This first event of OPEN 2019 covers the ideas behind The DNA of Collaboration and Harmonious Working Patterns to explore ideas which might help all the people, communities and organisations working on creating a new, decentralised, regenerative economy collaborate better to produce more impact.

Panelists:

• Indra Adnan from The Alternative
• Nathan Schneider from the Platform Cooperativism Consortium
• Matthew Schutte from Holochain
• Laura James from Cambridge Computer Laboratory
• Josh Fairhead, author of Harmonious Working Patterns
• Oliver Sylvester-Bradley from The Open Co-op

Follow along with the chat below the video and dig deeper – there are some valuable links to other articles on catalysing collaboration and related subjects.

Notes from the chat during the discussion:

16:47:37 Nenad Maljković : Interesting article in this context (4 minute read), for later, of course  https://medium.com/enspiral-tales/a-trickle-becomes-a-river-64893418a769
16:52:47 Trevor: Economies of scale and division of labour
Nenad Maljković : This makes very much sense from the permaculture (and living systeems) point of view!
16:57:37 From vivian : To me it sounds more like an argument for free markets, coming from the right of the political spectrum. the first is all about lots of autonomous utility-maximising agents (in an economic jungle) with no overall purpose
16:57:55 From vivian : Some of the interactions in a forest are pretty brutal!
16:59:13 From Nenad Maljković : Any group of humans is complex, adaptive system.
16:59:43 From vivian : Yes but many groups have a “purpose” and can plan together. That’s inherent in a democracy
17:00:53 From Dil Green : Forest participants and humans are different – because humans will always have some conceptually stated purpose (unless they are a zen master).
17:01:01 From Nenad Maljković : Vision, purpose… obsolete in groups that collaborate based on intrinsic values (first hand experience with transition town initiatives on the ground – they don’t waste time on defining purpose or vision
17:01:55 From Dil Green : For me, forests are fine (great!) in and of themselves – because the participants don’t have conceptual approaches.
17:02:40 From Nenad Maljković : For me (with permaculture glasses on) there is coordination >>> cooperation >>> collaboration succesion
17:02:51 From vivian : For me, defining purpose and vision are the most powerful democratic things to do in an organisation. In my experience, in groups where there is nothing like this going on, there’s usually one person or a small group in charge. Others might accept this for a time but it usually breaks down/
17:02:54 From Dil Green : It’s when humans try to act like forests that things get strange – because concepts cannot capture complexity – and complex relationships are what makes forests capable of building carrying capacity.
17:04:34 From Nenad Maljković : @vivian: group / team / organisatiom / network / “platform” / “ecosystem”… all are human systems, but different.
17:08:29 From Nenad Maljković : Oh… that’s not “community”…
17:09:11 From Ben Roberts : Re “Telegram hell:” “The small group is the unit of transformation” Peter Block
17:09:24 From Dil Green : @Nathan blockchain people obvs didn’t read the ‘Tyranny of Structurelessness’ in time…
17:09:58 From Dil Green : @ben nice distillation.
17:10:58 From Dil Green : Drawing appropriate boundaries and understanding that boundaries are spaces of exchange rather than barriers seems key.
17:15:40 From Nathan to All Panelists : @dil Actually at the meeting I was describing they were referencing “The Tyranny of Structureless” to describe their condition.
17:15:47 From Nathan to All Panelists :
17:16:03 From Ben Roberts : If we were sitting together, Matthew wouldn’t be on his phone like that!
17:16:17 From Nenad Maljković : Of course not – any mediated communication is 2nd grade communication… or worse
17:16:40 From Ben Roberts : And I wouldn’t also be working on a Google doc.
17:17:06 From Nenad Maljković : Focus Ben, focus!
17:17:13 From Simon to All Panelists : You think so ! ?
17:17:18 From Dil Green : https://medium.com/@joshafairhead/harmonious-working-patterns-2788d1523106
17:17:24 From Nathan to All Panelists : At the very least distract yourself with FLO software!
17:18:13 From Oliver Sylvester-Bradley : Harmonious Working Patterns: https://medium.com/@joshafairhead/harmonious-working-patterns-2788d1523106
17:19:03 From vivian : @Indra I like your analysis of how people interact with ideologies and the connection you make with concepts of identity. In the present political situation we have a classic case study of how people with insecure identities cleave to apparently powerful “ready-made” ones which are really crude vehicles for manipulation and control.
17:20:21 From Nenad Maljković : Hear, hear… (coming from an oralist)
17:20:50 From vivian : Arguably many externally-defined forms of identity (countries, brands for example) fall to a greater or lesser extent into this category.
17:21:31 From Dil Green : @Vivian Agreed
17:21:44 From Nenad Maljković : By the way, some good practical tips on… collaboration… here (there’s also part 2): https://medium.com/the-tuning-fork/hierarchy-is-not-the-problem-892610f5d9c0
17:22:06 From Nathan to All Panelists : I love that article, @Nanad. Thanks for sharing it.
17:22:06 From Dil Green : @Nenad – great stuff.
17:22:33 From Nathan to All Panelists : A corollary of mine: https://medium.com/medlab/co-ops-need-leaders-too-c78a303cd16ea
17:22:49 From Oliver Sylvester-Bradley : Thanks!
17:22:58 From Nathan to All Panelists : Sorry https://medium.com/medlab/co-ops-need-leaders-too-c78a303cd16e
17:23:19 From Dil Green : Rich and Nat capture something that panellists here are not talking about – which is scale. ‘How many people in the group?’ ‘What is the right size of group for this intent?” seem to me to be very important early questions.
17:25:38 From Nenad Maljković : What Matthew describes is how things work anyway… We are all associated – as individuals – with more then one “organisation”, etc.
17:26:50 From Dil Green : @Nen – I think he is saying that the protocols for collaboration in those forms of org are over-conditioned by the learned cultural modes of top-down hierarchy.
17:27:06 From Oliver Sylvester-Bradley : Cohesion – steer towards average position of neighbours
Separation – avoid crowding neighbours
Alignment – steer towards average heading of neighbours
17:27:13 From Oliver Sylvester-Bradley : https://open.coop/2019/03/07/defining-dna-collaboration/
17:27:23 From Simon to All Panelists : Is this aimed at corporations . . . who pay fat consultancy fees?. Personally can’t we just close them down?
17:27:37 From Ben Roberts : Never mind the GHG emissions associated with in-person meetings!
17:27:40 From Oliver Sylvester-Bradley : lol!
17:28:31 From Nenad Maljković : Extroverts and introverts keep their differences on video too
17:28:56 From vivian : @laura vulnerability is strength! (although I’m conscious I’m just sending text messages and you’re the one on the video! )
17:30:04 From Ben Roberts : So interesting to hear Laura say she “hates video.” The three ways of connecting–in-person, live virtual (video/audio), and asynch/text– each have benefits and limits, and each appeal/repel different people in different ways. Deep collaboration will leverage all three and have them synergize in ways we are still just starting to figure out.
17:30:21 From Ben Roberts : Yay NEC!
17:33:56 From Nathan to All Panelists : Thank you Laura for sharing that.
17:34:59 From Nenad Maljković : If viewer is focused enough on video listening can be as good – it’s a skill to acquire, in my experience.
17:35:20 From Laura James : Great point Indra about tech privilege. Virtual environments, especially without video, can be empowering for people with disabilities whose voices are not heard in the same way in face to face meetings. For scale we need to centre inclusivity
17:35:25 From Nenad Maljković : Live video is not the same thing as watching TV
17:35:29 From Nathan to All Panelists : One board I’m on requires members to stay unmuted on calls to enforce attention.
17:37:59 From Nenad Maljković : @laura: yes, fully agree + what Ben Roberts wrote above: “The three ways of connecting–in-person, live virtual (video/audio), and asynch/text– each have benefits and limits, and each appeal/repel different people in different ways. Deep collaboration will leverage all three and have them synergize in ways we are still just starting to figure out.”
17:41:34 From Nenad Maljković : Voting is out of date. We use consent decision-making (not even consensus, that’s also out of date).
17:44:57 From Nenad Maljković : Re. foking in collaboration – doable even without devices!
17:45:57 From Dil Green : imho democratic tools have appropriate and inappropriate contexts. So that voting can have its place (a quick workplace decision among 50 people as to a wildcat strike), consensus can have its place (a group of three choosing where to go for a meal), deliberative democracy… and so on.
17:49:40 From Nenad Maljković : @laura: thanks for sharing this, very useful!
17:50:49 From Matthew Schutte : Gregory Bateson’s critique of Conscious Purpose:
17:50:50 From Matthew Schutte : http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/Gregory_Bateson.pdf
17:51:49 From Matthew Schutte : And published yesterday: Gregory’s daughter, Nora Bateson’s article on “Tasting Textures of Communication in Warm Data”
17:51:49 From Matthew Schutte : https://medium.com/@norabateson/eating-sand-e478a48574a5
17:53:54 From Matthew Schutte : Nora’s wonderful recent 8 minute video that touches on the challenge that humanity faces today and the different ways of THINKING that may be required to actually surface solutions:
17:53:55 From Matthew Schutte : https://vimeo.com/310626097
17:55:20 From Nathan : Join us later! https://ethicaledtech.info/wiki/Meta:Inaugural_Edit-a-Thon
17:57:49 From Wes, Somerset UK to All Panelists : Really great session, thank you everyone!
17:59:13 From Dil Green : These ‘names’ are nicely captured by the concept of ‘patterns’ – identified recurring conditions in complex systems which are recognisable – although each instance is unique (in space and time), we can nevertheless useful name them.
17:59:49 From Ben Roberts : I’m not with you fully, @matthew. Sure, you can note how any boundary is permeable, or even arbitrary. And yet collectives DO exist in nature and are essential building blocks for its complex capacities for collaboration.
17:59:57 From Dil Green : Pattern languages allow us to trace systems of relationship between patterns that embody the complexity of the interactions.
18:00:13 From Simon to All Panelists : Interesting that Oliver insisted that everyone start by explaining ‘how they make a living’, & that Matthew lived in his car. Progress will be made when we don’t have to make these ridiculous choices. What will that take?
18:00:28 From Ben Roberts : It’s not just about giving something a “name.”
18:02:11 From Dil Green : @ben agreed – understanding a pattern and being able safely to interact with it design it requires a great deal of investigation, learning, documenting, mapping connections to larger and smaller contexts…
18:06:08 From Nenad Maljković : “Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.”
– Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, 1977
18:07:00 From Nenad Maljković : Might work in similar way in social systems… I think.
18:07:47 From Dil Green : Thank you Nenad! Chris alexander student/practitioner here.
18:08:38 From Ben Roberts : Here’s a pattern language for group engagement that I love to use in various ways: https://groupworksdeck.org/
18:09:00 From Dil Green : I am working on building pattern language authoring tools for all sorts of domains.
18:09:47 From Ben Roberts : There’s a new pattern language for “Wise Democracy” too: https://www.wd-pl.com/
18:10:58 From Dil Green : know the group works one, but nice to have this democracy one. Thanks
18:11:08 From Matthew Schutte : An interesting blogpost on Dyads and Triads (similar to some of Josh’s comments) by the co-creator of SSL the most widely used security protocol on earth:
18:11:08 From Matthew Schutte : http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2013/04/dyads-triads-the-smallest-teams.html
18:11:14 From Ben Roberts : One of its categories is Collaboration
18:11:29 From Ben Roberts : I can speak to one version of an answer to Nenad
18:12:11 From Ben Roberts : Cooperation is another C word to include
18:16:52 From Ben Roberts : I can also answer Nenad’s question re the various C-words with a story about what we’ve learned in the Thriving Resilient Communities Collaboratory
18:20:13 From Nenad Maljković to All Panelists : Maybe give Ben a chance to answer my question?
18:20:14 From Matthew Schutte : Yes! We need to give ourselves and one another AUTHORIZATION to show up as full humans — with the complexity of other contexts — not just as our “role” in the organization!
18:20:53 From Matthew Schutte : Nora Bateson has designed a wonderful process called a WARM DATA LAB to foster this kind of experience — and result in transformative shifts.
18:21:57 From Ben Roberts : I’m eager to try a warm data lab with Nora using Zoom (and maybe some asynch tools and perhaps even a network of in-person groups too).
18:22:28 From Matthew Schutte : Nora spoke at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco yesterday. That recording should be on NPR radio stations around the US (and elsewhere soon) and will probably be available online in the next few days:
18:22:29 From Matthew Schutte : https://www.commonwealthclub.org/videos
18:25:10 From Dil Green : Ben this is fascinating – thank you.
18:26:10 From Nenad Maljković : Thank you Ben!
18:26:14 From Dil Green : Is this documented / described anywhere?
18:26:25 From Indra : share your links Ben?
18:26:25 From Ben Roberts : www.thrivingresilience.org
18:26:27 From vivian : Thank you Oli!
18:26:32 From Dil Green : thanks!
18:26:51 From Nenad Maljković : Thank you all + Oliver and Dil
18:27:04 From Trevor : Thanks everyone!

The post Catalysing collaboration at scale appeared first on P2P Foundation.

When: Wednesday, 3 April
4:30 pm – 6:30 pm

Add to: iCal – gCal

(See OPEN COOP website for map and further detail)

Could we model a formula for organisational collaboration on three simple rules?

1. Cohesion
2. Seperation
3. Alignment

…and define a protocol to aggregate, visualise and disseminate the resultant murmurations?

This free webinar on “Catalysing collaboration at scale” is the first even of OPEN 2019 organised by The Open Co-op exploring ideas around The DNA of Collaboration and Harmonious Working Patterns.

We have convened a panel of community builders, technologists and collaborators to explore ideas which might help all the people, communities and organisations working on creating a new, decentralised, regenerative economy collaborate better to produce more impact.

Everyone is welcome to log in and listen to a discussion and participate in the Q&A.

We will be hearing from:

• Indra Adnan from The Alternative
• Nathan Schneider from the Platform Cooperativism Consortium
• Irina (Ira) Bolychevsky from Redecentralize
• Matthew Schutte from Holochain
• Laura James from Cambridge Computer Laboratory
• Oliver Sylvester-Bradley from The Open Co-op

The panel will explore questions such as:

• What examples can you give / have you seen of group and intergroup collaboration working well?
• What do you see as the key ingredients / tenets / requirements for successful collaboration?
• Once collaboration is working within our groups, how do you think we could encourage more inter-group collaboration to achieve wider systemic impact?
• Plus, the concept contained in the posts on The DNA of Collaboration and Harmonious Working Patterns and examples and ideas from the panels’ projects.

The webinar will be held on Zoom – you will need to download the Zoom package and then click on the link to Join the webinar – there is no need to register in advance.

Where: Online, Webinar, Zoom

Categories: Beginner Collaborate Discuss Intermediate

The post Catalysing collaboration at scale – The Open Co-op appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

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

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

Distributed Applications are Different

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

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

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

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

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

How the Cryptographic Autonomy License Will Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promised in February

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

Dates To Be Announced

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

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

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

— Holo Executive Director, Mary Camacho

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

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

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

What Comes Next?

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

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

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

We actually want to coordinate action.

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

Massive accounting engines can help create new commons.

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

There are forms of wealth more valuable than financial capital.

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

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

Software governance can go beyond “trustless” consensus.

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

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

An invitation to “next economy” forerunners

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

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

We would be honored to receive your support.

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

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

Originally published in Holo’s Medium page.

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

That may have made it sound complicated, but it’s fairly simple. In a large group of cattle, if something startles a few of them, and they react suddenly startling others, then this pattern repeats, then you get a stampede.

Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake both Centralize Power and Wealth

In Proof-of-Work, if you have more money to buy more computing power, then you can perform more hashes so that you earn more money than others, which lets you invest in more computing power, and so on.

In Proof-of-Stake, if you have more money to put at stake for your computed answers, you win more of the stakes, which lets you invest more stake, to win more stakes, and so on.

Make no mistake about it, in both cases, the rich get richer. Those with the power amplify their power.

Proof-of-Stake may solve the problem of wasting .3% of the planet’s electricity churning hashes, but it is exactly the same kind of positive feedback loop as Proof-of-Work.

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.

In less than 10 years, bitcoin issuance and holdings became more centralized than dollars. . We get to the same imbalances faster

Positive feedback loops do happen in nature, but they typically have boundary conditions which act as a guardrail — a way to break the cycle so that it doesn’t spiral into dangerous imbalance. But what is the limit to people’s greed? Do you see any realistic way to break this cycle other than collapse of the currency itself?

A viable alternative: This is why we’ve built Holochain — a scalable and healthy alternative to blockchain based on nature’s design patterns for operating on large scales.

Reposted from Medium: https://medium.com/holochain/blockchain-blind-spots-1904d490218d

.Photo by abbyladybug

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For Layne Hartsell and Emanuel Pastreich, looking at the commons-based models might be worth it in the case of North Korea. According to our South Korean friends, their progressive President, a ‘left-Clintonian’ in their view, is doing a lot for peace and de-nuclearization but the approach is to let loose extractive industry once a peace accord is achieved. Here is a possible alternative approach.

Originally published on atimes.com

Emanuel Pastreich, Layne Hartsell: Could an emergent North Korea provide the world with a new, from-scratch benchmark of sustainable, collaborative economic and social development? With geopolitical change and emerging technologies, the idea of a national “commons” now looks increasingly feasible.

Relations between North and South Korea are changing so rapidly, the pressing question is no longer what the next step in this process of reconciliation will be, but rather where the peninsula is heading in the political, economic and cultural senses.

A door is opening for the institutional transformation of the “Hermit Kingdom” with new concepts and technologies. The implementation of new approaches to government and the building of new infrastructure could make North Korea an inspiring experiment that other nations can model.

However, amid promising developments on the Korean Peninsula, media report that multinationals are planning to establish an extractive economy that will generate quick wealth from the exploitation of North Korea’s rich mineral resources and cheap labor.

The profits will not benefit impoverished North Koreans, but rather international investors. This suggests that Wall Street, or its Japanese or Chinese equivalents, will develop North Korea’s economy according to the blueprint offered by postwar Iraq.

But North Korea does not have to choose between following the backward economic policies of North Korea’s Labor Party, which have produced stagnation and poverty, nor must it embrace a consumption-based neoliberal “development” policy run by global investment banks and the consulting firms that they fund.

There is an alternative: a third way for North Korea to leapfrog dirty and exploitative “growth” but still reach sustainable economic and political success.

Embracing the 21^st-century commons

This “third way” for North Korea is a collaborative economy and society. This means embrace of the emerging global commons in education, politics, manufacturing and economics made possible by P2P (peer-to-peer) systems and commons-oriented production (for example Linux, Wikipedia). Because North Korea is in essence starting from scratch, it can adopt the Internet of Verification (such as blockchain and holochain) in a more comprehensive manner than has been done elsewhere.

Such economic innovations will be shared and participatory, in the sense that socialist economies were, but the decision-making process will be distributed throughout society so as to avoid authoritarian politics, and thereby empower communities to set priorities.

This approach will allow North Korea to benefit from the advantages of internationalization without allowing international finance to dictate what North Korea will become. Concrete proposals for such a sharing economy that are viable alternatives to exploitative and extractive market economies have been made by the P2P Foundation in Amsterdam and the Commons Foundation in Seoul.

North Korea can empower its people by integrating them into the global P2P economy that links individuals with their peers in South Korea and around the world, so that they can realize their full potential through commons-based micro-manufacturing controlled by neither the state nor by Wall Street. Rather than being exploited for cheap labor, or cheap mineral resources, North Korea can develop a model for positive globalization powered by people, not by capital.

Pre-modern Korea provides an example of the kind of fundamental conceptual shift required. The Japanese colonial strategy of 1910-45 demolished the shared communities of mutual support that once thrived in Korean villages, by means of the Japanese equivalent of enclosure acts that deprived most Koreans of their land and traditional means of production.

Choi Yong-gwan, founder of the Commons Foundation, explains how the commons is no new idea in Korea. “The village contracts (hyanghak) … defined roles in the community, but did not assign absolute ownership. Those village contracts were destroyed during the Japanese colonial period. The deepening inequality born of inhuman competition and the resulting concentration of wealth started then.”

The commons could provide a model for how wealthy nations can work with those less developed in a constructive, non-exploitative manner by creating shared economies focused on citizens. Moreover, because a commons economy is not about foreign investment or about exploiting labor, it does not fit into the standard models of economic interaction described in the current United Nations sanctions against North Korea. It therefore offers a realistic window of hope.

Although Western media portray North Korea as a bizarre, isolated and mysterious nation, recent negotiations with South Korea have revealed that it is like other developing nations struggling to find a place in a ruthless globalized order dominated by financial institutions. The innovations the authors of this article are proposing do not consist of a particular technology, but rather of an open platform that gives North Korea access to knowledge, to technology, to expertise and to financial resources from around the world that will permit it to make an economic transition without falling under the domination of oligarchs.

Commons 101: What to do

North Korea has little modern technology – but also has little of the commercialism or the consumer fetishism that have ripped apart the cultures of other nations. It therefore offers unprecedented opportunities for institutional innovation of which other counties are not capable, precisely because North Korea’s start point is zero.

North Korea could require that all buildings employ solar power; that manufacturing allow for open-source innovations at the local level; that services be shared between families without a middleman; and that local governments be allowed to develop ties with other local governments in other countries for education and social exchange.

North Korea could establish innovative financial systems that nourish local cooperatives employing cryptocurrencies and crowd funding as means to build local economic autonomy while also allowing foreign investment in the form of crowd funding, or micro-investments by supporters around the world.

North Korea could put together a shared economy wherein everything, from vacuum cleaners and saws, to washing machines and solar power generators, is held together in trust for the community. It could set up programs for the barter of services (from caring for children or the elderly to cleaning and cooking) that recognize contributions of all citizens. It could pair elderly people with young people, and farmers with city dwellers, to create new cultural and economic synergies.

North Korea lacks quality highways and related dependencies on automobiles. Therefore, cities with shared transportation, all-electric transportation, or even urban planning that eliminates the need for automobiles are possible in North Korea.

The adoption of a commons – of a shared economy rooted in regional agriculture and micro-manufacturing – is essential to reduce the unsustainable overproduction that plagues East Asia today and which not only promotes waste and economic disparity, but is also a major factor behind military conflicts.

North Korea’s opening could present a priceless opportunity to establish a healthy model of P2P internationalization.

Commons 101: How to do it

South Korea should play a major role, not only because it shares a common language, but also because it has established powerful precedents for a P2P economy.

South Koreans have displayed tremendous enthusiasm for participatory politics, culminating in the “Candlelight Revolution” of 2016 that brought millions of citizens together to demand an end to corrupt politics.

Seoul launched a program to create local villages across the city four years ago that provides a powerful platform for a sharing economy. And the city has recently committed US$54 million to establish blockchain systems throughout Seoul and to train a new generation of experts to use them effectively.

North Korea needs a P2P advisory committee that focuses on the ethical implications of economic and technological change, not on short-term profits. South Koreans can play this role, but it will also be important to obtain advice from around the world about how to avoid the traps emerging economies fall into.

North Korea has extensive deposits of coal, uranium, iron, gold, zinc and rare-earth minerals worth around $6 trillion, according to South Korean mining company Korea Resources. One of the first recommendations of the P2P advisory committee might be a freeze on the exploitation of subsurface resources until Pyongyang possesses sufficient expertise to assess the long-term environmental impact of such efforts.

The vetting of all proposals for the mining of resources; for the building of transportation infrastructure; and for the development of urban spaces by a P2P network of experts could be important first steps.

North Korea must avoid getting into heavy debt during the first stage of its opening. The committee could help it craft policies that ensure short-term returns for investors are not a factor in planning, while also assuring that there is no risk of capital flight. To prevent a situation in North Korea similar to the rise of oligarchs after the fall of the Soviet Union, people should be empowered to form community banks and create participatory financing mechanisms.

North Korea does not have to be a mysterious, closed, inscrutable remnant of the Cold War that must “catch up” with the “advanced” industrialized world. Rather, North Korea can be an inspiring experiment – a space wherein blockchain technologies, micro-manufacturing, a sustainable energy infrastructure and a P2P approach to internationalization ushers in a new era for itself, for Northeast Asia – and for the world.

Emanuel Pastreich is president of the Asia Institute (asia-institute.org), a think-tank that addresses challenges including climate change, the impact of technological change on society, and rapid shifts in international relations. He has written about the environment, technology, globalization, international relations and business in Asia for various journals, and has authored two books in English, five in Korean and one in Chinese.

This article was co-authored with Layne Hartsell, a fellow at the P2P Foundation who focuses on the philosophy of ethics and technology. He is also the director of the Technology Convergence and 3E (energy, environment and economy) Program at the Asia Institute in Seoul.

Photo by Clay Gilliland

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Hashgraph has been getting some press and many are excited about the speeds they promise and some of the videos and demonstrations they’ve shared. It is one of the closest innovations to Holochain that I’ve seen come out by people starting from a blockchain mindset. However, from my completely biased perspective, there are still a few gaps.

Hybrid of Data & Agent Centrism

Notice that all Hashgraph’s examples show the agents (labeled as A B C D E) and who is committing, sending, and receiving what transactions. Normally in blockchain explanations, they only focus on the chain of blocks, and maybe some info about the nonces needed from miners or stakers, but the data is never presented showing how every node actually receives transactions in a different order. This might cast doubt on the use of the word “consensus” when really blockchain just takes one node’s sequence as reality and drops all the others.

However, in Hashgraph, you can see how different agents are each building a different “reality.” Then they use some metadata about each agent’s state to enable them to build consensus based on gossip about gossip. Their algorithm looks at things from the perspective of EACH AGENT and then they somewhat arbitrarily say: “the median timestamp for a data element across agents shall be its official time.”

In the shift from data-centric blockchain toward agent-centric holochain, they are hybridizing.

The creators of Hashgraph made a partial mindshift from data-centric to agent-centric. And you can see how on Holochain, an app could also use exposed data about gossip and DHT timestamps to do its own variant of hashgraph consensus (except beware their patent).

A Fixation on Consensus

If you hear blockchain people talk about distributed computing, it is all about consensus. In fact the Hashgraph folks even claim Byzantine Fault Tolerance is about consensus (and not the ability to tolerate a Byzantine Fault — actions from corrupt or malicious nodes). Why such a fixation on consensus?

Why should you have just one algorithm for manufacturing that consensus for ALL dApps on a platform? Aren’t there many contexts where no consensus is needed? Or where it would be valuable to engage in different social processes around disagreement? In fact, why limit yourself to only one reality when in some cases information about differences of timing could be valuable data?

In Holochain, you have implicit or soft consensus when a data element saturates a majority of the DHT neighborhood where that data element resides. A later attempt to PUT that data to the DHT will produce a collision. But what if it is okay to have the collision, and just say “Okay, two people have now invented the Calculus.” or whatever. So now you have two authors, with different timestamps, and histories, and so what?

Well the “so what” comes into play when the data is a rival resource — like a Twitter handle, a domain name, or a cryptocoin. In this case, you want to handle a collision differently and block the later addition telling them the name is taken or the coin is spent. For general computing on distributed apps, this covers 99.9% of use cases. And on Holochain, the way we recommend implementing currencies using agent-centric crypto-accounting instead of data-centric coins means you don’t use rival coins at all.

So the only remaining case not handled by the soft consensus of the DHT, is when the collision happens before the DHT neighborhood can get saturated by an entry from one author. So if two people try to register the same name at the same time, how do you resolve it?

Paths to Many Consensi

We could pretend there’s just one absolute answer like what the Hashgraph algorithm produces using median time of gossip signatures. Or we could recognize the importance of choice and let the app builder decide.

• Maybe you start an auction and it goes to the highest bidder.
• Maybe you look at their reputation for community contribution and let the greatest contributor have it.
• Maybe you send them each a message to resolve the conflict with each other.
• Maybe you vote on it.

The point is, that for the very small percentage of times you could even have this kind of collision for most distributed computing apps, why would you want to swallow that computational overhead for ALL OTHER non-colliding bits of data? Why rule out the possibility of context-appropriate consensus solutions by hard-coding in only one arbitrary approach?

If 99.9% of data in distributed apps is non-rival, or non-conflicting, shouldn’t we just trigger special consensus resolution on that .1% of the cases and bear the (computational or social) cost of that overhead only on those cases?

However, since Blockchain grew up with its ONE APP being about managing rival coins, everyone thinks consensus is at the heart of the matter of distributed computing. Maybe this is also why blockchains don’t scale for doing generalized computation for dApps. If blockchains can’t even scale coin transactions, which are kind of a ridiculously simple app (Basically: Do you have the key? Okay, then you can write new coins up to the total value of the old coin. Repeat.), how do they ever expect to run things at true Internet scales like Facebook with 520k likes per second?

My answer: Holochain — for lightweight, scalable, P2P dApps which actually get more efficient as more users join.

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Aaron Fernando: We recently explored how blockchain is being used as a force for good and conducted a handful of interviews with practitioners in the industry. Yet the blockchain space is fast-moving and constantly brimming with new projects that could make the sharing economy increasingly accessible to all. This is a list of some other projects to look out for in this space:

1. Helbiz

Helbiz is a startup creating a marketplace that allows people to share not just cars, but any vehicle — bikes, boats, and other modes of transportation. Using both hardware and software, the idea is to be able to turn entire vehicles into Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices that it can be unlocked with a smartphone, tracked with GPS, and monitored for problems and maintenance. The Helbiz app will allow users to unlock vehicles and pay for vehicle usage in cryptocurrency. Though innovative, there are other organizations developing similar capabilities in the shared mobility space including HireGo and Xain.

2. Open Bazaar

Though there are other decentralized marketplaces that use blockchain technology, OpenBazaar was the first of its kind and is still going strong. Users are able to pay for goods in over fifty cryptocurrencies. Since there is no company or entity running it, there are no fees or limits to what can be bought or sold. Though significant technical differences exist, for the casual user, up-and-coming challengers such as Swarm City, Public Market, and Blockmarket will offer similar services with different features.

3. Sarafu-Credit

As a country, Kenya has been one of the fastest countries in the world to wholeheartedly embrace mobile money and mobile payments, with two-thirds of the population using it on a daily basis. So, not surprisingly, it is also among the first countries where blockchain-enabled community currencies are being used by merchants who might otherwise be too cash-strapped to transact with each other. The organization Grassroots Economics has been operating multiple community currencies in Kenya and and South Africa for the past few years to increase the buying and selling power of various communities. Recently, in partnership with blockchain-startup Bancor, Kenyan vendors have been signing up to accept cryptocurrency versions of these community currencies which they already accept in paper form.

4. Chamapesa

Another Kenya-based project making use of Kenyans’ high rates of adoption in mobile banking is Chamapesa, which is using blockchain technology to facilitate lending circles with smartphones. The organization has pointed out that it is not trying to change any core behavior, but rather is using blockchain to facilitate this type of community finance scheme — in one tweet, it said “We’re not changing Chamas behaviour except that instead of using paper books were going to be using smart phones.”

5. Holochain

Although the proponents of Holochain proudly stand by the fact that it is not a blockchain, for the layperson Holochain has very many similar use-cases. One main difference is that it comes without the prerequisite of using the enormous amounts of energy required by “proof-of-work” blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, yet it is still possible to run a blockchain exactly like Bitcoin on Holochain. Instead of having only one global agreement about what data is valid (as with a regular blockchain), individual users create their own intermeshed ledgers of valid data and personal histories.

Additionally, whenever we access a website on the Internet, we are really accessing information hosted on servers operated by some third party — usually in a location we don’t care about, owned by a separate private company. What Holochain makes possible is a blockchain-like method and reward structure for storing and accessing data and applications between users themselves, without having to rely on these third parties. This makes it possible to create and run applications of any sort between users, allowing the operation of a truly peer-to-peer internet.

6. Right Mesh

Only about half of the world’s population has regular Internet access, which means billions still do not have the ability to take advantage of web-based peer-to-peer technologies. Right Mesh is working to change that by allowing people can create their own networks with limited access to internet using mesh networking.

In a mesh network, information leaps between phones, computers, and other devices like frogs on lily pads until it gets to its destination. It does this by using these devices’ ability to connect directly with each other via Bluetooth or Wifi without being linked to the Internet itself. By encrypting the information — whether it’s a message, image, or payment — the network can ensure that only the desired recipient can understand and make use of the message, which opens up a host of mesh applications that can run on peer-to-peer devices in the absence of internet. Other mesh networks and mesh software already exist, but by using blockchain, this network will allow users to get paid for providing content to peers and existing as an infrastructure of the network itself, offsetting hardware and battery costs of doing so.

7. Beenest

Just like AirBnB, the platform Beenest connects hosts with potential guests and leverages blockchain technology to keep costs down. If using its own cryptocurrency — Bee Token — no fees or commissions are taken by the platform on booking and listing properties and charges lower fees than AirBnb when using other currencies or cryptocurrencies.

8. Possible

Possible is a Netherlands-based project is intended to increase social capital by giving people incentives to do the work that might not normally earn money, yet is crucial for healthy societies. Possible is a time bank, meaning that it enables individuals to offer up and use each other’s services denominated in hours of time rather than in some other unit of currency. Time banks have been around for well over a century, but they are often volunteer run and administering them using a centrally-managed database can, at times, prove difficult. By using blockchain technology to and decentralize who gets to update the database, projects like Possible could make it easier to operate time banks without having to rely on volunteers.

9. ShareRing

ShareRing is developing an app that uses blockchain technology that will allow users to find and search for nearby services and actually share anything with each other. Like a truly decentralized library of things — both physically and digitally — ShareRing could maximize the usage people get out of physical objects by enabling people to share them easily and fairly. The idea is to have a truly global network, so that the ShareRing app can be used to find and pay for similar services no matter where in the world a person  may be. The app will use two of its own cryptocurrencies: one that allows merchants to access the blockchain, and the other as a currency for paying for services on the platform.

10. Digital Town

Platforms like Amazon, Uber, and AirBnB offer useful services but continuously extract wealth from those who generate it though high fees, which are paid to these companies and their shareholders. Digital Town [one of Shareable’s sponsor] aims to change this business model by linking users in specific geographic localities with the information, resources, and services they need, but instead of extracting high fees, but instead of extracting high fees will ensure more of the profits generated locally, stay local.

With DigitalTown’s blockchain-based solution, merchants and consumers are rewarded for engagement. Merchants receive a free storefront with low commission rates and everyone receives a free SmartWallet, which supports traditional and cryptocurrencies. Businesses pay just a 1% payment processing fee and everyone enjoys free peer-to-peer transfers.

DigitalTown’s tools make it easy for communities to share content, discussions, events, and projects. Users of the platform are rewarded with CommunityPoints. Merchants can use CommunityPoints for marketing campaigns on DigitalTown and consumers can use CommunityPoints with participating merchants.

Header image by John Schnobrich on Unsplash.

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To understand them and what they’re fighting for, it’s important to understand the system they’re challenging.

Our money system is underpinned by national central banks and treasuries that issue foundational “base” money. This includes the physical cash in our wallets and also reserves, the special forms of digital money that commercial banks hold in their central bank accounts, which are inaccessible to us.

These commercial banks then boost the money supply by issuing a second layer of money on top of the central bank money layer, through a process called credit creation of money (sometimes called “fractional reserve banking”) to create commercial bank money, which we see as bank deposits in our bank accounts.

The details are subtle and complex ― especially at the international level ― but the interaction of these players issuing money and taking it out of circulation makes the money supply expand and contract as if it were breathing. Monetary reform groups target different elements of this. Here are five of them.

1. Government Money Warriors

Stephanie Kelton, professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University, is one of the leading lights of modern monetary theory.

We say that the sun rises, but in reality the sun stays fixed and the illusion of sunrise is created by the Earth turning. Modern monetary theory argues that a similar delusion occurs in our thinking about government money ― we often claim that a federal government “raises money” through taxation and then spends it, but actually it is government institutions that originally issue money by spending it into existence and then withdrawing it from circulation by demanding it back in taxation. If the government issues money, then why would it have to raise money by asking for it back?

The idea that a federal government can run out of money like an ordinary household or business is an illusion, argue advocates of modern monetary theory. A government can only run out of money if it either does not issue its own sovereign currency (like the European nations, which have opted for the euro) or if an artificial political limit has been placed on how much money it can issue. In the latter situation, governments must first recall money via tax (and other means) before reissuing it elsewhere.

This is why modern monetary theory advocates are incredulous about conservatives who want to block spending on education and health care by saying we don’t have the money to pay for it. “Governments with monopoly control over their currency can always pay for their policy priorities,” says Pavlina Tcherneva, an economics professor at the Levy Economics Institute at New York’s Bard College.

Under modern monetary theory, if there are unemployed people who want to work and material resources for them to work with, a federal government can issue new money without causing inflation because the increase in money supply will be met with an increase in production. “The goal is to use the public purse to serve the broad public interest without accelerating inflation,” said Stephanie Kelton, professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University and former senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

2. Bank Money Reformers

Bank money reformers want to target the powers of commercial banks to create money.

Other reformers target the commercial bank money system. They argue it creates economic instability, over-indebtedness and concentration of power in the hands of banks ― the very banks that led us into the 2008 financial crisis.

Bank money reform groups include the American Monetary Institute, Positive Money, and the International Movement for Monetary Reform.

Commercial banks create new money when they issue loans. The moderate wing of the bank reform movement argues that, because the government grants them this privilege, banks should be subject to greater democratic scrutiny over their lending. The hard-line wing believes bank creation of money should be banned altogether.

The movement to curtail bank money is politically more diverse than modern monetary theory; it’s been supported by certain libertarians, including the late economist Murray Rothbard, neoclassical economists such as Irving Fisher, as well as left-wing proponents, such as the U.K.’s Green Party, which believes bank money-creation leads to environmental crises and corporate domination.

Their prescriptions are not uniform: Positive Money, a research and campaigning organization in Britain, calls for the power to create money to be granted exclusively to a democratic, accountable and transparent public body, creating a “sovereign money” system in which we might all have our own accounts at the central bank. This is distinguished from full-reserve banking, which would require your bank to have the reserves to fully back your account.

3. Cryptocurrency Crusaders

The Bitcoin logo on display at the Consensus 2018 blockchain technology conference in New York City on May 16.

Cryptocurrency crusaders not only reject both national and bank money systems, but also reject the entire concept of credit money (money that is “created from nothing” through law or social agreement), calling for it to be replaced with “commodity money” (money that is “created from something” through production). They have inherited the baton from “goldbugs,” who called for gold to be money.

The movement, which began with Bitcoin, argues that the best money system is one that’s outside of human politics. This comes from a philosophical tradition that says systems should be governed by the boundaries of God, physics or math, rather than laws set by politicians. With gold, for example, these natural boundaries would be geology: how much gold can be found and extracted. In Bitcoin’s case, the boundary comes from the fact that the digital system sets a hard limit on how much digital money can be issued and then forces participants to “mine” it as if it were a commodity.

Because Bitcoin hard-liners believe true money is a limited-supply good that must be extracted through production, they claim that fiat money ― created by banks or countries ― is artificial or deceitful money under the control of corrupt powers. There’s a puritanical edge to these cryptocurrency crusaders, who mistrust human institutions and trust in an abstract ‘godlike’ order of mathematics and markets.

While theories like MMT hinge on collective human political institutions, crypto crusaders see politics as foolish. This distrustful attitude shows: The movement sometimes seems as much at war with itself as with the fiat money system, with bitter in-fights between supporters of different crypto-tokens.

They are, however, the richest of all monetary reformers, with many crypto users having ironically become millionaires in the fiat currency they claim to dislike so much.

4. The Localists

A note worth 10 Brixton pounds, an alternative currency in London, is illustrated with an image of David Bowie.

There’s a whole history of alternative non-government money prior to cryptocurrency. These original alternative currency variants include mutual credit systems, timebanks (where time is used to measure how many credits you earn), local community currencies, such as the U.K.-based Brixton pound, and systems like the Swiss Wir, a currency used between businesses.

The tradition is also skeptical of large-scale government-bank money systems, but rather than calling for them to be replaced by a robotic algorithm, they believe small-scale communities should take control to issue money locally.

Unlike cryptocurrency advocates, they have no problem with money being “created out of nothing.” Rather they have a problem with who gets to do that and at what scale. They believe large-scale systems alienate people and dissolve close-knit communities.

A mutual credit system like Sardex in Sardinia, for example, does not reject the idea of money expanding and contracting, but it brings together an island community to decide on what terms that occurs.

While the other movements are outspoken, local complementary currency enthusiasts are often humble and below-the-radar, working for low pay to build resilient community structures.

“Local currencies change how money is issued,” says Duncan McCann of the New Economics Foundation, “how it circulates and what it can be spent on in order to re-localize economies, encourage environmental behaviour, and promote small businesses.”

The crypto-credit alliance looks to merge older, alternative currency systems with blockchain technology.

5. The Crypto-Credit Alliance: Mutual credit meets blockchain technology

This is the least-known or developed of the movements, but is perhaps the most exciting. Nascent initiatives, such as Trustlines, Holochain, Sikoba, Waba and Defterhane, seek to hybridize older alternative currency systems like mutual credit with the blockchain architectures that underpin cryptocurrencies. They share common ground with both modern monetary theorists, who also see commodity money as regressive, and cryptocurrency advocates, who wish to bypass the government.

Cryptocurrency unleashed a lot of creativity, but much has been wasted on toxic speculation. On the other hand, localist mutual credit movements have powerful ideas but often struggle to get heard or to spread. Crypto-credit innovators are exploring the creative possibilities of merging these two to solve flaws in both.

Originally published in the Huffington Post

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