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Permaculture Principles | Design Principles - 1 views

permacultureprinciples.com/principles_business.php permaculture principles design business resilience paper
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Sep 11 - Cached
  • how the principles of permaculture might apply to business.
  • The shift will be from merely prioritising output to thinking more widely.
  • how to build resilience for business
  • ...64 more annotations...
  • observation
  • A post-peak world will depend on detailed observation and good design rather than energy-intensive solutions.
  • not rely on weather forecasts but to learn to read the clouds,
  • “instead of researching the market, be the market”
  • businesses should be out there observing.
  • larger businesses tend to rely more on surveys and on second-hand information.
  • direct contact with customers.
  • move our idea of ‘capital’ from what we have in the bank, to the resources we have around us
  • not running a business on a constant high speed cash throughput with little or no capital reserves
  • lack of resilience in the just-in-time supply approach
  • a shift to storages of parts and materials, as well as the need to financially not be so dependent on debt financing
  • work slower with more financial reserves and take less risks, not building beyond what the company’s financial resources can support.
  • either to not borrow any money at all, or to borrow so much money that you can’t fail, being bigger than the people you borrow money from, so they have a vested interest in your succeeding!
  • energy efficient
  • long term
  • Looking to make buildings as autonomous as possible in a world entering energy descent is critical
  • see things that are flowing past and through the business that others don’t see as being a resource and having no monetary value as being valuable.
  • any intervention we make in a system, any changes we make or elements we introduce ought to be productive
  • This is instinctive to businesses
  • Obtain a Yield, in this context, is out of balance
  • much of business
  • have taken this to extremes
  • A well-designed system using permaculture principles should be able to self-regulate, and require the minimum of intervention and maintenance, like a woodland ecosystem, which requires no weeding, fertiliser or pest control.
  • moving from “we’re just obeying the law” to being proactive, acting before you get hit over the head with regulation and other vulnerabilities.
  • be able to put a foot on the break, not just going hell for leather on profit maximisation.
  • apply applied restraint, avoiding excessive, overfast growth that hasn’t been consolidated
  • looking for the negative feedbacks, from customers and from the environment in general
  • We need to increase the tightness of feedbacks.
  • Where nature can perform particular functions
  • we should utilise these attributes, rather than thinking we can replace them
  • Where nature can take some work off our hands we should let it.
  • a shift towards renewable resources
  • The emerging opportunities for businesses are things that are renewable. Renewable energy sources are the ones that will ensure a business’s stability in the long run. We can also broaden the concept of renewable resources to include things like goodwill and trust, things which a business can rebuild with good husbandry. Most business doesn’t just depend on law and competition, trust is at the heart of much business and it is very much a renewable resource.
  • The concept of waste is essentially a reflection of poor design. Every output from one system could become the input to another system. We need to think cyclically rather than in linear systems.
  • looking at our work from a range of perspectives
  • wider context
  • keep a clearer sense of the wider canvas on which we are painting, and the forces that affect what we are doing.
  • being strategic is important too
  • ask how is what we are doing part of a bigger picture, the move away from globalisation and towards the local, taking steps back from the everyday.
  • This can be done firstly by allowing space for Devil’s advocates, for black sheep, for hearing the voices of those outside of the dominant culture of the organisation and secondly by looking from a holistic perspective of how things interconnect, rather than just relying on experts who are embedded in detail. It emphasises the need to value the generalist, to give value to holistic thinkers.
  • allowing people to imagine different possibilities.
  • scenario planning
  • Permaculture has been described as the science of maximising beneficial relationships.
  • Solutions are to be found in integrated holistic solutions rather than increased specialisation and compartmentalisation
  • The challenge here is to move to seeing business as being part of the geographical community, as being rooted in place, rather than just part of a globalised community. At the moment for many larger businesses, the local is something one pays lip-service to as a source of good PR, something one is passing through, rather than actually being an integral part of the community.
  • This is a profound structural challenge for large organisations. Part of the resilience of the organisation comes from the degree of lateral integration. resilience is in all solutions, it is the characteristic of ecological systems. If we apply these principles, resilience is one of the emergent properties
  • the notion that big is best needs to be challenged
  • new opportunities are very hard to understand and exploit from a macro level perspective, and are much better done from small scale perspective. It is here that the idea of appropriateness of scale becomes key.
  • more diverse systems have much more inbuilt resilience
  • have a diversity of small businesses, local currencies, food sources, energy sources and so on than if they are just dependent on centralised systems, globalisation’s version of monoculture.
  • not having all your eggs in one basket.
  • In the short term this kind of diversification could reduce profits, but in the longer term it will be more secure
  • this is about the reverse of specialisation, about having a mixed portfolio, and presents a big culture change for businesses.
  • it is a good strategy for business to keep a diverse portfolio of what sustains the business, keep some things that appear to be peripheral. They may not at this stage appear to be a serious part of how the business is run, but in this new world they will increasingly become so
  • ‘edge’
  • the point where two ecosystems meet is often more productive than either of those systems on their own.
  • overlap systems where possible so as to maximise their potential.
  • recognising that innovation doesn’t come from the centre but from fringe thinkers.
  • giving status to the marginal
  • It is important that the business has as many fingers in as many pies as possible, as many interfaces, and recognises that every person working for the business represents it in the community.
  • Natural systems are constantly in flux, evolving and growing.
  • Remaining observant of the changes around you, and not fixing onto the idea that anything around you is fixed or permanent will help too.
  • be flexible, lean and adaptable
  • A healthy approach is to start with no complete plan, to allow the process to be emergent. This is not a time when we can work to a rigid plan as conditions will change so fast. Organisations will need to stay on their toes, without rigid management.
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DRS-07-2014 - 0 views

ec.europa.eu/...1072-drs-07-2014.html proposal horizon 2020 Tibi's selection Hugo
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 14
     
    "Topic: Crisis management topic 7: Crises and disaster resilience - operationalizing resilience concepts"
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Is it time to change the way we work? | What Would The Internet Do? - 2 views

www.wwtid.com/...time-to-change-the-way-we-work document post blog value networks new economy
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 09 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • company culture
  • how important some values are for them to prosper and generate value
  • We are seeing some organization being more successful in creating a culture than others
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • some of the principles of the Internet culture are actually becoming critical in creating successful organizations
  • the Internet culture is setting the foundation for a different way of generating economic and social value.
  • set of values that I believe are relevant for all organization wishing to reinvent their model to be more successful, attract talent and be more sustainable.
  • Resilience
  • more chances to successfully face complexity, speed and unpredictability
  • Bouncing back is more valuable than being tough.
  • resources from your network, from outside, rather than stocking them.
  • establish a circle of trust
  • Compasses (instead of maps)
  • through clear principles and transparency.
  • groups of people can produce a better outcome than single individuals.
  • post-sale structure
  • Portfolios (instead of planning)/ Practice (instead of theory)
  • Prototype, and leverage the ecosystem to fail fast (or scale rapidly).
  • testing less than perfect products into a receptive and responsive ecosystem
  • Systems (instead of objects)
  • the social components, and the interdependence of people, groups and objects.
  • a new set of currency that will merge the intrinsic value with the extrinsic social components associated with it.
  • Pull (instead of push)/ Smart crowd (instead of experts)
  • planning everything excludes the unexpected
  • keeping the eyes open
  • Encourage rebellion (instead of compliance)/Constant learning (instead of education)
  • asking questions and not accepting the traditional answers as given
  • structurally encouraged to question in order to guarantee future development and innovation
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Did the Other Shoe Just Drop? Big Banks Hit with Monster $250 Billion Lawsuit in Housin... - 0 views

www.resilience.org/...lion-lawsuit-in-housing-crisis credit collapse alternative economic system
shared by Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The reason for this is that credit is merely one way by which a society manages the distribution of goods and services. . . . A credit collapse . . . doesn’t make the energy, raw materials, and labor vanish into some fiscal equivalent of a black hole; they’re all still there, in whatever quantities they were before the credit collapse, and all that’s needed is some new way to allocate them to the production of goods and services.
  • Better would be to have an alternative system in place and ready to implement before the boom drops.
  • On a national level, when the Wall Street credit system fails, the government can turn to the innovative model devised by our colonial forebears and start issuing its own currency and credit—a power now usurped by private banks but written into the US Constitution as belonging to Congress
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The chief problem with the paper scrip of the colonial governments was the tendency to print and spend too much.
  • he Pennsylvania colonists corrected that systemic flaw by establishing a publicly-owned bank, which lent money to farmers and tradespeople at interest
  • To get the funds into circulation to cover the interest, some extra scrip was printed and spent on government services.
  • The interest returned to public coffers, to be spent on the common weal.
  • The result was a system of money and credit that was sustainable without taxes, price inflation or government debt
  • Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
     
    "The reason for this is that credit is merely one way by which a society manages the distribution of goods and services. . . . A credit collapse . . . doesn't make the energy, raw materials, and labor vanish into some fiscal equivalent of a black hole; they're all still there, in whatever quantities they were before the credit collapse, and all that's needed is some new way to allocate them to the production of goods and services." and  "Better would be to have an alternative system in place and ready to implement before the boom drops." taken together may imply something other than the article's proposed solution of  "On a national level, when the Wall Street credit system fails, the government can turn to the innovative model devised by our colonial forebears and start issuing its own currency and credit-a power now usurped by private banks but written into the US Constitution as belonging to Congress"
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IFAD Investing in rural people - 0 views

www.ifad.org/about organisation potential_partner greens_for_good
shared by sebastianklemm on 25 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • sebastianklemm on 25 Apr 21
     
    At the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) we invest in rural people, empowering them to increase their food security, improve the nutrition of their families and increase their incomes. We help them build resilience, expand their businesses and take charge of their own development. IFAD is an international financial institution and specialized United Nations agency based in Rome, the UN's food and agriculture hub. Since 1978, we have provided US$22.4 billion in grants and low-interest loans to projects that have reached an estimated 512 million people.
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How Peer to Peer Communities will change the World - 0 views

meedabyte.wordpress.com/...bauwens-p2p-foundation-founder p2p Michel Bauwens learning paper
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • role of p2p movement
  • historical role
  • horizontalisation of human relationships
  • ...55 more annotations...
  • allowing the free aggregation of individuals around shared values or common value creation
  • a huge sociological shift
  • new life forms, social practices and human institutions
  • emergent communities of practice are developing new social practices that are informed by the p2p paradigm
  • ethical revolution
  • openness
  • participation
  • inclusivity
  • cooperation
  • commons
  • the open content industry in the U.S. to reach one sixth of GDP.
  • political expressions
  • the movement has two wings
  • constructive
  • building new tools and practices
  • resistance to neoliberalism
  • we are at a stage of emergence
  • difficulty of implementing full p2p solutions in the current dominant system
  • At this stage, there is a co-dependency between peer producers creating value, and for-profit firms ‘capturing that value’, but they both need each other.
  • Peer producers need a business ecology to insure the social reproduction of their system and financial sustainability of its participants, and capital needs the positive externalities of social cooperation which flow from p2p collaboration.
  • peer producing communities should create their own ‘mission-oriented’ social businesses, so that the surplus value remains with the value creators, i.e. the commoners themselves, but this is hardly happening now.
  • Instead what we see is a mutual accomodation between netarchical capital on one side, and peer production communities on the other.
  • the horizontal meets the vertical
  • mostly hybrid ‘diagonal’ adaptations
  • For peer producers the question becomes, if we cannot create our own fully autonomous institutions, how can we adapt while maintaining maximum autonomy and sustainability as a commons and as a community.
  • Why p2p have failed to create successful alternatives in some areas?
  • In commons-oriented peer production, where people aggegrate around a common object which requires deep cooperation, they usually have their own infrastructures of cooperation and a ecology combining community, a for-benefit association managing the infrastructure, and for-profit companies operating on the market place; in the sharing economy, where individuals merely share their own expressions, third party platforms are the norm. It is clear that for-profit companies have different priorities, and want to enclose value so that it can be sold on the marketplace. This in fact the class struggle of the p2p era, the struggle between communities and corporations around various issues because of partly differential interests.
  • Even commercially controlled platforms are being used for a massive horizontalisation and self-aggregation of human relationships, and communities, including political and radical groups are effectively using them to mobilize. What’s important is not just to focus on the limitations and intentions of the platform owners, but to use whatever we can to strengthen the autonomy of peer communities.
  • requires a clever adaptation
  • use for our own benefit
  • The fact today is that capital is still capable of marshaling vast financial and material resources, so that it can create,
  • platforms that can easily and quickly offer services, creating network effects
  • without network effects, there is no ‘there’ there, just an empty potential platform.
  • p2p activists should work on both fronts
  • using mainstream platforms for spreading their ideas and culture and reach greater numbers of people, while also developing their own autonomous media ecologies, that can operate independently, and the latter is an engagement for the ‘long haul’, i.e. the slow construction of an alternative lifeworld.
  • The commons and p2p are really just different aspects of the same phenomena; the commons is the object that p2p dynamics are building; and p2p takes place wherever there are commons.
  • So both p2p and the commons, as they create abundant (digital) or sufficient (material) value for the commoners, at the same time create opportunities to create added value for the marketplace. There is no domain that is excluded from p2p, no field that can say, “we wouldn’t be stronger by opening up to participation and community dynamics”. And there is no p2p community that can say, we are in the long term fully sustainable within the present system, without extra resources coming from the market sector.
  • One trend is the distribution of current infrastructures and practices, i.e. introducing crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social lending, digital currencies, in order to achieve wider participation in current practices. That is a good thing, but not sufficient. All the things that I mention above, move to a distributed infrastructure, but do not change the fundamental logic of what they are doing.
  • we are talking about the distribution of capitalism, not about a deeper change in the logic of our economy.
  • No matter how good you are, no matter how much capital you have to hire the best people, you cannot compete with the innovative potential of open global communities.
  • the p2p dynamics
  • the new networked culture
  • the opposite is also happening, as we outlined above, more and more commons-oriented value communities are creating their own entrepreneurial coalitions. Of course, some type of companies, because of their monopoly positions and legacy systems, may have a very difficult time undergoing that adaptation, in which case new players will appear that can do it more effectively.
  • the corporate form is unable to deal with ecological and sustainability issues, because its very DNA, the legal obligation to enrich the shareholders, makes its strive to lower input costs,  and ignore externalities.
  • we need new corporate structures, a new type of market entity, for which profit is a means, but not an end, dedicated to a ‘benefit‘, a ‘mission’, or the sustenance of a particular community and/or commons.
  • abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets
  • open design community
  • will inherently design for sustainability
  • for inclusion
  • conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing
  • entrepreneurs attaching themselves to open design projects start working from an entirely different space, even if they still use the classic corporate form. Prevent the sharing of sustainability designs through IP monopolies is also in my view unethical and allowing such patents should be a minimalist option, not a maximalist one.
  • The high road scenario proposes an enlightened government that ‘enables and empowers’ social production and value creation and allows a much smoother transition to p2p models; the low road scenario is one in which no structural reforms take place, the global situation descends into various forms of chaos, and p2p becomes a survival and resilience tactic in extremely difficult social, political and economic circumstances.
  • accelerated end of capitalism
  • Making sure that we get a better alternative is actually the historical task of the p2p movement. In other words, it depends on us!
  • I don’t really think in terms of technological breakthroughs, because the essential one, globally networked collective intelligence enabled by the internetworks, is already behind us; that is the major change, all other technological breakthroughs will be informed by this new social reality of the horizontalisation of our civilisation. The important thing now is to defend and extend our communication and organisation rights, against a concerted attempt to turn back the clock. While the latter is really an impossibility, this does not mean that the attempts by governments and large corporations cannot create great harm and difficulties. We need p2p technology to enable the global solution finding and implementation of the systemic crises we are facing.
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Beyond Blockchain: Simple Scalable Cryptocurrencies - The World of Deep Wealth - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...-cryptocurrencies-1eb7aebac6ae blockchainaccess_project paper Holochain Arthur Brock
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 01 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 01 Jun 16
     
    Article written by Arthur Brook, founder of Metacurrency project and of Ceptr.
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