Group items tagged

The script code is unable to manipulate any assets excepting those explicitly declared beforehand on the smart contract,

Not only can the smart contract move_funds() between these declared accounts, as its script logic dictates, but it can also stash_funds() directly inside the contract itself!

A smart contract can be activated, after which point it takes on a “life of its own”

You can also define variables in your smart contract, which persist through its entire lifetime. As the smart contract—including its internal state—continues to process over time, receipts will continue to drop into the relevant parties’ inboxes,

A signed copy of the original smart contract shows it as it was, when the parties first signed and activated it. Additionally, a server-signed, updated version of the contract comes with each receipt, showing the latest state

Once the contract expires (or is deactivated) then a finalReceipt is dropped into all relevant inboxes, after which no other receipts are possible for that smart contract.

Let’s say a party needs to DIRECTLY trigger one of the clauses on the contract. (Instead of waiting around for it to trigger automatically based on some rule.) For example, perhaps an escrow user wishes to execute a clause in order to DISPUTE THE OUTCOME, or perhaps an arbitrator wishes to activate a clause in order to RENDER A JUDGMENT. OT’s smart contracts can do precisely these sorts of things, limited only by your imagination (and my pre-alpha code.)

Many animals use visual observations to decide whether to work with others.

humans are more cooperative when they sense they're being watched.

The feeling of being watched enhances cooperation, and so does the ability to watch others. To try to know what others are doing is a fundamental part of being human

Shame serves as a warning to adhere to group standards or be prepared for peer punishment. Many individualistic societies, however, have migrated away from peer punishment toward a third-party penal system

Shame has become less relevant in societies where taking the law into one's own hands is viewed as a breach of civility.

Many problems, like most concerning the environment, are group problems. Perhaps to solve these problems we need a group emotion. Maybe we need shame.

Guilt prevails in many social dilemmas

It is perhaps unsurprising that a set of tools has emerged to assuage this guilt

Guilt abounds in many situations where conservation is an issue.

The problem is that environmental guilt, though it may well lead to conspicuous ecoproducts, does not seem to elicit conspicuous results.

The positive effect of idealistic consumers does exist, but it is masked by the rising demand and numbers of other consumers.

Guilt is a valuable emotion, but it is felt by individuals and therefore motivates only individuals. Another drawback is that guilt is triggered by an existing value within an individual. If the value does not exist, there is no guilt and hence no action

Getting rid of shaming seems like a pretty good thing, especially in regulating individual behavior that does no harm to others. In eschewing public shaming, society has begun to rely more heavily on individual feelings of guilt to enhance cooperation.

five thousand years ago, there arose another tool: writing

Judges in various states issue shaming punishments,

shaming by the state conflicts with the law's obligation to protect citizens from insults to their dignity.

What if government is not involved in the shaming?

Is this a fair use of shaming? Is it effective?

Shaming might work to change behavior in these cases, but in a world of urgent, large-scale problems, changing individual behavior is insignificant

vertical agitation

Guilt cannot work at the institutional level, since it is evoked by individual scruples, which vary widely

But shame is not evoked by scruples alone; since it's a public sentiment, it also affects reputation, which is important to an institution.

corporate brand reputation outranked financial performance as the most important measure of success

shame and reputation interact

in our early evolution we could gauge cooperation only firsthand

Shaming, as noted, is unwelcome in regulating personal conduct that doesn't harm others. But what about shaming conduct that does harm others?

why we learned to speak.1

Language

The need to accommodate the increasing number of social connections and monitor one another could be

allowed for gossip, a vector of social information.

in cooperation games that allowed players to gossip about one another's performance, positive gossip resulted in higher cooperation.

Of even greater interest, gossip affected the players' perceptions of others even when they had access to firsthand information.

Human society today is so big that its dimensions have outgrown our brains.

What tool could help us gossip in a group this size?

We can use computers to simulate some of the intimacy of tribal life, but we need humans to evoke the shame that leads to cooperation. The emergence of new tools— language, writing, the Internet—cannot completely replace the eyes. Face-to-face interactions, such as those outside Trader Joe's stores, are still the most impressive form of dissent.

what is stopping shame from catalyzing social change? I see three main drawbacks:

Today's world is rife with ephemeral, or "one-off," interactions.

Research shows, however, that if people know they will interact again, cooperation improves

Shame works better if the potential for future interaction is high

In a world of one-off interactions, we can try to compensate for anonymity with an image score,

which sends a signal to the group about an individual's or institution's degree of cooperation.

Today's world allows for amorphous identities

It's hard to keep track of who cooperates and who doesn't, especially if it's institutions you're monitoring

Shaming's biggest drawback is its insufficiency.

Some people have no shame

shame does not always encourage cooperation from players who are least cooperative

a certain fraction of a given population will always behave shamelessly

if the payoff is high enough

There was even speculation that publishing individual bankers' bonuses would lead to banker jealousy, not shame

shame is not enough to catalyze major social change

This is why punishment remains imperative.

Even if shaming were enough to bring the behavior of most people into line, governments need a system of punishment to protect the group from the least cooperative players.

Today we are faced with the additional challenge of balancing human interests and the interests of nonhuman life.

observation

A post-peak world will depend on detailed observation and good design rather than energy-intensive solutions.

not rely on weather forecasts but to learn to read the clouds,

“instead of researching the market, be the market”

businesses should be out there observing.

larger businesses tend to rely more on surveys and on second-hand information.

direct contact with customers.

move our idea of ‘capital’ from what we have in the bank, to the resources we have around us

not running a business on a constant high speed cash throughput with little or no capital reserves

lack of resilience in the just-in-time supply approach

a shift to storages of parts and materials, as well as the need to financially not be so dependent on debt financing

work slower with more financial reserves and take less risks, not building beyond what the company’s financial resources can support.

either to not borrow any money at all, or to borrow so much money that you can’t fail, being bigger than the people you borrow money from, so they have a vested interest in your succeeding!

energy efficient

long term

Looking to make buildings as autonomous as possible in a world entering energy descent is critical

see things that are flowing past and through the business that others don’t see as being a resource and having no monetary value as being valuable.

any intervention we make in a system, any changes we make or elements we introduce ought to be productive

This is instinctive to businesses

Obtain a Yield, in this context, is out of balance

much of business

have taken this to extremes

A well-designed system using permaculture principles should be able to self-regulate, and require the minimum of intervention and maintenance, like a woodland ecosystem, which requires no weeding, fertiliser or pest control.

moving from “we’re just obeying the law” to being proactive, acting before you get hit over the head with regulation and other vulnerabilities.

be able to put a foot on the break, not just going hell for leather on profit maximisation.

apply applied restraint, avoiding excessive, overfast growth that hasn’t been consolidated

looking for the negative feedbacks, from customers and from the environment in general

We need to increase the tightness of feedbacks.

Where nature can perform particular functions

we should utilise these attributes, rather than thinking we can replace them

Where nature can take some work off our hands we should let it.

a shift towards renewable resources

The emerging opportunities for businesses are things that are renewable. Renewable energy sources are the ones that will ensure a business’s stability in the long run. We can also broaden the concept of renewable resources to include things like goodwill and trust, things which a business can rebuild with good husbandry. Most business doesn’t just depend on law and competition, trust is at the heart of much business and it is very much a renewable resource.

The concept of waste is essentially a reflection of poor design. Every output from one system could become the input to another system. We need to think cyclically rather than in linear systems.

looking at our work from a range of perspectives

wider context

keep a clearer sense of the wider canvas on which we are painting, and the forces that affect what we are doing.

being strategic is important too

ask how is what we are doing part of a bigger picture, the move away from globalisation and towards the local, taking steps back from the everyday.

This can be done firstly by allowing space for Devil’s advocates, for black sheep, for hearing the voices of those outside of the dominant culture of the organisation and secondly by looking from a holistic perspective of how things interconnect, rather than just relying on experts who are embedded in detail. It emphasises the need to value the generalist, to give value to holistic thinkers.

allowing people to imagine different possibilities.

scenario planning

Permaculture has been described as the science of maximising beneficial relationships.

Solutions are to be found in integrated holistic solutions rather than increased specialisation and compartmentalisation

The challenge here is to move to seeing business as being part of the geographical community, as being rooted in place, rather than just part of a globalised community. At the moment for many larger businesses, the local is something one pays lip-service to as a source of good PR, something one is passing through, rather than actually being an integral part of the community.

This is a profound structural challenge for large organisations. Part of the resilience of the organisation comes from the degree of lateral integration. Resilience is in all solutions, it is the characteristic of ecological systems. If we apply these principles, resilience is one of the emergent properties

the notion that big is best needs to be challenged

new opportunities are very hard to understand and exploit from a macro level perspective, and are much better done from small scale perspective. It is here that the idea of appropriateness of scale becomes key.

more diverse systems have much more inbuilt resilience

have a diversity of small businesses, local currencies, food sources, energy sources and so on than if they are just dependent on centralised systems, globalisation’s version of monoculture.

not having all your eggs in one basket.

In the short term this kind of diversification could reduce profits, but in the longer term it will be more secure

this is about the reverse of specialisation, about having a mixed portfolio, and presents a big culture change for businesses.

it is a good strategy for business to keep a diverse portfolio of what sustains the business, keep some things that appear to be peripheral. They may not at this stage appear to be a serious part of how the business is run, but in this new world they will increasingly become so

‘edge’

the point where two ecosystems meet is often more productive than either of those systems on their own.

overlap systems where possible so as to maximise their potential.

recognising that innovation doesn’t come from the centre but from fringe thinkers.

giving status to the marginal

It is important that the business has as many fingers in as many pies as possible, as many interfaces, and recognises that every person working for the business represents it in the community.

Natural systems are constantly in flux, evolving and growing.

Remaining observant of the changes around you, and not fixing onto the idea that anything around you is fixed or permanent will help too.

be flexible, lean and adaptable

A healthy approach is to start with no complete plan, to allow the process to be emergent. This is not a time when we can work to a rigid plan as conditions will change so fast. Organisations will need to stay on their toes, without rigid management.

There is a clear institutional division of labour between these three players

a set of "for-benefit institutions' which manage the 'infrastructure of cooperation'

an enterpreneurial coalition that creates market value on top of that commons;

because democracy, and the market, and hierarchy, are modes of allocation of scarce resources

Is there perhaps a new model of power and democracy co-evolving out of these new social practices, that may be an answer to the contemporary crisis of democracy

we are witnessing a new model for the state. A 'P2P' state, if you will.

The post-democratic logic of community

these communities are not democracies

Can we also learn something about the politics of this new mode of value creation

has achieved capacities both for global coordination, and for the small group dynamics that are characteristic of human tribal forms and that it does this without 'command and control'! In fact, we can say that peer production has enabled the global scaling of small-group dynamics.

Everyone can contribute without permission, but such a priori permissionlessness is  matched with mechanisms for 'a posteriori'  communal validation, where those with recognized expertise and that are accepted by the community, the so-called 'maintainers' and the 'editors',  decide

These decisions require expertise, not communal consensus

tension between inclusiveness of participation and selection for excellence

allowing for maximum human freedom compatible with the object of cooperation. Indeed, peer production is always a 'object-oriented' cooperation, and it is the particular object that will drive the particular form chosen for its 'peer governance' mechanisms

The main allocation mechanism in such project, which replaces the market, the hierarchy and democracy,  is a 'distribution of tasks'

no longer a division of labor between 'jobs', and the mutual coordination works through what scientist call 'stigmergic signalling'

work environment is designed to be totally open and transparent

every participating individual can see what is needed, or not and decide accordingly whether to undertake his/her particular contribution

this new model

Such communities are truly poly-archies and the type of power that is held in them is meritocratic, distributed, and ad hoc.

conflicts between contributors

are not decided by authoritarian fiat, but by 'negotiated coordination'.

allowing the free aggregation of individuals around shared values or common value creation

a huge sociological shift

new life forms, social practices and human institutions

emergent communities of practice are developing new social practices that are informed by the p2p paradigm

ethical revolution

openness

participation

inclusivity

cooperation

commons

the open content industry in the U.S. to reach one sixth of GDP.

political expressions

the movement has two wings

constructive

building new tools and practices

resistance to neoliberalism

we are at a stage of emergence

difficulty of implementing full p2p solutions in the current dominant system

At this stage, there is a co-dependency between peer producers creating value, and for-profit firms ‘capturing that value’, but they both need each other.

Peer producers need a business ecology to insure the social reproduction of their system and financial sustainability of its participants, and capital needs the positive externalities of social cooperation which flow from p2p collaboration.

peer producing communities should create their own ‘mission-oriented’ social businesses, so that the surplus value remains with the value creators, i.e. the commoners themselves, but this is hardly happening now.

Instead what we see is a mutual accomodation between netarchical capital on one side, and peer production communities on the other.

the horizontal meets the vertical

mostly hybrid ‘diagonal’ adaptations

For peer producers the question becomes, if we cannot create our own fully autonomous institutions, how can we adapt while maintaining maximum autonomy and sustainability as a commons and as a community.

Why p2p have failed to create successful alternatives in some areas?

In commons-oriented peer production, where people aggegrate around a common object which requires deep cooperation, they usually have their own infrastructures of cooperation and a ecology combining community, a for-benefit association managing the infrastructure, and for-profit companies operating on the market place; in the sharing economy, where individuals merely share their own expressions, third party platforms are the norm. It is clear that for-profit companies have different priorities, and want to enclose value so that it can be sold on the marketplace. This in fact the class struggle of the p2p era, the struggle between communities and corporations around various issues because of partly differential interests.

Even commercially controlled platforms are being used for a massive horizontalisation and self-aggregation of human relationships, and communities, including political and radical groups are effectively using them to mobilize. What’s important is not just to focus on the limitations and intentions of the platform owners, but to use whatever we can to strengthen the autonomy of peer communities.

requires a clever adaptation

use for our own benefit

The fact today is that capital is still capable of marshaling vast financial and material resources, so that it can create,

platforms that can easily and quickly offer services, creating network effects

without network effects, there is no ‘there’ there, just an empty potential platform.

p2p activists should work on both fronts

using mainstream platforms for spreading their ideas and culture and reach greater numbers of people, while also developing their own autonomous media ecologies, that can operate independently, and the latter is an engagement for the ‘long haul’, i.e. the slow construction of an alternative lifeworld.

The commons and p2p are really just different aspects of the same phenomena; the commons is the object that p2p dynamics are building; and p2p takes place wherever there are commons.

So both p2p and the commons, as they create abundant (digital) or sufficient (material) value for the commoners, at the same time create opportunities to create added value for the marketplace. There is no domain that is excluded from p2p, no field that can say, “we wouldn’t be stronger by opening up to participation and community dynamics”. And there is no p2p community that can say, we are in the long term fully sustainable within the present system, without extra resources coming from the market sector.

One trend is the distribution of current infrastructures and practices, i.e. introducing crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social lending, digital currencies, in order to achieve wider participation in current practices. That is a good thing, but not sufficient. All the things that I mention above, move to a distributed infrastructure, but do not change the fundamental logic of what they are doing.

we are talking about the distribution of capitalism, not about a deeper change in the logic of our economy.

No matter how good you are, no matter how much capital you have to hire the best people, you cannot compete with the innovative potential of open global communities.

the p2p dynamics

the new networked culture

the opposite is also happening, as we outlined above, more and more commons-oriented value communities are creating their own entrepreneurial coalitions. Of course, some type of companies, because of their monopoly positions and legacy systems, may have a very difficult time undergoing that adaptation, in which case new players will appear that can do it more effectively.

the corporate form is unable to deal with ecological and sustainability issues, because its very DNA, the legal obligation to enrich the shareholders, makes its strive to lower input costs,  and ignore externalities.

we need new corporate structures, a new type of market entity, for which profit is a means, but not an end, dedicated to a ‘benefit‘, a ‘mission’, or the sustenance of a particular community and/or commons.

abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets

open design community

will inherently design for sustainability

for inclusion

conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing

entrepreneurs attaching themselves to open design projects start working from an entirely different space, even if they still use the classic corporate form. Prevent the sharing of sustainability designs through IP monopolies is also in my view unethical and allowing such patents should be a minimalist option, not a maximalist one.

The high road scenario proposes an enlightened government that ‘enables and empowers’ social production and value creation and allows a much smoother transition to p2p models; the low road scenario is one in which no structural reforms take place, the global situation descends into various forms of chaos, and p2p becomes a survival and resilience tactic in extremely difficult social, political and economic circumstances.

accelerated end of capitalism

Making sure that we get a better alternative is actually the historical task of the p2p movement. In other words, it depends on us!

I don’t really think in terms of technological breakthroughs, because the essential one, globally networked collective intelligence enabled by the internetworks, is already behind us; that is the major change, all other technological breakthroughs will be informed by this new social reality of the horizontalisation of our civilisation. The important thing now is to defend and extend our communication and organisation rights, against a concerted attempt to turn back the clock. While the latter is really an impossibility, this does not mean that the attempts by governments and large corporations cannot create great harm and difficulties. We need p2p technology to enable the global solution finding and implementation of the systemic crises we are facing.

There’s an opportunity to disrupt how those organizations work. Intermediaries, though they do a good job, have a few problems — they’re centralized, which makes them vulnerable to attack or failure

They tax the system

They capture data

They exclude billions of people from the global economy

internet of value

With blockchain, we can go from redistributing wealth to distributing value and opportunity value fairly a priori, from cradle to grave.

creating a true sharing economy by replacing service aggregators like Uber with distributed applications on the blockchain

unleashing a new age of entrepreneurship

build accountable governments through transparency, smart contracts and revitalized models of democracy.

The virtual you is owned by large intermediaries

This virtual you knows more about you than you do sometimes

So there’s a strange phenomenon from the first generation of the Internet where the most important asset class that’s been created is data —and we don’t control it or own it.

individuals taking back their identity through your own personal avatar

The financial services industry

antiquated

a complicated machine that does a simple thing

settlement

an opportunity to profoundly change the nature of the entire industry. The Starbucks transaction should be instant.

At the heart of it, the financial services industry moves value.

so this is both an existential threat to the financial services industry and an historic opportunity.

Banks trade on trust

Within the decade, every single financial asset, which is really just a contract

will all move to a blockchain-based format

In the accounting world, a lot of firms rely on costly audits to drive their profits

With blockchain, you could have a third entry time-stamped in a distributed ledger that could be acceptable to any relevant stakeholders from regulators to shareholders, giving you a perfect record of the truth and thus the financial health of an organization.

Nobel-winning economist Ronald Coase argued that firms exist because transaction costs in an open market are greater than the cost of doing things inside the boundaries of the corporation.

four costs — of search, coordination, contracting and establishing trust

Blockchains will profoundly affect all of these.

you can now synthesize trust on an open platform and people who’ve never met can trust each other to do certain things. So this results in a whole number of new business models

It turns out the Internet of Everything needs a Ledger of Everything, because a lightbulb buying power from your neighbor’s solar panel definitely won’t use banks or the Visa network

Right now, governments take tax revenue from corporations, individuals, licenses and so on. All of that can change. We can first of all have transparency in a radical sense because sunlight is the best disinfectant. Secondly, we can open up governments in a different sense of sharing data.

governments can enable self-organization to occur in society where companies, civil society organizations, NGOs, academics, foundations, and government agencies and individual citizens ought to use this data to self-organize and create what we used to call services or forms of public value. The third one has to do with the relationship between citizens and their governments.

There are more opportunities to create government by the people for the people

Electronic voting won’t be delivered by traditional server technology because it won’t be trusted by citizens

Common entrance suite / Maison keying (CES)[edit] This system is widely used in apartments, office blocks and hotels. Each apartment (for example) has its own individual key which will not open the doors to any other apartments, but will open common entrance doors and communal service areas. It is often combined with a master-keyed system in which the key is kept by the landlord.

Master keyed (MK)

A master key operates a set of several locks. Usually, there is nothing special about the key itself, but rather the locks into which it will fit.

A practical attack exists to create a working master key for an entire system given only access to a single master-keyed lock, its associated change key, a supply of appropriate key blanks, and the ability to cut new keys. This is described in Cryptology and Physical Security: Rights Amplification in Master-Keyed Mechanical Locks.[36] However, for systems with many levels of master keys, it may be necessary to collect information from locks in different "subsystems" in order to deduce the master key. Locksmiths may also determine cuts for a replacement master key, when given several different key examples from a given system.

Control key

A control key is a special key used in removable core locking systems. The control key enables a user, who has very little skill, to remove from the core, with a specific combination, and replace it with a core that has a different combination.

Do not duplicate key

A "do not duplicate" key (or DND key, for short) is one that has been stamped "do not duplicate", "duplication prohibited

Restricted key

A restricted keyblank has a keyway for which a manufacturer has set up a restricted level of sales and distribution. Restricted keys are often protected by patent, which prohibits other manufacturers from making unauthorized productions of the key blank. In many cases, customers must provide proof of ID before a locksmith will cut additional keys using restricted blanks. Some companies, such as Medeco High Security Locks, have keyways that are restricted to having keys cut in the factory only. This is done to ensure the highest amount of security. These days, many restricted keys have special in-laid features, such as magnets, different types of metal, or even small computer chips to prevent duplication.