Smartgrid Life: Blockchain Cryptosustainability

The contemporary era of blockchains as an implementation mechanism for decentralization suggests a new overall conceptualization of life as being supported by any number of smartgrids. Distributed network grids is a familiar idea for resources such as water, electricity, health services, and Internet access, and might be extended to other resources, literally and conceptually. One example is on-demand microcoaching, for example guidance for playing a certain guitar solo with Piano++. Jeremy Rifkin, in Zero Marginal Cost Society and other books, outlines the grid paradigm, contemplating three smartnetworks: Internet communications grids, energy grids, and logistics grids. Evelyn Rodriguez adds another grid, local fresh produce, in the notion of Food as Distributed Commons, possibly in the form of a blockchain-based PopupFarm Grid DCO (distributed collaborative organization).

PopupFarm Grid
The idea of the PopupFarm Grid is that the 'urban farm grid' or 'fresh food grid' is like an energy grid. As the energy grid could be participative with solar panel installers selling unused power back to the grid, so too could urban fresh food be a peer-based collaborative production. Anyone could purchase a hydroponics unit and make capacity and outputs flexibly available on the urban food grid for community consumption. There could be an Uber-like mapping app to find the local hydroponics units with items fresh and maturing today, in an on-demand real-time updating reservation-taking system. This could lead to better utilization of fresh produce, improved health, and local community sustainability, knowledge-transfer, and self-sufficiency.

Consumers could own cryptoshares in virtual food cooperatives (like permacredits, the concept of a global affinity currency supporting local operations), and arrive and pay with community token. There could be dynamic supply-demand management and rebalancing at the community level. A series of smart contracts could onboard/offboard the diverse use cases and bridge time gaps. For example, land permitted for 2018 could already join the P2P network (similar to Lazooz drivers pre-earning token), to start earning community participation against future capacity. The paper-route of the future could be kids learning and participating in container maintenance for neighborhood urban food units. There could be decentralized exchange with software from OpenBazar or BitMarkets (decentralized versions of CraigsList). Another piece in the value chain could be idle Uber drivers (Lazooz in the decentralized model) and TaskRabbit, etc. gophers fulfilling delivery on-demand.

Cryptocitizen Mentality and Cryptosustainability Communities
The emerging cryptocitizen mentality is a new level of self-responsibility-taking: designing, iterating, and participating in community sustainability initiatives, including self-defining economic models. Cryptosustainability means sustainability in low-footprint mindful use of environmental resources, and also sustainability in human society organization models, where the idea is to build, prototype, and iterate new and innovative ways of doing things at various levels of scale. There can be a lot of energy when a community comes together at the beginning of a project, but keeping the energy resident over years and different phases of the project can be elusive. Blockchains are useful for this because they can help to build community trust and transparency by keeping information and record-keeping accessible. Blockchain-based cooperatives can build trust through the transparency and auditability of community operations. Anyone can check the record anytime. This could be useful for distributed decentralized governance and the coordination of cooperative shared ownership. Blockchain smart contracts can also help facilitate ongoing community processes, for example with modules for voting and decision-making with liquid democracy (e.g.; on-demand participative democracy) in proposal development, coordination, and voting; demand-planning ahead of time regarding the amount and type food wanted this year with a prediction market like from Augur; and a P2P dispute resolution and moderation with a PrecedentCoin module.

Smart Contract Cryptolaw to accelerate the Automation Economy

Smart contracts are agreements between parties posted to the blockchain, possibly for automated execution. The agreements can be and among humans and technology entities (like machine to machine communications). Smart contracts don't make anything possible that was previously impossible, but rather, allow solving common problems in a way that minimizes trust. Minimal trust often makes things more convenient by allowing human judgements to be taken out of the loop, thus allowing complete automation. Ethereum and Eris Industries are open-source software projects developing smart contract platforms. Some examples of smart contracts are betting on the high temperature tomorrow, without an intermediary, automated mortgage rate resets, inheritance payouts, and peer-to-peer insurance.

Economy Outsourced to Smart Contract DAOs/DACs?
Smart contracts bring up the distinction between technically-binding and legally-binding frameworks, where code contracts run inexorably even if conditions have changed whereas human contracts are more flexibly binding. The quintessential example of a smart code contract is a vending machine. If the vending machine is not broken, every time you put in money, you get your selected item. The machine is not thinking of when or how to comply with your request, there is no discretion, the machine always complies. The key shift is that we want to be aware of is that we are starting to have a world not just where we have vending machines, but where smart contracts might be running big sectors of our economy, for example the whole mortgage industry.

Cryptolaw: intersection of Technological and Legal Frameworks
Cryptolaw then is the intersection of technological and legal frameworks. One key question is whether we want a separate legal system for smart contracts since they may be unenforceable in our current legal system. For example, a decentralized program already launched and running is difficult to control, regulate, or sue for damages. Further, smart contracts impact not just contract law, but the notion of the social contract within society more generally. What kinds of social contracts do we humans want with technological entities?

Compliant and A-compliant Smart Contracts
As with blockchain applications being in two modes, enterprise and individual, the thinking is that there may be two modes of smart contracts: compliant and a-compliant. Compliant smart contracts would have the four parameters of mutual assent, consideration, capacity and legality, and features such as a kill switch, automated consumer protection, assurity funds escrowed, and identity transparency. The other mode, a-compliant smart contracts, would be operating outside but not necessarily in opposition to, the current legal structure. Another way of looking at this is by the counterparty, are these human-human, human-entity, or entity-entity contracts? We may have a future world where there are new forms of legal entity status like personhood granted to smart contract entities like with corporations. http://www.slideshare.net/lablogga/blockchain-consensus-protocols

Material inspired by: Primavera de Filippi and Gavin Woods.
More Details: Cryptocitizen: Smart Contracts, Pluralistic Morality, and Blockchain Society

Immanence Reputations of Intelligent Instances running on Smartnetworks

One vision of the future is digital societies, comprised of different forms of intelligence like blockchain AIs, smart-contract DACs, and human mindfile uploads all running on smartnetworks. Verification of such digital identities may well be required for smartnetwork access. We are already living in a prototype of this world now, in the sense that access to digital properties requires digital identity verification. Many websites invite logging in with Facebook or Twitter as an already-established digital identity heuristic.

Also in the contemporary world, we are currently constrained to an embodied form, but there would be no such requirement in the digital societies of the future. Digital identity could become so distributed, portable, copiable, open-sourceable, sharable, malleable, and shardable, that it no longer makes sense to think in terms of entities. Instead of entities, personal identities, or embodied containers, there could be ephemeral instances; thinking, informational, actional, enjoyful, subjectivational instances. The question would then be how to enable smartnetwork operations in a post-entity society, perhaps one in which ‘ephemeral instances of capability and creativity’ have replaced identity-bounded entities.

One answer is that reputation could still matter. Even if not a full-fledged identity-entity, any instance, any measurable quantum, any participation no matter how ephemeral could still have a reputation. Reputations could become a lot more complicated, measuring different levels like actor, action, and intention, and also line-item credit for contributions and new ideas. Composite team reputations could be calculated for sharded groupmind participations. All this is could be possible through technology like blockchains that afford more granularity and accessibility in record-keeping.

Thus teputation might persist as a validation mechanism, even in advanced scenarios like post-entity digital societies. However, the trick will be to enact reputation assessment schemas that are not completely externally-imposed and outside the purview of the agent being evaluated. Preferable is re-envisioning reputation as a mechanism to empower the liberty and expression possibilities of the entities or instances being reputationified. This is an immanence reputation, one that is reflective of criteria self-determined by the agent and that accentuates its possibilities. The predictive analytics of the big data era could be applied to the development of reputational mechanisms to encourage agent futurity and potentiality realization as opposed to those that solely based on past acts.