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.

Popup Dining as Distributed Autonomous Space

Popup dining could be a fun new idea in the trend of popup experiences - on-demand serendipity and practicality ranging from popup entertainment, co-housing, and co-working to popup farms on disused land.

Any range of food providers ranging from existing restaurants to individuals building cooking brands could sponsor on-demand popup dining tables in city streets and at festivals.

Consumers could pre-select the menu (including a blind prix fixe menu), and the time and location of the popup dining experience. At the appointed time and location, ad-hoc P2P urban delivery service contractors could deliver the table, food, and dining experience.

Uber-like, the Popup Dining app could show the progress of the popup table to the consumer location, and be the payment mechanism at completion.

You can even do your own guerrilla popup dining now, just order your Caviar restaurant courier delivery to a non-traditional location like a street corner (bring your own stool) or bar. 

Everything about popup dining as distributed autonomous space is modularized, including the basics of a table, chairs, food, service labor, location, labor, and level of service. Expansion modules could include engaging a local artist, musician, or lecturer from that neighborhood, a live chef station, a sommelier, a chocolatier, a vodka infusion expert, etc. Blockchain-based smart contracts could further facilitate the validated automation of service delivery for popup dining.

Popup as a life style and life as performance art!

The Future: Ephemeralities running on Quantum Smartnetworks

The future could be one of pluralistic digital societies running on consensus-confirmed smartnetworks. There could be many kinds of entities, those with human-roots, technology entities, and any variety of hybrids. Blockchains could be the coordination mechanism between these entities, based on attestation variables like capacity and reputation. Further, eventually the digital societies of the future could be post-entity ‘entities’ or ‘whats’ – ephemeralities, presences, capacities, reservoirs, resources, like capacity in reserve: processing, memory, consciousness, ideas, associative processing, analysis, feedback, support, and critique. Perhaps all in the future is just capacity.

The ontological unit of intelligibility could be resident capacities in reserve, not resident entities already instantiated but available capacities, energy fields, potentialties. This is not even already-intentioned propensities (as contemplated by Popper ), but the uncollapsed waves and particles of quantum mechanics catalyzed into reality through intention, need, interaction, and imagination. Ephemeralities could automatically coalesce into actuality from virtuality to respond to a purpose, and continually meta-self-evaluate to monitor for ongoingness and finality of purpose.

Like photons, electrons, and maybe gravitons exist as wave packets at more than one place and time, only manifesting into reality when an observation is made, and the concept could be extended so that capacities too might coalesce into reality when an observation, conscious choice, or other motivator to action is made about the need for the capacity.

Quantum Smartnetworks
The notion of Quantum Smartnetworks is twofold. First, there is conceiving of some model, like blockchains, as a universal mechanism for measuring, administering, exchanging, tracking, monitoring, recording, finding, and interacting with all manner of granular quanta of anything; any entity that is dividable into essential quantized constituent building blocks. Second, there is the application of quantum principles to smartnetwork instances, in the sense of quantum smartnetworks as the orchestration of post-entity capacities or energies existing in potentiality (Deleuze’s virtuality) into reality.

Science fiction examples can lead the way, for example Accelerando features distributed trust networks and reputation markets, where one use of blockchain models could be digital copies “watching over their originals from the consensus cyberspace of the [smart] city [2].”

References 
[1] Popper, K.R. (1959). "The Propensity Interpretation of Probability" The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 10, 37, 25-42.
[2] Stross, C. (2006). Accelerando. London: Ace.

Post-entity Society of Instances

In digital smartnetwork societies, entities wanting to conduct smartnetwork operations will likely need to be independently confirmed and validated through mechanisms like consensus trust. Consensus trust and reputation structures have been conceived as grounded in a fixed and persistent entity.

However, there is the possibility of progressing to a post-entity society. Humans are currently constrained to an embodied form, but this may not be the situation in the future, and there is no such requirement for technology entities in the realm of digital identity. Digital identity might become so distributed, portable, copiable, open-sourceable, sharable, malleable, and shardable, that it no longer makes sense to think in terms of entities.

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. The 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; and calculate composite team reputations for sharded cloudmind group participations. All this is could be possible because blockchains give us much more granularity in record-keeping.

Antidote to Holacracy: Blockchain Smart Assets

New Strategies needed to Meet Group Needs in Holacracies
The failings-to-date of holacracy have to do with career growth, compensation, and capacity (in the sense of codification and deployment group knowledge). This is exciting news for learnings in prototyping decentralized flat governance models in groups. After the fact, it is quite obvious that career growth and compensation would need to be redefined in a holacratic model since they are still in the mode of the old structure. The needs behind these areas need to be elicited and addressed via other means. For example, the needs behind career growth could be learning, variety, and contribution, where previously career progression was a strategy for meeting these needs. Now, the needs are still there, but different strategies for meeting them in decentralized models need to be innovated, such as switching responsibilities with some frequency and the ability to learn about and contribute in new ways. Similarly with compensation; the underlying needs could be financial security, status, and being acknowledged, and now in holacractic models, these would need to be met differently. This would also be trued for the codification and deployment of new capacities emerging from the group operations.

Group Needs registered as Blockchain Smart Assets
One great benefit of blockchains is their potential agility in coordinating soft processes like ongoing group orchestration in a flat collaborative model. Blockchains can be a heightened level of holacratic operation that attends to the fundamental needs underlying group operations. Once elicited, registering group needs as blockchain-based smart assets can be a way of keeping the needs of the group alive on an ongoing basis. Participants could anonymously vote community token as to what group needs are being met/unmet and these addressed in the community meeting. Each group need, (like autonomy, collaboration, agreeing to the same rules, privacy, and creativity), could be registered as its own smart asset, with an address, thus community token could be anonymously voted to this address to indicate groups needs met/unmet.

Group needs as blockchain-based smart assets is an outgrowth of the Convergent Facilitation model for effective group operation. Convergent facilitation is a model for collaborative decision-making, a way to correct the paradigm of ‘no one makes a decision’ or ‘someone makes a decision for everyone else.’ The reason that convergent facilitation can an effective means of collaborative decision-making is both 1) quick and efficient use of everyone’s time in making initial decisions and 2) the quality of buy-in that keeps decisions sustainably alive in facilitating the group’s operations after the decision is made. This is because each person is encouraged and empowered to take stewardship and ownership of ‘our needs as a group.’ Instead of a begrudging compromise (‘it wasn’t really my decision’), this leads to a willingness to stretch to meet our group needs in empowerment because ‘it was my decision.’ Convergent facilitation helps us as a group to get into the highest mode of why we are here, to create something together that matters to all of us. It is a process based on principles that allows groups to make decisions together in cooperative manner, not win-lose, majority wins, or unwilling consensus.

One part of convergent facilitation is transparent decision-making. Probably not everyone wants to participate in every decision, but everyone might want to know what is going on. Thus, all decisions that need to be made can be listed, and community members can indicate their interest in leading, participating, and not hearing about different decisions (Figure 1). In this way, transparency, and trust in community decision-making are created. Everyone knows what is happening.

Figure 1. Convergent Facilitation Decision-making Matrix.

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

Rethinking Risk with Automated Blockchain Macroeconomic Indicators

Progress is underway to investigate and migrate many different parts of the banking, securities, and insurance industries to public and private blockchains. These operations include settlement and clearing, smart property digital asset registration and transfer of stocks, bonds, derivatives, private equity, and other instruments, and the structuring of more predictable insurance payouts. One next step is articulating how blockchains might be used more broadly across industries and economies for automated risk management and macroeconomic indicator generation. This could help meet the need for real-time knowledge about the health of financial systems, especially given their interdependence and global nature.

Automatic Macroeconomic Indicators
The pseudonymous property of blockchains could be a valuable parameter of transaction data structures that automatically relay meta-data as a semi-private input to large-scale open risk models [1] at the entity and macroeconomic level. Risk measurement and macroeconomic indicators could thus be produced automatically in real-time with tremendous aggregate transparency. The functionality could be built into fintech blockchains as a standard, with other organizations (like smart contract DAOs) to blend the data into macroeconomic statistics. Fintech standards bodies analogous to IEEE working groups could recommend protocols. Transaction meta-data aggregation could also engender a new class of economic indicators granularly measuring sophisticated parameters such as interlinkage, complexity, value-at-risk, and country-level inflows/outflows, and prediction markets and derivatives could run over these.

Hayekian Market Signaling
For automatically generated macroeconomic indicators, there would need to be a willingness to disclose exposure, whether pseudonymous or not, and whether on public or private blockchains. This could be compelled by regulatory entities, or better, volunteered as a market-signaling technique, just as the smart contract industry may fork into legally-compliant and a-compliant contracts. Prediction markets could be a further layer to elicit anonymously-voted opinions regarding data quality. This could facilitate the concept of markets as discovery in the Hayekian competitive currencies model and address systemic collusive tendencies and the predictive avoidance of collapses.

Immanence Philosophy of Risk
One effect of having granular, precise, real-time automated economic indicators and risk measurement systems is that it could enable more fundamentally our definition of risk to shift. As traditionally conceived, we have what is conceptually and emotionally a scarcity relationship with risk. Risk is something to measure, avoid, manage, and control, as exemplified by traditional finance and insurance models. There is the begrudging position of ‘no risk, no reward’ and ‘nothing ventured nothing gained,’ but this view is conceived in the scarcity of trade-offs, not in the abundance of making new bigger spaces for opportunity. Instead, risk could be reconceptualized as ‘taking a step,’ taking a step into an unknown of immanence, from an unknown yet supported downside and into a completely open upside. Immanence risk models could be realized through societal shared trust and the willingness to share information in comfortable ways to create the underlying layer supporting the open upside. A concrete example of this could be deploying open source FICO scores and decentralized credit bureaus with blockchain-based reputation structures where the global shared information trust model facilitates the local open upside possibility.

[1] Open Source Risk Model resources:
Hwang, J.H. Proposal for an Open-Source Financial Risk Model
Papadopoulos, P. OpenRisk.eu, Open Risk API (White Paper, Github)

CryptoSustainability: Reinventing Economics

The new ‘Sensibility of the Cryptocitizen’ is about a rethinking our relationship with authority, and political and economic life design. It includes personal digital security practices like backing up our money, and more profoundly is not just about rethinking relationships of authority and power, and economic resources and exchange, but reinventing the models by which we use them. Perhaps never before has there been such a creativity that we are bringing to designing and trying different models and modes of life; prototyping as a life practice.

True autonomy is setting our own rules, economic, political, social, etc.; in every domain; setting our own rules for life per our own purposes and value systems. We are inventing new models that more directly address our local individual needs rather than accepting status quo models from the structured world.

Part of the ‘reinventing economics’ mindset is thinking more modularly and portably about resources, and where and how everything can be accomplished more fungibly and effectively, with a new responsiveness to meet needs dynamically. What if every resource had the Uber-like conceptualization of immediate resource delivery on demand? Not just food, transportation, products, and valet services [1], but more foundational resources too that involve space like lodging, showers, team coworking space, and office meeting space; on-demand pod space; portable mobile resource use.

There are some exciting examples of fungible, distributed autonomous space. Distributed autonomous mobile space includes the concept of a mobile AirBnB, embodied by the Blackbird Bus, which uses city streets as a commons for on-demand locational parking of a 68-passenger school bus that has been converted into a luxury mobile office/living space for a startup company, and offers co-housing nights via AirBnB. For example, there are Houslets, modular, portable, reconfigurable, and open-source living structures which can be fixed or mobile or anything in between. Another example is using space and economic designability to competitive advantage, such as autonomous political/judicial zones within countries, like the Zones for Economic Development and Employment (ZEDEs) in Honduras. Existing space-on-demand offerings like Liquid Space (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly booking of office space) could be further extended and enhanced by delivering mobile office pods to locations.

[1] The plethora of eDelivery services: Amazon Prime. Munchery. Postmates. Seamless. EAT24. GrubHub. Safeway.com. Whole Foods. DoorDash. Washio. TaskRabbit. FreshDirect. Homejoy. Uber. Google Express. Alfred.

Blockchain Government

Blockchain technology is starting to arrive to the extent that applications are being defined for different sectors, most prominently markets/finance/banking, government/legal, IOT, and health. In all of these venues, the thinking is that centralized models may be something of the past, and could be supplemented or improved by secure decentralized frameworks that could be more efficient, quicker, and less expensive. For example, in finance and banking interbank transfers currently take three days to clear, but this could be immediate.

The reason that secure decentralized ‘smartnetwork’ operations are possible is the maturity of the Internet. The Internet is now large enough and liquid enough in terms of global reach, billions of participants, and in-place infrastructure such that a whole new tier of applications is enabled like those using blockchain technology. Blockchain technology creates secure decentralized transaction networks. The technology combines the peer-to-peer file-sharing of BitTorrent with public key cryptography to form a network where independent parties (rather than a centralized authority) can confirm that transactions are unique and valid, and record them into a ledger. This means that transaction networks can be more decentralized, secure, and resilient, and also accommodate a much greater scale of activity since parties do not need to know and trust each other, just the system.

Government is a sector where blockchain applications could have a significant benefit and finally allow services that are personalized instead of one-size-fits all. Public services could be as individually-specific as a Starbucks coffee order. Blockchains could be a liberty-enhancing equality technology allowing individuals to be more empowered, participative, and involved. Governance might be the next venue where individuals can take more authority and responsibility for themselves. The Internet made this possible with financial instruments, an intermediary like a stock broker is no longer needed for selecting and buying-selling financial instruments like stocks, bonds, CDs, and mortgage products. Likewise in information and entertainment, the Internet has fractured traditional centralized industries and created a new sensibility where individuals select their own content. Health services is another example where patient-driven EMRs (electronic medical records), web-based test data, personalized genomics, and quantified-self wearables have led to a new sensibility of individuals self-advocating for health as biocitizens. The key point is that the nexus of authority has shifted to the individual per decentralized Internet models. Blockchain-based government services could trigger a similar shift in sensibility and a rethinking of authority

Decentralization concepts are already underway in government (Rescaling the State) with a focus on the important role of mayors as non-partisan administrators (If Mayors Ruled the World), and the rise of metropolitanism (21st Century is the Metropolitan Century and Metropolitan Revolution). These ideas could be deployed in more detail per several key properties of blockchain technology in government services, for example its being secure, decentralized, scalable, universal, granular, auditable, trackable, and transparent. Applications could roll out in two phases:

Basic Blockchain Government Applications

• Transnational organizations – Correspondingly transnational governance structures for world-scale organizations like WikiLeaks, ICANN, and Wikipedia could be accountably and transparently coordinated by blockchains 
• Document registrations – Blockchains could serve as the whole of a society’s public records repository
• Voting – More secure and universal public electronic voting systems, and more transparent, usable, aggregatable data regarding representative issue voting records; faster results tabulation
• Issue and proposition development – Blockchain-coordinated proposal development, validation, and community dialogue and participation, and short-term delegative democracy instead of elected representatives (Liquid Feedback) 
• Campaign – More immediate, transparent, universal, and interoperable finance disclosure and tracking
• Digital signatures and identity – Blockchain-based digital identity validation, signatures, proof-of-truth functions, escrows, passport services, and inclusive pseudonymous identity services for documented and undocumented individuals alike
• Notary services - using blockchain technology's secure auditable record-logging functionality together with digital timestamping and pointers to electronic documents stored off-chain

Advanced Blockchain Government Applications

• Personalized opt-in governance services – Individuals could enroll in competitive personalized governance services (locality-provided or vendor-provided), paying for preferred services, such as composting, or education. Other personalized government services could include: reputation-based ID systems, voting, dispute resolution, national income distribution, public documents registration and repository (Bitnation, facilitator of the world’s first blockchain marriage October 5, 2014)   
• Blockchain public finance services - Self-directed community bonds (Neighbor.ly), whose creditworthiness could be facilitated and evaluated with blockchain-based mechanisms such as Ricardian contracts, such as those contemplated by Greece to provide assurance regarding tax receipts
• Real-time documented legal services - On-demand tele-attorney consultation, rights advocacy, law enforcement interaction, and private policing (Sidekik)
• Futarchy prediction markets - Two-step voting process on outcomes and strategies for their attainment rather than individuals as representatives 
• Token issuance and management - Civic tokens (convertible to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or fiat currency, or accepted directly) could be issued for guaranteed basic income initiatives, health services, EBT/foodstamp programs, or other community spending initiatives to improve efficiency and reduce fraud

Philosophy of Big Data

Big data is growing as an area of information technology, service, and science, and so too is the need for its intellectual understanding and interpretation from a theoretical, philosophical, and societal perspective.

The ways that we conceptualize and act in the world are shifting now due to increasingly integrated big data flows from the continuously-connected multi-device computing layer that is covering the world. This connected computing layer includes wearables, Internet-of-Things (IOT) sensors, smartphones, tablets, laptops, Quantified Self-Tracking devices like the Fitbit, connected car, smarthome, and smartcity.

Through the connected computing world, big data services are facilitating the development of more efficient organizing mechanisms for the conduct and coordination of our interaction with reality.

One effect is that our stance is moving from being constrained to reactive response to now being able to engage in much more predictive action-taking in many areas of activity.

Another effect is that a more efficient world is being created, automating not just mechanical tasks, but also cognitive tasks. This paper discusses how a philosophy of big data might help in conceiving, creating, and transitioning to data-rich futures.

 More Information: Presentation, Video, Paper