put in markets (which does not differ ideologically from the preconceptions of neo-liberalism); an equally Utopian faith cannot be put in the state, which was the error of most of 20th century radicalism. The true solution is to take the best from both sides: putting faith in the choices of individuals and decentralized networks, but refining this idea and focusing it via the conscious political decision-making of self-managed cooperatives. And on the other hand, political decisions have to be coherent and focused on a clear ethical difference from speculative and acquisitive methods, while also not needing to fit into the bureaucratic structures of the state and parliamentary campaigns.

Read the whole article here.

The post Theoretical Considerations on the Development of FairCoin appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Holo is helping to grow a more human Internet — where you control your personal data and choose how your applications work. With Holo, you share your computer’s spare capacity to help others connect to peer-to-peer apps. When people use the apps you host, you can get rewarded in cryptocurrency by the app’s creators. Connect your HoloPort to the network. Choose what apps you want to host. Help take back the Internet.

Holochain’s crowdfund campaign is being very successful, but there’s still time to chip in.

Holo is a community committed to growing a truly peer-to-peer Internet. Holo helps accomplish this by allowing anyone to access distributed applications simply by typing a URL into a web browser. We believe that when everyone can explore the distributed Internet, the Internet will shift, and change the world in powerful ways by empowering individuals, fostering trust, and helping build thriving communities.

However, Holo isn’t just good for the world. It’s good for you too. Holo incentivizes you to share your computer’s spare capacity by rewarding you with our secure cryptocurrency — Holo fuel. When people use your hosting capacity the companies providing the app you host can reward you in cryptocurrency.

By pooling together our computing resources we make possible an entire network of distributed apps that are free from centralized, corporate control. By putting that scale of control back into the hands of users, we enable humanity to access entirely new possibilities for how we do economics, governance, medicine, and community.

Holo is human-centered. It leverages solid cryptography and combines proven platforms for managing shared data integrity to bring people together in more powerful and effective ways. Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies run on an architecture called blockchain. Blockchain has inspired many to imagine new decentralized ways to organize ourselves and our data. However, these approaches have limited performance and burn massive amounts of computing and electricity. Holo runs on Holochain — a next-generation platform that is more scalable, exponentially faster, far more energy efficient, and 10,000x cheaper than blockchain.

By backing this project now, you not only help us launch the Holo network in Spring 2018, but also lay a foundational piece of Holo’s network infrastructure by purchasing one of our HoloPorts, a preconfigured hosting node.

The HoloPort is an easy and direct way to support the distributed Internet. Holo will use HoloPorts to provide a stable foundation for both distributed applications and personal data in the network to be hosted by the community, rather than by a corporation.

DISCLAIMER: You do not receive any cryptocurrency rewards for purchasing a HoloPort. In the future, you must provide hosting services for P2P web apps, and only then will you receive payment from the application providers for services you’ve performed.

We believe a distributed Internet must be funded by a wide spectrum of backers for it to best serve the diverse needs of our world. That is why we’ve chosen to not accept venture capital.

Our dedicated team has been working more than a decade (primarily as volunteers) to create a more resilient Internet that will work better for all of its citizens.

But we need your help to take it to the world! Your backing now enables the launch of a broad, secure, and user-ready network beginning in spring of 2018.

Buying a HoloPort will help create the stable, secure hosting foundation necessary for a distributed Internet in this new world.

Stand up, and support the Internet we all need!

“We are so used to these systems being manipulated that people just think that’s how the Internet works. We need to think about what it should be like.”

—Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, 2017

The Internet was envisioned as an open platform to allow anyone to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographical boundaries. But over the past twenty years, the web has concentrated power in the hands of a few giants.

Google now controls 88% of search advertising online. Nearly 80% of mobile operating systems installed are Android. More than half of all online purchases happen on Amazon. Facebook controls 77% of mobile social media.

Because of that increasing centralization, the Internet is failing us in many ways.

Today our online movements are tracked, logged, analyzed, and sold. We’re manipulated by platforms seeking to addict and distract us; they want us to spend more time on their sites and buy more products from their advertisers. This is not an Internet that serves us, it’s an Internet that serves the interests of others.

A centralized Internet makes us more vulnerable to hacking, censorship, tracking, and numerous other abuses. And because we have little say in how these systems we rely upon operate, we aren’t able to improve how they work for us. The centralized nature of today’s Internet makes us less able to adapt to change, and less capable of confronting the complex challenges that we face.

Today, most web traffic passes through corporate web servers, putting them in the middle of our interactions. But by replacing the function of corporate servers with our own computers we cut out the middlemen and take back control. Our voices can be heard again.

User-run apps are more agile and responsive than their centralized counterparts since users can set the rules and change them as desired. Plus, when we are in control of our own data, we can use it in new ways.

• Imagine a rideshare app run by the riders and drivers without a monopoly in the middle dictating terms. Holo hosts would get paid for helping host a website where anyone can book a ride.
• Imagine apps that help emergency responders coordinate with one another in the aftermath of a fire or hurricane, without needing to have a connection all the way back to some Silicon Valley data center. Unlike today’s centralized applications, apps on Holo run just fine on a local network.
• Imagine a community of rural homeowners who generate, store, and share electricity using solar panels, windmills, small water turbines, and backup batteries. Holo fuel is custom-designed to handle exactly these sorts of micro-transactions.

Holo includes a secure micropayment cryptocurrency engine which web app creators can use to pay you when you host their apps. With Holo you’ll be able to share the capacity of your computer just like you might rent out a spare room on Airbnb. Holo makes this world available to anyone with a computer and Internet connection, not just an elite class of miners and developers.

The easiest way to support the distributed network and earn Holo fuel is by purchasing a HoloPort. Since our objective is the dissemination of devices dedicated to running the network, we’re offering this personal server nearly at cost. HoloPorts are “plug and play,”meaning they come with the software already installed and are optimized to run Holo. Just plug it in, follow the instructions, and start hosting the network to earn Holo fuel.

Check out the campaign page for more.

The post Holo: Take Back the Internet – Shared P2P Hosting appeared first on P2P Foundation.