Personal Project Journal Citizenship

PERSONAL PROJECT JOURNAL

Design innovation and Citizenship Lorenzo Columbo 2018

CTRL+ SHIFT+ KNOWLEDGE

INDEX INTRODUCTION

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BLOCKCHAIN CONCENSUS (Gerard Briscoe) FUTURE BLOCHCKAIN POSSIBILITIES PROBLEMS (Christopher Reay)

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METACURRENCY (Arthur Brock)

Design & Citizenship Specialist Course The production of an encompassing overview of design and citizenship and the construction of a set of roles that the citizen designer may perform within or for a broad context of citizen centric organisations or in addressing citizen specific phenomena ranging from the public, voluntary and private sectors and the activities that may occur between them.

BROKEN ASSUMPTIONS GOVERNANCE HOLOCHAIN

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PERPLEXITY SOCIETY INFO FAKE NEWS VALUE of TRUTH POINTS...

CONCLUSION REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION

We have been asked to investigate a problem that cre-

ates a sense of unease in us and to identify the instruments applicable to it. Seeing a society that by now has lost the values of sharing and love for individualism and capitalism, I find in the blockchain an excellent phenomenon and a tool to look for as it promises and lays the foundations for a social change of values on a world scale.

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The first section wants to Secondly there is the turn- Finally, explain the blockchain. An emerging technology that perfectly reflects the values​​ of decentralization and participation, distributing power to all users in a transparent and equitable way for everyone. As a premise, it is a paradigm of innovative sharing with high applicability in the real world, leading to solving major problems of today's society. For points, besides explaining the basic philosophy and the technical part. The concept of consent within the same technology will be clarified, until showing its future applicability. Finally, it will be questioned by unfortunately three sore points, not yet resolved to make sure that, the blockchain, become the most important future digital change after the creation of the world wide web.

ing point. After meeting and having had the opportunity to know Christopher Reay. I have discovered how in the world there are people who are working and making possible an idea of an equitable world, with an idea of value and fair value for all citizens. Dreaming of a better world, not through the creation of a new currency.

Instead, they are building a platform for the decentralized evolution, deployment, and operation of many currencies and other distributed applications. An honor, discover the effort of these people through projects like Ceptr, Meta currency, Holochain, and Platform. earth. One feels less alone and with a little hope. Read and discover a movement of people in a digital world, imperceptible to contact but alive with changes and revolutions. We are all connected. Read to know and decide you become aware of the world.

after becoming aware of the Posiwid theory, I literally perception in my natural view of the changing events in our society.

Understanding that, despite being in contact with some of the people, in my opinion, the most brilliant in the world, it is not possible in one day to accept and propose ideas without people not metabolizing the new values ​​of society before. I have moved on how people get information, the level of disinformation and ignorance in today’s society.

How we are judged in our judgment and behavior to infer how we are currently in a deadlock, in a historical moment controlled by a few people aware of the technological impact on our lives in this digital world. We are in a world where man has evolved technologically to keep up with critical human thought. We are at the mercy of the few, the only possible solution to achieve change is to know and become aware of how we live and what direction we are taking with the associated consequences.

BLOCKCHAIN For some, the Blockchain is the new genera-

tion of the Internet, or better yet it is the New Internet. For greater accuracy, it is believed that it may represent a sort of Internet of Transactions and for those who look beyond the concept of the transaction, the Blockchain can represent the Internet of Value. For others, it is the digital representation of four very clear and strong concepts: decentralization, transparency, security, and immutability. For others still, as mentioned, is the clear digital declination of a new concept of Trust. And for these reasons, some believe that the Blockchain can also assume an almost “political” value, as a platform that allows the development and implementation of a new form of democracy, really decentralized and really able to guarantee everyone the possibility to verify, to “control”, to have complete transparency, to create immutable and shared archives and for this reason unalterable, immutable and therefore immune from corruption.

For a while the Blockchain has been confused, or better identified with Bitcoin, that is with a declension of the Blockchain and in particular with that which is at the basis of the digital currency or crypto Bitcoin. Perhaps, for this reason, the Blockchain often appears to be associated with a concept of digital currency, and payment. In fact, as we will see, the Blockchain has a great value both in the extraordinary Bitcoin experience and as a platform for managing transactions and exchanges of information and data even in completely different sectors far from finance and payment.1

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“As evident, the Blockchain lends itself to be interpreted. More than a technology, it is a paradigm, a way of interpreting the great theme of decentralization and participation.

For this reason, there are various variations, different interpretations and different definitions of the Blockchain.”

The main features of the Blockchain What are the main features of the Blockchain?

Let’s see them together: Reliability: the Blockchain is reliable. Not being governed by the center, but giving all the direct participants a controlling part of the entire chain, the Blockchain becomes a less centralized, less governable system, and at the same time much more secure and reliable, for example by malicious attacks. If in fact only one of the nodes in the chain is attacked and damaged, all the other nodes of the distributed database will continue to be active and operational, welding the chain and not losing important information in this way.

Transparency: transactions carried out through the Blockchain are visible to all participants, thus ensuring transparency in operations.

Distributed power: making transactions through the Blockchain is convenient for all participants, as they are fewer interlocutors of third parties, necessary in all conventional transactions that occur between two or more parties (ie banks and other similar bodies). The information already entered in the Blockchain cannot be changed in any way. In this way, the information contained in the Blockchain are all more solid and reliable, precisely because they can not be altered and therefore remain as they were inserted the first time.

Immutability: with the Blockchain, you can make irrevocable transactions, and at the same time more easily traceable. This ensures that the transactions are final, with no possibility of being changed or canceled.2

Distributed power. The real change is represented by the Distributed Ledger, that is by a real and complete distributed logic where no center exists and where the logic of governance is built around a new concept of trust among all the subjects. Nobody (but really nobody) has the opportunity to prevail and the decision-making process passes strictly through a rigorous process of Consensus building. You don’t have to trust a 3rd party central authority (a bank, government, business, or club) for the currency to work. The currency operates independent of the goodwill, integrity, practices, or decisions of any particular (non-representative / unaccountable) group.

Reliability.

The Blockchain is a technology that allows the creation and management of a large distributed database for the management of transactions that can be shared between several nodes of a network. This is a database structured in Blocks (containing multiple transactions) that are connected to each other in a network so that every transaction initiated on the network must be validated by the network itself in the “analysis” of each individual block. The Blockchain thus consists of a chain of blocks that each contains multiple transactions. The solution for all transactions is entrusted to the Nodes that are called to see, control and approve all transactions by creating a network that shares on each node the archive of the whole Blockchain and therefore of all the blocks with all transactions.

Immutability.The Blockchain as a safe and immutable Master Book over time The Blockchain is the decentralized and cryptographically secure Ledger for managing transactions on peer-topeer networks. It is a technology that allows the exchange of information and different types of values on ​​ the Internet. Each block is also an archive for all transactions and for the entire history of each transaction, which can only be changed with the approval of the network nodes. Transactions can be considered unmodifiable (except through the repetition and the “re” -authorization of the same by the entire network). Hence the concept of immutability.

Transparency.The Blockchain as a public register open to all. The blockchain is a decentralized database that stores assets and transactions on a peer-to-peer network. It is a public registry for managing data related to transactions in blocks and managed by encryption by network participants who verify, approve and subsequently record all the blocks with all data of each transaction on all nodes. The same “information” is therefore present on all nodes and therefore becomes unmodifiable if not through an operation that requires the approval of the majority of nodes of the network and that in any case will not change the history of that same information.

The blockchain is not an application, it is not a system, it is not a technology. The Blockchain is a new paradigm for the management of information that allows guaranteeing the real immutability of data because it is able to guarantee and certify the complete history of all data and operations connected to each transaction.

Gerard

Let’s see concretely what the Blockchain consists of. The

Blockchain is a communication protocol, which identifies a technology based on the logic of the distributed database (a database in which the data are not stored on a single computer but on multiple machines connected to each other, called nodes).

The Blockchain is a series of blocks that store a set of transactions validated and correlated by a Timestamp. Each block includes the hash (a non-invertible computer algorithmic function that maps an arbitrary length string into a predefined length string) that uniquely identifies the block and allows connection to the previous block by identifying the previous block.

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The basic components of the Blockchain:

Briscoe gave a lecture in our course. Peaceful and never inappropriate.

Almost a great apparition, in the right moment, one of the few people I have found to have an open and critical vision regarding technologies.

He Spaced between artificial intelligence up to the blockchain. At a time when skepticism from the people closest to me prevailed over curiosity. On the latter, he gave me a great perspective, which I had not recognized before. Basically, we can plan the best service or possibility but first of all, we should ask ourselves: What do we need decision consensus and above all how do we want to get this consensus?

Node: they are the participants in the Blockchain and are physically constituted by the servers of each participant Transaction: consists of the data that represent the values​​ object of “exchange” and that need to be verified, approved The transaction contains information on the recipient’s puband then archived lic address, the characteristics of the transaction and the cryptographic signature that guarantees the security and Block: is represented by the grouping of a set of transac- authenticity of the transaction. tions that are combined to be verified, approved and then The Blockchain is to be seen as a public and shared register archived by the Blockchain participants consisting of a series of clients or nodes.

Ledger: it is the public register in which all transactions carried out in an orderly and sequential manner are “noted” with maximum transparency and in an unchanging way.

The Ledger consists of the set of blocks that are chained together by an encryption function and thanks to the use of hashes Hash: it is an operation (Non-Invertible) that allows mapping a string of text and/or numeric of variable length in a unique and univocal string of determined length. The Hash uniquely and securely identifies each block. A hash must not allow going back to the text that generated it.

Each block, therefore, contains several transactions and has a Hash placed in the header. The Hash records all the information related to the block and a Hash with information related to the previous block that allows to create the chain and to link one block to the other.

The Blockchain is organized to automatically update itself on each of the clients participating in the network. Every operation carried out must be automatically confirmed by all the individual nodes through cryptographic software, which verify a package of data defined by private key or seed, which is used to sign the transactions. Guaranteeing the digital identity of those who have authorized them.

As mentioned, the Blockchain is a distributed database (database).

So, to understand well what is the Blockchain, it is necessary to understand better what is a distributed database ie a distributed database, that is shared between multiple computers, called nodes, connected to the network.

Each time a block is generated, the chain is lengthened. This chain is a compose the great book Mastro Blockchain which is owned by all users.3

CONSENSUS

Research Fellow, Ph.D. Electronic Engineering, MEng Computing, BEng Computing. Dr. Gerard Briscoe is a Research Fellow in Digital Cultures and a Research Affiliate of the University of Glasgow. Gerard specializes in interdisciplinary research at the fringe of the computing sciences with design practices. He is interested in designing digital cultures to create preferable futures; and putting the soul back into technology, including Digital Creative Commons, Digital Materiality, Resistance to Digitization, and Cyborg 4 Posthumanism.

The role of miners

GERARD BRISCOE

For a new block of transactions to be added to the blockchain, it must be checked, validated, and encrypted. Only with this passage can it then become active and be added to the Blockchain. This step is necessary to solve a mathematical problem that requires a conspicuous commitment also in terms of power and processing capacity. This operation is defined as “Mining” and is carried out by the “Miner”.

The work of the “Miner” is absolutely fundamental in the economy of the management of the Blockchain. Anyone can become a “Miner” and can compete for being the first complex mathematical problem related to the creation of each new block of valid and encrypted transactions that can be added to the Blockchain.

Since this is an important commitment, as mentioned with considerable expenditure of energy, it is a commitment that needs to be remunerated and incentivized. In the “Private” or Permissioned Blockchains, this role is played, depending on the governance, by the authority that activates the Blockchain itself.

In the Public or Permissionless Blockchains, this role can be played by any Blockchain participant and the Miner is incentivized with forms of remuneration that depend on the type of rules or governance defined by each Blockchain.

But let’s go back to the ledger. The operation that adds a new block to the chain updates the ledger held by all the Blockchain participants. These participants, therefore, accept a new block when - thanks to the resolution of the complex mathematical problem - the validity of all its transactions has been verified.

In the event that the verification process detects an error, an anomaly, a discrepancy, the block is rejected and all have visibility of the fact that the transaction has not been authorized. Otherwise, if all transactions are validated, the block is created

and added and will become part of the Blockchain (of the chain) in effect as a permanent and immutable public record; no Blockchain participant can change it or remove it.

not “public”, that is, they do not know each other and the Proof of Work also represents the way to build a relationship of “trust” based on the concrete collaboration to the solution of the tests that must be validated.

What is Distributed Consent The Blockchain validation process involves a verification and approval phase based on calculation resources that are made available by the Blockchain participants and which are aimed at solving complex problems or cryptographic puzzles and which allow having a Distributed Consent and no more than a consent based on a third party intermediary or a centralized institution or institution. Those who participate in the resolution of the problem and who therefore contribute to the validation of the process and the transaction are called Miner and their intervention, which needs to be carried out with important resources, is remunerated through the issuance of a virtual currency or cryptocurrency.

The logic that underlies this process starts from the assumption that in order to avoid fraud risks, in particular by a “node” of the Blockchain, it is necessary to create obstacles and complications on the whole validation process. Specifically, each node that intends to participate in validation must also solve a complex problem in the form of a cryptographic puzzle. The puzzle is designed to compete for all the nodes and all contribute to the resolution by making available its computing power. The node that will be able to solve the cryptographic puzzle will have the right to validate the block with the presentation of the Proof of Work which is also the proof of the solution of the puzzle. For this commitment and for this result the node is remunerated with a Unit of value that depends on the type of Blockchain.

Then I add that in the Blockchain the nodes are

DIFFERENT WAYS OF CONSENSUS: Proof-of-work (PoW) Proof-of-useful-Work (uPoW) Proof-of-Stake (PoS) delegated-Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) Proof-of-Importance (PoI) Proof-of-Activity (PoA) Proof-of-Burn (PoB) Proof-of-Deposit (PoD) Proof-of-Capacity (PoC) Proof-of-useful-Capacity (uPoC) Proof-of-Stake (FBA)

FUTURE

BLOCKCHAIN

POSSIBILITIES

What is Future Thinkers

Podcast about?

Future Thinkers is a series of podcasts and videos about evolving technology, society, and consciousness to create a more sustainable future for all of humanity.

The podcast explores questions such as “what does the future of humanity hold, and how can we help create it?”,”how can we create societies where all human beings thrive?”, “what is the nature of reali ty and cons-

ciousness?” in the form of a discussion between the cohosts and guests. Some of the topics discussed include emerging technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, transhumanism, future societies, consciousness, meditation, psychedelics, and the philosophies that connect all these things. The blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that underlies cryptocurrencies like bit coin and platforms like

Ethereum. It provides a way to record and transfer data that is transparent, safe, auditable, and resistant to outages. This technology has the ability to make the organizations that use it transparent, democratic, decentralized, efficient, and secure. It will likely to disrupt many industries in the coming 5 to 10 years. These are some of the industries it’s already disrupting.5

Banking and Payments Some say that the blockchain will do to banking what the internet did to media. It can be used to give access to financial services to billions of people around the world, including those in third world countries who don’t have access to traditional banking. Bitcoin allows anyone to send money across borders almost instantly and with relatively low fees. Abra is one startup that is working on a bitcoin-based remittance service.

Cyber Security Although the blockchain ledger is public, the data is verified and encrypted using advanced cryptography. This way the data is less prone to being hacked or changed without authorization.

That said, the applications build on the blockchain are still young and there have been several hacks in recent months. This is something future applications will need to grow up to.

Supply Chain Management With blockchain technology, transactions can be documented in a permanent decentralized record and monitored securely and transparently. This can greatly reduce time delays and human mistakes. It can also be used to monitor costs, labor, and even waste and emissions at every point of the supply chain. This has serious implications for understanding and controlling the real environmental impact of products. The distributed ledger can also be used to verify the authenticity or fair trade status of products by tracking them from their origin. Some blockchain companies working in this sector are Provenance, Fluent, SKUChain, and Blockverify.

Forecasting The blockchain is set to change the entire approach to research, consulting, analysis and forecasting. Online platforms like Augur are looking to create global decentralized prediction markets.

These technologies can be used to place and monitor bets on anything from sports to stocks to elections in a decentralized way.

Networking and the Internet of Things Samsung and IBM are using blockchain technology for a new concept called ADEPT, which will create a decentralized network of IoT devices.

Operating like a public ledger for a large number of devices, it would eliminate the need for a central location to handle communications between them. The devices would be able to communicate to each other directly to update software, manage bugs, and monitor energy usage.

Insurance The global insurance market is based on trust management. The blockchain is a new way of managing trust and can be used to verify many types of data in insurance contracts, such as the insured person’s identity. So-called Oracles can be used to integrate real-world data with blockchain smart contracts. This technology is very useful for any type of insurance that relies on real-world data, for example, crop insurance.

Aeternity is one blockchain project that is building tools that are useful in the insurance industry.

Private Transport and Ride Sharing The blockchain can be used to create decentralized versions of peer-to-peer ridesharing apps, allowing both car owners and users to arrange terms and conditions in a secure way without third-party providers. Startups working in this area include Arcade City and La’Zooz.

The use of built-in e-wallets can allow car owners to automatically pay for parking, highway tolls, and electricity top-ups for their vehicle.

UBS, ZF, and Innogy are some of the companies developing blockchain based e-wallets.

Cloud Storage Data on a centralized server is inherently vulnerable to hacking, data loss, or human error. Using blockchain technology allows cloud storage to be more secure and robust against attacks. Storj is one example of a cloud storage network using the technology.

Charity Common complaints in the charity space include inefficiency and corruption, which prevent money from reaching those that are meant to have it.

Using blockchain technology to track donations can let you be sure your money is going to end up in the right hands. Bitcoin-based charities like the BitGive Foundation use blockchain’s secure and transparent distributed ledger to let donors see that the intended party has received the funds.

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Voting Probably one of the most important areas of society that the blockchain will disrupt is voting. The 2016 US election is not the first time certain parties were accused of rigging election results. Blockchain technology can be used for voter registration and identity verification, and electronic vote counting to ensure that only legitimate votes are counted, and no votes are changed or removed. Creating an immutable, publicly-viewable ledger of recorded votes would be a massive step toward making elections more fair and democratic. Democracy Earth and Follow My Vote are two startups aiming to disrupt democracy itself by creating blockchain-based online voting systems for governments.

Government Government systems are often slow, opaque, and prone to corruption. Implementing blockchain-based systems can significantly reduce bureaucracy and increase security, efficiency, and transparency of government operations. Dubai, for example, is aiming to put all its government documents on the blockchain by 2020.

Public Benefits The public benefits system is another sector that suffers from slowness and bureaucracy. Blockchain technology can help assess, verify, and distribute welfare or unemployment benefits in a much more streamlined and secure way. GovCoin is a UK-based company that is helping the government to distribute public benefits using blockchain technology. The blockchain is also a good contender for implementing a basic income. Circles is a project working on developing a blockchain-based technology for implementing a universal basic income.

Healthcare Another industry that relies on many legacy systems and is ripe for disruption in healthcare. One of the challenges hospitals face is the lack of a secure platform to store and share data, and they are often victims of hacking because of outdated infrastructure. Blockchain technology can allow hospitals to safely store data like medical records and share it with authorized professionals or patients. This can improve data security and can even help with accuracy and speed of diagnosis. Gem and Tierion are two companies that are working on disrupting the current healthcare data space.

Energy Management Energy management has been a highly centralized industry for a long time. Energy producers and users cannot buy it directly from each other and have to go through the public grid or a trusted private intermediary. TransactiveGrid is a startup using Ethereum that allows customers to buy and sell energy from each other in a peerto-peer way.

Online Music Several startups are coming up with ways for musicians to get paid directly from their fans, without giving up large percentages of sales to platforms or record companies. Smart contracts can also be used to automatically solve licensing issues and better catalog songs with their respective creators. Mycelia and Ujo Music are two startups creating blockchain-based solutions in the music industry.

Real Estate Some of the issues in buying and selling real estate are bureaucracy, lack of transparency, fraud, and mistakes in public records. Using blockchain technology can speed up transactions by reducing the need for paper-based record keeping. It can also help with tracking, verifying ownership, ensuring the accuracy of documents, and transferring property deeds. Ubitquity is a blockchain-secured platform for real estate record-keeping that is an alternative for legacy paper-based systems.

Crowdfunding Crowdfunding has become a popular method of fundraising for new startups and projects in recent years. Crowdfunding platforms exist to create trust between project creators and supporters, but they also charge high fees. In blockchain-based crowdfunding, trust is instead created through smart contracts and online reputation systems, which removes the need for a middle-man. Many blockchain startups have now raised millions of dollars through such token sales. Although it’s still early days and the regulatory future or blockchain-based crowdfunding is uncertain, it’s an area that holds a lot of promise.

Changing incentives In a world of complexity, it can be difficult for individuals or companies to see the direct effects of their actions. Therefore, the incentives for acting in an environmentally sustainable way aren’t always clear, especially in the short term.

Blockchain technology can help both individuals and companies to see the real impact of their actions and incentivize them to take the actions that benefit the environment.

Recycling With the current recycling programs, people often don’t have good incentives to participate.

A recycling program on the blockchain could encourage participation by giving a financial reward in the form of a cryptographic token in exchange for depositing recyclables like plastic containers, cans, or bottles. Similar setups already exist in several places around the world, in particular in Northern Europe. It would make it easy to transparently track data like volume, cost, and profit, and to evaluate the impact of each location, company, or individual participating in the program.

Social Plastic (aka Plastic Bank) and RecycleToCoin are two projects working on this.6

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Retail When you shop, your trust of the retail system is tied to the trust of the store or marketplace. Decentralized blockchain-based retail utilities work differently: they connect buyers and sellers without a middleman and associated fees. In these cases, trust comes from smart contract systems, the security of exchanges, and built-in reputation management systems. One startup disrupting the retail space is OpenBazaar.

Carbon Tax In the current system, the environmental impact of each product is difficult to determine, and its carbon footprint is not factored into the price.

This means that there is little incentive for consumers to buy products with a low carbon footprint and little incentive for companies to sell such products. A blockchain-based reputation system could also give each company and product a score based on the carbon footprint of the products they sell. This would make manufacturing more transparent, and discourage wasteful and environmentally unfriendly practices.

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Climate impact

Iceland

will use more energy mining bitcoin than powering the country itself. Iceland may soon use more electricity to mine bitcoin than it uses to power every home, according to an Icelandic energy expert.

The energy used by Iceland’s bitcoin mining market is experiencing “exponential growth,” and data centers may use more energy than all of the country’s homes in 2018, Johann Snorri Sigurbergsson from Icelandic energy company HS Orka told the BBC. Sigurbergsson also said HR Orka “won’t have enough energy” to power numerous new data centers that have been proposed.

Bitcoin mining occurs when computers verify existing bitcoin trans-

actions by solving complex mathematical problems and then receive bitcoin as a reward. Sigurbergsson told the BBC he estimates Iceland’s bitcoin mining tools currently use around 840-gigawatt hours of electricity to power computers and cooling systems each year, while most of the country’s homes use around 700-gigawatt hours.

Iceland is a popular crypto mining destination Bitcoin mining thrives in Iceland, where energy is cheap, and internet connections use superfast fiber-optic networks.7 Additionally, Iceland’s cold climate plays an important role in ensuring crypto utilities don’t overheat.

Mining hardware generates large amounts of heat, and Iceland’s yearround cool weather saves companies from additional temperature control costs.

But the centers still use huge amount

of electricity.

Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can’t afford to ignore it!

Bitcoin’s electricity usage is enormous. In November, the power consumed by the entire bitcoin network was estimated to be higher than that of the Republic of Ireland. Since then, its demands have only grown. It’s now on pace to use just over 42TWh of electricity in a year, placing it ahead of New Zealand and Hungary and just behind Peru, according to estimates from Digiconomist. That’s commensurate with CO2 emissions of 20 megatonnes – or roughly 1m transatlantic flights.

That fact should be a grave notion to anyone who hopes for the cryptocurrency to grow further in

stature and enter widespread usage. But even more alarming is that things could get much, much worse, helping to increase climate change in the process.8 Burning huge amounts of electricity aren’t incidental to bitcoin: instead, it’s embedded into the innermost core of the currency, as the operation known as “mining”. In simplified terms, bitcoin mining is a competition to waste the most electricity possible by doing pointless arithmetic quintillions of times a second.

PROBLEMS Scalability

Currently, all blockchain consensus protocols (eg. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Tendermint) have a challenging limitation: every fully participating node in the network must process every transaction. Recall that blockchains have one inherent critical characteristic — “decentralization” — which means that every single node on the network processes every transaction and maintains a copy of the entire state.

While a decentralization consensus mechanism offers some critical benefits, such as fault tolerance, a strong guarantee of security, political neutrality, and authenticity, it comes at the cost of scalability. The number of transactions the blockchain can process can never exceed that of a single node that is participating in the network. In fact, the blockchain actually gets weaker as more nodes are added to its network because of the inter-node latency that logarithmically increases with every additional node.

In order to scale, the blockchain protocol must figure out a mechanism to limit the number of

participating nodes needed to validate each transaction, without losing the network’s trust that each transaction is valid. It might sound simple in words but is technologically very difficult.

Why?

However, transitioning state on the blockchain also has several non-parallelizable (serial) parts, so we’re faced with some restrictions on how we can transition state on the blockchain while balancing both parallelizability and utility.9

1. Since every node is not allowed to validate every transaction, we somehow need nodes to have a statistical and economic means to ensure that other blocks (which they are not personally validating) are secure.

Security

2. There must be some way to guarantee data availability. In other words, even if a block looks valid from the perspective of a node not directly validating that block, making the data for that block unavailable leads to a situation where no other validator in the network can validate transactions or produce new blocks, and we end up stuck in the current state. (There are several reasons a node might go offline, including malicious attack and power loss.)

3. Transactions need to be processed by different nodes in parallel in order to achieve scalability.

security problems With IOT, for example, we have to think about basic cyber-security and privacy technology, also configure and upgrading devices at scale, typing i.p. addresses for each and every household device. If no: How should the law handle an autonomous vehicle that accidentally kills a human? If a vending machine is programmed to order the most profitable products, will they discover a supplier of illegal goods or drugs? How does society govern distributed models of an enterprise? How can owner keep ultimate control? How do we prevent Hostile takeovers?

Vint Cerf say "The nightmare headline for me is, 100.000 refrigerators attacking the bank of America".10

CHRISTOPHER REAY

Community Market Design | Systems Transformation | Interface Perfection | Interpersonal Communication Skills. “One of the least reliable people I knew, not because of his character but because of the way he organized himself, in short, a genius.�

The impression, after the first five minutes, was fantastic.

At first impact an unruly person without the slightest worry of the judgment of others. We met a few weeks later. Where I had the chance to meet one of his friends, Patrik. It seemed almost unreal, I was with two (in my opinion, out of the average) without ever really known first, in a comfortable atmosphere and pleasant conversation. I let myself go more, then, after a couple of pints. Both, interesting and critical people. They opened a world for me. If before the meeting I was looking for clarification about the doubts about the blockchain, when the day ended, I had more questions than answers. Thanks to Christopher, I got to know Holochain, Ceptr, Meta Currency, Platform.earth and Trevis Hilder.

Literally blew my mind. Moving from conversations about technology, he came to question Shark Tank until he discovered that he had studied and developed his thesis on Von Neumann. What to say more, a great day. It gave me hope, in what I believed and in knowing that there are people like them.

META We’ve designed and built multiple iterations of multi-cur-

rency platforms which enable a huge range of configurability for different currency solutions. In order to get the tools right for a truly decentralized economy with enhanced social collective intelligence, our current iteration of tools involves rebuilding our whole computing and communications stack with tools which are natively semantic, decentralized, and cryptographically secure.

Sovereign Accountable Commons

ARTHUR BROCK Distributed App Architect, Cryptocurrency Designer, Next Economy Speaker, Social Entrepreneur, Culture Hacker. He build targeted currencies which shape the social dynamics of our emerging post-industrial economy. To that end, I’ve created more than a hundred designs for multi-currency systems, and my software company has built and deployed dozens of those systems.

My current focus is launching Holochain, an alternative to blockchain for running fully P2P distributed applications.

In the MetaCurrency Project, we’re committed to practicing what we preach, or eating our own dog food if you prefer that way of saying it. So as we release Ceptr and the tools we’ve been incubating for the past decade, we are also launching a new organizational model to hold the code, assets and coding community that we see emerging. At the moment we’re calling it Source Tree Commons, and it will be the first Sovereign Accountable Commons launched.

A Sovereign Accountable Commons (SAC) is akin to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) on the blockchain but they leverage a different distributed architecture. Instead of building on ethereum or a blockchain, we’re building on Ceptr. Ceptr is a new technology platform for building Distributed Apps and for enhancing collective intelligence that we’ve been incubating for almost a decade and we plan to release in 2017.11

2.

CURRENCY - The story I want to be able to tell my (as of yet non-existent) grandchildren in 25 years. -

Once upon a time, our planet was dying.

People had organized themselves into patterns with funny names like “limited liability corporations,” “federal governments,” “non-profit organizations,” and “institutions of higher education.”

We were unwittingly eating the world and all of

its resources to perpetuate the survival of and expand the growth of these social organisms.

This was a time before humans had recognized the power of currencies as “Current-Sees.” We barely understood any difference between the aggregate actions of individuals and the phenomenon of those individuals organized into coherent patterns. Today we know that these patterns, or social organisms, actually have their own hardwired feedback loops, nervous systems, intelligence, and incentives and rewards, distinct from the individuals within them, just as biological organisms have intelligence distinct from the cells they’re comprised of. But at that time, we didn’t have good tools to see these patterns clearly. In fact, people’s attention and imagination were so occupied by a single dominant form of currency — money — that it was almost impossible to see the rich ecosystem of emerging post-monetary currencies which had begun shaping new flows and behaviors, and solving (as well as creating) complex flow problems on vast scales. As evidence of planetary breakdown grew, the denial of the reality of the problem also grew louder (things like species extinction, topsoil loss, radioactive contamination, peak oil, resource depletion, climate change, melting glaciers, population growth, incomprehensible wealth imbalance, entrenched political corruption, unchecked corporate greed & growth, GMO contamination of seed stocks, colony collapse, spreading poverty, malnutrition with obesity, rising terrorism and war, etc…) There was a lot of fear and distraction in those days. The world was chang-

ing too fast. Many clung to idealized images of a past that were no longer relevant because we didn’t yet know how to integrate changes quickly enough into our culture, our organizations, or our minds. Since information sources and sharing protocols weren’t integrated, we couldn’t clearly see flow patterns on large scales. The fragmentation made it easy for people to only pay attention to what they wanted to hear, or remain ignorant and unseeing of things they didn’t search out. In fact, most information was received in the form of dramatic entertainment called “news” that was filtered and scripted by the organizations delivering it according to criteria which supported their own influence and growth. Since currency was only thought of as money, and wealth as accumulation, when people organized themselves into collective patterns, those social organisms were preoccupied with their own growth and acquisition of artificially scarce money. They were structured as cancers — using their resources only for their own perpetuation and growth — killing the planet that is their host. In many ways, this explosion of social organisms and communication protocols was even more chaotic than the Internet it began replacing. Really amazing patterns started emerging which quickly outperformed the corporations of the past because they were better at having people feel fulfilled, trusted, known, heard and involved… better at sharing resources that were previously hoarded… better at creating outrageous productivity and creative results. Once we learned how to organize ourselves in these ways, we were able to reverse the damage to the planet and our communities very quickly. Problems that had been accumulating for hundreds of years, we reversed in only a handful years because we could coordinate on a planetary scale in ways that nourished the bodies, spirits, and hearts of everyone involved. We learned the joy of dancing together for mutual benefit, built the tools for us to see the state of our collective dance, and grew to feel the vibrancy of those rhythms together.12

BROKEN ASSUMPTIONS

eople Make Rational DeciBefore we can really tack- P sions le building next-genera- Neurologically speaking, the ability is an emotional capacity. tion governance, we may toThedecide rational weighing of pros and continues ad infinitum without have to shake up some cons the emotional will to bring it to cloand act. But that’s just the tip of of the assumptions hold- sure the iceberg of this problem. have to oversimplify issues for ing us back. After all, we We people to understand them. Our is impaired by hundreds can’t build something on reasoning of cognitive biases. We say and do to be accepted by our peers disproven ideals and ex- things and groups, and let our need for or preoccupation with pect it to work, no matter acceptance immediate desires overshadow our how comfortable they are ability to perceive things rationally. to cling to.

People Follow Procedures

We need a breakthrough in large-scale collective wisdom.

Arthur Brock

Interestingly, it’s possible to create social processes which help keep our irrationality in check. For example, models like Holacracy, have you speak from a role or responsibility that you have, rather than from your personal beliefs or preferences.

Good social processes are compelling and following them can become deeply embedded in the culture of

a group. However, humans aren’t robots, and the more contrived, structured, and rational you make a process, the fewer people tend to enjoy or adhere to it. Even when people mostly follow a procedure, they won’t follow it consistently.

We all agree driving on the correct side of the road is important, yet we bend that rule when we think circumstances warrant it. When people know the system is preventing them from doing what they feel is right, they find ways to get around the system, even when they agree with most of its workings.13 Governance Should Treat Everyone Equally We are not equal. We have differences — different interests, attention spans, beliefs, expectations, strengths, weaknesses, skills, habits, languages, etc. The real goal is to be treated equitably and fairly, not as identical interchangeable units.

In an era of massive customization — of media, products, art, and experiences — why should we be stuck with one-size-fits-all governance?

Direct democracy, enables people

to participate directly in discussion and voting on individual issues rather than isolating everyone from direct participation through representatives. Liquid democracy enables people to delegate their votes to people based on specific topics or domains.

Voting Works It reduces rich, nuanced discourse to a one-dimensional sum of numbers.

Even if you use more advanced runoff techniques or pairwise comparison algorithms, you basically reduce issues to a popularity contest. Just because something is currently popular doesn’t make it good or wise.

Knowing how popular something is can be extremely useful, especially for understanding paths to adoption, but aren’t their better ways of making good decisions? Speaking from my experience, every setting where voting was used to decide things were less satisfying (in terms of quality of decisions, an experience of participation, and believe you could effect needed changes) than groups where the process for discourse went deep enough that alignment was clear without a need for counting votes.

We Can Have more Parties/Elect Better Representatives Putting aside the fact that concentrating power into the hands of a small number of representatives makes it easy for the wealthy to target their influence and manipulate those “representatives.”

At least not in the general sense, that across all issues someone who doesn’t even know me could be said to represent my perspective or interest in net neutrality, military spending, drug enforcement, funding for arts, immigration policy, etc.

Realistically, the more power becomes aggregated or concentrated, a system ends up with poorer discourse and is easier to manipulate.

Laws Should Be Carefully Deliberated and Made to Last

Transparency

We Know What Decisions To Make

We favor transparency and see a commitment to it as admirable. Yet transparency often doesn’t accomplish what we hope. In some cases, people feel vulnerable to attacks or persecution from disagreeing parties. In other cases, it creates uncomfortable tension between personal inclinations and social pressures.

But the sticky point for me is that data taken out of context is not information, it is misinformation.

When you have attained the level of expertise to be involved in making decisions about a complex issue, then you are using specialized language in your discourse which is inherently opaque to people outside. People outside of your context and domain of specialization can hear/see the same words, but they don’t have the same meaning.

It might have been much easier to address sustainable energy use or C02 emissions if we designed all our technology with that in mind from the beginning. But we didn’t yet know it mattered.

And now that we’re addicted to convenience and certain lifestyles, it’s much harder to change course. Everything is connected, but our decision-making processes can’t deal with the complexity of “everything.” So we chop the world into arbitrary parts and convince ourselves our cutting, and our understanding of that segment is good enough to make useful decisions about it.

We significantly overestimate our ability to predict the outcomes of our decisions, while underestimating our cognitive biases and corruption by a self-serving influence of special interests feeding those biases. In my experience, agile/ adaptive governance approaches outperform structures which focus heavily on the decision-making process. When we minimize the cost of trying something, learning from it and changing it if we didn’t get it right, then we’re leveraging human intelligence in the learning, rather than in predicting an unknown future.14

WHAT SHOULD WE REMEMBER

NEED TO ACT FAST

TOO MUCH INFORMATION

NOT ENOUGH MEANING

Living systems on every scale have governance — methods of self-regulation to manage the coherence and continuity of the system. Also, for steering toward goals or away from dangers. This governance is not the same as a government.

Government as we know it is a blunt instrument designed to enforce the will of the many over the few (although at this point it enforces the will of few on the many) It is a monolithic bureaucracy. And frankly, it isn’t very good at governance, at least not as defined in this few sentences.

Arthur Brock

The Nature of Change Notice that governance includes both conserving continuity and making progress. All living systems have this tension between being conservative and progressive. Progressive: Adapt or die — change is required. A system which cannot

adapt to changing circumstances will get steamrolled by them. Furthermore, we want more than just adapting to survive, but evolving to improve and thrive. We want to move toward goals and higher quality of life. And we want to be able to perceive and avoid dangers and respond deftly when confronted by them. Conservative: Maintain integrity or fly apart. What makes a system

work is the pattern of self-regulation it has established: feedback loops, dynamic balances, flows which nourish all the parts of a whole, so the whole can function. Disruption of the integrity of these patterns brings death even more quickly than a failure to evolve.

False Enemies Globally, politics polarizes around that tension: conservative vs. progressive. This is a false choice. Both are mandatory. It doesn’t matter whether we like it or not. When the world around you is changing, and that change is accelerating, the question is never whether to change or stay the same.

The questions we must confront are: What changes are vital? (to survival and goals) How do we implement those changes in a way that doesn’t destroy the integrity of what works?

Selecting a conservative vs. a progressive candidate is a false choice that we are forced to make because of broken architectures of governments.

GOVERNANCE The Failure of Representative Democracy 1. One person can’t actually represent many.

Maybe if we sit down and you tell me your concerns and commitments about an issue, then I could represent you (and myself) on that issue.

But as you add a few more people, that gets increasingly difficult. Now make it millions of people that I don’t talk to directly and make it apply to all issues. What are the chances I’m really representing you? Is it even possible that I could come close to representing that kind of population across the complex range of issues that officials are supposed to make decisions about?

2. Party Affiliation: A two-party system reduces politics down to voting for a conservative or progressive. Multi-party politics isn’t much better as it still reduces the range of discourse down to the ideological platform of the party. Voter choices go from 2 to 3 or 5, which is nowhere near the level of complexity of choice that we need for navigating the world we’re in.

3. Non-Local Issues: Particularly, at the level

of the Federal government, most of the decisions made have little to do with locale. Local decisions are certainly made on neighborhood, municipal, and loosely state levels. (Many states are too big be “local” ) So we are constrained to voting by party and locale. These factors map very poorly to the real world challenges we need to collectively navigate.

A World too Big, Fast, and Complex The Constitution was written for the Agrarian Republic. The level of complexity that officials were expected to confront absolutely did not include things like Nuclear Power and Weaponry, Electronic Surveillance, Climate Change, Net Neutrality, Air Traffic Control, etc.

The politicians have on even basic workings of some of these issues. They can’t be experts on everything, especially when their job security is mostly tied to schmoozing influential funders.

We have politicians without the right expertise, with inherent conflicts of interest by who they have to please to keep getting campaign funds,

who can’t possibly represent the complexity of their constituency, and are elected by association with ideological simplifications … and we pretend there’s a chance of good governance from this setup. The bureaucracy simply doesn’t have the throughput to keep up with the increased complexity of issues and the pace that the world is changing.

The End of Old World Order The government was already dying. The gap between what it had become and what we need it to be was becoming intolerable for too many people. That is part of what enabled Trump to get his foot in the door of the presidency, and if his first week in office is any indication, his team will dismantle much, and quickly.

This is not business as usual. They are not playing by the old rules. There is a good chance that they won’t acknowledge any established means of reclaiming the power they’ve seized. Not by impeachment. Not by the next election. Not by constitutional convention. Spending your energy on those things will likely be energy lost. We’ll see

if I’m right about this, but if I am, that means our only real alternative is to build the next generation of self-governance that reclaims the powers we’ve surrendered to the government.

It will need to be a P2P, fully-distributed, digital democracy that will be so different from how we think of government, that it may better be thought of as a kind of social network. You jump on, scan your feed, participate in conversations you’re interested in, weigh in with “likes” or other similar feedback, etc.15

+

I take the example of this year’s Italian elections because in the meantime thanks to the articles by Arthur Brock, I am becoming aware of how alternatives exist in today’s model of society. This makes me become bruised, as injustice takes place in Italy under the gaze of everyone. Unfortunately, as a people, we are welcoming but also easy to exploit because we are too proud of ourselves. Without seeing beyond the shadow of what has been the largest and most grandiose empire in the world. Albori of an era that is now only a memory, but many of which, and unfortunately, I would dare to say even little-cultured people, hope or still believe. After all, was not Brexit a nostalgic vision of the rebirth of the British colonial empire?

Italian elections - 4 March 2018 LEFT MOVEMENT

MOVEMENT OF CENTER

RIGHT COALITION

You can hate Matteo Renzi, you may think that the current ruling class of the Democratic Party is too centrist or slave of the usual unions (both these criticisms are very widespread), that it is too hard or too soft with the migrants (both these criticisms are very widespread), that the 80 euros was a stupid way to spend the money, that the Good School is a failure, and so on.

The worst thing: a small group of good-for-nothing - a few in good faith, others in bad faith - who lie constantly, who uses complete incompetence as a flag, who gets consents blowing on our worst instincts, which is disastrously everywhere governments, he was not even able to make electoral lists and a program without making mistakes by amateurs, who could not manage a condominium and is directly controlled by a consulting firm. All the other small parties did not have any influence on the final choice, just make sure that their representatives take part in the parliament.16

The center-right coalition is not a coalition, it does not have a leader and has no common projects except for some empty slogans. It is enormously more dangerous and farcical than the one that between 2008 and 2013 has literally dragged the country one step away from the bankruptcy and the complete Greece-style commissioner, that is, one step away from the moment when perhaps the money you have in the bank is not worth nothing more, to understand each other.

All while his boss, who incidentally was also head of the government of Italy, was tried for tax fraud and child prostitution

MOVEMENT OF CENTER

227/630

LEGA (right)

124/630

PD (left)

112/630

FORZA ITALIA (right)

106/630

FRATELLI D’ITALIA (right)

31/630

OTHERS (left and right)

30/630

ELECTION OVERVIEW

ABSTRACT: We present a cryptocurrency design pattern scalable and

efficient enough to operate on the global scale without specialized hardware and without consensus. We combine the principles of double-entry accounting with cryptographic signing to instantiate a new form of tokenless cryptocurrency. We provide optimizations to enable the tracking and billing for the trillions of network interactions per second required to run a global-scale, decentralized hosting platform. We propose a blend of automation (akin to smart contracts) with engineered visibility to enable better decisions by human agents. Finally, we explore security considerations​ ​relative​ ​to​ ​blockchain​ ​based​ ​currencies.17

HOLOCHAIN

This team has been designing alternative cur-

rencies inside a Living Systems Model of Wealth for over a decade and a half. We’ve been trying to get people to look beyond the extractive nature of money to “Current-Sees” as widespread tools for coordination and collective intelligence — not for getting rich.

They launched Holochain as an alternative to blockchain precisely because blockchain is so destructive — not only from an electricity waste perspective but because its only useful application so far is Tokenization — turning everything in the world into fungible tokens. Even if they solved their energy problems, they’d still be eating the planet turning everything into gambling chips. Holochain solves blockchain’s energy problem and so much more because its fundamental design is based on the scaling patterns found in nature. It doesn’t need a currency built into it, because it’s efficient enough to make it worthwhile running just so you get to keep your own data instead of giving it over to Facebook, Google, or other big corporations.

And the first currency we’re building on top of it is not a crypto coin (we won’t build any of those) but a mutual-credit, value-stable, asset-backed, crypto-accounting framework for P2P applications. Theyr systems are not designed for hiding digital anonymous cash, but for building social coherence by holding people to account for shared agreements.

Alternate Approach: Parallel Chains with Intrinsic Data Integrity Managing consensus about a shared reality is a central challenge at the heart of all distributed computing solutions. The bitcoin blockchain made a big step forward in practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, by creating blocks of many transactions (with a 10 minute delay and randomized selection to append the block), instead of getting consensus about the sequence of thousands of transactions in a hash chain, it gives you 10 minutes to collect transactions, and then your peers just validate (signatures and unspent tokens) on the whole block. Currently, the bitcoin blockchain has grown to almost 65GB and can only process 7 transactions per second. If we want to democratize money by hav-

ing cryptocurrencies become a significant and viable means of transacting on a daily basis, they believe we need fundamentally more scalable approaches that don’t require expensive, dedicated hardware just to participate. Luckily, if we only enforce consensus where consensus is actually what’s needed, the nature of the problem changes drastically. We need consensus about whether a domain name has been registered, who owns it and where it points to.

Replicate the same processes across all nodes When two parties want to do a transaction, and each can have confidence their own code, and the results that your code produces. Then you treat it as authoritative and commit it to your local cryptographically self-validating data store.

Empower every node with full agency Allowing each node to treat itself as a full authority to process transactions (or interactions via shared protocols) is exactly how you empower each node with full agency. Each node runs its copy of the signed program/processes on its own virtual machine, taking the transaction request combined with the transaction chains of the parties to the transaction. Each node can confirm their counterparty’s integrity by replaying their transactions to produce their current state while confirming signatures and integrity of the chain.

If both nodes are in an appropriate state which allows the current transaction, then they countersign the transaction and append to their respective chains.

When your node appends a mutually validated and signed Transaction to its chain, it has updated its local state and is able to represent the integrity of its data locally. As long as each transaction (link in the chain) has valid linkages and countersignatures, we can know that it hasn’t been tampered with. Integrity, then all nodes can interact in parallel, independent of other interactions to maximize scalability and simultaneous processing. Either the node has the credits or it doesn’t. I don’t have to refer to a global ledger to find out, the state of the node is in the countersigned, tamper-proof chain.

Establish protocols for interaction Any transaction is just a special kind of communication according to a specific grammar or protocol. For example, “Transfer X units of Currency Y from Account A to Account B for This Described Purpose.” Just like any meaningful communication, a protocol needs to be established to make sure that a transaction carries all the information needed for each node to run the processes and produce a new signed and chained state.

It turns out when you focus on distributing process first you end up with even more greatly distributed data. This is because each participant holds only their own data. In contrast, blockchains store everybody’s transactions in a single database that every node verifies and copies.

The underlying foundation of distributed process enables deeper distribution of data and parallel architectures.

Customizable Containers Another noteworthy observation about humans, cells, and atoms, is that each has a general “container” that gets configured to a specific use. The human brain has specialized sections for language processing, but we can learn whatever language was raised in (plus more). The Receptors we’ve built are a general purpose framework which can load code for different distributed applications.

Building certain universal capacities into these receptors makes the job much easier for the developer of a distributed application or cryptocurrency because the bulk of the infrastructure is already present for managing distributed processes, DHTs, and the validation, distribution, and release of code.

Core Currency Design Principle: Mutual Credit The means to design better, more equitable currencies has come a long way in the past 500 years. So, it is probably a good idea to integrate best practices from community currencies instead of just basing the design on the money.

Most people think that money is just money, but there are literally hundreds of decisions you can make in designing a currency to target particular needs, niches, communities or patterns of flow.

Some seemingly small decisions end up having large effects when iterated over centuries and billions of transactions. But, for the moment, let’s just stick to one core design principle regarding how units in a currency are issued.

Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat “spoken into being” (the meaning of “fiat” in Latin) currencies.

They create tokens or coins from nothing. Bitcoin does this through mining, allowing the miner who completes a complex processing task first, to commit the next block of transactions to the chain along with a transaction that creates a bunch of new coins. You wouldn’t need to manage consensus about whether a crypto coin is spent if your system created accounts which have normal balances based on summing their transactions.

There’s a name for this completely peer-to-peer approach to issuing managing a currency supply: mutual credit. In a mutual credit system, units of currency are issued when a participant extends credit to another user in a standard spending transaction. Picture a new mutual credit currency with all acacounts having a zero balance.

The first transaction could look like this: Alice pays Bob 20 credits for a haircut. Alice’s account now has -20, and Bob’s has +20.

Notice the net number units in the system remains zero, just like the balance sheet in standard accounting must always balance to zero. That accounting practice places no limits on the amount of cash or assets a business can have; it simply means they are offset by an equal amount of liabilities or equity. Every negative balance in a mutual credit system is offset by positive balances so there is always a system wide 0 balance. You could think of the total number of units in circulation at any time as the sum of all the negative balances (or if you prefer, the sum of positive balances since they are the same number).

But wait , logically— Alice spent credits she didn’t have! That’s exactly how the issuance of mutual credit works. Managing the currency supply in a mutual credit system is about managing credit limits — how far people can spend into a negative balance. 18

One elegant approach to managing mutual credit limits is to set them based on actual demand. You can calculate credit limits to be an equivalent of what you can pay back in 3 months (or another arbitrary period) based on the transaction history of each account (with a couple of anti-gaming modifications). This allows the currency supply to expand and contract based on the actual usage patterns of the community which demonstrate the market demand for the value people are providing.

Minimum Viable Mutual Cryptocurrency Instead of sending a check or wiring money through a bank or Western Union, hundreds of millions of people transfer money through the hawala system. Hawala is a network of merchants and businessmen, which has been operating since the middle ages, performing money transfers on an honor system and typically settling balances through merchandise instead of transferring money. It works like this: a laborer building a skyscraper in Dubai wants to send some of his earnings homes to his family in Egypt. He goes into a store in Dubai, gives the owner, who is a hawaladar, 1,200 UAE Dirham in cash, and provides a passphrase for collecting the cash. The hawaladar calls a hawaladar he knows in Egypt and arranges for an equivalent sum in Egyptian Pounds to be picked up using that password. The laborer calls his wife and tells her the password and at which store to collect the money. Each hawaladar makes a record on their own books of the debt, which is eventually settled by applying it as a discount to merchandise going from Dubai to Egypt.

More Scalable Security: Notaries + DHT Since some communities don’t have much social accountability, relationship, or clear personal identity and reputation, the minimal implementation above may not quite be enough. It has a vulnerability which is why I added a “denounce” transaction above to blacklist cheaters. It would be possible for someone to hack the code on their node to “forget” their most recent transaction (drop the head of their chain), and go back to their previous version of the chain before that transaction. Then they could append a new transaction, drop it, and append again.

After both parties have signed the agreed upon transaction, each party submits the transaction to separate notaries. Notaries are a special class of participant who validates transactions (auditing each chain, ensuring nobody passes through an invalid state), and then they sign an outer envelope which includes the signatures of the two parties. Notaries agree to run high-availability servers which collectively manage a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) servicing requests for transaction information. As their incentive for providing this infrastructure, notaries get a small transaction fee.19

CONCLUSION It is not only possible but far more scalable to build cryptocurrencies without a global ledger consensus approach or cryptographic tokens.

There are actually NO decentralized cryptocurrencies in existence because none of them have effectively decentralized decisions about the evolution of their code yet.

They are lowering the barriers to entry for groups and communities to create new distributed commons for sharing resources (think Uber, Lyft, CouchSurfing.com, Airbnb, Craigslist, Freecycling, etc) without a central corporation in the middle — able to be launched, hosted, and maintained by its participants — they call this a Sovereign Accountable Commons.

To achieve this, every one of those new commons will need multiple decentralized currencies embedded in the management and metrics of the system. Most will be non-monetary currencies, tracking ratings, feedback, reliability, timeliness, or other dimensions of reputation. Some will be monetary tokens for an exchange of value. All need an infrastructure that doesn’t require a mountain of venture capital to launch and an army of geeks to maintain They believe this is the foundation of the next networked economy. And they want to ensure we’re not carrying over the same broken assumptions and patterns in the currency that perpetuate structural problems of inherent inequity. We can’t just replace the banking elite with a geek elite. We need to be able to build using the same organizational patterns as living systems.20

POSI - the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does by Stafford Beer. -

POSIWID

is a systems thinking heuristic coined by Stafford Beer. The term is widely used by systems theorists. It is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can be read from the intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it. It is important always to focus upon what a system (whatever that may be - an individual, an organization, a machine or anything else that fits the definition) actually does, not upon what one imagines it should be doing or what someone claims it does. As long as it continues doing it and continues maintaining its own ability to do it, whatever it is doing is its purpose. Patrick Hoverstadt added: “This apparently simple mantra has huge ramifications.

It forces us to look seriously at what our organizations actually do and not just hide behind the mantra of our good intentions.�21

If the goal of society is

what it does, then it means that we are in an evolutionary point of the human species in which we are at the level of social and human values, stopped if not impoverished. We are more and more accustomed and indifferent to injustice, because at the mercy of a change of our dynamics and beliefs too fast to be able to have control. It does not want to be a pessimistic thought but rather a critical thought of how human beings have returned to a dark era, like the medieval one, only surrounded by screens, pixels, and vices.

Trevor Hilder, graduated in Theology & Philosophy after Initially studying Theoretical Physics. He pioneered corporate ICT training, use of microcomputers in business and PC-hosted database systems, subsequently managing numerous large-scale ICT projects for diverse businesses.Since learning Systems Thinking from Stafford Beer, the founder of Management Cybernetics, he has applied it to complex problems with carefully selected small teams.He coined the term "moral modalities".22 Here some assumptions to start to interrogate yourself across the posiwid theory of Stafford Beer and be possibly interested to know more about moral modalities.

IWID 13579 2 4 6 8 10 The unequal distribution of money is a recurring theme through history and the media of exchange available for use by those who actually do productive work are restricted to whatever those with a coercive advantage allow. Such restrictions are applied by diverse threats, either explicit or implicit.

Any politician or government claiming to serve the interests of all citizens while acting to preserve currently dominant economic structures are in a state of “double-think”. Currently, individuals are treated largely as expendable, competing organisms within an ecosystem rather than as organs to be nurtured within a body.

The “trickle down” effect is a myth. Dominant economic structures currently ensure that resources are drawn “upwards” from those with least to those who already hold and control most.

Our planet has finite resources and finite capacity to tolerate the unconstrained expansion of human extractive activity. Although the biosphere it supports has considerable capacity for self-repair and the maintenance of a temporary homeostatic condition, that capacity is finite.23

The fate of humanity is inextricably coupled to that of all other life, to an extent we can still only begin to observe. Even if biophilia were not an intrinsic value to many, the health of the biosphere to which we are structurally coupled must be valued as greatly as our own.

Earth can provide more than sufficient resources to meet the needs of all of its inhabitants, and yet millions are starving, homeless and otherwise suffering unnecessarily as a consequence of resource misdistribution.

Any assumption that certain individuals or groups of individuals have an absolute right to prosper at the expense of others is ultimately incompatible with the requirements of a connected and self-preserving global population.

The only “laws” that matter in the longer term is those of physics, mathematics, logic and the diverse natural laws (chemistry, biology, ecology, etc.) that follow from them. In contrast, human laws, those artificially constraining human activity, may be viewed as temporary fixes, often remnants of responses to emergent consequences of prior situations.

Economic entities (including corporations) which maximize self-interest through externalization of costs are essentially cancerous growths within the larger but finite planetary system.

The term “wealth” has lost its essential meaning through catachresis. Henry George said: “The word wealth is plenty or abundance; that of the possession of things conducive to a certain kind of weal or well-being” and ”as social health must mean something different from individual health, so social wealth, or the wealth of the society.

The masses will always be below average.

The greater the age will lower, the barrier of the sex will fall, and the democracy will arrive at the absurd giving the decisions around the greater things to the most incapable. It will be the punishment of its abstract principle of equality, which dispenses the ignorant to educate himself, the imbecile to judge, the child to be a man and the criminal to correct himself. Public law based on equality will fall apart because of its consequences. Because it does not recognize the inequality of value, merit, experience, that is individual fatigue: it will culminate in the triumph of dregs and cultural flattening. We will pay the adoration of appearances.

Henri-FrĂŠdĂŠric Amiel, June 12th, 1871

The perception of the future has changed in the last decade.

3.

PERPLEXITY

Today's perspective includes global warming, mass biological extinctions, growing social inequality, people who, instead of being freed from work, are simply without work and a concrete perspective of wars and tensions. We can hope that today's pessimism is unfounded, as is the optimism of the past, but we can not be sure: it will depend on our choices today.

Science and technology continue to advance but there is a gap between the two. Soon we will progress on our knowledge of the world, but it will not change much from how we live today. Technological development is actually slowing down. Just think of the changes that our grandparents lived: radio, television, telephone, lighting, cars, airplanes, the man on the moon and the atomic bomb. The generations that have seen the extermination of the inhabitants of America, the fall of the Roman Empire, the black plague in Europe, the industrial revolution and the Russian one, have experienced on the skin changes much more radical than the current ones. Yes, we are in a period of great change, but what affects us in the first person are the consequences of an effect due to technology, which we perceive only recently, seeing our inability to learn from history and reverse individualistic values ​​in a world now lived globally. We are afraid of it and it seems enormous because we have no real awareness of what is happening, we do not really perceive it. A modern phenomenon, unfortunately, is the rekindling of local realities. Having a reading of the artificial world: a group of individuals geographically close to us, are declared “like us” and we see others as “others”. We are beginning to distinguish ourselves by race and religion, as in the darkest periods of history. Ironic since fifty years ago, the world was divided between large collective projects: communism against the free market, for example. Politics, revolution, liberation were values ​​perceived as universal. To characterize the present is a vision instead of tribalism. Only fables that unite and divide human beings, in a game to rediscover our individuality in a world that now seems too vast and frightening. To avoid mass manipulations or disasters on a global scale perhaps, it is time to think of ourselves as citizens of the planet not as tribesmen, collaboration instead of competition, if we were looking for meeting points rather than colliding with each other. From the danger of ignorance, we must use a little reasonableness because science and technology cannot do it. Technology does not make mistakes. The fears that torment us today are unemployment, corruption, poverty, crime, access to health, pollution and terrorism. In all this, the media have a fundamental role in shaping opinions and, consequently, also in fears. Today the fruition of the media and the date information tend to be superficial, characterized by the “titles” decreasing the space to understanding and deepening the phenomena. Between television and the web, with the multiplicative effect of opinions, there is often the spread of unfounded news.24

There is a famous Russian saying that reads: "The past is unpredictable, the future is certain". I confess that lately, I am thinking of these words often.

I think about it while, looking around, I realize that we continue to re-examine the events of the last two years, starting from the election of Donald Trump, with renewed surprise. I think of it as we imagine the future with ever-increasing terror. If I had to try to identify the problem, I would say this: we have developed too advanced technologies, and we have done it in too little time, without even trying to take into consideration what the implications or consequences could be.

Perhaps, the truth is that we are not biologically ready, as living beings, for all the information we receive every moment.

Carlo Rovelli

Unfortunately, even if included in the chat with the few people who are thinking about a new government system and technological currency, fair for everyone(Holochain).

I find it hard to bring out my voice and be taken into consideration. I do not blame them, they are doing something spectacular and incredible. I can say that I do not have the right “reputation” to be able to approach them. But thanks to my abilities instead of acting directly in a project that is not mine and of which I have little technical and practical competence, I can support their actions through a much more ancient challenge of money: challenge the ignorance of today’s people about technology. How it works, who controls it (you, you or who creates it). This hinders any change but above all makes any solution more difficult if not understood and supported. Below I will analyze and better research today’s society in relation to an individual. How it is working and what are the technological implications in our society. If you want to try to create a reaction you must first understand how to move people’s conscience on difficult, important, and crucial issues to create possibilities and solutions.

We live in an information

society. A society where the creation, distribution, use, integration, and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity. Its main drivers are digital information and communication technologies, which have resulted in an information explosion and are profoundly changing all aspects of social organization, including the economy, education, health, warfare, government, and democracy. The People who have the means to partake in this form of society are sometimes called digital citizens, defined by

K. Mossberger as “Those who use the Internet regularly and effectively”. This is one of many dozen labels that have been identified to suggest that humans are entering a new phase of society. Information technology goes beyond the internet, and there are discussions about how big the influence of specific media or specific modes of production really is. Frank Webster notes five major types of information that can be used to define information society: technological, economic, occupational, spatial and cultural. According to Webster, the character of information has transformed

the way that we live today.

How we conduct ourselves centers around theoretical knowledge and information.26

Percentage of people who said they could not live without a cell phone 79%

53%

51%

49%

36%

SOCIETY

Van Dijk has defined the idea “network soci-

ety” as a form of a society increasingly organizing its relationships in media networks gradually replacing or complementing the social networks of face-to-face communication. Personal and social-network communication is supported by digital technology. This means that social and media networks are shaping the prime mode of organization and most important structures of modern society. Van Dijk's. The Network Society describes what the network society is and what it might be like in the future. The first conclusion of this book is that modern society is in a process of becoming a network society. This means that on the internet interpersonal, organizational, and mass communication come together. People become linked to one another and have access to information and communication with one another constantly. Using the internet brings the “whole world” into homes and workplaces. Also, when media like the internet becomes even more advanced it will gradually appear as “normal media” in the first decade of the 21st century as it becomes used by larger sections of the population and by vested interests in the economy, politics, and culture. It asserts that paper means of communication will become out of date, with newspapers and letters becoming ancient forms for spreading information. Other kinds of communities arise. Daily living and working environ-

CHINA

ments are getting smaller and more heterogeneous, while the range of the division of labor, interpersonal communications and mass media extends. So, the scale of the network society is both extended and reduced as compared to the mass society. The scope of the network society is both global and local, sometimes indicated as “glocal”. The organization of its components (individuals, groups, organizations) is no longer tied to particular times and places. Aided by information and communication technology, these coordinates of existence can be transcended to create virtual times and places and to simultaneously act, perceive and think in global and local terms.27 Digital divide

A digital divide is an economic and social inequality with regard to access to, use of, or impact of information and communication technologies.

The divide within countries may refer to inequalities between individuals, households, businesses, or geographic areas, usually at different socioeconomic levels or other demographic categories. The divide between different countries or regions of the world is referred to as the global digital divide, examining this technological gap between developing and developed countries on

GB

USA

ITA

JAP

an international scale.

The term digital divide describes a gap in terms of access to and usage of information and communication technology. It was traditionally considered to be a question of having or not having access, but with a global mobile phone penetration of over 95%, it is becoming a relative inequality between those who have more and less bandwidth and more or fewer skills. Conceptualizations of the digital divide have been described as "who, with which characteristics, connects how to what": Who is the subject that connects: individuals, organizations, enterprises, schools, hospitals, countries, etc.

Which characteristics or attributes are distinguished to describe the divide: income, education, age, geographic location, motivation, reason not to use, etc.

How sophisticated is the usage: mere access, retrieval, interactivity, intensive and extensive in usage, innovative contributions, etc.

To what does the subject connect: fixed or mobile, Internet or telephony, digital TV, broadband, etc.28 The “digital divide” is also referred to by a variety of other terms which have similar meanings, though may have a slightly different emphasis: digital inclusion, digital participation, basic digital skills, media literacy and digital accessibility.

Political advertising online needs transparency and understanding. Political advertising online has rapidly become a sophisticated industry. The fact that most people get their information from just a few platforms and the increasing sophistication of algorithms drawing upon rich pools of personal data, means that political campaigns are now building individual adverts targeted directly at users. One source suggests that in the 2016 US election, as many as 50,000 variations of adverts were being served every single day on Facebook, a near-impossible situation to monitor. And there are suggestions that some political adverts – in the US and around the world - are being used in unethical ways – to point voters to fake news sites, for instance, or to keep others away from the polls. Targeted advertising allows a campaign to say completely different, possibly conflicting things to different groups. Is that democratic? We need more algorithmic transparency to understand how important decisions that affect our lives are being made, and perhaps a set of common principles to be followed. We urgently need to close the “internet blind spot” in the regulation 29 of political campaigning.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee GLOBALIZATION Risk 20% 20% 29% 38% 33%

Opportunity GB

54%

SPAIN

49% USA ITALY FRANCE

39% 28% 26%

GLOBALIZATION Fadi Chehadé, former director of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), proposed an innovative solution to manage the web, bringing together transactional realities: public, private, with the aim of developing a series of open digital protocols. Chehadé imagines three levels: the first is that of competence and experts; the second is responsibility and law; the third is that of the infrastructure of the global "network of networks", which should be coordinated by a central authority. This is how international politics works in the digital age.

Digital technologies, for better or for worse, have a democratizing effect. National states will not disappear soon, because they continue to hold enormous power and superior legitimacy of any other system of government. The administration of a state will remain an important discipline for its officials. The art of administering networks, however, in the world of the twenty-first century, formed by the Internet and by economic, civil, educational, religious, social and criminal connections on the globe, will be a discipline open to all.30

INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY “If everyone was to behave like us then the world would be a better place — we would be able to get rid of guilt, inequality, competition, greed, and anger”."If we all ate less and were less materialistic the world would be a better place.” “Only by changing ourselves can we change the world, by our living example.” This is the one foundational belief system of every intentional community that all members can agree on. This was also the justification that the hippies used for practically everything. The theory goes like this: Instead of acting in the world, all you have to do is become a peaceful, non-violent person — a model human, and others will follow your model. This is how you change the world, by focusing entirely on yourself. It is a way of thinking only in terms of intentions and not of consequences. You may declare outstanding universalist intentions for world peace, but what are the actual consequences? Ex. What are the consequences for the Global economy of 1000 people in the west dropping out of the consumption cycle and growing their own vegetables? Zero. You can do this as a way to make yourself feel better about your consumption choices, but if you use “changing the world” as a justification, then you are deluding yourself.

Those who use organic food as a metaphor for self-perfection fail to grasp that not everyone in the world can afford to eat or grow organic vegetables and to drop out of capitalism: it is technically impossible to feed the entire population of the planet with organic produce.31

New media is the con-

cept that new methods of communicating in the digital world allow smaller groups of people to congregate online and share, sell and swap goods and information. It also allows more people to have a voice in their community and in the world in general. The most important structural characteristic of new media is the integration of telecommunications technologies. The second structural new media characteristic of the current communications revolution is the rise of interactive media. Interactivity is a sequence of action and reaction. The downloaded link or the supply side of websites, interactive television and computer programs is much wider than the uplink or retrieval made by their users. The third, technical, characteristic of new media

is digital code.

Jerry Michalski, futurist and founder of REX, replied, “The trustworthiness of our information environment will decrease over the next decade because 1. It is inexpensive and easy for bad actors to act badly; 2.

Potential technical solutions based on strong ID and public voting (for example) won’t quite solve the problem, and 3. real solutions based on actual trusted relationships will take time to evolve – likely more than a decade.”

Many people expressed concerns about how people’s struggles to find and apply accurate information contribute to a larger social and political problem: There is a growing deficit in commonly accepted facts or some sort of cultural “common ground.” Why has this happened? They cited several reasons:

Online echo chambers or silos divide people into separate camps, at times even inciting them to express anger and hatred at a volume not seen in previous communications forms.

Information overload crushes people’s attention spans. Their coping mechanism is to turn to entertainment or other lighter fare.

High-quality journalism has been decimated due to changes in the attention economy. They said these factors and others make it difficult for many people in the digital age to create and come to share the type of “common knowledge” that undergirds better and more-responsive public policy. A share of respondents said a lack of commonly shared knowledge leads many in society to doubt the reliability of everything, causing them to simply drop out of civic participation,

depleting the number of active and informed citizens.

Many of those who expect no improvement of the information environment said those who wish to spread misinformation are highly motivated to use innovative tricks to stay ahead of the methods meant to stop them. They said certain actors in government, business and other individuals with propaganda agendas are highly driven to make technology work in their favor in the spread of misinformation, and there will continue to be more of them.

“The quality of information will not improve in the coming years, because technology can’t improve human nature all that much.”

Christian H. Huitema

Technology corporations have lately become incredibly wealthy and powerful by controlling and exploiting access to the information we all create. These corporations abuse the control they exercise over all of our data, our work and our networks, because they can and because it is profitable for them to do so. From monitoring our shopping and browsing habits to manipulating what mood we are in or whether we vote, these corporations are replacing our traditional governance and media structures with corporate dictatorships that have no social interest and exist to provide maximum profit for shareholders. Their users tolerate this abusive relationship because they don't want to lose all the years worth of data or the networks of contacts they have created.32

INFO

WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media provided by anonymous sources. Its website, initiated in 2006 in Iceland by the organization Sunshine Press, claims a database of 10 million documents in 10 years since its launch.33

“Information must be a human right. Governance is not by democracy or consent if we are denied the information we require in order to make decisions or if we are misled with false information. It is not enough to declare freedom of speech or internet access as human rights. Technology must also be structured to facilitate access to accurate, verifiable information.�

34

Heather Marsh Net neutrality

How many of us are dealing with computers, tablets, and smartphones every day?

SOUTH AFRICA

GB

USA

GERMANY

ITALY

SPAIN

80%

75%

73%

58%

57%

45%

59%

58%

60%

53%

45%

18-24 yo

25-34 yo

35-44 yo

45-54 yo

55-64 yo

Never without social, how many of us access you at least once a day?

Free of speech The Internet has almost eliminated the barriers to the transmission of information. Today, to speak to a large audience, a smartphone and an account on a social media are sufficient. This transfer of power to individuals has been really exciting, but now we begin to see the consequences. With today's freedom of expression, constructed falsehoods, wrong interpretations, and false news follow. Some countries now use the providers to filter certain contents, considering them dangerous and capable of creating social unrest. Where will we set the limits? When does filtering turn into

censorship? How to combine cultural differences in a global internet now? If the tendency to filter the contents of the internet should be affirmed, it is possible that the filtered content would simply move into the deep web. Transparency is a key element in the assessment of the health of a company. Committed to filtering the opinions that we do not like or do not share, we run the risk of obscuring serious social problems: how to remain aware of what is happening in the world while limiting the consequences of the freedom to express hatred and falsehood? How 35 can the capacity for critical thinking be instilled?

Net Neutrality is at the same time a foundation principle for the internet and a guarantee of freedom. Since the beginning the network has treated all the data in the same way, without discrimination in terms of access and speed, avoiding that some specific services or applications enjoyed advantages against others. Today, this principle is no longer valid. Evan Green says: "Everywhere in the world, every great web service has grown thanks to public support, always promising benefits for everyone". "Many of these companies, however, now are monopolies, trying to use their status to get more money, have more power and control the flow of information on their networks, at the expense of, of course, everyone's access to information and freedom of expression ". What would happen if Net Neutrality really were outdated? The Internet would become more like television, where the voices you hear are mainstream or with more money. We would pay more to access the internet: censored, slowed down and checked. "The web has no boundaries, so the question is global".36

Mute is good We live in a sort of golden age of silent, like the dawn of cinematography: from the gifs that are repeated in a loop to the comic videos like Charlie Chaplin. The most used formats are those that can be used without speakers or headphones.

"The success of these contents is compatible with today's life: they can be followed anywhere away from prying ears". "The captions or subtitles are the umpteenth evolution of the oldest public manifesto". More than a hundred years ago, thinking of the Lumière brothers, the important thing was to amaze, now that communication is pervasive it must be very fast: a video must capture the attention in a few seconds, hence the preference for strong, unusual and fast images sequence. Everything is part of a more and more use of smartphones by the multiplication of our range of attention: silent is also the advertising films shown at the station or in airports, and the short promotional videos that appear on TV. Silent videos are a clue to how our way of communicating will evolve.37

FAKE

NEWS + Fake news is a type of yellow

journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media. This false information is mainly distributed by social media but is periodically circulated through mainstream media. Fake news is written and published with the intent to mislead in order to damage an agency, entity, or person, and/or gain financially or politically, often using sensationalist, dishonest, or

outright fabricated headlines to increase readership, online sharing, and Internet click revenue. In the latter case, it is similar to sensational online "clickbait" headlines and relies on advertising revenue generated from this activity, regardless of the veracity of the published stories.

Intentionally misleading and deceptive fake news is different from obvious satire or parody, which is intended to amuse rather than mislead its audience. How could we not foresee all the ways in which a certain piece of news, relaunched and shared by various sources, can be manipulated and modified? Why did not we prepare ourselves for the so-called alternative facts or fake news? Looking to tomorrow, it is difficult not to think of a future in which reality itself is not changed, in which faces and voices can be changed to make the people who have never said things and to question the things that those people actually did.38 The Voco project of Adobe develops a sort of Photoshop of acoustic waves, to produce something that sounds natural, substituting waveforms with pixels. “Already in the course of 2018 good acting

skills and a small dose of bad intentions will be enough to create a vocal personification so successful as to deceive, confuse, infuriate and mobilize public opinion.” What consequences would the audio, counterfeit and public domain, of a world leader who declares warlike declarations?39 The facts, already in danger, could become a memory of the past. It is not absurd, then, to think that technology, the same that brought us to this precise moment, may not be able to help us get out of it.

We are constantly changing, and we are doing it also from the point of view of entertainment and the idea of ​​pleasure. With hindsight, pleasure is not the strongest human instinct, it is fear. Which is also the reason why every minute, in the world millions of people look at their phone, trying to know more and more about new threats and new fears.

Rather than freeing ourselves from our anguish and bringing us closer to each other, technology is making us slaves and leading us to a comatose state of perennial anxiety. it is the fear that drives us to want to know everything, always, at any moment. it is the fear that makes us

follow social media and makes us alarmed. And you do it endlessly, swirling, like in a vicious circle. We care about our future, as long as we continue to trust more of the technological devices than ourselves. As long as we talk more with these objects than with our peers. With the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, there has been an important change, almost radical, from optimism to pessimism and vice versa. Our fear, now, can be summarized in a question. And that is: “What will happen to us if our future is exactly the same as our present?”. What will happen if we discover that our species, humanity, has already reached its evolutionary peak and that we are now locked in place, unable to compromise to progress, refusing to improve because trapped in what seems to be the renewed war of a renewed stone age? The man of the future, in this scenario, must become an individual who trusts only what he can verify.

A different person. Who loves the stranger the same way he loves his neighbor. Who believes that hope, and not fear, can free him.40

It’s too easy for misinformation to spread on the web. Today, most people find news and information on the web through just a handful of social media sites and search engines. These sites make more money when we click on the links they show us. And, they choose what to show us based on algorithms which learn from our personal data that they are constantly harvesting. The net result is that these sites show us content they think we’ll click on – meaning that misinformation, or ‘fake news’, which is surprising, shocking, or designed to appeal to our biases can spread like wildfire. And through the use of data science and armies of bots, those with bad intentions can game the system to spread misinfor41 mation for financial or political gain.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

TRUST EVOLUTION OF TRUST

FNTST

LOCAL

Falsify News to Tell Society Truth

In a digital world where most people do not

have the slightest idea of ​​how the technological tools that affect their lives now work, a striking example is the activism of Anonymous and the truths given by Wikileaks.

Both survive thanks to the basic idea of ​​social justice in this digital age. The first by carrying out “terrorist” acts of information technology, the second is a non-profit association that releases articles on an”uncomfortable” truths.

From here I take my first extrapolation of a concrete thought about my research. Succeeding through a common idea and described through points. Which can be accessible to everyone, making every citizen an actor of the same and creator of content that go to create a reaction, in reality, sharing scientific facts and data through false truths. Finding in the fake news an excellent medium to make viral topics or articles. The objective is to tell and explain the technological truths of today’s society through a sort of propaganda that reveals the intentions behind the fake news itself. Ex. 1. Donald Trump believes in global warming; 2. It is explained by concrete facts and given the problem of global warming; 3. It is stated that Donald Trump never stated the first sentence.

DATA VISUALIZATION Data is now recognized as one of the founding pillars of our economy, and the notion that the world grows exponentially richer in data every day is already yesterday’s news. Big Data doesn’t belong to a distant dystopian future; it’s a commodity and an intrinsic and iconic feature of our present — like dollars, concrete, automobiles. The ways we relate to data are evolving more rapidly than we realize, and our minds and bodies are naturally adapting to this new hybrid reality built of both physical and informational structures.

And visual design — with its power to instantly reach out to places in our subconscious without the mediation of language, and with its inherent ability to convey large amounts of structured and unstructured information across cultures . It’s going to be even more central to this silent but inevitable revolution.44

INSTITUTIONAL

DISTRIBUTED

Today, we live between continuous and radical transformations, in a metamorphosis from which not even the business world is immune. We know that the largest taxi company, Uber, does not own cars; Airbnb is without real estate; Skype has no infrastructure, Alibaba has no inventory, Netflix does not operate cinemas. In such a context, people can struggle to manage the new paradigms and complexity due to the amount of information, advertising, and products. On a global level, many people perceive that the world changes too fast, so many realize that the information received is often mixed, half feel overwhelmed by the abundance of choice. The search for a balance between autonomy of choice and being recommended continues. Today, a customer is often conveyed by the advice of other people or by looking for shortcuts, also trusting algorithms without using our critical thinking.42

Propaganda is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented. Propaganda is often associated with material prepared by governments, but activist groups, companies, and the media can also produce propaganda.

In the twentieth century, the term propaganda has been associated with a manipulative approach, but propaganda historically was a neutral descriptive term.

The Onion

Data visualization should do:

study of the visual representation of data, meaning “information that has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information”.

Make complex things simple; Extract small information from large data; Present truth, do not deceive; Induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology,; Make large data sets coherent; Encourage the eye to compare different pieces of data; Reveal the data at several levels of detail, from a broad overview of the fine structure; Serve a reasonably clear purpose: description, exploration, tabulation or decoration;45 Data visualization or data visualization is viewed by many disciplines as a modern equivalent of visual communication. It involves the creation and

The Onion is an American digital media company and news satire organization that publishes articles on the international, national, and local news.

Based in Chicago, the company originated as a weekly print publication on August 29, 1988. In the spring of 1996, The Onion began publishing online. In 2007, the organization began publishing satirical news audio and video online, as the Onion News Network.43

A primary goal of data visualization is to communicate information clearly and efficiently via statistical graphics, plots and information graphics. Numerical data may be encoded using dots, lines, or bars, to visually communicate a quantitative message. Effective visualization helps users analyze and reason about data and evidence.

It makes complex data more accessible, understandable and usable. Users may have particular analytical tasks, such as making comparisons or understanding causality, and the design principle of the graphic (i.e., showing comparisons or showing causality) follows the task.

Data visualization is both an art and a science.

It is viewed as a branch of descriptive statistics by some, but also as a grounded theory development tool by others.

New information platforms feed the ancient instinct peo-

ple have to find information that syncs with their perspectives: A 2016 study that analyzed 376 million Facebook users’ interactions with over 900 news outlets found that people tend to seek information that aligns with their views.

Humans are by nature selfish, tribal, gullible convenience seekers who put the most trust in that which seems familiar Jim Hendler, professor of computing sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, commented, “The information environment will continue to change but the pressures of politics, advertising, and stock-return-based capitalism rewards those who find ways to manipulate the system, so it will be a constant battle between those aiming for ‘objectiveness’ and those trying to manipulate the system.”

“We were in this position before, when printing presses broke the existing system of information management. A new system emerged and I believe we have the motivation and capability to do it again.” Jonathan Grudin46

Technological anxiety Technology is the protagonist of our everyday life to the point that already more than six Italians in ten are struggling to conceive their existence without internet (Ipsos data). In the global context, the slightest position of the European states in terms of optimism towards technology can amaze but must be interpreted in the light of a social climate made up of pessimism, disintegration, and negativity. Zygmunt Bauman says: "Utopia has abandoned its natural position in the future and tends to position itself in the past, supported by the widespread belief that the best is behind us and that our children will be worse off than us". For the world, the effort is complicated by a context fueled not only by "technology anxiety" but also by a now low level of education. If today, many people can not live without a cell phone, it would be wrong to give technology the guilt of the inability to self-control and the responsibility for excesses.

One should also recognize an individual right to disconnection.47

Do we trust who manages our personal data?

SI

NO 46%

41%

Banks 45%

40%

Supermarkets 36%

46%

Pharmaceutical companies 35%

50%

Telephone companies 29% Social media

56%

Abundance of information Even though the abundance of information can be beneficial in several levels, some problems may be of concern such as privacy, legal and ethical guidelines, filtering and data accuracy. Filtering refers to finding useful information in the middle of so much data, which relates to the job of data scientists. A typical example of a necessity of data filtering (data mining) is in healthcare since in the next years is due to have EHRs (Electronic Health Records) of patients available. With so much information available, the doctors will need to be able to identify patterns and select important data for the diagnosis of the patient. On the other hand, according to some experts, having so much public data available makes it difficult to provide data that is actually anonymous. Another point to take into account is the legal and ethical guidelines, which relates to who will be the owner of the data and how frequently he/she is obliged to the release this and for how long. With so many sources of data, another problem will be the accuracy of such. An untrusted source may be challenged by others, by ordering a new set of data, causing a repetition in the information. According to Edward Huth, another concern is the accessibility and cost of such information. The accessibility rate could be improved by either reducing the costs or increasing the utility of the information. The reduction of costs according to the author, could be done by associations, which should assess which information was relevant and gather it in a more organized fashion.48

+

We’ve lost control of our personal data. The current business model for many websites offers free content in exchange for personal data. This widespread data collection by companies also has other impacts. Through collaboration with - or coercion of - companies, governments are also increasingly watching our every move online, and passing extreme laws that trample on our rights to privacy. In repressive regimes, it’s easy to see the harm that can be caused – bloggers can be arrested or killed, and political opponents can be monitored. But even in countries where we believe governments have citizens’ best interests at heart, watching everyone, all the time is simply going too far.

It creates a chilling effect on free speech and stops the web from being used as a space to explore important topics, like 49 sensitive health issues, sexuality or religion.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

VALUE of

TRUTH Currently, the value is primarily associated with

scarcity. Things like breathable air and drinkable water do not become valuable until they are scarce. This is clearly a problem if we want to have values which reflect the real value of things within a living system. Also, our models of wealth are totally upside down. Real wealth (derived from "weal" referring to wellness) is not a function of how much stuff you can accumulate. This is like thinking that becoming as fat as possible is to be healthy, or that cancer is a model for health systems. (Cancer uses all of its resources to grow more, until it kills its host.)

Real wealth is a function of how quickly people’s needs are met. You only need a few things at a time. You don’t need the car when you’re not driving it, or the extra house, or the boat or the closets full of clothes you’re not wearing. You just need access to those things at the time that you do. This means that scarcity should be dealt with exactly the opposite of how we currently do. Currently, scarce things become costly and hoarded by the wealthy so that even fewer people have access to them. We need currency systems which optimize effective sharing of scarce things so that they can be where they’re needed precisely when they’re needed.

Money does not do that.

In fact, commercial economies don’t do this very well at all (although capitalists loudly exclaim that they do).

As far as I know, the most efficient models for doing this are gift economies. Think of how much less efficient a family would be if it didn’t operate on a gift economy but actually had to negotiate and process payments for every item shared.

We are one big family. We live in a big house called Earth. We share our house with all other life on the planet, and in turn, it shares with us.

Our whole commercial economy is built on plundering this gift economy. What does the earth charge for oil, trees, and fish? What does the sun charge for growing our food?50

Resistance movement A resistance movement is an organized effort by some portion of the civil population of a country to resist the legally established government or an occupying power and to disrupt civil order and stability. It may seek to achieve its objectives through either the use of nonviolent resistance (sometimes called civil resistance) or the use of force, whether armed or unarmed.

“The major new challenge in reporting news is the new shape of truth,” said Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine. “Truth is no longer dictated by authorities but is networked by peers. For every fact, there is a contract and all these contracts and facts look identical online, which is confusing to most people.”

Kevin Kelly Fact checking is the act of checking factual assertions in a non-fictional text in order to determine the veracity and correctness of the factual statements in the text. This may be done either before (ante hoc) or after (post hoc) the text has been published or otherwise disseminated. Several organizations are devoted to Post hoc fact-checking, such as FactCheck.org and PolitiFact. Research on the impact of fact-checking is relatively recent but the existing research suggests that fact-checking does indeed correct misperceptions among citizens, as well as discourage politicians from spreading misinformation.51

Anonymous is a decentralized international hacktivist group that is widely known for its various DDOS cyber attacks against several governments, government institutions & government agencies, corporations, and the Church of Scientology.52 They work through the concept of Stigmergy: Is a consensus social network mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next ac- tion, by the same or a different agent. In that way, subsequent actions tend to reinforce and build on each other, leading to the spontaneous emergence of coherent, apparently systematic activity.53

COMMUNITY

Internet activism is the use of

electronic communication technologies such as social media, e-mail, and podcasts for various forms of activism to enable faster and more effective communication by citizen movements, the delivery of particular information to large and

INCOME

Offer Internet-based services to

customers. A range of services can be offered online, and a number of service delivery options can be employed. Give the tools or the knowledge as a consultant to create your contents. Earn income with a subscription business model. Subscrip-

You and your data have a value:

VALUE MEDIUM

through private data account, you are able to pass the quantity of data you prefer without constrictions.

Especially if the notice you participate in could possibly damage your safety. So, would be a free choice to reveal your complete identity or maintain a level of security.

Supposed to be an open contents method created by users, the value of the notice should be supported by the reliability of the people that wrote or participate in the outcome and facts of the arguments for support and spread a trustful notice.

Fake news is a type of yellow

journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online

specific audiences as well as coordination. OR community as cooperation in a social network organized through different layers of control and administration related to the geographical area and contents (user-generated content).

A challenge between contributors is also another form of contribution if we think about the quantity of proposal and quantity of outcomes supposed to be spread on different mediums. The most difficult but the one that permits to maintain inviolate the originals values: Non-profit organization.54 tion revenue can provide a reliable income stream for content-driven websites, such as newspapers and magazines, which, as mentioned, can also take advantage of advertising revenue. Collect advertising revenue on your website. Advertising can turn any popular website into a cash machine. Certain types of websites lend themselves to online advertising more than others. Content-driven websites, such as news sites and discussion forums, can leverage Internet advertising more than professional consultants, for example. Last but not least, public donations.55 Supported by people, technology, and science the aim is to spread truth notices and be recognized as a trustful database of information, giving you the possibility to be informed and understand a technological topic with the implications in the real life. First, everyone should count on this system to inform himself, created by discussion and debate of expert and common people through facts. Finally, should make you understand topics, usually, difficult to comprehend and analyze in this mess of information network, driven by the like recognition rather than a moral obligation.56 social media. Guerrilla Marketing is a marketing technique where marketers use creative, imaginative yet unconventional marketing tactics to get maximum reach and better results without involving heavy costs and resources. Meme/memetics A way of describing cultural information being shared. An element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.57 Interviews, articles, videos, short-film and documentary, fake voices and illustrations.

RELIABILITY

Trust, the reliability of the notice or

from the system generated. Utilizing unconventional methods may be considered incorrect.

You want to draw the most attention possible on the news and allow the

INCENTIVES

Implicit incentives: These incen-

tives are not based on anything tangible. Social incentives are the most common form of implicit incentives.

These incentives allow the user to feel good as an active member of the community. Social incentives also include the ability to connect users with others. Other common social incentives are status, badges or levels within the site, something a user earns when they reach a certain level

public to find the same in a more intuitive and simple, thanks to the satire of the title or the topic that arouses an emotion, so simple to remember.

In the notice should be clarified the lie about title or memes or materials around people or events used to hook the people focus. The cornerstone of the project lies in following the letter to a manifesto that requires the truthfulness of the news supported by facts or evidence. An excellent example of this is through links and data visualization, to present an audience with the simple small truth about whatever the data are measuring. of participation which may or may not come with additional privileges.

Explicit incentives: These incentives refer to tangible rewards. Examples include financial payment, entry into a contest, a voucher, a coupon, or frequent traveler miles.

The drawback to explicit incentives is that they may cause the user to be subject to the overjustification effect, eventually believing the only reason for the participating is for the explicit incentive. This reduces the influence of the other form of social or altruistic motivation, making it increasingly costly for the content host to retain long-term contributors.

for people to understand them. Our reasoning is impaired by hundreds of cognitive biases. We say and do things to be accepted by our peers and groups, and let our need for acceptance or preoccupation with immediate desires overshadow our ability to perceive things rationally.

We are driven by emotion in a period of continuing society transformation. As a message would be less difficult to understand the message is better, obviously doesen't mean less impactful or correct in a first instance. Lately, if we created the curiosity or interest related to the argument, people themselves are more interested to know better and more. Interesting and more complete would be a sort of open community where everyone could discuss or take feedback of an eventual article.

So, achieve a complete understanding of the theme treated.58

also using incorrect methods or untrue news, we want to make understand certain contexts and realities of today’s society, in a way that even if the news is false in itself as a title or scoop. The same persons inserted or mentioned in it will not be able to dissociate themselves from the news itself more time to understand through facts and data a given topic. The risk for these people is the loss of credibility. As Sir Tim Berners-Lee said: The governments stop the web from being used as a space to explore important topics, like sensitive health issues, sexu-

ality or religion. Also, it’s too easy for misinformation to spread on the web. Today, most people find news and information on the web through just a handful of social media sites and search engines.These sites make more money when we click on the links they show us. And, they choose what to show us based on algorithms which learn from our personal data that they are constantly harvesting. Not really the best scenario to keep yourself informed and to acquire knowledge. Ultimately, we are a population without a voice or critical thinking because without culture.59

INFORMATION We have to oversimplify issues

SOCIETY With tedious news to the detri-

ment of icons or people of power today, it aims to create a reaction from the population. Through an end trick,

CONCLUSION My conclusion is divided into three parts:

When it comes to the future, there are usually two pos-

sibilities for dealing with the issue. The first is to consider what is happening or what will happen shortly. Someone else somewhere in the world - almost always in California - is deciding for us tomorrow. The second approach is that according to which every single individual is the architect of his own destiny, with the ability to create, build and manipulate the reality in which he lives according to his own needs. In an interconnected world, fortunately, governed not by a single human being and in which technologies are only tools, there is a third way. No one is not the creator of his own destiny. But we are not even totally at the mercy of others or of the technologies that, according to the most despotic futurologists, are condemning us to a destiny of subjects. We are immersed in an environment that is characterized by technology, or rather technology: artificial intelligence present for every sector of society, cures that guarantee a longer life, cars that drive themselves, systems like blockchain that allow transactions - not just financial - safe, clean energy. And much, much more. it is clear that these innovations have not been produced by individuals. We have arrived with time and thanks to a multiplicity of people who have contributed. So if we want to live our time in a relevant way, leaving a sign in favor of the community, we must use these tools and play our part. At the base of everything, there is the knowledge of the means. “The best corrective to post-truth is the truth, that is culture”, says philosopher Maurizio Ferraris. Despite all the perfectible aspects, in the West, we live a privileged situation, very different from the past. Everyone’s contribution will be essential to shaping the future. Changing the rules and values that ​​ will enable us to live in a more equitable globalized world (including social media) to design an educational system for the new generations. We must reconvert the past and inadequate models that are creating, always a bigger gap, among the populations of the world. and we citizens of the world, we must begin to understand the functioning of forces in today’s digital and real world, in a critical way to have an idea of ​​their own, a conscience and renewed confidence in tomorrow.60

REACTION/ QUESTIONS +

UNDERSTAND/ PERCEIVE +

POSSIBILITIES

The first reaction/questions. Through fast and effective methods, easily viral or comprehensible, you want through satirical news/cartoons or mediums such as short videos or guerrilla marketing actions, create curiosity and draw attention to technological issues that involve freedom of expression or action today. Unveiling and creating questions on situations as modern as it is with a stigma, difficult to eliminate. The second understand and understand. There is no single channel that includes a complete explanation of facts and data regarding the situation of today’s society in relation to technologies and social values. Showing, in a clear way, the current situation of society, where this projection is taking us and how our behavior and mentality affects all of this. WFinally, possibility. There is a database that incentives, without being obscured or blocked, that shows those (between associations and individuals) whose goal is to instruct or unveil an injustice to allow citizens to become aware of the possibilities and current technological alternatives. There are all the technical and technological means necessary to change values and trends in today’s life.

Where an injustice is found, there is always a solution. Often you are not allowed to see it or now conveyed as injustice or inapplicable possibility as against the canons of a civilization that has now lost its critical sense.

As Nietzsche wrote in Human All Too Human: “(The modern) individual focuses too narrowly on his own short lifespan and wants to pluck the fruit himself from the tree he plants, and so no longer likes to plant those trees that demand a century of constant tending and are intended to provide shade for long successions of 61 generations.”

Ferdinando Ametrano, Wired n°83.

25

Carlo Rovelli, Wired 83. 2017

49

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, https://webfoundation.org/2017/03/webturns-28-letter/

2

Don Tapscott, The blockchain revolution, 2017

26

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Network_society

50

http://blog.newcurrencyfrontiers. com/2009/04/value-values-and-new-economy.html

3

Mauro Bellini, https://www.blockchain4innovation.it/esperti/blockchain-perche-e-cosi-importante/

27

Van Dijk’s, Network Society, Social Aspects of the New Media, 1999

51

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Fact_checking

4

http://gsadesigninnovation.com/ about-indi/people/dr-gerardbriscoe/

28

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide#Social_capital

52

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Anonymous_(group)

5

https://futurethinkers.org/ blockchain-environment-climate-change/

29

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, https://webfoundation.org/2017/03/webturns-28-letter/

53

http://www.bcp.psych.ualberta. ca/~mike/Pearl_Street/Dictionary/contents/S/stigmergy.html

6

https://futurethinkers.org/industries-blockchain-disrupt/

30

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Wired 83, 2017

54

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ User-generated_content

7

Rosie Perper, Business Insider, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/

31

JANNA ANDERSON AND LEE RAINIE http://www.pewinternet. org/2017/10/19

55

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/ make-money-internet-business-4056.html

8

Alex Hern, https://www.theguardian. com/technology/2018/jan/17/

32

Ewan Morrison https://areomagazinecom/2018/03/08/why-utopian-communities-fail/

56

9

Preethi Kasireddy, https://hackernoon. com/blockchains-dont-scale-not-today-at-least-but-there-s-hope/

33

https://wikileaks.org/What-isWikileaks.html

57

10

Don Tapscott, The blockchain revolution, 2017

34

Heather Marsh, Getgee.xyz, 2017

58

11

Arthur Brock, https://medium.com/ metacurrency-project/the-metacurrency-myth-8db61ed14fb8

35

Vint Cerf, Wired 83, 2017

59

12

Arthur Brock, Eric Harris-Braun, Grammatic Capacities and the Evolution of

36

Evan Green, Wired 83, 2017

60

61

Complex Adaptive Systems, 2016

13

Buster Benson, https://betterhumans.coach.me/cognitive-biascheat-sheet-55a472476b18

37

Denis Lotti, Wired 83, 2017

14

Arthur Brock, https://medium.com/ metacurrency-project/broken-assumptions-of-governance/

38

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Fake_news

15

Arthur Brock, https://medium.com/ metacurrency-the Future of Governance is not Governments/

39

Noah Hawley, Wired n°84, 2018

16

Francesco Costa, http://www. francescocosta.net/2018/02/19/ guardiamoci-negli-occhi/

40

William Welser, Wired n°83, 2017

17

Eric Harris-Braun, Nicolas Luck, Arthur Brock, Holochain scalable agent-cen-

41

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, https://webfoundation.org/2017/03/webturns-28-letter/

tric distributed computing 10/24/2017

18

Bitcoin: Destroyer of Worlds, Arthur Brock https://medium.com/@artbrock/

42

Nicola Neri, Wired 83, 2017

19

Arthur​ ​Brock​ ,​​ ​​Eric​ ​Harris-Braun, Holo:​ ​ Cryptocurrency​I​nfrastructure for​​

43

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ The_Onion

Global​ ​Scale​ ​and​ ​Stable​ ​Value, 2017

20

Arthur Brock https://medium.com/ holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalable-cryptocurrencies/

44

https://datavisualization.ch

21

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ The_purpose_of_a_system_is_ what_it_does

45

http://drewconway.comzia/2013/3/26/what-data-visualization-should-do-simple-small-truth

22

http://webofwealth.org

46

JANNA ANDERSON AND LEE RAINIE http://www.pewinternet. org/2017/10/19

23

Trevor Hilder, John Waters, Approaches to currency targetting: insights from cybernetics, 2017

47

Nando Pagnoncelli, Wired 83, 2017

24

Noah Hawley, Wired n°84, 2018

48

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Information_explosion

REFERENCE

1

Irene NG, Wired 83, 2017

https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/

Buster Benson, https://betterhumans.coach.me/cognitive-biascheat-sheet-55a472476b18

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, https://webfoundation.org/2017/03/webturns-28-letter/ Federico Ferrazza, Wired 83.

Jennifer Huber, Wired 83. 2017

Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, 1878

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THANKS +