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chrisaiki

Free currency - 0 views

The free currency produced by the Duniter open software will solve Sensorica sharing value problem. Everybody will receive an universal dividend (ie a medium income, a kind of basic income compute ...

opensource free currency

started by chrisaiki on 26 May 16 no follow-up yet
faly77

From Platforms to Neighbourhoods - 0 views

  •  
    One of the biggest problems we see facing communities who want to use digital tools to coordinate is that platforms are the unit of social organization online. The logic of platforms enforces top-down cultural homogeneity on all groups who must submit to this culture in exchange for access to basic tools for coordination.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The New Normal in Funding University Science | Issues in Science and Technology - 1 views

  • Government funding for academic research will remain limited, and competition for grants will remain high. Broad adjustments will be needed
  • he sequester simply makes acute a chronic condition that has been getting worse for years.
  • the federal budget sequester
  • ...72 more annotations...
  • systemic problems that arise from the R&D funding system and incentive structure that the federal government put in place after World War II
  • Researchers across the country encounter increasingly fierce competition for money.
  • unding rates in many National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) programs are now at historical lows, declining from more than 30% before 2001 to 20% or even less in 2011
  • even the most prominent scientists will find it difficult to maintain funding for their laboratories, and young scientists seeking their first grant may become so overwhelmed that individuals of great promise will be driven from the field
  • anxiety and frustration
  • The growth of the scientific enterprise on university campuses during the past 60 years is not sustainable and has now reached a tipping point at which old models no longer work
  • Origins of the crisis
  • ederal funding agencies must work with universities to ensure that new models of funding do not stymie the progress of science in the United States
  • The demand for research money greatly exceeds the supply
  • the demand for research funding has gone up
  • The deeper sources of the problem lie in the incentive structure of the modern research university, the aspirations of scientists trained by those universities, and the aspirations of less research-intensive universities and colleges across the nation
  • competitive grants system
  • if a university wants to attract a significant amount of sponsored research money, it needs doctoral programs in the relevant fields and faculty members who are dedicated to both winning grants and training students
  • The production of science and engineering doctorates has grown apace
  • Even though not all doctorate recipients become university faculty, the size of the science and engineering faculty at U.S. universities has grown substantially
  • proposal pressure goes up
  • These strategies make sense for any individual university, but will fail collectively unless federal funding for R&D grows robustly enough to keep up with demand.
  • At the very time that universities were enjoying rapidly growing budgets, and creating modes of operation that assumed such largess was the new normal, Price warned that it would all soon come to a halt
  • the human and financial resources invested in science had been increasing much faster than the populations and economies of those regions
  • growth in the scientific enterprise would have to slow down at some point, growing no more than the population or the economy.
  • Dead-end solutions
  • studies sounded an alarm about the potential decline in U.S. global leadership in science and technology and the grave implications of that decline for economic growth and national security
  • Although we are not opposed to increasing federal funding for research, we are not optimistic that it will happen at anywhere near the rate the Academies seek, nor do we think it will have a large impact on funding rates
  • universities should not expect any radical increases in domestic R&D budgets, and most likely not in defense R&D budgets either, unless the discretionary budgets themselves grow rapidly. Those budgets are under pressure from political groups that want to shrink government spending and from the growth of spending in mandatory programs
  • The basic point is that the growth of the economy will drive increases in federal R&D spending, and any attempt to provide rapid or sustained increases beyond that growth will require taking money from other programs.
  • The demand for research money cannot grow faster than the economy forever and the growth curve for research money flattened out long ago.
  • Path out of crisis
  • The goal cannot be to convince the government to invest a higher proportion of its discretionary spending in research
  • Getting more is not in the cards, and some observers think the scientific community will be lucky to keep what it has
  • The potential to take advantage of the infrastructure and talent on university campuses may be a win-win situation for businesses and institutions of higher education.
  • Why should universities and colleges continue to support scientific research, knowing that the financial benefits are diminishing?
  • esearch culture
  • attract good students and faculty as well as raise their prestige
  • mission to expand the boundaries of human knowledge
  • faculty members are committed to their scholarship and will press on with their research programs even when external dollars are scarce
  • training
  • take place in
  • research laboratories
  • it is critical to have active research laboratories, not only in elite public and private research institutions, but in non-flagship public universities, a diverse set of private universities, and four-year colleges
  • How then do increasingly beleaguered institutions of higher education support the research efforts of the faculty, given the reality that federal grants are going to be few and far between for the majority of faculty members? What are the practical steps institutions can take?
  • change the current model of providing large startup packages when a faculty member is hired and then leaving it up to the faculty member to obtain funding for the remainder of his or her career
  • universities invest less in new faculty members and spread their internal research dollars across faculty members at all stages of their careers, from early to late.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      Sharing of resources, see SENSORICA's NRP
  • national conversation about changes in startup packages and by careful consultations with prospective faculty hires about long-term support of their research efforts
  • Many prospective hires may find smaller startup packages palatable, if they can be convinced that the smaller packages are coupled with an institutional commitment to ongoing research support and more reasonable expectations about winning grants.
  • Smaller startup packages mean that in many situations, new faculty members will not be able to establish a functioning stand-alone laboratory. Thus, space and equipment will need to be shared to a greater extent than has been true in the past.
  • construction of open laboratory spaces and the strategic development of well-equipped research centers capable of efficiently servicing the needs of an array of researchers
  • phaseout of the individual laboratory
  • enhanced opportunities for communication and networking among faculty members and their students
  • Collaborative proposals and the assembly of research teams that focus on more complex problems can arise relatively naturally as interactions among researchers are facilitated by proximity and the absence of walls between laboratories.
  • An increased emphasis on team research
  • investments in the research enterprise
  • can be directed at projects that have good buy-in from the faculty
  • learn how to work both as part of a team and independently
  • Involvement in multiple projects should be encouraged
  • The more likely trajectory of a junior faculty member will evolve from contributing team member to increasing leadership responsibilities to team leader
  • nternal evaluations of contributions and potential will become more important in tenure and promotion decisions.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      Need value accounting system
  • relationships with foundations, donors, state agencies, and private business will become increasingly important in the funding game
  • The opportunities to form partnerships with business are especially intriguing
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      The problem is to change the model and go open source, because IP stifles other processes that might benefit Universities!!!
  • Further complicating university collaborations with business is that past examples of such partnerships have not always been easy or free of controversy.
  • some faculty members worried about firms dictating the research priorities of the university, pulling graduate students into proprietary research (which could limit what they could publish), and generally tugging the relevant faculty in multiple directions.
  • developed rules and guidelines to control them
  • University faculty and businesspeople often do not understand each other’s cultures, needs, and constraints, and such gaps can lead to more mundane problems in university/industry relations, not least of which are organizational demands and institutional cultures
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      Needs for mechanisms to govern, coordinate, structure an ecosystem -See SENSORICA's Open Alliance model
  • n addition to funding for research, universities can receive indirect benefits from such relationships. High-profile partnerships with businesses will underline the important role that universities can play in the economic development of a region.
  • Universities have to see firms as more than just deep pockets, and firms need to see universities as more than sources of cheap skilled labor.
  • foundations or other philanthropy
  • We do not believe that research proposed and supervised by individual principal investigators will disappear anytime soon. It is a research model that has proven to be remarkably successful and enduring
  • However, we believe that the most vibrant scientific communities on university and college campuses, and the ones most likely to thrive in the new reality of funding for the sciences, will be those that encourage the formation of research teams and are nimble with regard to funding sources, even as they leave room for traditional avenues of funding and research.
Kurt Laitner

Crowding Out - P2P Foundation - 1 views

  • The curve indicates that while workers will initially chose to work more when paid more per hour, there is a point after which rational workers will choose to work less
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      in other words, people are financially motivated until they are financially secure, then other motivations come in
  • "leaders" elsewhere will come and become your low-paid employees
  • At that point, the leaders are no longer leaders of a community, and they turn out to be suckers after all, working for pittance, comparatively speaking
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      so part of the dynamic is that everyone is paid fairly, if not there is the feeling of exploitation
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • under certain structural conditions non-price-based production is extraordinarily robust
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      which are... abundance?
  • There is, in fact, a massive amount of research that supports the idea that when you pay people to do something for you, they stop enjoying it, and distrust their own motivations. The mysterious something that goes away, and that “Factor X” even has a name: intrinsic motivation.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      the real question though is why, and whether it is the paying them that is the problem, or perhaps how that is determined, and who else gets what on what basis..  if you have to have them question the fairness of the situation, they will likely check out
  • giving rewards to customers can actually undermine a company’s relationship with them
  • It just is not so easy to assume that because people behave productively in one framework (the social process of peer production that is Wikipedia, free and open source software, or Digg), that you can take the same exact behavior, with the same exact set of people, and harness them to your goals by attaching a price to what previously they were doing in a social process.
  • Extrinsic rewards suggest that there is actually an instrumental relationship at work, that you do the activity in order to get something else
  • If you pay me for it, it must be work
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      only because a dichotomy of work and play exists in western culture
  • It’s what we would call a robust effect. It shows up in many contexts. And there’s been considerable testing to try to find out exactly why it works. A major school of thought is that there is an “Overjustification Effect.” (http://kozinets.net/archives/133)
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      yes, why is key
  • interesting examples of an effect called crowding
  • Offering financial rewards for contributions to online communities basically means mixing external and intrinsic motivation.
  • A good example is children who are paid by their parents for mowing the family lawn. Once they expect to receive money for that task, they are only willing to do it again if they indeed receive monetary compensation. The induced unwillingness to do anything for free may also extend to other household chores.
  • Once ‘gold-stars’ were introduced as a symbolic reward for a certain amount of time spent practicing the instrument, the girl lost all interest in trying new, difficult pieces. Instead of aiming at improving her skills, her goal shifted towards spending time playing well-learned, easy pieces in order to receive the award (Deci with Flaste 1995)
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      this is a more troubling example, as playing the harder pieces is also practicing - I would take this as a more complex mechanism at work - perhaps the reinterpretation by the girl that all playing was considered equal, due to the pricing mechanism, in which case the proximal solution would be to pay more for more complex pieces, or for levels of achievement - the question remains of why the extrinsic reward was introduced in the first place (unwillingness to practice as much as her parents wanted?) - which would indicate intrinsic motivation was insufficient in this case
  • Suddenly, she managed to follow the prescription, as her own (intrinsic) motivation was recognized and thereby reinforced.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      or perhaps the key was to help her fit the medication into her day, which she was having trouble with...
  • The introduction of a monetary fine transforms the relationship between parents and teachers from a non-monetary into a monetary one
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      absolutely, in some sense the guilt of being late is replaced by a rationalization that you are paying them - it is still a rationalization, and parents in this case need to be reminded that staff have lives too to reinforce the moral suasion
  • "The effects of external interventions on intrinsic motivation have been attributed to two psychological processes: (a) Impaired self-determination. When individuals perceive an external intervention to reduce their self-determination, they substitute intrinsic motivation by extrinsic control. Following Rotter (1966), the locus of control shifts from the inside to the outside of the person affected. Individuals who are forced to behave in a specific way by outside intervention, feel overjustified if they maintained their intrinsic motivation. (b) Impaired self-esteem. When an intervention from outside carries the notion that the actor's motivation is not acknowledged, his or her intrinsic motivation is effectively rejected. The person affected feels that his or her involvement and competence is not appreciated which debases its value. An intrinsically motivated person is taken away the chance to display his or her own interest and involvement in an activity when someone else offers a reward, or commands, to undertake it. As a result of impaired self-esteem, individuals reduce effort.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      these are finally very useful - so from (a) as long as self determination is maintained (actively) extrinsic reward should not shut down intrinsic motivation AND (b) so long as motivations are recognized and reward dimensions OTHER THAN financial continue to operate, extrinsic reward should not affect intrinsic motivation
  • External interventions crowd-out intrinsic motivation if the individuals affected perceive them to be controlling
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      emphasis on "if" and replacing that with "in so far as"
  • External interventions crowd-in intrinsic motivation if the individuals concerned perceive it as supportive
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      interesting footnote
  • In that case, self-esteem is fostered, and individuals feel that they are given more freedom to act, thus enlarging self-determination
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      so effectively a system needs to ensure it is acting on all dimensions of reward, or at least those most important to the particular participant, ego (pride, recognition, guilt reduction, feeling needed, being helpful, etc), money (sustenance, beyond which it is less potent), meaning/purpose etc.  If one ran experiments controlling for financial self sufficiency, then providing appreciation and recognition as well as the introduced financial reward, they might yield different results
  • cultural categories that oppose marketplace modes of behavior (or “market logics”) with the more family-like modes of behavior of caring and sharing that we observe in close-knit communities (”community logics”)
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      are these learned or intrinsic?
  • this is labor, this is work, just do it.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      except that this cultural meme is already a bias, not a fact
  • When communal logics are in effect, all sorts of norms of reciprocity, sacrifice, and gift-giving come into play: this is cool, this is right, this is fun
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      true, and part of our challenge then is to remove this dichotomy
  • So think about paying a kid to clean up their room, paying parishioners to go to church, paying people in a neighborhood to attend a town hall meeting, paying people to come out and vote. All these examples seem a little strange or forced. Why? Because they mix and match the communal with the market-oriented.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      and perhaps the problem is simply the conversion to money, rather than simply tracking these activities themselves (went to church 50 times this year!, helped 50 orphans get families!) (the latter being more recognition than reward
  • Payment as disincentive. In his interesting book Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt describes some counterintuitive facts about payment. One of the most interesting is that charging people who do the wrong thing often causes them to do it more, and paying people to do the right thing causes them to do it less.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      and tracking them causes them to conform to cultural expectations
  • You direct people _away_ from any noble purpose you have, and instead towards grubbing for dollars
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      and we are left with the challenge, how to work to purpose but still have our scarce goods needs sufficiently provided for?  it has to be for love AND money
  • When people work for a noble purpose, they are told that their work is highly valued. When people work for $0.75/hour, they are told that their work is very low-valued
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      so pay them highly for highly valued labour, and don't forget to recognize them as well... no?
  • you're going to have to fight your way through labour laws and tax issues all the way to bankruptcy
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      this is a non argument, these are just interacting but separate problems, use ether or bitcoin, change legislation, what have you
  • Market economics. If you have open content, I can copy your content to another wiki, not pay people, and still make money. So by paying contributors, you're pricing yourself out of the market.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      exactly, so use commonsource, they can use it all they want, but they have to flow through benefit (provide attribution, recognition, and any financial reward must be split fairly)
  • You don't have to pay people to do what they want to do anyways. The labour cost for leisure activities is $0. And nobody is going to work on a wiki doing things they don't want to do.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      wow, exploitative in the extreme - no one can afford to do work for free, it cuts into paid work, family time etc.  if they are passionate about something they will do it for free if they cannot get permission to do it for sustenance, but they still need to sustain themselves, and they are making opportunity cost sacrifices, and if you are in turn making money off of this you are an asshole.. go ahead look in the mirror and say "I am an asshole"
  • No fair system. There's simply no fair, automated and auditable way to divvy up the money
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      this is an utter cop out - figure out what is close enough to fair and iterate forward to improve it, wow
  • too complicated to do automatically. But if you have a subjective system -- have a human being evaluate contributions to an article and portion out payments -- it will be subject to constant challenges, endless debates, and a lot of community frustration.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      yes to the human evaluation part, but "it's too complicated" is disingenuous at the least
  • Gaming the system. People are really smart. If there's money to be made, they'll figure out how to game your payment system to get more money than they actually deserve
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      yes indeed, so get your metrics right, and be prepared to adjust them as they are gamed - and ultimately, as financial penalties are to BP, even if some people game the system, can we better the gaming of the capitalist system.. it's a low bar I know
  • They'll be trying to get as much money out of you as possible, and you'll be trying to give as little as you can to them
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      it doesn't have to be this way, unless you think that way already
  • If you can't convince people that working on your project is worth their unpaid time, then there's probably something wrong with your project.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      wow, talk about entrepreneurial taker attitude rationalization
  • People are going to be able to sense that -- it's going to look like a cover-up, something sleazy
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      and getting paid for others free work isn't sleazy, somehow...?
  • Donate.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      better yet, give yourself a reasonable salary, and give the rest away
  • Thank-you gifts
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      cynical.. here have a shiny bobble you idiot
  • Pay bounties
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      good way to get people to compete ineffectively instead of cooperating on a solution, the lottery mechanism is evil
  •  
    while good issue are brought up in this article, the solutions offered are myopic and the explanations of the observed effects not satisfying
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Beyond Blockchain: Simple Scalable Cryptocurrencies - The World of Deep Wealth - Medium - 0 views

  • I clarify the core elements of cryptocurrency and outline a different approach to designing such currencies rooted in biomimicry
  • This post outlines a completely different strategy for implementing cryptocurrencies with completely distributed chains
  • Rather than trying to make one global, anonymous, digital cash
  • ...95 more annotations...
  • 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.
  •  
    Article written by Arthur Brook, founder of Metacurrency project and of Ceptr.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The Baffler - 0 views

  • This tendency to view questions of freedom primarily through the lens of economic competition, to focus on the producer and the entrepreneur at the expense of everyone else, shaped O’Reilly’s thinking about technology.
  • the O’Reilly brand essence is ultimately a story about the hacker as hero, the kid who is playing with technology because he loves it, but one day falls into a situation where he or she is called on to go forth and change the world,
  • His true hero is the hacker-cum-entrepreneur, someone who overcomes the insurmountable obstacles erected by giant corporations and lazy bureaucrats in order to fulfill the American Dream 2.0: start a company, disrupt an industry, coin a buzzword.
  • ...139 more annotations...
  • gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism
  • innovation is the new selfishness
  • mastery of public relations
  • making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject
  • memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.
  • “Open source software” was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O’Reill
  • It’s easy to forget this today, but there was no such idea as open source software before 1998; the concept’s seeming contemporary coherence is the result of clever manipulation and marketing.
  • ideological cleavage between two groups
  • Richard Stallman
  • Free Software Foundation, preoccupied with ensuring that users had rights with respect to their computer programs. Those rights weren’t many—users should be able to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies of it, and to release their improved version (if there was one) to the public
  • “free software.”
  • association with “freedom” rather than “free beer”
  • copyleft
  • profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.
  • Plenty of developers contributed to “free software” projects for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some, like Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the much-celebrated Linux operating system, did so for fun; some because they wanted to build more convenient software; some because they wanted to learn new and much-demanded skills.
  • Stallman’s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types
  • he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association
  • By early 1998 several business-minded members of the free software community were ready to split from Stallman, so they masterminded a coup, formed their own advocacy outlet—the Open Source Initiative—and brought in O’Reilly to help them rebrand.
  • “open source”
  • The label “open source” may have been new, but the ideas behind it had been in the air for some time.
  • In those early days, the messaging around open source occasionally bordered on propaganda
  • This budding movement prided itself on not wanting to talk about the ends it was pursuing; except for improving efficiency and decreasing costs, those were left very much undefined.
  • extremely decentralized manner, using Internet platforms, with little central coordination.
  • In contrast to free software, then, open source had no obvious moral component.
  • “open source is not particularly a moral or a legal issue. It’s an engineering issue. I advocate open source, because . . . it leads to better engineering results and better economic results
  • While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.
  • Stallman the social reformer could wait for decades until his ethical argument for free software prevailed in the public debate
  • O’Reilly the savvy businessman had a much shorter timeline: a quick embrace of open source software by the business community guaranteed steady demand for O’Reilly books and events
  • The coup succeeded. Stallman’s project was marginalized. But O’Reilly and his acolytes didn’t win with better arguments; they won with better PR.
  • A decade after producing a singular vision of the Internet to justify his ideas about the supremacy of the open source paradigm, O’Reilly is close to pulling a similar trick on how we talk about government reform.
  • much of Stallman’s efforts centered on software licenses
  • O’Reilly’s bet wa
  • the “cloud”
  • licenses would cease to matter
  • Since no code changed hands
  • So what did matter about open source? Not “freedom”
  • O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied.
  • the freedom of the producer
  • who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics.
  • The most important freedom,
  • is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”
  • O’Reilly opposed this agenda: “I completely support the right of Richard [Stallman] or any individual author to make his or her work available under the terms of the GPL; I balk when they say that others who do not do so are doing something wrong.”
  • The right thing to do, according to O’Reilly, was to leave developers alone.
  • According to this Randian interpretation of open source, the goal of regulation and public advocacy should be to ensure that absolutely nothing—no laws or petty moral considerations—stood in the way of the open source revolution
  • Any move to subject the fruits of developers’ labor to public regulation
  • must be opposed, since it would taint the reputation of open source as technologically and economically superior to proprietary software
  • the advent of the Internet made Stallman’s obsession with licenses obsolete
  • Many developers did stop thinking about licenses, and, having stopped thinking about licenses, they also stopped thinking about broader moral issues that would have remained central to the debates had “open source” not displaced “free software” as the paradigm du jour.
  • Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators likened the “openness” of open source software to the “openness” of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech.
  • “open to intellectual exchange”
  • “open to competition”
  • “For me, ‘open source’ in the broader sense means any system in which open access to code lowers the barriers to entry into the market”).
  • “Open” allowed O’Reilly to build the largest possible tent for the movement.
  • The language of economics was less alienating than Stallman’s language of ethics; “openness” was the kind of multipurpose term that allowed one to look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics
  • highlight the competitive advantages of openness.
  • the availability of source code for universal examination soon became the one and only benchmark of openness
  • What the code did was of little importance—the market knows best!—as long as anyone could check it for bugs.
  • The new paradigm was presented as something that went beyond ideology and could attract corporate executives without losing its appeal to the hacker crowd.
  • What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else.
  • What they had in common was disdain for Stallman’s moralizing—barely enough to justify their revolutionary agenda, especially among the hacker crowds who were traditionally suspicious of anyone eager to suck up to the big corporations that aspired to dominate the open source scene.
  • linking this new movement to both the history of the Internet and its future
  • As long as everyone believed that “open source” implied “the Internet” and that “the Internet” implied “open source,” it would be very hard to resist the new paradigm
  • Telling a coherent story about open source required finding some inner logic to the history of the Internet
  • “If you believe me that open source is about Internet-enabled collaboration, rather than just about a particular style of software license,”
  • everything on the Internet was connected to everything else—via open source.
  • The way O’Reilly saw it, many of the key developments of Internet culture were already driven by what he called “open source behavior,” even if such behavior was not codified in licenses.
  • No moralizing (let alone legislation) was needed; the Internet already lived and breathed open source
  • apps might be displacing the browser
  • the openness once taken for granted is no more
  • Openness as a happenstance of market conditions is a very different beast from openness as a guaranteed product of laws.
  • One of the key consequences of linking the Internet to the world of open source was to establish the primacy of the Internet as the new, reinvented desktop
  • This is where the now-forgotten language of “freedom” made a comeback, since it was important to ensure that O’Reilly’s heroic Randian hacker-entrepreneurs were allowed to roam freely.
  • Soon this “freedom to innovate” morphed into “Internet freedom,” so that what we are trying to preserve is the innovative potential of the platform, regardless of the effects on individual users.
  • Lumping everything under the label of “Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression
  • Forced to choose between preserving the freedom of the Internet or that of its users, we were supposed to choose the former—because “the Internet” stood for progress and enlightenment.
  • infoware
  • Yahoo
  • their value proposition lay in the information they delivered, not in the software function they executed.
  • The “infoware” buzzword didn’t catch on, so O’Reilly turned to the work of Douglas Engelbart
  • to argue that the Internet could help humanity augment its “collective intelligence” and that, once again, open source software was crucial to this endeavor.
  • Now it was all about Amazon learning from its customers and Google learning from the sites in its index.
  • The idea of the Internet as both a repository and incubator of “collective intelligence”
  • in 2004, O’Reilly and his business partner Dale Dougherty hit on the idea of “Web 2.0.” What did “2.0” mean, exactly?
  • he primary goal was to show that the 2001 market crash did not mean the end of the web and that it was time to put the crash behind us and start learning from those who survived.
  • Tactically, “Web 2.0” could also be much bigger than “open source”; it was the kind of sexy umbrella term that could allow O’Reilly to branch out from boring and highly technical subjects to pulse-quickening futurology
  • O’Reilly couldn’t improve on a concept as sexy as “collective intelligence,” so he kept it as the defining feature of this new phenomenon.
  • What set Web 2.0 apart from Web 1.0, O’Reilly claimed, was the simple fact that those firms that didn’t embrace it went bust
  • find a way to harness collective intelligence and make it part of their business model.
  • By 2007, O’Reilly readily admitted that “Web 2.0 was a pretty crappy name for what’s happening.”
  • O’Reilly eventually stuck a 2.0 label on anything that suited his business plan, running events with titles like “Gov 2.0” and “Where 2.0.” Today, as everyone buys into the 2.0 paradigm, O’Reilly is quietly dropping it
  • assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances
  • Take O’Reilly’s musings on “Enterprise 2.0.” What is it, exactly? Well, it’s the same old enterprise—for all we know, it might be making widgets—but now it has learned something from Google and Amazon and found a way to harness “collective intelligence.”
  • tendency to redescribe reality in terms of Internet culture, regardless of how spurious and tenuous the connection might be, is a fine example of what I call “Internet-centrism.”
  • “Open source” gave us the “the Internet,” “the Internet” gave us “Web 2.0,” “Web 2.0” gave us “Enterprise 2.0”: in this version of history, Tim O’Reilly is more important than the European Union
  • For Postman, each human activity—religion, law, marriage, commerce—represents a distinct “semantic environment” with its own tone, purpose, and structure. Stupid talk is relatively harmless; it presents no threat to its semantic environment and doesn’t cross into other ones.
  • Since it mostly consists of falsehoods and opinions
  • it can be easily corrected with facts
  • to say that Tehran is the capital of Iraq is stupid talk
  • Crazy talk, in contrast, challenges a semantic environment, as it “establishes different purposes and assumptions from those we normally accept.” To argue, as some Nazis did, that the German soldiers ended up far more traumatized than their victims is crazy talk.
  • For Postman, one of the main tasks of language is to codify and preserve distinctions among different semantic environments.
  • As he put it, “When language becomes undifferentiated, human situations disintegrate: Science becomes indistinguishable from religion, which becomes indistinguishable from commerce, which becomes indistinguishable from law, and so on.
  • pollution
  • Some words—like “law”—are particularly susceptible to crazy talk, as they mean so many different things: from scientific “laws” to moral “laws” to “laws” of the market to administrative “laws,” the same word captures many different social relations. “Open,” “networks,” and “information” function much like “law” in our own Internet discourse today.
  • For Korzybski, the world has a relational structure that is always in flux; like Heraclitus, who argued that everything flows, Korzybski believed that an object A at time x1 is not the same object as object A at time x2
  • Our language could never properly account for the highly fluid and relational structure of our reality—or as he put it in his most famous aphorism, “the map is not the territory.”
  • Korzybski argued that we relate to our environments through the process of “abstracting,” whereby our neurological limitations always produce an incomplete and very selective summary of the world around us.
  • nothing harmful in this per se—Korzybski simply wanted to make people aware of the highly selective nature of abstracting and give us the tools to detect it in our everyday conversations.
  • Korzybski developed a number of mental tools meant to reveal all the abstracting around us
  • He also encouraged his followers to start using “etc.” at the end of their statements as a way of making them aware of their inherent inability to say everything about a given subject and to promote what he called the “consciousness of abstraction.”
  • There was way too much craziness and bad science in Korzybski’s theories
  • but his basic question
  • “What are the characteristics of language which lead people into making false evaluations of the world around them?”
  • Tim O’Reilly is, perhaps, the most high-profile follower of Korzybski’s theories today.
  • O’Reilly openly acknowledges his debt to Korzybski, listing Science and Sanity among his favorite books
  • It would be a mistake to think that O’Reilly’s linguistic interventions—from “open source” to “Web 2.0”—are random or spontaneous.
  • There is a philosophy to them: a philosophy of knowledge and language inspired by Korzybski. However, O’Reilly deploys Korzybski in much the same way that the advertising industry deploys the latest findings in neuroscience: the goal is not to increase awareness, but to manipulate.
  • O’Reilly, of course, sees his role differently, claiming that all he wants is to make us aware of what earlier commentators may have overlooked. “A metaphor is just that: a way of framing the issues such that people can see something they might otherwise miss,
  • But Korzybski’s point, if fully absorbed, is that a metaphor is primarily a way of framing issues such that we don’t see something we might otherwise see.
  • In public, O’Reilly modestly presents himself as someone who just happens to excel at detecting the “faint signals” of emerging trends. He does so by monitoring a group of überinnovators that he dubs the “alpha geeks.” “The ‘alpha geeks’ show us where technology wants to go. Smart companies follow and support their ingenuity rather than trying to suppress it,
  • His own function is that of an intermediary—someone who ensures that the alpha geeks are heard by the right executives: “The alpha geeks are often a few years ahead of their time. . . . What we do at O’Reilly is watch these folks, learn from them, and try to spread the word by writing down (
  • The name of his company’s blog—O’Reilly Radar—is meant to position him as an independent intellectual who is simply ahead of his peers in grasping the obvious.
  • “the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think”
  • As Web 2.0 becomes central to everything, O’Reilly—the world’s biggest exporter of crazy talk—is on a mission to provide the appropriate “context” to every field.
  • In a fascinating essay published in 2000, O’Reilly sheds some light on his modus operandi.
  • The thinker who emerges there is very much at odds with the spirit of objectivity that O’Reilly seeks to cultivate in public
  • meme-engineering lets us organize and shape ideas so that they can be transmitted more effectively, and have the desired effect once they are transmitted
  • O’Reilly meme-engineers a nice euphemism—“meme-engineering”—to describe what has previously been known as “propaganda.”
  • how one can meme-engineer a new meaning for “peer-to-peer” technologies—traditionally associated with piracy—and make them appear friendly and not at all threatening to the entertainment industry.
  • O’Reilly and his acolytes “changed the canonical list of projects that we wanted to hold up as exemplars of the movement,” while also articulating what broader goals the projects on the new list served. He then proceeds to rehash the already familiar narrative: O’Reilly put the Internet at the center of everything, linking some “free software” projects like Apache or Perl to successful Internet start-ups and services. As a result, the movement’s goal was no longer to produce a completely free, independent, and fully functional operating system but to worship at the altar of the Internet gods.
  • Could it be that O’Reilly is right in claiming that “open source” has a history that predates 1998?
  • Seen through the prism of meme-engineering, O’Reilly’s activities look far more sinister.
  • His “correspondents” at O’Reilly Radar don’t work beats; they work memes and epistemes, constantly reframing important public issues in accordance with the templates prophesied by O’Reilly.
  • Or take O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts around cyberwarfare.
  • Now, who stands to benefit from “cyberwarfare” being defined more broadly? Could it be those who, like O’Reilly, can’t currently grab a share of the giant pie that is cybersecurity funding?
  • Frank Luntz lists ten rules of effective communication: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning, and context.
  • Thus, O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts usually result in “meme maps,” where the meme to be defined—whether it’s “open source” or “Web 2.0”—is put at the center, while other blob-like terms are drawn as connected to it.
  • The exact nature of these connections is rarely explained in full, but this is all for the better, as the reader might eventually interpret connections with their own agendas in mind. This is why the name of the meme must be as inclusive as possible: you never know who your eventual allies might be. “A big part of meme engineering is giving a name that creates a big tent that a lot of people want to be under, a train that takes a lot of people where they want to go,”
  • News April 4 mail date March 29, 2013 Baffler party March 6, 2013 Žižek on seduction February 13, 2013 More Recent Press I’ve Seen the Worst Memes of My Generation Destroyed by Madness io9, April 02, 2013 The Baffler’s New Colors Imprint, March 21, 2013
  • There is considerable continuity across O’Reilly’s memes—over time, they tend to morph into one another.
sebastianklemm

Crypto4Good - 2 views

  •  
    Crypto4Good is a French NGO organizing charity events supported by the French-speaking crypto community. Best Practice: During a 24 hours live event by Crypto4Good + Binance Charity on 19 June 2021, two professional trading teams - Kryll.io & Diabolo.io - leveraged an experimental fund that was collected throughout the French crypto community in the weeks before the event. The two trading teams competed to make the most out of this fund within 24 hours of trading. Finally, both the money fundraised as well as the money sucessfully traded by Kryll.io & Diabolo.io will be given to NGOs in France. In the next weeks the event teams will travel to 5 cities in France: Lille, Paris, Lyon, Nantes, Toulouse, and use all of the donations collected and the money traded to buy as much food and basic necessities as possible. All these products will be donated to social services: https://www.binance.charity/fight-hunger-worldwide
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

James Grier Miller, Living Systems (1978) - 0 views

  • reality as an integrated hierarchy of organizations of matter and energy
  • General living systems theory is concerned with a special subset of all systems, the living ones
  • a space is a set of elements which conform to certain postulate
  • ...266 more annotations...
  • s. Euclidean space
  • metric space
  • topological space
  • Physical space is the extension surrounding a point
  • My presentation of a general theory of living systems will employ two sorts of spaces in which they may exist, physical or geographical space and conceptual or abstracted spaces
  • Physical or geographical space
  • Euclidean space
  • distance
  • moving
  • maximum speed
  • objects moving in such space cannot pass through one another
  • friction
  • The characteristics and constraints of physical space affect the action of all concrete systems, living and nonliving.
  • information can flow worldwide almost instantly
  • Physical space is a common space
  • Most people learn that physical space exists, which is not true of many spaces
  • They can give the location of objects in it
  • Conceptual or abstracted spaces
  • Peck order
  • Social class space
  • Social distance
  • Political distance
  • life space
  • semantic space
  • Sociometric space
  • A space of time costs of various modes of transportation
  • space of frequency of trade relations among nations.
  • A space of frequency of intermarriage among ethnic groups.
  • These conceptual and abstracted spaces do not have the same characteristics and are not subject to the same constraints as physical space
  • Social and some biological scientists find conceptual or abstracted spaces useful because they recognize that physical space is not a major determinant of certain processes in the living systems they study
  • interpersonal relations
  • one cannot measure comparable processes at different levels of systems, to confirm or disconfirm cross-level hypotheses, unless one can measure different levels of systems or dimensions in the same spaces or in different spaces with known transformations among them
  • It must be possible, moreover, to make such measurements precisely enough to demonstrate whether or not there is a formal identity across levels
  • fundamental "fourth dimension" of the physical space-time continuum
  • is the particular instant at which a structure exists or a process occurs
  • or the measured or measurable period over which a structure endures or a process continues.
  • durations
  • speeds
  • rates
  • accelerations
  • irreversible unidirectionality of time
  • thermodynamics
  • negentropy
  • "time's arrow."
  • Matter and energy
  • Matter is anything which has mass (m) and occupies physical space.
  • Energy (E) is defined in physics as the ability to do work.
  • kinetic energy
  • potential energy
  • rest mass energy
  • Mass and energy are equivalent
  • Living systems need specific types of matter-energy in adequate amounts
  • Energy for the processes of living systems is derived from the breakdown of molecules
  • Any change of state of matter-energy or its movement over space, from one point to another, I shall call action.
  • It is one form of process.
  • information (H)
  • Transmission of Information
  • Meaning is the significance of information to a system which processes it: it constitutes a change in that system's processes elicited by the information, often resulting from associations made to it on previous experience with it
  • Information is a simpler concept: the degrees of freedom that exist in a given situation to choose among signals, symbols, messages, or patterns to be transmitted.
  • The set of all these possible categories (the alphabet) is called the ensemble or repertoire
  • .) The unit is the binary digit, or bit of information
  • . The amount of information is measured as the logarithm to the base 2 of the number of alternate patterns
  • Signals convey information to the receiving system only if they do not duplicate information already in the receiver. As Gabor says:
  • [The information of a message can] be defined as the 'minimum number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to construct the message, on the basis of the data already available to him.'
  • meaning cannot be precisely measured
  • Information is the negative of uncertainty.
  • information is the amount of formal patterning or complexity in any system.
  • The term marker was used by von Neumann to refer to those observable bundles, units, or changes of matter-energy whose patterning bears or conveys the informational symbols from the ensemble or repertoire.
  • If a marker can assume n different states of which only one is present at any given time, it can represent at most log2n bits of information. The marker may be static, as in a book or in a computer's memory
  • Communication of almost every sort requires that the marker move in space, from the transmitting system to the receiving system, and this movement follows the same physical laws as the movement of any other sort of matter-energy. The advance of communication technology over the years has been in the direction of decreasing the matter-energy costs of storing and transmitting the markers which bear information.
  • There are, therefore, important practical matter-energy constraints upon the information processing of all living systems exerted by the nature of the matter-energy which composes their markers.
  • organization is based upon the interrelations among parts.
  • If two parts are interrelated either quantitatively or qualitatively, knowledge of the state of one must yield some information about the state of the other. Information measures can demonstrate when such relationships exist
  • The disorder, disorganization, lack of patterning, or randomness of organization of a system is known as its entropy (S)
  • the statistical measure for the negative of entropy is the same as that for information
  • entropy becomes a measure of the probability
  • Increase of entropy was thus interpreted as the passage of a system from less probable to more probable states.
  • according to the second law, a system tends to increase in entropy over time, it must tend to decrease in negentropy or information.
  • therefore no principle of the conservation of information
  • The total information can be decreased in any system without increasing it elsewhere
  • but it cannot be increased without decreasing it elsewhere
  • . Making one or more copies of a given informational pattern does not increase information overall, though it may increase the information in the system which receives the copied information.
  • transforms information into negative entropy
  • smallest possible amount of energy used in observing one bit of information
  • calculations of the amount of information accumulated by living systems throughout growth.
  • the concept of Prigogine that in an open system (that is one in which both matter and energy can be exchanged with the environment) the rate of entropy production within the system, which is always positive, is minimized when the system is in a steady state.
  • in systems with internal feedbacks, internal entropy production is not always minimized when the system is in a stationary state. In other words, feedback couplings between the system parameters may cause marked changes in the rate of development of entropy. Thus it may be concluded that the "information flow" which is essential for this feedback markedly alters energy utilization and the rate of development of entropy, at least in some such special cases which involve feedback control. While the explanation of this is not clear, it suggests an important relationship between information and entropy
  • amount of energy actually required to transmit the information in the channel is a minute part of the total energy in the system, the "housekeeping energy" being by far the largest part of it
  • In recent years systems theorists have been fascinated by the new ways to study and measure information flows, but matter-energy flows are equally important. Systems theory is more than information theory, since it must also deal with energetics - such matters as
  • the flow of raw materials through societies
  • Only a minute fraction of the energy used by most living systems is employed for information processing
  • I have noted above that the movement of matter-energy over space, action, is one form of process. Another form of process is information processing or communication, which is the change of information from one state to another or its movement from one point to another over space
  • Communications, while being processed, are often shifted from one matter-energy state to another, from one sort of marker to another
  • transformations go on in living systems
  • One basic reason why communication is of fundamental importance is that informational patterns can be processed over space and the local matter-energy at the receiving point can be organized to conform to, or comply with, this information
  • the delivery of "flowers by telegraph."
  • Matter-energy and information always flow together
  • Information is always borne on a marker
  • . Conversely there is no regular movement in a system unless there is a difference in potential between two points, which is negative entropy or information
  • If the receiver responds primarily to the material or energic aspect, I shall call it, for brevity, a matter-energy transmission; if the response is primarily to the information, I shall call it an information transmission
  • Moreover, just as living systems must have specific forms of matter-energy, so they must have specific patterns of information
  • example
  • example
  • develop normally
  • have appropriate information inputs in infancy
  • pairs of antonyms
  • one member of which is associated with the concept of information (H)
  • the other member of which is associated with its negative, entropy (S)
  • System
  • A system is a set of interacting units with relationships among them
  • .The word "set" implies that the units have some common properties. These common properties are essential if the units are to interact or have relationships. The state of each unit is constrained by, conditioned by, or dependent on the state of other units. The units are coupled. Moreover, there is at least one measure of the sum of its units which is larger than the sum of that measure of its units.
  • Conceptual system
  • Units
  • terms
  • Relationships
  • a set of pairs of units, each pair being ordered in a similar way
  • expressed by words
  • or by logical or mathematical symbols
  • operations
  • The conceptual systems of science
  • observer
  • selects
  • particular sets to study
  • Variable
  • Each member of such a set becomes a variable of the observer's conceptual system
  • conceptual system may be loose or precise, simple or elaborate
  • Indicator
  • an instrument or technique used to measure fluctuations of variables in concrete systems
  • Function
  • a correspondence between two variables, x and y, such that for each value of x there is a definite value of y, and no two y's have the same x, and this correspondence is: determined by some rule
  • Any function is a simple conceptual system
  • Parameter
  • An independent variable through functions of which other functions may be expressed
  • The state of a conceptual system
  • the set of values on some scale, numerical or otherwise, which its variables have at a given instant
  • Formal identity
  • variables
  • varies comparably to a variable in another system
  • If these comparable variations are so similar that they can be expressed by the same function, a formal identity exists between the two systems
  • Relationships between conceptual and other sorts of systems
  • Science advances as the formal identity or isomorphism increases between a theoretical conceptual system and objective findings about concrete or abstracted systems
  • A conceptual system may be purely logical or mathematical, or its terms and relationships may be intended to have some sort of formal identity or isomorphism with units and relationships empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
  • Concrete system
  • a nonrandom accumulation of matter-energy, in a region in physical space-time, which is organized into interacting interrelated subsystems or components.
  • Units
  • are also concrete systems
  • Relationships
  • spatial
  • temporal
  • spatiotemporal
  • causal
  • Both units and relationships in concrete systems are empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
  • patterns of relationships or processes
  • The observer of a concrete system
  • distinguishes a concrete system from unorganized entities in its environment by the following criteria
  • physical proximity of its units
  • similarity of its units
  • common fate of its units
  • distinct or recognizable patterning of its units.
  • Their boundaries are discovered by empirical operations available to the general scientific community rather than set conceptually by a single observer
  • Variable of a concrete system
  • Any property of a unit or relationship within a system which can be recognized by an observer
  • which can potentially change over time, and whose change can potentially be measured by specific operations, is a variable of a concrete system
  • Examples
  • number of its subsystems or components, its size, its rate of movement in space, its rate of growth, the number of bits of information it can process per second, or the intensity of a sound to which it responds
  • A variable is intrasystemic
  • not to be confused with intersystemic variations which may be observed among individual systems, types, or levels.
  • The state of a concrete system
  • its structure
  • represented by the set of values on some scale which its variables have at that instant
  • Open system
  • Most concrete systems have boundaries which are at least partially permeable, permitting sizable magnitudes of at least certain sorts of matter-energy or information transmissions to pass them. Such a system is an open system. In open systems entropy may increase, remain in steady state, or decrease.
  • Closed system
  • impermeable boundaries through which no matter-energy or information transmissions of any sort can occur is a closed system
  • special case
  • No actual concrete system is completely closed
  • In closed systems, entropy generally increases, exceptions being when certain reversible processes are carried on which do not increase it. It can never decrease.
  • Nonliving system
  • the general case of concrete systems, of which living systems are a very special case. Nonliving systems need not have the same critical subsystems as living systems, though they often have some of them
  • Living system
  • a special subset of the set of all possible concrete systems
  • They all have the following characteristics:
  • open systems
  • inputs
  • throughputs
  • outputs
  • of various sorts of matter-energy and information.
  • maintain a steady state of negentropy even though entropic changes occur in them as they do everywhere else
  • by taking in inputs
  • higher in complexity or organization or negentropy
  • than their outputs
  • The difference permits them to restore their own energy and repair breakdowns in their own organized structure.
  • In living systems many substances are produced as well as broken down
  • To do this such systems must be open and have continual inputs of matter-energy and information
  • entropy will always increase in walled-off living systems
  • They have more than a certain minimum degree of complexity
  • They either contain genetic material composed of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
  • or have a charter
  • blueprint
  • program
  • of their structure and process from the moment of their origin
  • may also include nonliving components.
  • They have a decider, the essential critical sub-system which controls the entire system, causing its subsystems and components to interact. Without such interaction under decider control there is no system.
  • other specific critical sub-systems or they have symbiotic or parasitic relationships with other living or nonliving systems
  • Their subsystems are integrated together to form actively self-regulating, developing, unitary systems with purposes and goals
  • They can exist only in a certain environment
  • change in their environment
  • produces stresses
  • Totipotential system
  • capable of carrying out all critical subsystem processes necessary for life is totipotential
  • Partipotential system
  • does not itself carry out all critical subsystem processes is partipotential
  • A partipotential system must interact with other systems that can carry out the processes which it does not, or it will not survive
  • parasitic
  • symbiotic
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      The Exchange fime is a symbiotic system to SENSORICA
  • Fully functioning system
  • when it
  • Partially functioning system
  • it must do its own deciding, or it is not a system
  • Abstracted system
  • Units
  • relationships abstracted or selected by an observer in the light of his interests, theoretical viewpoint, or philosophical bias.
  • Some relationships may be empirically determinable by some operation carried out by the observer, but others are not, being only his concepts
  • Relationships
  • The relationships mentioned above are observed to inhere and interact in concrete, usually living, systems
  • these concrete systems are the relationships of abstracted systems.
  • The verbal usages of theoretical statements concerning abstracted systems are often the reverse of those concerning concrete systems
  • An abstracted system differs from an abstraction, which is a concept
  • representing a class of phenomena all of which are considered to have some similar "class characteristic." The members of such a class are not thought to interact or be interrelated, as are the relationships in an abstracted system
  • Abstracted systems are much more common in social science theory than in natural science.
  • are oriented toward relationships rather than toward the concrete systems
  • spatial arrangements are not usually emphasized
  • their physical limits often do not coincide spatially with the boundaries of any concrete system, although they may.
  • important difference between the physical and biological hierarchies, on the one hand, and social hierarchies, on the other
  • Most physical and biological hierarchies are described in spatial terms
  • we propose to identify social hierarchies not by observing who lives close to whom but by observing who interacts with whom
  • intensity of interaction
  • in most biological and physical systems relatively intense interaction implies relative spatial propinquity
  • To the extent that interactions are channeled through specialized communications and transportation systems, spatial propinquity becomes less determinative of structure.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      This is the case of SENSORICA, built on web-based communication and coordination tools. 
  • PARSONS
  • the unit of a partial social system is a role and not the individual.
  • culture
  • cumulative body of knowledge of the past, contained in memories and assumptions of people who express this knowledge in definite ways
  • The social system is the actual habitual network of communication between people.
  • RUESCH
  • A social system is a behavioral system
  • It is an organized set of behaviors of persons interacting with each other: a pattern of roles.
  • The roles are the units of a social system
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      That is why we need a role system in SENSORICA
  • On the other hand, the society is an aggregate of social subsystems, and as a limiting case it is that social system which comprises all the roles of all the individuals who participate.
  • What Ruesch calls the social system is something concrete in space-time, observable and presumably measurable by techniques like those of natural science
  • To Parsons the system is abstracted from this, being the set of relationships which are the form of organization. To him the important units are classes of input-output relationships of subsystems rather than the subsystems themselves
  • system is a system of relationship in action, it is neither a physical organism nor an object of physical perception
  • evolution
  • differentiation
  • growth
  • from earlier and simpler forms and functions
  • capacities for specializations and gradients
  • [action] is not concerned with the internal structure of processes of the organism, but is concerned with the organism as a unit in a set of relationships and the other terms of that relationship, which he calls situation
  • Abstracted versus concrete systems
  • One fundamental distinction between abstracted and concrete systems is that the boundaries of abstracted systems may at times be conceptually established at regions which cut through the units and relationships in the physical space occupied by concrete systems, but the boundaries of these latter systems are always set at regions which include within them all the units and internal relationships of each system
  • A science of abstracted systems certainly is possible and under some conditions may be useful.
  • If the diverse fields of science are to be unified, it would be helpful if all disciplines were oriented either to concrete or to abstracted systems.
  • It is of paramount importance for scientists to distinguish clearly between them
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Co-Creating as Disruption to the Dominant Cultural Framework » Wirearchy - 0 views

  • more open people processes
  • Participative processes like Open Space, World Cafes, Unconferences, Peer Circles
  • Barcamps, Wordcamps, Govcamps, Foo Camps, Unconferences, high-end celebrity-and-marketing-and venture-capital ‘experience’ markets, new cultural and artistic festivals with technology-and-culture-making themes
  • ...45 more annotations...
  • maker faires
  • community-and-consensus building, organizing for activism and fundraising
  • The impetus behind this explosion is both technological and sociological
  • Technological
  • information technology and the creation and evolution of the Internet and the Web
  • appearance, development and evolution of social tools, web services, massive storage, and the ongoing development of computer-and-smart-devices development
  • Sociological
  • People are searching for ways to find others with similar interests and motivations so that they can engage in activities that help them learn, find work, grow capabilities and skills, and tackle vexing social and economic problems
  • get informed and take action
  • Developing familiarity and practice with open and collaborative processes
  • play and work together
  • rules about self-management, operate democratically, and produce results grounded in ownership and the responsibilities that have been agreed upon by the ‘community’
  • The relationships and flows of information can be transferred to online spaces and often benefit from wider connectivity.
  • Today, our culture-making activities are well engaged in the early stages of cultural mutation
  • What’s coming along next ?  “Smart” devices and Internet everywhere in our lives ?  Deep(er) changes to the way things are conceived, carried out, managed and used ?  New mental models ?  Or, will we discover real societal limits to what can be done given the current framework of laws, institutions and established practices with which people are familiar and comfortable ?
  • Shorter cycle-based development and release
  • Agile development
  • It is clear evidence that the developmental and learning dynamics generated by continuous or regular feedback loops are becoming the norm in areas of activity in which change and short cycles of product development are constants.
  • The Internet of Things (IoT)
  • clothes, homes, cars, buildings, roads, and a wide range of other objects that have a place in peoples’ daily life activities
  • experiencing major growth, equally in terms of hardware, software and with respect to the way the capabilities are configured and used
  • The IoT concept is being combined with the new-ish concepts of Open Data and Big Data
  • ethical, political and social impact policy decisions
  • that key opportunities associated with widespread uptake of the IoT are derived from the impact upon peoples’ activities and lives
  • ‘we’ are on our way towards more integrated eco-systems of issues, people and technologies
  • participation and inclusion enabled by interconnectedness are quickly becoming the ‘new rules’
  • What the Future May Hold
  • the ‘scenario planning’ approach
  • world’s politics, economics, anthropology, technology, psychology, sociology and philosophy
  • A scenario planning exercise carried out by the Rockefeller Foundation
  • Clearly these early (and now not-so-weak) signals and patterns tell us that the core assumptions and principles that have underpinned organized human activities for most of the past century
  • are being changed by the combinations and permutations of new, powerful, inexpensive and widely accessible information-processing technologies
  • The short description of each scenario reinforces the perception that we are both individually and collectively in transition from a linear, specialized, efficiency-driven paradigm towards a paradigm based on continuous feedback loops and principles of participation, both large and small in scope.
  • cultural ‘mutation’
  • Wirearchy
  • a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
  • the role of social media and smart mobile devices in the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East
  • The roots of organizational development (OD) are in humanistic psychology and sociology action and ethnographic and cybernetic/ socio-technical systems theory.  It’s a domain that emerged essentially as a counter-balance to the mechanistic and machine-metaphor-based core assumptions about the organized activities in our society.
  • Organizational development principles are built upon some basic assumptions about human motivations, engagement and activities.
  • Participative Work Design – The Six Criteria
  • in recent years created models that help clarify how to evaluate and respond to the continuous turbulence and ambiguity generated by participating in interconnected flows of information.
  • contexts characterized by either Simple, Complicated or Chaotic dynamics (from complexity theory fundamentals). Increasingly, Complexity is emerging as a key definer of the issues, problems and opportunities faced by our societies.
  • peer-to-peer movement(s) unfolding around the world
  • Co-creating in a wide range of forms, processes and purpose may become an effective and important antidote to the spreading enclosure of human creative activity.
  • But .. the dominant models of governance, commercial ownership and the use and re-use of that which is co-created by people are going to have to undergo much more deep change in order to disrupt the existing paradigm of proprietary commercial creation and the model of socio-economic power that this paradigm enables and carries today.
Kurt Laitner

Crisis of Value Theory - P2P Foundation - 0 views

  • accumulation of knowledge assets
  • a new class has arisen which controls the vectors of information
  • In terms of knowledge creation, a vast new information commons is being created, which is increasingly out of the control of cognitive capitalism.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • But notice that to do this, the system had to change, the core logic was no longer the same.
  • The emergence of the peer model of production, based on the non-rivalrous nature and virtually non-existent marginal cost of reproduction of digital information, and coupled with the increasing unenforceability of “intellectual property” laws, means that capital is incapable of realizing returns on ownership in the cognitive realm.
  • capital is becoming an a posteriori intervention in the realization of innovation, rather than a condition for its occurrence
  • 1) The creation of non-monetary value is exponential 2) The monetization of such value is linear
  • What this announces is a crisis of value, most such value is ‘beyond measure’, but also essentially a crisis of accumulation of capital.
  • more and more positive externalizations are created from the social field
  • “the core logic of the emerging experience economy, operating as it does in the world of non-rival exchange, is unlikely to have capitalism as its core logic.”
  • This takes the form both of “intellectual property” law, as well as direct subsidies from the taxpayer to the corporate economy
  • crisis of realization under state capitalism to capital’s growing dependence on the state to capture value from social production and redistribute it to private corporate owners
  • The state capitalist system will reach a point at which, thanks to the collapse of the portion of value comprised of rents on artificial property, the base of taxable value is imploding at the very time big business most needs subsidies to stay afloat.
  • We live in a political economy that has it exactly backwards. We believe that our natural world is infinite, and therefore that we can have an economic system based on infinite growth. But since the material world is finite, it is based on pseudo-abundance. And then we believe that we should introduce artificial scarcities in the world of immaterial production, impeding the free flow of culture and social innovation, which is based on free cooperation, by creating the obstacle of permissions and intellectual property rents protected by the state. What we need instead is a political economy based on a true notion of scarcity in the material realm, and a realization of abundance in the immaterial realm.
  • Brains and bodies still need others to produce value, but the others they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to organize production.
  • The household and informal economies have been allowed to function to the extent that they bear reproduction costs that would otherwise have to be internalized in wages; but they have been suppressed (as in the Enclosures) when they threaten to increase in size and importance to the point of offering a basis for independence from wage labor. “
  • increasing untenability of property rights in the information realm
  • there is no more outside.
  • one of intensive development, to grow in the immaterial field, and this is basically what the experience economy means
  • Innovation is becoming social and diffuse, an emergent property of the networks
  • failure of artificial abundance
  • failure of artificial scarcity
  •  
    the passing of the capitalist age
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Dark Intellectual Property. Why We Need a Kickstarter for Patents - 0 views

  • “dark IP,” the intellectual property (IP) that remains on the shelf: undiscovered, unexplored, untapped
  • our ability to catch so much in the net by dragging the surface (to use Mike Bergman’s analogy) actually still misses the invisible wealth of what lies beneath.
  • But dark IP is different than the other hidden-depths knowledge since it’s also unfair. Because taxpayers paid for much of the research — whether basic understanding with long-term benefits or more applied research with shorter-term benefits — that now lies collecting dust on university shelves.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • the people of the United States spent an average of nearly $40 billion every year supporting institutional research
  • 65 percent of invention disclosure bundles remain, on average, unlicensed and unused … each year.
  • ”…the street finds its own uses for things.”
  • most of the IP (much of which we paid for) isn’t actually on the street, where entrepreneurial folks can do something with it.
  • the overworked and understaffed tech transfer offices
  • their models
  • There’s not necessarily room for exploration and discovery
  • byzantine bureaucracy of large organizations
  • But let’s face it, there’s also the hoarding and the overprotecting
  • So much IP is generated that it’s far too much for any one entity to ever make sense of
  • very few people are aware of — let alone able to access — an invention outside the social circle of its inventors, the scientific community involved, or even the “crowd” that’s sometimes harnessed in open innovation
  • we need new ways of democratizing it
  • Not democratizing the IP itself — institutions should still own and generate profits from the intellectual property they’ve created — but democratizing the ways in which we allow this IP to be discovered and licensed.
  • idea contests
  • marketplaces
  • competitions to find uses for on-the-shelf IP
  • missing out on the transformative potential of what technology can do here
  • promoting new ways of interacting around intellectual property
  • Marblar, where I’m an advisor
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      The guy is not entirely for open innovation but proposes an intermediary model to democratize the use of IP
  • This turns off the average entrepreneur, who doesn’t have the patience and bandwidth to engage in all the unnecessary overhead of searching, browsing, and licensing IP.
  • Many small startups don’t even bother with IP
  • Another missing piece is ways of allowing the crowd to interact with each other and decide which technologies should be licensed
  • bidding wars
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      competitive dynamic for acquiring IP and using it effectively. This doesn't solve the problem, because some companies will still buy it for defensive purposes or block others from using it, unlike with truly open innovation. 
  • Most of the examples I listed above haven’t changed much over the past decade or broken into the mainstream.
  • why not a Kickstarter for IP?
  • Such a website would bring together not just funds and transactions, but communities — with their attendant feedback mechanisms — that are interested in creating something novel around unused patents.
  • such a model would help get the ideas of a few into the minds of many.
  • open up the currently closed shelf to virtual browsing
  • inventions are not only ‘filed’ or ‘granted’ but ‘browsed’ or ‘licensed’.
Kurt Laitner

The Link Economy and Creditright - Geeks Bearing Gifts - Medium - 3 views

  • Online, content with no links has no value because it has no audience
  • News Commons used Repost as the basis of a content- and audience-sharing network among dozens of sites big and small in the state’s new ecosystem
  • Huffington Post and Twitter can get thousands of writers — including me — to make content for free because it brings us audience and attention.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Consider an alternative to syndication. I’ll call it reverse syndication. Instead of selling my content to you, what say I give it to you for free? Better yet, I pay you to publish it on your site. The condition: I get to put my ad on the content. I will pay you a share of what I earn from that ad based on how much audience you bring me.
  • That model values the creation of the audience
  • If content could travel with its business model attached, we could set it free to travel across the web, gathering recommendations and audience and value as it goes
  • She searched Google for “embeddable article” and up came Repost.us, already created by entrepreneur and technologist John Pettitt. Repost very cleverly allowed embeddable articles to travel with the creator’s own brand, advertising, analytics, and links.
  • First, he found that the overlap in audience between a creator’s and an embedder’s sites generally ran between 2 and 5 percent. That is to say, the embedders brought a mostly new audience to the creator’s content.
  • Instead, Pettitt found that click-through ran amazingly high: 5 to 7 percent — and these were highly qualified clicks of people who knew what they were going to get on the other side of a link
  • I call this creditright. We need a means to attach credit to content for those who contribute value to it so that each constituent has the opportunity to negotiate and extract value along the chain, so that each can gain permission to take part in the chain, and so that behaviors that benefit others in the chain can be rewarded and encouraged
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      so *net basically, or OVN contributory value accounting
  • Each creator’s ads traveled with its content — though that wasn’t necessarily optimal, because an ad for a North Jersey hairdresser wouldn’t perform terribly well with South Jersey readers brought in through embedding.
  • key factor in its failure: Repost could find many sites willing and eager to make their content embeddable. It didn’t find enough sites to embed the content.
  • But the embedders got nothing aside from the free use of content — content that was just a link away anyway
  • Our ultimate problem in media is that we do not have sufficient technical and legal frameworks for alternate business models.
  • That formula was the key insight behind Google: that links to content are a signal of its value; thus, the more links to a page from sites that themselves have more links, the more useful, relevant, or valuable that content is likely to be
  • Silicon Valley’s: Those people are your fans who are bringing value to you by sending you audiences and by contributing their creativity, and you’d be wise to build your businesses around making it easier, not harder, for them to get and share your content when and how they want it.
  • And so, we came to agree that we need new technological and legal frameworks flexible enough to enable multiple models to support creativity.
  • Hollywood’s side: People who download our content without buying it or who remix it without our permission — and the platforms that facilitate these behaviors — are stealing from us and must be stopped and punished.
  • Imagine you are a songwriter. You hear a street poet and her words inspire you to write a song about her, quoting her in the piece. You go to a crowdfunding platform — Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or Patreon — to raise money for you to go into the studio and perform and distribute your song. Another songwriter comes along and remixes it, making a new version and also sampling from others’ songs. Both end up on YouTube and Soundcloud, on iTunes and Google Play. Audience members discover and share the songs. A particularly popular artist shares the remixed version on Twitter and Facebook and it explodes. A label has one of its stars record it. The star appears on TV performing it. A movie studio includes that song in a soundtrack. There are many constituents in that process: the subject, the songwriter, the patrons, the fans, the remixer, the distributor, the label, the star, the show, the studio, and the platforms. Each contributed value.
  • Each may want to recognize value — but not all will want cash. There are other currencies in play: The poet may want credit and fame; the songwriter may want to sell concert tickets; the patrons may want social capital for discovering and supporting a new artist; the remixer may want permission to remix; the platforms may want a cut of sales or of subscription revenue; the show may want audience and advertising; the studio will want a return on its investment and risk.
  • I’ve suggested they would be wiser to seek another currency from Google: data about the users, helping build better services for readers and advertisers and thus better businesses
  • We will need a way to attach metadata to content, recording and revealing its source and the contributions of others in the chain of continuing creation and distribution.
  • We need a marketplace to measure and value their contributions and a means to negotiate rewards and permissions
  • We need payment structures to handle multiple currencies: data as well as money
  • And we need a legal framework to allow the flexible exploration of new models, some of which we cannot yet imagine.
  • It took many more years for society to develop principles of free speech to balance the economic and political interests of those who would attempt to control a new tool of speech.
  • We must reimagine the business of media and news from the first penny, asking where value is created, who contributes to it, where it resides, and how to extract it
  • Thus, we need new measures of value
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

https://planetmint.io/ - 1 views

  •  
    Consensus - Byzantine Fault Tolerant Planetmint integrates the extendable smart contracting language, Zenroom by Dyne. Smart contracts can be formally verified. I can't seem to open their "smart contract" page: https://docs.planetmint.io/en/latest/basic-usage.html#contracts-conditions
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