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)

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)

Do you ever stop to think about the ways we communicate?

When you talk over the phone your call can easily be monitored or recorded. Your private life is potentially exposed, but just for a brief moment. No big deal, right? Nobody is going to be listening to you unless you're doing something wrong. But the call itself and the fact that it happened is retained for a few years by your phone company. Thus that window into your life is widened, just a little bit.

When you send someone a text message the person you're texting, your location and the message itself are also retained for a few years by your phone company. When you visit any website or use any app which requires an internet connection the same thing happens and could soon be mandatory. The window widens again.

When you chat on Facebook literally everything you're saying and in some cases what is going on in the room around you is recorded. Forever. If not by Facebook then by the governments tapped into the internet backbone. When you use Google Hangouts you record your face, what you're doing and the environment around you and hand that over forever too. It happened with Yahoo Chat, and it will happen again. When you sync your files to Drive or iCloud or OneDrive or Dropbox, you give away the very real and substantial value of the contents of your hard drive. When you sit in front of a Kinect, you invite Microsoft and probably the US government into your home to study you in intricate high-def three-dimensional detail. When you post and tag those photos of your night out on Facebook or Instagram you provide structured information to assist a powerful AI in enhancing its detailed 3D maps of you and your friend's faces and predictive models of your behaviour. And when we start wearing Google Glass around and buying devices like the Amazon Fire, we will be handing over the world around us in real-time.

Truly. Legitimately. Non-crazy like. As described in the NSA's own documents as “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” Petabytes of it every day. Handing over our data until, as Google's CEO said, “We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about.”

It's as if we want to do away with the window completely.

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