Application of Holochain both by tech co-ops… and for co-ops
Unique opportunity to work with Art Brock the Holochain co-founder and lead!
Fabian Tompsett and I are starting a CoTech Holochain group. We propose to launch this in a 4-6pm session immediately before the 6:30-9pm CoTech Meetup on the 21st of Feb, at the Space4 venue.
We are very fortunate to have Art Brock give a brief intro and support a hands on session - for which only JavaScript is needed.
Opening - what and why (30 mins?)
Inspiration - What was/were the vision/ideas and driver/s behind it?
Motivation - What kinds of things can you do with it that you couldn’t do before?
Progression - Metacurrency → CEPTR → Holochain
- Where has it got to now, and what is the road plan?
Cautions - Reliability? Security?
Understanding - How does it work? A mental model for developers
(largest part of this section & intro to next)
Main course - Hands on (1 hr 30 mins?)
Application - What do you need to get set up? How do you use it?
Example walk through - Jason Sackey? (Web developer working on Holochain Fractal wiki?)
Work towards a CoTech Mutual Credit/Timebank?
(first step towards a Co-op Mutual Credit system + offers and wants)
For the draft proposal motivating this session and to be discussed in the follow-on, see: Growing the Co-operative Economy
Holochain looks set to fulfil the now fading promise of Blockchain. Blockchain was a great development, inspiring a lot of innovative work, but shortcomings are becoming apparent, from the massive compute power and concomitant energy needed to operate it, leading to a huge centralization of a few massive mining setups, that in turn potentially threaten its key security feature, through the time delays needed to confirm transactions, the increasing costs of transactions, to the ever growing single blockchain ledger that would have to record all the world’s transactions if a Blockchain currency is ever to become global.
Holochain addresses all these issues and already builds in equivalents to some of the proposed blockchain additions such as SegWit (Segregated Witness) and side chains (with their own yet to be resolved issues). Instead each chain is agent based and the verifying DHT (Distributed Hash Table) nodes mutually verify and secure transactions between parties. Similar to BitTorrent it provides distributed storage, and similar to SETI at home it provides distributed processing using the massively unused cycles available on all our machines - and it’s small enough to run on mobile phones on. It thus makes truly co-operative distributing computing possible, with the potential to serve up to Facebook scale applications, but with no centralised servers and no monopolistic corporations needed to run them.
It therefore seems much better aligned with co-operative principles and values.