Decentralized Cloud Societies
I brain dumped on twitter a few nights ago on my view of a developing abstraction for decentralized ledgers.
I’ve since had some interesting conversations diving into another part of the ‘stack’ here, that I didn’t properly reference above. That is dynamic rules at the node communication layer. As my friend Clayton put it:
been thinking about crypto currencies with economic policy built in. bitcoin has anti-inflation built in. what other economic policies could you build in? what if you start putting lots of intelligence at the nodes and when transactions are verified the nodes intelligently manipulate the transactions by small amounts in a pro-social way? can we implement dynamic taxes and subsidies?
Worth rereading Balaji’s wired article on organizing communities/nations on the cloud, keeping in mind Clayton’s above lens on decentralized datasets and network protocols automating and mechanizing social/polical rules. Jumping down this rabbit hole..
quick recap of tweet dump:
Bitcoin protocol exposed 3 high level variable parameters:
1) message
2) compute problemset
3) base digit
3 follows from 2 follows from 1
— Zavain Dar (@zavaindar) March 24, 2014
a priori we want a secure decentralized database
we create compute problems to maintain data integrity
we incentive compute w/ base digits
— Zavain Dar (@zavaindar) March 24, 2014
For Bitcoin there’s a marriage of 1) and 3).
messages are of the form of signed letters transferring digits. this isnt requisite in paradigm
— Zavain Dar (@zavaindar) March 24, 2014
.@Namecoin separates the two, with messages being IP addresses for end servers - while value in namecoin base digit persists
— Zavain Dar (@zavaindar) March 24, 2014
Bitcoin’s compute problem is arbitrary int guessing and hashing.
— Zavain Dar (@zavaindar) March 24, 2014
Can imagine greater NP-hard compute problems acting 2-fold:
1)validate blockchain
2)create external value: video hosting, protein folding?
— Zavain Dar (@zavaindar) March 24, 2014
.@balajis @naval talk ‘appcoins’: innovations in 1) and 2) - with 3) as liquid incentivization for investors/nodes
http://t.co/5sopDs9cqy
— Zavain Dar (@zavaindar) March 24, 2014
best guess: @ethereumcharles @ethereumproject fix 3) and 2), while leaving 1) turing-complete scriptable.
— Zavain Dar (@zavaindar) March 24, 2014
.@polemitis compiling list of innovations in 1) here: http://t.co/cVL8QASxfz.
— Zavain Dar (@zavaindar) March 24, 2014
.@rezendi blogs on 1) here: http://t.co/fGvpr7lQkT Spot. fucking. on.
— Zavain Dar (@zavaindar) March 24, 2014