Group items tagged

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.

“We find that people will copy your design no matter what you do,” she says. “You might as well just play the game and go ahead and innovate. It’s fun, it keeps us on our toes.”

“The open source model just forces us to innovate,” says Boudreaux.

the open hardware model means that SparkFun’s existence depends not on any particular product, but on an ongoing relationship with customers that’s not too dissimilar to the loyalty commanded by a fashion house.

wolf of obsolescence is always at electronics’ door

don’t spend much time worrying about the copyists, they just keep releasing new looks

it’s about staying relevant and filling the needs of the community

SparkFun’s rapid turnover model is one that echoes the fashion industry.

keep their service exemplary

listening to their customers

developed a community of loyal users and fans

weekly new product posts

You can learn a lot about what a company cares about by looking at what they give away and what they protect.

SparkFun’s actual value is in the community of fans and loyal customers that keep coming back, and the expertise under its roof in servicing their needs.

Their catalog has about 2,500 items at any given time

SparkFun orders parts from 500 suppliers

15 new products every week

hey retire products at a similar rate, due to either low sales, or obsolescence

Of the 2,500 items, about 400 are things designed internally.

To handle the pace of change, SparkFun needs to keep its inventory lean.

“We try to do small runs and order in small quantities. Especially something that’s going to be obsolete quickly.”

To help manage the demand, they use an in-house software system

along with inventory and CMS management, tries to predict demand for different components and ensure they get ordered with sufficient lead time to account for how long it takes to get there.

the innovation (revisions and new releases) here at SparkFun is organic and not planned,” says Boudreaux, “But we do a few things to make sure we are keeping up.”

monitors all costumer feedback from emails to the comment section that is present on every page of the company’s site. They also ensure that team members have time to tinker in the office, write tutorials, and visit hackerspaces and maker events. “For us, designing (and revising) widgets is the job.”

anyone in the company can suggest ideas and contribute designs.

ideas run through an internal process of design, review, prototyping, testing and release.

“They eat these products up, even if the products are not ready for the mainstream & educator community due to minimal documentation or stability.”

symbiotic relationship with these early adopters, where feedback helps SparkFun revised and improve products for use by the rest of the community

I don’t think they help much

The risk of this rate of change is that SparkFun can end up outpacing some of their customers.

“There’s balance in everything,” says Boudreaux, “Innovation does not necessarily need speed in order to create valuable change. Sometimes innovation works at a slower pace, but that does not mean it is any less valuable to those that benefit from it, and we are constantly balancing the needs of two very different customers.”

unprotected and unencumbered by patents

racing to get the latest, coolest things in the hands of its customers.

patents

“We have to be willing to kill ideas that don’t work, take a lot of tough criticism, and move fast. If we stay agile, we stay relevant.”

cost $30,000 to $50,000

USPTO is so backed up you’ll have to wait three to five years to even hear back on their decision.

how much does technology change in five years?

company’s blog where they’ve been documenting production and business practices for years.

they even want to open source Sparkle. “It’s a wild ride,” she says, “but a fun one for sure.”

A broad statement of the key idea of smart contracts, then, is to say that contracts should be embedded in the world.

And where the vending machine, like electronic mail, implements an asynchronous protocol between the vending company and the customer, some smart contracts entail multiple synchronous steps between two or more parties

POS (Point of Sale)

EDI (Electronic Data Interchange

SWIFT

allocation of public network bandwidth via automated auctions

Smart contracts reference that property in a dynamic, proactively enforced form, and provide much better observation and verification where proactive measures must fall short.

The mechanisms of the world should be structured in such a way as to make the contracts (a) robust against naive vandalism, and (b) robust against sophisticated, incentive compatible (rational) breach.

A third category, (c) sophisticated vandalism (where the vandals can and are willing to sacrifice substantial resources), for example a military attack by third parties, is of a special and difficult kind that doesn't often arise in typical contracting, so that we can place it in a separate category and ignore it here.

The threat of physical force is an obvious way to embed a contract in the world -- have a judicial system decide what physical steps are to be taken out by an enforcement agency (including arrest, confiscation of property, etc.) in response to a breach of contract

It is what I call a reactive form of security.

The need to invoke reactive security can be minimized, but not eliminated, by making contractual arrangements verifiable

Observation of a contract in progress, in order to detect the first sign of breach and minimize losses, also is a reactive form of security

A proactive form of security is a physical mechanism that makes breach expensive

From common law, economic theory, and contractual conditions often found in practice, we can distill four basic objectives of contract design

observability

The disciplines of auditing and investigation roughly correspond with verification of contract performance

verifiability

The field of accounting is, roughly speaking, primarily concerned with making contracts an organization is involved in more observable

privity

This is a generalization of the common law principle of contract privity, which states that third parties, other than the designated arbitrators and intermediaries, should have no say in the enforcement of a contract

The field of security (especially, for smart contracts, computer and network security), roughly corresponds to the goal of privity.

enforceability

Reputation, built-in incentives, "self-enforcing" protocols, and verifiability can all play a strong part in meeting the fourth objective

Smart contracts often involve trusted third parties, exemplified by an intermediary, who is involved in the performance, and an arbitrator, who is invoked to resolve disputes arising out of performance (or lack thereof)

In smart contract design we want to get the most out of intermediaries and arbitrators, while minimizing exposure to them

Legal barriers are the most severe cost of doing business across many jurisdictions. Smart contracts can cut through this Gordian knot of jurisdictions

Where smart contracts can increase privity, they can decrease vulnerability to capricious jurisdictions

Secret sharing

The field of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), in which elements of traditional business transactions (invoices, receipts, etc.) are exchanged electronically, sometimes including encryption and digital signature capabilities, can be viewed as a primitive forerunner to smart contracts

One important task of smart contracts, that has been largely overlooked by traditional EDI, is critical to "the meeting of the minds" that is at the heart of a contract: communicating the semantics of the protocols to the parties involved

There is ample opportunity in smart contracts for "smart fine print": actions taken by the software hidden from a party to the transaction.

Thus, via hidden action of the software, the customer is giving away information they might consider valuable or confidential, but the contract has been drafted, and transaction has been designed, in such a way as to hide those important parts of that transaction from the customer.

To properly communicate transaction semantics, we need good visual metaphors for the elements of the contract. These would hide the details of the protocol without surrendering control over the knowledge and execution of contract terms

Protocols based on mathematics, called cryptographic protocols, tre the basic building blocks that implement the improved tradeoffs between observability, verifiability, privity, and enforceability in smart contracts

secret key cryptography,

Public key cryptography

digital signatures

blind signature

Where smart contracts can increase observability or verifiability, they can decrease dependence on these obscure local legal codes and enforcement traditions

zero-knowledge interactive proof

digital mix

Keys are not necessarily tied to identities, and the task of doing such binding turns out to be more difficult than at first glance.

All public key operation are are done inside an unreadable hardware board on a machine with a very narrow serial-line connection (ie, it carries only a simple single-use protocol with well-verified security) to a dedicated firewall. Such a board is available, for example, from Kryptor, and I believe Viacrypt may also have a PGP-compatable board. This is economical for central sites, but may be less practical for normal users. Besides better security, it has the added advantage that hardware speeds up the public key computations.

If Mallet's capability is to physically sieze the machine, a weaker form of key protection will suffice. The trick is to hold the keys in volatile memory.

The data is still vulnerable to a "rubber hose attack" where the owner is coerced into revealing the hidden keys. Protection against rubber hose attacks might require some form of Shamir secret sharing which splits the keys between diverse phgsical sites.

How does Alice know she has Bob's key? Who, indeed, can be the parties to a smart contract? Can they be defined just by their keys? Do we need biometrics (such as autographs, typed-in passwords, retina scans, etc.)?

The public key cryptography software package "Pretty Good Privacy" (PGP) uses a model called "the web of trust". Alice chooses introducers whom she trusts to properly identify the map between other people and their public keys. PGP takes it from there, automatically validating any other keys that have been signed by Alice's designated introducers.

1) Does the key actually belong to whom it appears to belong? In other words, has it been certified with a trusted signature?

2) Does it belong to an introducers, someone you can trust to certify other keys?

3) Does the key belong to someone you can trust to introduce other introducers? PGP confuses this with criterion (2). It is not clear that any single person has enough judgement to properly undertake task (3), nor has a reasonable institution been proposed that will do so. This is one of the unsolved problems in smart contracts.

PGP also can be given trust ratings and programmed to compute a weighted score of validity-- for example, two marginally trusted signatures might be considered as credible as one fully trusted signature

Notaries Public Two different acts are often called "notarization". The first is simply where one swears to the truth of some affidavit before a notary or some other officer entitled to take oaths. This does not require the notary to know who the affiant is. The second act is when someone "acknowledges" before a notary that he has executed a document as ``his own act and deed.'' This second act requires the notary to know the person making the acknowledgment.

"Identity" is hardly the only thing we might want map to a key. After all, physical keys we use for our house, car, etc. are not necessarily tied to our identity -- we can loan them to trusted friends and relatives, make copies of them, etc. Indeed, in cyberspace we might create "virtual personae" to reflect such multi-person relationships, or in contrast to reflect different parts of our personality that we do not want others to link. Here is a possible classification scheme for virtual personae, pedagogically presented:

A nym is an identifier that links only a small amount of related information about a person, usually that information deemed by the nym holder to be relevant to a particular organization or community

A nym may gain reputation within its community.

With Chaumian credentials, a nym can take advantage of the positive credentials of the holder's other nyms, as provably linked by the is-a-person credential

A true name is an identifier that links many different kinds of information about an person, such as a full birth name or social security number

As in magick, knowing a true name can confer tremendous power to one's enemies

A persona is any perstient pattern of behavior, along with consistently grouped information such as key(s), name(s), network address(es), writing style, and services provided

A reputable name is a nym or true name that has a good reputation, usually because it carries many positive credentials, has a good credit rating, or is otherwise highly regarded

Reputable names can be difficult to transfer between parties, because reputation assumes persistence of behavior, but such transfer can sometimes occur (for example, the sale of brand names between companies).

Blind signatures can be used to construct digital bearer instruments, objects identified by a unique key, and issued, cleared, and redeemed by a clearing agent.

The clearing agent prevents multiple clearing of particular objects, but can be prevented from linking particular objects one or both of the clearing nyms who transferred that object

These instruments come in an "online" variety, cleared during every transfer, and thus both verifiable and observable, and an "offline" variety, which can be transfered without being cleared, but is only verifiable when finally cleared, by revealing any the clearing nym of any intermediate holder who transfered the object multiple times (a breach of contract).

To implement a full transaction of payment for services, we need more than just the digital cash protocol; we need a protocol that guarantees that service will be rendered if payment is made, and vice versa

A credential is a claim made by one party about another. A positive credential is one the second party would prefer to reveal, such as a degree from a prestigious school, while that party would prefer not to reveal a negative credential such as a bad credit rating.

A Chaumian credential is a cryptographic protocol for proving one possesses claims made about onself by other nyms, without revealing linkages between those nyms. It's based around the is-a-person credential the true name credential, used to prove the linkage of otherwise unlinkable nyms, and to prevent the transfer of nyms between parties.

Another form of credential is bearer credential, a digital bearer instrument where the object is a credential. Here the second party in the claim refers to any bearer -- the claim is tied only to the reputable name of issuing organization, not to the nym or true name of the party holding the credential.

Smart Property We can extend the concept of smart contracts to property. Smart property might be created by embedding smart contracts in physical objects. These embedded protocols would automatically give control of the keys for operating the property to the party who rightfully owns that property, based on the terms of the contract. For example, a car might be rendered inoperable unless the proper challenge-response protocol is completed with its rightful owner, preventing theft. If a loan was taken out to buy that car, and the owner failed to make payments, the smart contract could automatically invoke a lien, which returns control of the car keys to the bank. This "smart lien" might be much cheaper and more effective than a repo man. Also needed is a protocol to provably remove the lien when the loan has been paid off, as well as hardship and operational exceptions. For example, it would be rude to revoke operation of the car while it's doing 75 down the freeway.

Smart property is software or physical devices with the desired characteristics of ownership embedded into them; for example devices that can be rendered of far less value to parties who lack possesion of a key, as demonstrated via a zero knowledge interactive proof

One method of implementing smart property is thru operation necessary data (OND): data necessary to the operation of smart property.

A smart lien is the sharing of a smart property between parties, usually two parties called the owner and the lienholder.

Many parties, especially new entrants, may lack this reputation capital, and will thus need to be able to share their property with the bank via secure liens

What about extending the concept of contract to cover agreement to a prearranged set of tort laws? These tort laws would be defined by contracts between private arbitration and enforcement agencies, while customers would have a choice of jurisdictions in this system of free-market "governments".

If these privately practiced law organizations (PPLs for short) bear ultimate responsibility for the criminal activities of their customers, or need to insure lack of defection or future payments on the part of customers, they may in turn ask for liens against their customers, either in with contractual terms allowing arrest of customers under certain conditions

Other important areas of liability include consumer liability and property damage (including pollution). There need to mechanisms so that, for example, pollution damage to others' persons or property can be assessed, and liens should exist so that the polluter can be properly charged and the victims paid. Where pollution is quantifiable, as with SO2 emissions, markets can be set up to trade emission rights. The PPLs would have liens in place to monitor their customer's emissions and assess fees where emission rights have been exceeded.