This past year working on Holo-REA has been a fascinating, exciting and occasionally overwhelming foray into the evolution of distributed systems. In that time, a small group of contributors has managed to prototype a robust economic ledger which not only manages supply chain tracking, but also facilitates complex operational planning and business process management.

It is truly a simple and elegant solution to numerous economic and resource coordination activities. But, that was already known— this is the second (some would say third) generation of an existing system that has been proven in multiple real-life case studies.

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I first discovered the ValueFlows project while searching for movements aiming to replace the current world economy with more sustainable and humane ways of organising. With apps like Buycott having found traction and new blockchain-based platforms like OriginTrail gathering momentum, the rise in consumer demand for transparent and trustworthy information on the products and services we buy seems set to skyrocket in the near future.

But consumer-curated platforms like Buycott & Good On You and even the next generation of blockchain-enabled supply chain tracking systems only go so deep. We need more than just guesses from third-parties or even information that lets us see inside the products we buy— we need information to show us what's going on externally, too. That includes the health and wellbeing of those involved in the production process as well as their communities; but much more critically it also includes the negative effects and impacts our production system has on the natural environment. And we need these capabilities delivered in a way that allows organisations to experiment with and own their own systems; not as part of a one-size-fits all global solution.

I think this recent interview with my former colleague and collaborator Thomas Miller is the clearest and simplest I've ever been able to communicate the purpose of 'open value networks', the promise of Holochain and ValueFlows; and why I believe methods like this are the most likely means of salvation for our species. (more)

(A report from the first Holochain intensive / unofficial ValueFlows festival.)

Last weekend the first ever Holochain intensive was held on the Sunshine Coast in Australia. You'd be forgiven for wondering why that location was chosen - we don't usually get much attention from the tech industry down here compared to places like California - but for whatever reason there's a significant number of Aussies interested and involved in the Holochain ecosystem. Basically it happened here because enough of us came together to make it happen.

I'm dubbing it the "unofficial ValueFlows festival" because REA accounting was particularly dominant over the weekend, front and center in a lot of sessions and the thing that most people there seemed to be focused on. As the resident "expert" I wasn't really prepared for how many of the presentations and workshops I would be facilitating or how many conversations I would be having about it. This is largely due to Holochain's founder Art having been turned on to REA by Bob and Lynn of Mikorizal and championing those concepts to groups interested in building on the platform. (more)

For me today, ValueFlows feels like a simple concept. But I still remember my early days coming to terms with it, sitting in a co-working space in Athens with a bunch of Spanish speakers and trying not to be down on myself for understanding & contributing so little. Underneath the simplicity runs a great deal of complexity, and I've not always been the best at cutting through that to explain how it's all relevant to people. The same goes for Holochain's architectural decisions & theoretical underpinnings.

But last night was one of the better explanations I've channeled, so... I present it here for the opportunity to remix it with your own. How do you explain the importance of these systems? What real, tangible outcomes are you looking for in the world? (more)

Devcon4 was a blast- at least, the bits I was well enough to attend. I've been fighting a pretty serious illness for some months (ticks are the worst), but my housemate has a diagnosis now so hopefully the end is in sight for me. It was less about attending the conference and more about catching up and swapping notes with people, anyway. I stayed with the Circles UBI team (who are all amazing) and managed to bump in to Frankie from MetaMask & the Scuttleverse again, and meet some members of the 'Dark Crystal' team (which is a super exciting project- stay tuned!)

I also managed to catch up with Vinay Gupta in the corridor after Stewart Brand's talk and had a nice little chat with him. It was really quite delightful and it seemed like we both got a lot out of it. Turns out we're all a lot more reasonable in real life... who knew? :p (more)

It's been a harrowing and lengthy internal debate for me trying to decide whether to publish this post. On the one hand, I've annoyed somebody very influential and this is likely to be seen as "poking the bear". Or it could be viewed as the plaintive whining of a someone with a fragile emotional constitution. It might not be a great career move.

On the other hand, it's clear to me that something is very wrong with how things unfolded. There are aspects of power imbalance, racism, privilege, suppression and misinformation at play here. It's not ok. The world should not be like this. Innovators should be supporting innovation, not stifling it.

It's been said before that blockchain is a 1% conversation, but in my experience the percentage is even smaller. There are a lot of hidden interests in the space— particularly people with huge financial investments and a lot to lose who don't take kindly to being challenged on their versions of progress. Not even by those who travel in their circles. If I am being attacked and silenced - as a white male software engineer - then what hope is there for anyone in a marginalised group to be heard?

Maybe all that writing this will achieve is that I look a bit silly, make an enemy and my life gets slightly more difficult. Maybe I've already made an enemy and writing this will make no difference at all. Who knows. I'm sure all of us involved are already more than a little ashamed of some of the things we said. I can only hope the overall outcomes of this piece will be constructive rather than destructive.

Because in the end, I have to go with "fuck it". This article isn't for that person. When I sit back and ask myself, "why did it matter so much", there's only one way to go with this. This article is for others with big ideas and small voices who would let themselves be pushed out of the debate. So I'll try to leave emotion and names out of it, and discuss what happened in the abstract. These themes affect all of us. It's important. (more)

With development of blockchain applications now booming there are many interesting things happening and a lot of reasons to be excited for 2018. Unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic too. Many are approaching application development in the same ways they always have, which in an open global system runs at odds with the design and ethos of the very ground they're walking on.

Creating an open-source platform designed to work as part of a globally integrated system is a very different process than building a product or enterprise platform to be monetized through licensing and sales. In this article, I'll attempt to explain why this is the case and give some tangible rules to guide you on your journey to creating the next killer blockchain app. I'll focus on Ethereum, but the same ideas apply to any public global system. (more)

Recently I decided to fly halfway across the world to attend Open2017, a two-day conference on the emerging "Platform Cooperativism" movement. For those unfamiliar with the term, simply think 'online platforms + cooperatives'— or to put it another way, "what if Facebook was owned and goverened by the people who used it?".

My interest in platform co-ops came by way of my interest in crypto-economics, piqued specifically by Ethereum. Prior to that I had no real interest in economics or finance, but when confronted with a system which allowed value to be codified I was suddenly all ears. It seemed humanity had developed a system whereby values (as in real values; individual, social & community values rather than financial ones) could be encoded into economic systems. This could easily be a game-changer, I thought. The future seemed bright and interesting. (more)

A couple of months ago I gave a technical talk about blockchains at a local Ethereum meetup. The presentation is essentially a knowledge remix of all the publicly available Solidity reference material with some software engineering concepts, architectural suggestions, challenges and detailed breakdown of the DAO hack thrown in for good measure.

You can view slides from the talk here or over on github. If you've ever wanted to get started writing software for Ethereum - or blockchains in general - then I highly recommend you take a look and save yourself some research!

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About a month ago, I started idly looking through a piece of code called "The Standard DAO Framework". It's a weird piece of code-

• It's written in a language not many people have heard of yet (github doesn't even have syntax highlighting, which makes it a bit annoying to read there).
• The language only runs on a super-slow virtual computer about the speed of a 1998 cellphone.
• The virtual computer is simulated by everyone together simultaneously, is everywhere and nowhere and is owned by no-one.

This article is about the piece of code, what it does and what it means. The short version is that a DAO represents a single collective entity - like a company, a government, a trust or a marriage. The "Standard DAO Framework" is a higher abstraction for society, if you will, created as software to simulate the way trust must work internally between all the individuals involved in these groups in order to achieve a fair and just shared outcome. It is not an AI - it has no will or direction of its own - it merely encodes the logic all parties have agreed must be adhered to into an incorruptible and deterministic process that no flawed human can subvert. (more)