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Distributed ledgers have primarily claimed to supplant the need for Bitcoin's mining process by introducing trust requirements among participants. These ledgers also promise users the immutability of Bitcoin without the need for expensive mining operations.

the technology powering distributed ledgers predates blockchains by well over 20 years.

Proponents of distributed ledgers argue that they can displace centralized providers such as SWIFT,

by moving money faster

There’s no doubt that blockchain technology will facilitate disruptive innovations in finance

But a world of private ledgers sounds eerily similar to a range of “private Internets.”

Blockchain technology is useful not because it offers efficiency in a world of message-passing but because it uses a complex process to settle value between untrusted parties.

But distributed ledgers do not offer users the ability to easily convert their tokens and messages into fungible units of value. Nor do distributed ledgers escrow value between parties that don't trust each other.

If a ledger is not a public resource, it will have the pressures incumbent to existing settlement systems plus the overhead of maintaining a shared database among competitors. What efficiency will remain thereafter remains dubious.

Permissioned Blockchains

their institutional users will probably find it expedient to hash their private-chain transactions and use those hashes to create bitcoin addresses and then send tiny fractions of a bitcoin to them to register their data at a location that cannot be hacked or changed.

In other words, all private ledger/blockchains will lead to Bitcoin's Rome, driven there by its low cost and high public accountability.

This is in contrast to key scheduling; key scheduling typically refers to the internal handling of key material within the operation of a cipher.

it involves system policy, user training, organizational and departmental interactions, and coordination between all of these elements.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

A public key infrastructure is a type of key management system that uses hierarchical digital certificates to provide authentication, and public keys to provide encryption. PKIs are used in World Wide Web traffic, commonly in the form of SSL and TLS.

we are interested in the resilience that comes from building a rich ecosystem of interoperable currencies

What are the core elements of a modern cryptocurrency?

Digital

Holdings are electronic and only exist and operate by virtue of a community’s agreement about how to interpret digital bits according to rules about operation and accounting of the currency.

Trustless

don’t have to trust a 3rd party central authority

Decentralized

Specifically, access, issuance, transaction accounting, rules & policies, should be collectively visible, known, and held.

Cryptographic

This cryptographic structure is used to enable a variety of people to host the data without being able to alter it.

Identity

there must be a way to associate these bits with some kind of account, wallet, owner, or agent who can use them

Other things that many take for granted in blockchains may not be core but subject to decisions in design and implementation, so they can vary between implementations

It does not have to be stored in a synchronized global ledger

does not have to be money. It may be a reputation currency, or data used for identity, or naming, etc

Its units do not have to be cryptographic tokens or coins

It does not have to protect the anonymity of users, although it may

if you think currency is only money, and that money must be artificially scarce

Then you must tackle the problem of always tracking which coins exist, and which have been spent. That is one approach — the one blockchain takes.

You might optimize for anonymity if you think of cryptocurrency as a tool to escape governments, regulations, and taxes.

if you want to establish and manage membership in new kinds of commons, then identity and accountability for actions may turn out to be necessary ingredients instead of anonymity.

In the case of the MetaCurrency Project, we are trying to support many use cases by building tools to enable a rich ecosystem of communities and current-sees (many are non-monetary) to enhance collective intelligence at all scales.

Managing consensus about a shared reality is a central challenge at the heart of all distributed computing solutions.

If we want to democratize money by having cryptocurrencies become a significant and viable means of transacting on a daily basis, I believe we need fundamentally more scalable approaches that don’t require expensive, dedicated hardware just to participate.

We should not need system wide consensus for two people to do a transaction in a cryptocurrency

Blockchain is about managing a consensus about what was “said.” Ceptr is about distributing a consensus about how to “speak.”

how nature gets the job done in massively scalable systems which require coordination and consistency

Replicate the same processes across all nodes

Empower every node with full agency

Hold this transformed state locally and reliably

Establish protocols for interaction

Each speaker of a language carries the processes to understand sentences they hear, and generate sentences they need

we certainly don’t carry some kind of global ledger of everything that’s ever been said, or require consensus about what has been said

Language IS a communication protocol we learn by emulating the processes of usage.

Dictionaries try to catch up when the usage

there is certainly no global ledger with consensus about the state of trillions of cells. Yet, from a single zygote’s copy of DNA, our cells coordinate in a highly decentralized manner, on scales of trillions, and without the latency or bottlenecks of central control.

Imagine something along the lines of a Java Virtual Machine connected to a distributed version of Github

Every time this JVM runs a program it confirms the hash of the code it is about to execute with the hash signed into the code repository by its developers

This allows each node that intends to be honest to be sure that they’re running the same processes as everyone else. So when two parties want to do a transaction, and each can have confidence their own code, and the results that your code produces

Then you treat it as authoritative and commit it to your local cryptographically self-validating data store

Allowing each node to treat itself as a full authority to process transactions (or interactions via shared protocols) is exactly how you empower each node with full agency. Each node runs its copy of the signed program/processes on its own virtual machine, taking the transaction request combined with the transaction chains of the parties to the transaction. Each node can confirm their counterparty’s integrity by replaying their transactions to produce their current state, while confirming signatures and integrity of the chain

If both nodes are in an appropriate state which allows the current transaction, then they countersign the transaction and append to their respective chains. When you encounter a corrupted or dishonest node (as evidenced by a breach of integrity of their chain — passing through an invalid state, broken signatures, or broken links), your node can reject the transaction you were starting to process. Countersigning allows consensus at the appropriate scale of the decision (two people transacting in this case) to lock data into a tamper-proof state so it can be stored in as many parallel chains as you need.

When your node appends a mutually validated and signed transaction to its chain, it has updated its local state and is able to represent the integrity of its data locally. As long as each transaction (link in the chain) has valid linkages and countersignatures, we can know that it hasn’t been tampered with.

If you can reliably embody the state of the node in the node itself using Intrinsic Data Integrity, then all nodes can interact in parallel, independent of other interactions to maximize scalability and simultaneous processing. Either the node has the credits or it doesn’t. I don’t have to refer to a global ledger to find out, the state of the node is in the countersigned, tamper-proof chain.

Just like any meaningful communication, a protocol needs to be established to make sure that a transaction carries all the information needed for each node to run the processes and produce a new signed and chained state. This could be debits or credits to an account which modify the balance, or recoding courses and grades to a transcript which modify a Grade Point Average, or ratings and feedback contributing to a reputation score, and so on.

By distributing process at the foundation, and leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity, our approach results in massive improvements in throughput (from parallel simultaneous independent processing), speed, latency, efficiency, and cost of hardware.

You also don’t need to incent people to hold their own record — they already want it.

Another noteworthy observation about humans, cells, and atoms, is that each has a general “container” that gets configured to a specific use.

Likewise, the Receptors we’ve built are a general purpose framework which can load code for different distributed applications. These Receptors are a lightweight processing container for the Ceptr Virtual Machine Host

Ceptr enables a developer to focus on the rules and transactions for their use case instead of building a whole framework for distributed applications.

how units in a currency are issued

Most people think that money is just money, but there are literally hundreds of decisions you can make in designing a currency to target particular needs, niches, communities or patterns of flow.

Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies. They create tokens or coins from nothing

These coins are just “spoken into being”

the challenging task of

ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending

Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies

These coins are just “spoken into being”

the challenging task of tracking all the coins that exist to ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending

You wouldn’t need to manage consensus about whether a cryptocoin is spent, if your system created accounts which have normal balances based on summing their transactions.

In a mutual credit system, units of currency are issued when a participant extends credit to another user in a standard spending transaction

Alice pays Bob 20 credits for a haircut. Alice’s account now has -20, and Bob’s has +20.

Alice spent credits she didn’t have! True

Managing the currency supply in a mutual credit system is about managing credit limits — how far people can spend into a negative balance

Notice the net number units in the system remains zero

One elegant approach to managing mutual credit limits is to set them based on actual demand.

concerns about manufacturing fake accounts to game credit limits (Sybil Attacks)

keep in mind there can be different classes of accounts. Easy to create, anonymous accounts may get NO credit limit

What if I alter my code to give myself an unlimited credit limit, then spend as much as I want? As soon as you pass the credit limit encoded in the shared agreements, the next person you transact with will discover you’re in an invalid state and refuse the transaction.

If two people collude to commit an illegal transaction by both hacking their code to allow a normally invalid state, the same still pattern still holds. The next person they try to transact with using untampered code will detect the problem and decline to transact.

Most modern community currency systems have been implemented as mutual credit,

Hawala is a network of merchants and businessmen, which has been operating since the middle ages, performing money transfers on an honor system and typically settling balances through merchandise instead of transferring money

Let’s look at building a minimum viable cryptocurrency with the hawala network as our use case

To minimize key management infrastructure, each hawaladar’s public key is their address or identity on the network. To join the network you get a copy of the software from another hawaladar, generate your public and private keys, and complete your personal profile (name, location, contact info, etc.). You call, fax, or email at least 10 hawaladars who know you, and give them your IP address and ask them to vouch for you.

Once 10 other hawaladars have vouched for you, you can start doing other transactions because the protocol encoded in every node will reject a transaction chain that doesn’t start with at least 10 vouches

seeding your information with those other peers so you can be found by the rest of the network.

As described in the Mutual Credit section, at the time of transaction each party audits the counterparty’s transaction chain.

Our hawala crypto-clearinghouse protocol has two categories of transactions: some used for accounting and others for routing. Accounting transactions change balances. Routing transactions maintain network integrity by recording information about hawaladar

Accounting Transactions create signed data that changes account balances and contains these fields:

The final hash of all of the above fields is used as a unique transaction ID and is what each of party signs with their private keys. Signing indicates a party has agreed to the terms of the transaction. Only transactions signed by both parties are considered valid. Nodes can verify signatures by confirming that decryption of the signature using the public key yields a result which matches the transaction ID.

Routing Transactions sign data that changes the peers list and contain these fields:

As with accounting transactions, the hash of the above fields is used as the transaction’s unique key and the basis for the cryptographic signature of both counterparties.

Remember, instead of making changes to account balances, routing transactions change a node’s local list of peers for finding each other and processing.

a distributed network of mutual trust

operates across national boundaries

everyone already keeps and trusts their own separate records

Hawaladars are not anonymous

“double-spending”

It would be possible for someone to hack the code on their node to “forget” their most recent transaction (drop the head of their chain), and go back to their previous version of the chain before that transaction. Then they could append a new transaction, drop it, and append again.

After both parties have signed the agreed upon transaction, each party submits the transaction to separate notaries. Notaries are a special class of participant who validate transactions (auditing each chain, ensuring nobody passes through an invalid state), and then they sign an outer envelope which includes the signatures of the two parties. Notaries agree to run high-availability servers which collectively manage a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) servicing requests for transaction information. As their incentive for providing this infrastructure, notaries get a small transaction fee.

This approach introduces a few more steps and delays to the transaction process, but because it operates on independent parallel chains, it is still orders of magnitude more efficient and decentralized than reaching consensus on entries in a global ledger

millions of simultaneous transactions could be getting processed by other parties and notaries with no bottlenecks.

There are other solutions to prevent nodes from dropping the head of their transaction chain, but the approach of having notaries serve out a DHT solves a number of common objections to completely distributed accounting. Having access to reliable lookups in a DHT provides a similar big picture view that you get from a global ledger. For example, you may want a way to look up transactions even when the parties to that transaction are offline, or to be able to see the net system balance at a particular moment in time, or identify patterns of activity in the larger system without having to collect data from everyone individually.

By leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity to run numerous parallel tamper-proof chains you can enable nodes to do various P2P transactions which don’t actually require group consensus. Mutual credit is a great way to implement cryptocurrencies to run in this peered manner. Basic PKI with a DHT is enough additional infrastructure to address main vulnerabilities. You can optimize your solution architecture by reserving reserve consensus work for tasks which need to guarantee uniqueness or actually involve large scale agreement by humans or automated contracts.

It is not only possible, but far more scalable to build cryptocurrencies without a global ledger consensus approach or cryptographic tokens.

In a first phase, the commons simply emerges as an added alternative.

becoming a subsector of society, and starts influencing the whole

phase transition and transformation will need to occur.

how a commons-dominated, i.e. after the phase transition, society would look like.

At its core would be a collection of commons, represented by trusts and for-benefit associations, which protect their common assets for the benefit of present and future generations

The commons ‘rents out’ the use of its resources to entrepreneurs. In other words, business still exists, though infinite growth-based capitalism does not.

More likely is that the corporate forms will be influenced by the commons and that profit will be subsumed to other goals, that are congruent with the maintenance of the commons.

The state will still exist, but will have a radically different nature

Much of its functions will have been taken over by commons institutions, but since these institutions care primarily about their commons, and not the general common good, we will still need public authorities that are the guarantor of the system as a whole, and can regulate the various commons, and protect the commoners against possible abuses. So in our scenario, the state does not disappear, but is transformed, though it may greatly diminish in scope, and with its remaining functions thoroughly democratized and based on citizen participation.

In our vision, it is civil-society based peer production, through the Commons, which is the guarantor of value creation by the private sector, and the role of the state, as Partner State, is to enable and empower the creation of common value. The new peer to peer state then, though some may see that as a contradictio in terminis, is a state which is subsumed under the Commons, just as it is now under the private sector. Such a peer to peer state, if we are correct, will have a much more modest role than the state under a classic state society, with many of its functions taken over by civil society associations, interlinked in processes of global governance. The above then, this triarchy, is the institutional core which replaces the dual private-public binary system that is characteristic of the capitalist system that is presently the dominant format.

fundamental mission is to empower direct social-value creation, and to focus on the protection of the Commons sphere as well as on the promotion of sustainable models of entrepreneurship and participatory politics

the state becomes a 'partner state' and enables autonomous social production.

the state does exist, and I believe that we can’t just imagine that we live in a future state-less society

retreating from the binary state/privatization dilemma to the triarchical choice of an optimal mix amongst government regulation, private-market freedom and autonomous civil-society projects

the role of the state

“the peer production of common value requires civic wealth and strong civic institutions.

trigger the production/construction of new commons by - (co-) management of complexe resource systems which are not limited to local boundaries or specific communities (as manager and partner) - survey of rules (chartas) to care for the commons (mediator or judge) - kicking of or providing incentives for commoners governing their commons - here the point is to design intelligent rules which automatically protect the commons, like the GPL does (facilitator)"

the emergence of the digital commons. It is the experience of creating knowledge, culture, software and design commons, by a combination of voluntary contributions, entrepreneurial coalitions and infrastructure-protecting for-benefit associations, that has most tangibly re-introduced the idea of commons, for all to use without discrimination, and where all can contribute. It has drastically reduced the production, distribution, transaction and coordination costs for the immaterial value that is at the core also of all what we produce physically, since that needs to be made, needs to be designed. It has re-introduced communing as a mainstream experience for at least one billion internet users, and has come with proven benefits and robustness that has outcompeted and outcooperated its private rivals. It also of course offers new ways to re-imagine, create and protect physical commons.

stop enclosures

peer to peer, i.e. the ability to freely associate with others around the creation of common value

communal shareholding, i.e. the non-reciprocal exchange of an individual with a totality. It is totality that we call the commons.

It is customary to divide society into three sectors, and what we want to show is how the new peer to peer dynamic unleashed by networked infrastructures, changes the inter-relationship between these three sectors.

In the current ‘cognitive capitalist’ system, it is the private sector consisting of enterprises and businesses which is the primary factor, and it is engaged in competitive capital accumulation. The state is entrusted with the protection of this process. Though civil society, through the citizen, is in theory ‘sovereign’, and chooses the state; in practice, both civil society and the state are under the domination of the private sector.

it fulfills three contradictory functions

Of course, this is not to say that the state is a mere tool of private business.

protect the whole system, under the domination of private business

protector of civil society, depending on the balance of power and achievements of social movements

protector of its own independent interests

Under fascism, the state achieves great independence from the private sector , which may become subservient to the state. Under the welfare state, the state becomes a protector of the social balance of power and manages the achievements of the social movement; and finally, under the neoliberal corporate welfare state, or ‘market state’, it serves most directly the interests of the financial sector.

key institutions and forms of property.

The state managed a public sector, under its own property.

The private sector , under a regime of private ownership, is geared to profit, discounts social and natural externalities, both positive and negative, and uses its dominance in society to use and dominate the state.

civil society has a relative power as well, through its capability of creating social movements and associations

Capitalism has historically been a pendulum between the private and the public sector

However, this configuration is changing,

the endangerment of the biosphere through the workings of ‘selfish’ market players; the second is the role of the new digital commons.

participatory politics

Peer production gives us an advance picture of how a commons-oriented society would look like. At its core is a commons and a community contributing to it, either voluntarily, or as paid entrepreneurial employees. It does this through collaborative platforms using open standards. Around the commons emerges enterprises that create added value to operate on the marketplace, but also help the maintenance and the expansion of the commons they rely on. A third partner are the for-benefit associations that maintain the infrastructure of cooperation. Public authorities could play a role if they wanted to support existing commons or the creation of new commons, for the value they bring to society.

if a commons is not created as in the case of the digital commons, it is something that is inherited from nature or former generations, given in trust and usufruct, so that it can be transmitted to our descendents. The proper institution for such commons is therefore the trust, which is a corporate form that cannot touch its principal capital, but has to maintain it.