I'm including this here as it does logically follow on from my earlier post on “features and corollaries” that closely circumscribe the behavioural envelope of a peer-to-peer networked cryptocurrency.
Originally posted to the Spreadcoin thread as part of a short discussion on (my perception of the) reality and as direct response to the (paraphrased) question - “Thought you left ages ago, are you back or what?”
... as a grizzled R&D engineer I knew I was still lacking that key insight that clears away the mists and allows me to make strong, supportable statements and, as I have learned to expect, more time had to elapse before a clear picture eventually emerged -- in this instance, the mists cleared in the spring of this year.
It's not possible to summarise the insight both concisely and satisfactorily. It's a complex cross-disciplinary understanding (my strong point) and was the result of a long journey through some challenging terrain - a journey which is not yet complete. For me personally, the magnitude of the difference such insights bring is akin to the difference in perspective from the foot of hill and the top. All I have done, in a manner of speaking, is join up the dots differently to make a different picture but the result is sufficiently clear and robust to provide empirically-supportable explanations for all of the otherwise-puzzling phenomena I encounter in the altcoin domain. I was immediately able to understand that my watching brief on the altcoin domain and my curation work on DOACC had both served their sole purpose (to educate me) and so I terminated both efforts. This, coupled with some ${HOME} issues, prompted me to take a six-month absence from bitcointalk to pursue a more focused research agenda, test my new understanding and to try to clarify it further by pursuing the translation of the logical implications into altcoin features, using the dialectic of development to deepen my understanding.
This is one set of the dots, posted to the Slimcoin thread (another alt for which I did a “drive-by” contribution) :
They need a person associated with the official coin. Is someone still around?
The requesting person needs to be associated with the official coin (use an email address indicating that you are from the team)
Hmm.
At base, an altcoin is a value transfer system implemented in the form of a peer-to-peer networked cryptocurrency. The cryptography securing the implementation imposes some
inherent constraints on the peers:
1. The protocol cannot treat peers as anything other than homogeneous
2. The protocol requires that peers can only be distinguished via serialized cryptographic hashes.
Corollaries:
a. The protocol-enforced egality of untrusted peering nodes is inherently inimical to the imposition of a hierarchy.
b. The modelling of peering nodes as serialized cryptographic hashes inherently prohibits any reference to identity.
c. Malfeasance by unidentifiable pseudonymous participants is inherently immune to both financial and social sanction.
So, “official”
this and “official”
that are meaningless in the context of a peer-to-peer networked cryptocurrency because no-one has the authority to stamp anything “official”.
Or rather, anyone and everyone has the opportunity to stamp anything they want as “official” or make a claim to be “the official dev” but it carries no inherent authority, only that which it can engender by it own efforts.
When it comes to p2p apps, the bottom line is that as soon as the source code is publicly released,
no-one is ”in charge” of
anything.
Cheers
Graham
I doubt that any subscriber to this thread would find my assertions controversial. I'm not saying anything new, I'm just joining up the dots.
Don't mistake “obvious” for “shallow”, these principles run deep, they are a genetic inheritance if you like and they are absolutely crucial in that the value transfer system collapses totally if they are subverted. The corollaries are
defining features of all altcoin “communities”.
Some more dots to join (and yet others to follow at home) ...
Altcoins rely on two different types of consensus. The first type is the cryptographic consensus that must be created in order for the currency to function at all; the second type is the social consensus that is created by people choosing to hold the coin and/or run nodes. It is the social consensus that gives the cryptographic consensus its semantics, its
meaning. The only thing that the machine can reliably “know” is whether the sequence of
n bytes beginning at
this memory location is an identical match to another sequence of
n bytes beginning at
that memory location. The rest, as they say, is left to the reader’s imagination.
The social consensus is equally important as the cryptographic one. In addition to grounding the semantics of the tokens secured by the blockchain, it's the wellspring of the vaunted “network effect” --- which is really just a weak way of saying “backed by people”. In the context of an altcoin, the only available option is direction-by-social-consensus because the inherited cryptography protocols are inimical to the imposition of control by a central authority.
Unlike traditional currencies such as dollars, bitcoins are issued and managed without any central authority whatsoever: there is no government, company, or bank in charge of Bitcoin.
-
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/The fact that there is no-one in charge is significant to US financial regulators. A couple of years ago
FinCEN made it unambiguously clear ...
A final type of convertible virtual currency activity involves a de-centralized convertible virtual currency (1) that has no central repository and no single administrator, and (2) that persons may obtain by their own computing or manufacturing effort.
So, “official”
this and “official”
that are meaningless in the context of a cryptocurrency because no-one has the authority to stamp anything “official”. Or rather, anyone and everyone has the opportunity to stamp anything they want as “official” or make a claim to be “the official dev” but it carries no inherent authority, only that which it can engender by it own efforts. When it comes to p2p apps, the bottom line is that as soon as the source code is publicly released,
no-one is ”in charge” of
anything.
(The witticism “herding cats” doesn’t even come in to it; people are completely free to do as they like: run a node, not run a node; hold coins, don't hold coins; set up a foundation, a faucet, a business, promote the coin, fud the coin, set up webwallets, offer an alternative wallet design, provide off-chain features, pay to spam the blockchain, pay to clean up the blockchain, generously contribute to a faucet, mischevously drain a faucet dry.)
An altcoin “community” is an egalitarian group of pseudonymous strangers --- these are the ground conditions to which any altcoin community is obliged to accommodate itself when conducting its affairs.
The requirement for egality means that the only viable activity model is
self-organisation. The requirement for pseudonymity means that the only sustainable relationship model is
self-interested co-operation.
This is a very demanding combination with very few candidate organisational models from which to draw inspiration for effective ways of working under these constraints.
But there are a couple of candidates ...
i)
Anarcho-collectivism Collectivist anarchism advocates the abolition of both the state and private ownership of the means of production. It instead envisions the means of production being owned collectively and controlled and managed by the producers themselves. For the collectivization of the means of production, it was originally envisaged that workers will revolt and forcibly collectivize the means of production. Once collectivization takes place, money would be abolished to be replaced with labour notes and workers' salaries would be determined in democratic organizations based on job difficulty and the amount of time they contributed to production. These salaries would be used to purchase goods in a communal market.
There
has been a revolution ... but in personal computing. There’s more than a hint of the means of production being owned collectively and controlled and managed by the producers themselves, especially when it comes to cryptocurrency. There's also more than a hint from FinCENT (above) ... “(2) that persons may obtain by their own computing or manufacturing effort.”
Irrespective of how we got here, we’ve arrived at something very much like anarcho-collectivism. The ambitions detailed above bear a remarkable resemblance to the notions of “smart contracts” and some altcoins’ plans to cast the blockchain as employer, making payment in altcoin. A form of anarchism is inherent in any peer-to-peer network by definition - given that whilst there are some laws in this anarchy, they are the incorruptible mathematical laws of cryptography and are as pertinent to an anarchy as the law of gravity.
So welcome to anarcho-collectivism, I hope it works for you. No leaders, no bosses and an incorruptibly level playing field for all - what’s not to like about a crypto-anarchic collective?
(Well, for a start: it's primarily just a label and as such doesn't really provide much practical advice on how a community of peer-to-peer networked cryptocurrency holders might sensibly conduct itself. So ...)
ii)
TealA community of altcoin users naturally forms a Teal organisation because it is basically constrained to do so by the inherent characteristics of the protocols of the peer-to-peer networked cryptocurrency from which the social consensus emerges. For an altcoin community to act as a Teal organisation isn't a matter of informed individual or collective choice, it's a matter of the “organo-crypto genetic inheritance” creating an inability to behave otherwise.
“Teal” is a modernistic organisational model developed by Frédéric Laloux, based on principles of modern systems thinking and laid out in his book
Reinventing Organizations. The aim is to create better organisations that can grow and adapt to work in complex environments and mount an effective response to change.
Drawing from Ken Wilber’s
Integral Theory (a model of psychology development that describes human development as following a set course of stages of development) Laloux maps a colour scheme to the historical development of human organizations: Red \> Amber \> Orange \> Green \> Teal \> Turquoise. Teal organisations are represented as the best integration of what’s collectively been learned so far.
It's worth noting Laloux' methodology at this point - whilst Teal as a notion was developed from Wilber's initial sketch, Laloux is also a field worker and his characterisation of the details of the Teal model is very usefully informed by organisational practices observed in the field.
The key breakthroughs, things that distinguish Teal (from Green) are:
*
self-management: operate effectively, even at a large scale, with a system based on peer relationships, without the need for either hierarchy or consensus.
*
wholeness - practices that invite us to reclaim our inner wholeness and bring all of who we are to work, instead of with a narrow “professional” self / “masculine resolve” etc.
*
evolutionary purpose organizations seen as having a life and a sense of direction of their own. Instead of trying to predict and control the future, members of the organization are invited to listen in and understand what the organization wants to become, what purpose it wants to serve.
In terms of joining up the dots ... these “key breakthroughs” also accurately characterise an altcoin community in terms of unavoidable outcomes:
* no hierarchy === self-management
* no hierarchically-imposed roles === wholeness
* no hierarchical control === evolutionary purpose.
A holistic and evolutionary approach follows naturally from genuine self-management, i.e. when authority is devolved to the individual. In the absence of centrally-imposed roles, behaving as a whole person is the default and in the absence of centrally-imposed goals, the organisation is free to evolve itself.
I invite you to take a (relatively) brisk canter through the rest of the listed characteristics of a Teal organisation. There's a fairly accessible
slideset summary (PDF) from Ulrich Gerndt of changefactory Gmbh (it's Ulrich's graphic I re-used above). You can pick up the story on slide #21 and take it from there. As far as I can make out, it's a near-perfect match - if the characteristic appears nonsensical in an altcoin context that's because it's irrelevant in a fully decentralised context, e.g. “formal multi-step conflict resolution process” and “self-decorated warm spaces without status markers”.
In passing, I'll make two observations that I consider immediately pertinent:
1. The list of Teal characteristics is also a blueprint for any altcoin community that wishes to follow it.
2. Teal's “evolutionary purpose” breakthrough offers quite a different explanation of progress in the Bitcoin community. It too is pure Teal (albeit somewhat distorted/dysfunctional), so what's happening there can be seen as an anticipated natural evolution of purpose. Expect the same in any altcoin “community”.
Thank you for bearing with me, I offer it as a useful (perhaps even necessary) grounding for an appreciation of my next post ...
