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Jukka Peltokoski

The Revolution will (not) be decentralised: Blockchains - Commons TransitionCommons Tra... - 0 views

commonstransition.org/t-be-decentralised-blockchains

ethereum blockchain commons commonstransition bollier

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 11 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Decentralised topologies and non-discriminatory protocols have been all but replaced by a recentralisation of infrastructure, as powerful corporations now gatekeep our networks. Everything might be accessible, but this access is mediated by a centralised entity. Whoever controls the data centre exercises political and economic control over communications. It’s difficult to see how we can counteract these recentralising tendencies in order to build a common core infrastructure.
  • These centralising tendencies have also reared their head in cryptocurrencies.
  • powerful mining pools now control much of the infrastructure and rent-seeking individuals control a lion’s share of Bitcoin’s value.
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • the underlying architecture has potentials not only for the future of money, but also for the future of networked cooperation.
  • Blockchain-based technologies may still have a role to play.
  • Just as Bitcoin makes certain financial intermediaries unnecessary, new innovations on the blockchain remove the need for gatekeepers from other processes
  • The broader implication is that the blockchain could support the activities and resources necessary to the commons
  • A lot of what follows is pretty speculative, but worth discussing in the context of peer-production.
  • The blockchain is the distributed ledger that keeps track of all transactions made using the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Arguably this is Bitcoin’s key innovation
  • the blockchain could support new forms of peer-production, and fully decentralised infrastructures for applications as varied as finance, mesh networks, cloud databases and share economies.
  • claim is that blockchain-based technologies such as Ethereum can support and scale distributed forms of cooperation on a global scale.
  • There are a number of start-ups and groups currently innovating in this space such as Ethereum, Ripple and Mastercoin.
  • extends the decentralised capabilities of Bitcoin beyond financial transactions
  • Bitcoin involves two parameters: a trustless database (more on this later) and a transactions system capable of sending value from place to place
  • Ethereum builds a generalised framework that extends the capabilities of the blockchain to allow developers to write new consensus applications.
  • Distributed Organisations & the Trust Web:
  • Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.
  • it doesn’t matter whether I believe in my fellow peers just so long as I believe in the technical efficiency of the blockchain protocol.
  • Where questions about how to reach consensus, negotiate trust and especially scale interactions beyond the local are pervasive in the commons, the blockchain looks set to be a game changer.
  • ‘consensus’ algorithms
  • Cohen and Mougayar have dubbed this innovation the “trust web”
  • Ethereum incentivises participation, encouraging actors to contribute without introducing centralisation
  • Node Incentivisation:
  • In order to use an Ethereum application, users make micropayments to the developers in ether, Ethereum’s coin, or ‘cryptofuel’ as they term it.
  • Monetary transactions aside, this encourages people to contribute to the commons and puts systems in place to try and protect its resources from commercial expropriation.
  • a change to infrastructure
  • Decentralised Infrastructures:
  • Instead, we can imagine infrastructure as something immaterial and dispersed, or managed through flexible and transient forms of ownership.
  • The payoff seems to be that new blockchain-based technologies have the potential to support new forms of commons-based peer production, supplying necessary tools for cooperation and decision making, supporting complementary currencies and even provisioning infrastructures.
  • Other issues concern the design of trustless architectures and smart property.
  • Trustless Architectures: First of all, what kind of subjectivity does the blockchain support?
  • ‘trust in the code.’
  • proof-of-work is not a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as social confidence in favour of an algorithmic regulation
  • the blockchain could support not only cryptocurrencies but also other financial instruments like equity, securities and derivatives; smart contracts and smart property; new voting systems; identity and reputation systems; distributed databases; and even the management of assets and resources like energy and water.
  • proceeds from a perspective that already presumes a neoliberal subject and an economic mode of governance in the face of social and/or political problems. ‘How do we manage and incentivise individual competitive economic agents?’ In doing so, it not only codes for that subject, we might argue that it also reproduces that subject
  • Smart Property:
  • new controls implied by smart property also have worrying implications
  • Property doesn’t disappear, but instead it is enforced and exercised in different ways. If rights were previously exercised through norms, laws, markets and architectures, today they are algorithmically inscribed in the object.
  • There is real potential in the blockchain if we appreciate it not as some ultimate techno-fix but as a platform that, when combined with social and political institutions, has real possibilities for the future of organisation.
Jukka Peltokoski

Owning is the New Sharing | Open Co-op Commons - 1 views

open.coop/...owning-is-the-new-sharing

osuuskunta omistus yhteisötalous coop opencoop jakamistalous neweconomy osuuskuntateoria commons p2p sharing owning jukkap2p

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 28 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “I’m working to find a steady economic base,” he said. “I don’t really want to put it into the hands of the VCs.” Venture capitalists, that is — the go-to source of quick and easy money for clever tech entrepreneurs like him. He’d get cash, but they’d get the reins.
  • new company,Swarm, the world’s first experiment in what he was calling “cryptoequity.”
  • Swarm would be a crowdfunding platform, using its own virtual currency rather than dollars; rather than just a thank-you or a kickback, it would reward backers with a genuine stake in the projects they support.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • Entrepreneurs could sidestep the VCs by turning to a “swarm” of small investors — and maybe supplant the entire VC system. By the end of the summer, he’d raised more than a million dollars in cryptocurrency. The legality of the model is uncertain,
  • High hopes for a liberating Internet have devolved into the dominance of a few mega-companies and the NSA’s watchful algorithms. Platforms entice users to draw their communities into an apparently free and open commons, only to gradually enclose it by tweaking terms of service, diluting privacy, or charging fees for essential features.
  • Facebook started flocking to Ello
  • The line between workers and customers has never been so blurry. Online platforms depend on their users
  • looking for ways to build platforms of their own.
  • VC-backed sharing economy companies like Airbnb and Uber have caused trouble for legacy industries, but gone is the illusion that they are doing it with actual sharing.
  • OuiShare, which connects sharing-economy entrepreneurs around the world
  • it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever.
  • Loomio is now being used by governments, organizations, and schools; a significant portion of the current usage comes from Spain’s ascendant political party, Podemos.
  • new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between.
  • aspire toward an economy, and an Internet, that is more fully ours.
  • Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist to CEOs and governments, contends that the Internet-of-things and 3-D printers are ushering in a “zero marginal cost society” in which the “collaborative commons” will be more competitive than extractive corporations.
  • People are recognizing that doing business differently will require changing who gets to own what.
  • form of ownership
  • Cooperative intelligence
  • Occupy’s kind of direct democracy and made it available to the world in the form of an app — Loomio
  • It’s a worker-owned cooperative that produces open-source software to help people practice consensus — though they prefer the term “collaboration” — about decisions that affect their lives.
  • Enspiral, an “open value network” of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.
  • Rather than giving up on ownership, people are looking for a different way of practicing it.
  • The worker cooperative is an old model that’s attracting new interest among the swelling precariat masses
  • Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits
  • multi-stakeholder cooperative — one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once
  • “It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”
  • Sensorica pays workers for their contributions to the product. Unlike Sovolve, they participate in the company democratically. Everything from revenues to internal criticism is out in the open, wiki-style, for insiders and outsiders alike to see.
  • Only one device has been sold
  • Bitcoin
  • makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs,
  • The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum,
  • to develop decentralized social networks,
  • even an entirely new Internet
  • Swarm’s competition makes it hard not to notice the inequalities built into the models vying to disrupt the status quo. Bitcoin’s micro-economy holds the dubious distinction of being more unequal than the global economy as a whole. On a sharing platform, who owns, and who just rents? In an economy of cooperatives, who gets to be a member, and who gets left out?
  • Sooner or later, transforming a system of gross inequality and concentrated wealth will require more than isolated experiments at the fringes — it will require capturing that wealth and redirecting its flows. This recognition has been built into some of the most significant efforts under the banner of the so-called “new economy” movement. They’re often offline, but that makes them no less innovative.
  • connecting them to large anchor institutions in their communities; hospitals and universities with deep pockets can help a new enterprise become viable much more quickly than it can on its own
  • Government is an important source of support, too. Perhaps more than some go-it-aloners in tech culture might like to admit, a new economy will need new public policies
  • The early followers Francis of Assisi at first sought to do away with property altogether
  • There are many ways to own. Simply giving up on ownership, however, will mean that those who actually do own the tools that we rely on to share will control them.
  • changing what owning means altogether.
  • Jukka Peltokoski on 28 Oct 16
     
    Omistaminen on uusi yhteinen.
Jukka Peltokoski

The Blockchain: A Promising New Infrastructure for Online Commons | David Bollier - 0 views

bollier.org/...-infrastructure-online-commons

ethereum blockchain commons bollier smart contract verkosto

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 11 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Move beyond the superficial public discussions about Bitcoin, and you’ll discover a software breakthrough that could be of enormous importance to the future of commoning on open network platforms.
  • Blockchain technology
  • can validate the authenticity of an individual bitcoin without the need for a third-party guarantor such as a bank or government body
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • collective-action problem in an open network context
  • How do you know that a given document, certificate or dataset -- or a vote or "digital identity" asserted by an individual -- is the “real thing” and not a forgery? 
  • online “ledger” that keeps track of all transactions of all bitcoins
  • set of transactions known as the “block”
  • a kind of permanent record maintained by a vast distributed peer network
  • blockchain technology could provide a critical infrastructure for building what are called “distributed collaborative organizations.”
  • to give its members specified rights within the organization, which are managed and guaranteed by the blockchain
  • blockchain technology is not confined to digital currency
  • reliable systems to manage their inter-relationships on network platforms.
  • Bitcoin 2.0 projects
  • a way to create distributed networks of solar power on residential houses
  • Transactions would be near-instantaneous, and transaction costs would be minimal.
  • traditional issues related to shared common-pool resources—such as the free rider problem or the tragedy of the commons—could be addressed with the implementation of blockchain-based governance, through the adoption of transparent decision-making procedures and the introduction decentralized incentives systems for collaboration and cooperation.
  • to reach consensus and implement innovative forms of self-governance. The possibility to record every interaction on a incorruptible public ledger and the ability to encode a particular set rules linking these interactions to a specific transactions (e.g., the assignment of cryptographic tokens) makes it possible to design new sophisticated incentive systems
  • Decentralized blockchain technologies bring trust and coordination to shared resource pools, enabling new models of non-hierarchical governance, where intelligence is spread on the edges of the network instead of being concentrated at the center
  • commons-based peer-production communities
  • have had a hard scaling up, without turning into more bureaucratic and centralized institutions
  • could overcome many collective-action challenges that cannot be easily solved by conventional institutions today
  • Who guards the guards? 
  • blockchain technology does offer more formidable tools for better protecting the perimeter of the commons and for empowering commoners to decide their own fate
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