Re: <nettime> The Real Crypto Movement

[carlo von lynX <lynX@time.to.get.psyced.org>]

On Fri, May 06, 2022 at 11:42:22AM +0200, Jaromil wrote:
> For instance when I read Geert here, someone whom I held accountable all this time for his netiquette violations, his texts are very readable from a mobile mail client. When I read Carlo von Lynx instead, a man notably very observant of netiquette, his mails appear hard to read.

Me? Netiquette? I'm just using 30+ year old mail clients... haha
But I will try to break the 72 character rule ASAP.
Also, I'm not Kibo, so you're getting this feedback a month late...

> “One main problem with anarchism as a social system is about transaction costs. But the digital revolution alters two aspects of political economy that have been otherwise invariant throughout human history. All software has zero marginal cost in the world of the Net, while the costs of social coordination have been so far reduced as to permit the rapid formation and dissolution of large-scale and highly diverse social groupings entirely without geographic limitation.”
> - Eben Moglen, 1999

Unfortunately there are a couple more...

> The DAO concept presumes that access to a DLT is available to all shareholders to allow members to vote on collective decisions and transactions in a distributed and asynchronous way. Votes may be held during certain time-frames and more sophisticated governance rules may be adopted, for instance that each voter may exercise a weight that is proportional to his or her investment or commitment into the project, which may be measured in various ways and not just by means of a financial stake: from using a simple time-bank to adopting different reputation and delegation systems up to more sophisticated governance models as “Conviction Voting”.

You say "for instance" here, but since a person can adopt a thousand wallets/identities when buying shares of a DAO there isn't really a viable way to implement a *democratic* decision-making process whereby humans do NOT count by how much they are invested... is there? I think this defeats the plan of using DAOs and blockchains for governing Commons right from the start. You have experienced Liquid Democracy, you know how a Commons can indeed be governed via the Internet if the precondition of identifying participants as real human beings is actually implemented.

Since we don't want to drop the objective of disintermediation, what we really need is a distributed social network and graph that we can consult to ensure that all participants are real human beings - only then can we hope that the decision-making process has any ethically meaningful outcome.

> What is interesting to note as an outcome of this and other big DAOs is that the technology per-se (be it completely or partially decentralized) did not provide a solution to the many challenges posed by large and distributed governance models.

Unlike liquid democracy, which does...

> “Smart” is an euphemism for magic / enchanted / cursed (unfortunately, it usually means cursed) - Caleb James DeLisle

hahaha, you can't beat cjd

> Let's dig into the “smart contract” definition

I think it was termed "smart" because it does more advanced things than a Bitcoin. So it isn't smarter compared to a proper real-world contract which is backed by proper human jurisdiction with humans deciding what's right and what's wrong, not some obscure person that wrote up some DAO bytecode and let it run loose in complete disrespect of the eneeds of human society.

> Determinism: unknown random values are never mixed during the computing process so that, given the same data inputs, the exact same outputs can be always obtained in any execution condition on any machine architecture. This also means that execution is a “duplicable” process (could be also defined as reproducible or reversible) and can be verified.

In 1990, Stephen 'BuGless' van den Berg suggested IRC chatrooms should be governed by bytecode which is distributed to all IRC servers and reliably executed always in the same way. These days one would connect those IRC servers into a private blockchain, of course.

1990... that's five years before Java bytecode hit the streets and only three years after LPMUD was invented, a multi-player game that runs on bytecode, empowering all "wizards" to develop code for the game without having to trust them. Previous multi-player games only allowed wizards to configure pre-programmed items.

I'm just saying, great ideas keep bubbling up frequently. One of them got disproportionate extra attention because it is suitable for crime and speculation. It may have been conceived to confront the "hornets" (see below), but the hornets are nesting in it as it is much easier to abuse and gain advantage in than traditional means of corruption, crime and speculation.

> Malicious code: no declared intention for the execution is imposed on the code, it may even aim to consume the resources of an entire network of machines. All code has to be executed: it is up to the machines to defend themselves from malicious intents by limiting the conditions of code execution, for instance a limit in computation cycles.

So we all agree that the code is the same, but we may refuse to run it, so we cannot agree on the results...  :D   I would rather adopt a social graph to achieve malice resistance instead.

> The innovation lying behind the term “smart contract” focuses on the contract language and virtual machine as building blocks to scale up platform infrastructures at great sizes, while providing access to advanced cryptographic computations that seal contents in a programmable way.

Too bad it still sits on top of blockchains and mined currencies. With the consensus mechanism built on top of a distributed social network, those contracts could actually be among humans, and evaluating the consensus of humans doesn't take any GPUs. Right?

> The core components of a blockchain/DLT in the “web3” acception are four:
> 1. The peer to peer network layer

Which is highly susceptible to Sibyl Attacks and therefore cannot be employed safely for any other purpose but:

> 2. The consensus algorithm
> 3. The virtual machine
> 4. The immutable ledger
> Then there are two optional components mostly related with state persistence:
> 5. (optionally) a peer to peer distributed file system

... which either passes through the consensus mechanism, making it energy-inefficient as nodes have to process file system changes even if totally irrelevant, or otherwise there is limited guarantee for consistency as the Sybil Attacks & co are back in the game, allowing for certain nodes or certain content to be masked ... right?

> 6. (optionally) oracle notarization for legacy databases

I missed this one.

> What I’ve written so far should make clear that, by virtue of crypto design patterns, the integrity of an application and its results may be completely separated from the blockchain/DLT infrastructure that runs them, while all participants can be reassured about the correctness of the inputs, the processes and the outputs.

Given anyone of them actually fully understood all implications of the code, including the person who wrote it...

> In a certain dystopian future the term “software piracy” may acquire a whole new meaning and it will be up to the crypto commons movement to defend the freedom of decentralized system developers as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, who has aptly chosen to hide himself and his or her real identity following the famous last sentence:
> 
> “WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.”
> - Satoshi Nakamoto, 11 December 2010

Sounds legit, but I can't help thinking that he might also have been fully aware that he was deploying a huge pyramid scheme with him probably the richest participant and just didn't expect that the hornets would let Bitcoin go on for so many years, allowing him to still enjoy all the wealth of this cryptographically most sophisticated form of scam.

> If a censorship war is ever started against developers then a whole new sort of “lunar” software licenses may be needed, or perhaps no licenses at all: just public domain software maintained by anonymous developer collectives.

Huh... why should the hornets worry about developers? There's nothing wrong with distributed systems, just the idea of a consensus-based currency was brilliant yet profoundly wrong and bad for human society. A great future for disintermediated technology is possible after the criminal incentives and financial speculation have been regulated away. We need human-driven disintermediated tools, not currency-driven. Kick out the mining process, plug in the distributed social graph.

> I believe the crypto commons movement has a clear mission: to shape and defend the techno-political evolution of information technology platforms outside of the logics of property. The new conditions for anonymous collective ownership of decentralized information architectures require us to understand a new ethical sense for computational democracy.

Sounds legit. Maybe you've been expecting the right things from the wrong technology, though.

> The unconditioned accessibility to and governmentality of programming languages will be of growing importance, even more than free and open source practices are already today for the crypto commons movement.

You should try out liquid democratic software development.

> As a propositive conclusion I would like to share a few ways I see the crypto commons movement can go beyond the mere application of financial gambling or digital property attributions.

I'm all ears.

> The crypto commons movement ideal will be that of making humans understand machines: to envision new trust models in cybernetics and fight back the supremacy of centralized black-box governance. The crypto commons movement challenge is to create deterministic conditions for replicable computation, implement algorithms whose mode of operation can be scientifically proven, communicated with simplicity and democratically debated. Algorithms of dissent.

Indeed, this summary of intent makes sense to me as well, although I am considering somewhat different approaches to get there... a lot more human-centric I guess.

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