Twenty years ago John Perry Barlow wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. He believed public computer networks would globally free us all from establishment shackles. Hackers Acid Phreak and Phiber Optik promptly called him out for his naiveté. Without authorization they extracted his complete credit history and publicly posted it to exhibit how the new computer networks were instead being used: at the behest of overlords within banks and state.

For twenty years my partners, friends and I have been researching and developing a solution to this problematic situation. We have now reached a time where a fully decentralized cryptographically fair and uncensorable peer-to-peer networking infrastructure, identity and reputation system is within our capability to implement as a self-organizing loose-knit group of freely associated individuals.

Crop Circle Systems is the name under which we've operated our tech consulting business, registered since 1999 in Ohio, incorporated in the State of Florida, 2013.

We develop a BSD-licensed open source operating we've named nuOS. Currently this can be described as a rolling release distribution and orchestration system around the latest stable production branch of FreeBSD and current ports branch. Everything built shall be BSD-licensed open source and atop OSI-approved open source. All shall ideally remain compatible and interoperable with upstream components and dependencies. Transparency and contribution shall remain the firm commitment regarding the official nuOS distributions' deviations and patches.

Why do we need yet another open source operating system distribution? To date operating system software has been for a host. Whether for a server, workstation, laptop, tablet, phone or embedded device, it's host-oriented. nuOS is a turnkey operating system for the entire dynamic networking and computing infrastructure providing the needs of your whole entire business, family, group or individual cause. It runs on host servers, workstations, personal computing devices, routers and the so-called internet of things. It is designed to operate in a global federation of interoperating yet potentially hostile peers in a global design never attempted before by any operating system, open sourced or otherwise.

A primary nuOS project is nuGold, a purely trustless cryptocurrency which will be fairly mineable by anyone via the complementary processes: Promise-of-Spacetime and Proof-of-Performance. These features will allow the vast majority of the software services of nuOS to be dynamically scaled and extended into the global network of nuOS nodes which are mining nuGold. (Unit noun: nugget; Proposed ticker: NUG). It shall launch with zero premine and operate with zero mining tax. I can't think of a good case to be made for anything above absolute zero compulsory contribution when talking about a cryptocurrency with the aims we have for this project. Subprojects are under development and 3rd party applications may come to exist by which certain features or aspects of operation are dependent upon tokens typed as and created by other means or controlled using other properties as needed.

While nuOS shall by design always come to include everything necessary to independently and optimally run self-hosted systems [of both turnkey and intuitively/extensively user customizable varieties] resilient to peer misbehavior, our roadmap also includes a free tier of 'cloud' service provided gratis by CropCircle.Systems on their Cargobay.net platform, (which is really just a white labeled multi-tenant commercial offering of the application also to be running at nu.Place). For zero cost, investment or commitment, fresh users, typical consumers requiring no indoctrination, even those totally unaware of the crypto technology space, will be able to try and even continue to use a reliable production infrastructure implemented on the vanilla nuOS distribution using almost any networked device. The graphical user interface is totally contained within web standards compliant HTML5 single page applications.

Application URI endpoints have been secured for both the traditional ICANN domain name system and the Namecoin trademark registration blockchain. The following domains have been secured by the distributors for any user to optionally use. These are guaranteed to remain both free of cost to use and free of compulsory advertising or compulsory information disclosure of any kind:

nuos.org
nu.zone
nu.place
nu.email
nu.chat
nu.team
nu.show
nu.live
nu.lol
nu.money
nu.gold

nuOS includes tools [currently extending the Tendermint ecosystem] for streamlined development, production and deployment of not just tokens and so-called smart contracts but entire custom blockchain networks and solutions, with interoperability features explicitly definable. Any association can issue or track their own security, stock, bond, product, service, promise, property or limited membership using our suite and enjoy a painless experience implementing our industry's leading best practices.

nuGold shall augment the suite to offer via opt-in an implicit interoperability mode, free from additional development or configuration, between most blockchain applications utilizing the suite. This means there exists a single streamlined interface by which any full node of any participating blockchain can operate as a light client to any other participating blockchain. It provides a three-phase commit across them that you can rest assured is free of the common vulnerabilities, pitfalls and mistakes that we've identified over decades in the crypto and distributed system engineering fields. We are hoping we can provide an interface compatible with that used by the Cosmos.Network blockchain and their Atom token while offering a higher level of security and resilience than they aspire for with their design of that network.

The nuOS source code shall include the source project files for aforementioned suite used in the creation of Crops (Proposed ticker: CROP), [currently a] good faith promise, [not a security, stock, bill or bond]. The suite of tools is not merely technical, we've navigated much of the pertinent legal framework for you. (We are not your lawyer. Enlist a competent attorney.)

We model the initial distribution of Crops 1:1 after the privately held shares of corporate stock of Crop Circle Systems, Inc. Calling it in law a transferrable unlimited good faith promise avoids up front all legal regulatory authority and jurisdictional tax authority while admittedly removing some [weak, we'd argue] investor protections offered in law. The only "promise" it can technically fulfill is validating its bearer's membership without revealing its bearer's identity or locality and optionally it can assist delivering an authenticated node/wallet software update to the client through the blockchain and verify the reporting and aggregation of messages from each client.

However, the above being stated, here in good faith I am placing against the brand of the company and project this promise that the holder of the promise will be reissued a regulated share of company stock 1:1 in the event of regulated public offering. Additionally here in good faith I am placing against the brand of the company and project the promise that the company's board of directors and officers in fact do act in accordance to the wishes of the free association's members. Bearing said promise may be taken as evidence of acceptance of said transferrable unlimited good faith promise.

as of today seems reasonably active. does not provide quite the same security guarantees as proof of work or the exact same use cases as bitcoin but very useful and extensible

Hi everyone. Long time lurker, first time poster.

A few friends and I are consultants, programmers, network and system administrators in the United States and operate under the brand Crop Circle Systems, Inc. http://ccsys.com

I'm a proponent of FreeBSD (mostly) as well as NetBSD, OpenBSD, Gentoo Linux and the Genode OS Framework.

We develop system administration solutions around FreeBSD, ZFS, DTrace and VirtualBox.

We develop networking solutions around NetBSD and OpenBSD.

We release a [currently] FreeBSD 9.2 based distro called nuOS. It is quite vanilla FreeBSD with whip cream and a cherry on top. We don't take anything away or impose our way of doing things if you already like FreeBSD the way it is. Advanced users can enjoy our a la carte features while users less experienced with FreeBSD will be guided effectively without being mesmerized by "black magic". If you looked at FreeBSD before and found it daunting or too much work to deploy using its modern features we might help you fall in love with your OS all over again. http://nuos.org https://github.com/CropCircleSys/nuOS

We develop applications around HTML5, AngularJS, Node.js, Erlang, Redis and MongoDB among other favorites like PostgreSQL. Upon those we are building a full-stack application framework currently called BreakNeck (working title) vertically integrated all the way from your users' tantalized senses on down through the system framework we've built with nuOS. Your native apps are welcomed to tie in replacing HTML5 and AngularJS while sharing everything below, though if you come to us for that, we currently outsource Mac OS X, MS Windows, iOS and Android development (and are always interested in connecting with more of those developers). I'm honing my chops with Qt5 as of late as well but I'm not a pro with it yet.

We are working on a platform as a service for [self-]managed hosting called CargoBay. https://cargobay.net

The difference with CargoBay is, because the entire nuOS and BreakNeck platforms (minus multitenancy and billing) are available as open source for your use at your own shop, it's made completely hassle-free to migrate in either direction. Hybrid deployments will also be a breeze and seamless. (That's what we tell investors at least.) Seriously though, that should be relatively painless for you to engineer your own hybrid solutions specific to your needs with our tools and services. As you grow or change your mind about configuration you should not be made to rue the earlier decisions you've made and extorted for them. nuOS's features make experimentation fun again and BreakNeck's features will take the guesswork out of production-ready web-scale stable hardened implementations and deployments.

We hear a lot of clients of Crop Circle Systems' complain that "cloud" service/platform/hosting providers seem to try and lock you in, more so the easier they try to be to use/manage. The "addiction" factor rather than the satisfaction factor is not a good way to do business, in our opinions. We could be wrong but I think our approach will have more long term sustainability for our customer, ourselves and the relationship between us. We don't concede that ease-of-use must sacrifice control, capability or options.

The idea with CargoBay is it's so easy to leave, and effectively welcoming to work under the hood with your own tools or ours, that you'll decide to stay or recommend it to others even if you were to outgrow us (to a nuOS/BreakNeck deployment in-house or at one of our 800-lb-gorilla competitors strategic partners). Our platform is engineered to play well with others. (We have to, being a pygmy marmoset, to complete the analogy. ) Hopefully we grow to fulfill the vast majority of our customers' needs.

Whether you are interested in services or informing us of your availability and skill-set in order to network and partner, consider reaching out to us through our profile here or our web sites. We are based in downtown Tampa, Florida and just ramping up currently. Early adopters will be rewarded with our starving-artist pricing and have their development/deployment needs catered to early.