Research Notes – Page 18 – Blockchain & Society

Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web | Technology | The Guardian

Posted in decentralization, discourse, opinion, Research Notes

It is supposed to be like the web you know but without relying on centralised operators. In the early days of the world wide web, which came into existence in 1989, you connected directly with your friends through desktop computers that talked to each other. But from the early 2000s, with the advent of Web 2.0, we began to communicate with each other and share information through centralised services provided by big companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. It is now on Facebook’s platform, in its so called “walled garden”, that you talk to your friends. “Our laptops have become just screens. They cannot do anything useful without the cloud,” says Muneeb Ali, co-founder of Blockstack, a platform for building decentralised apps. The DWeb is about re-decentralising things – so we aren’t reliant on these intermediaries to connect us. Instead users keep control of their data and connect and interact and exchange messages directly with others in their network.

Source: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web | Technology | The Guardian

The perfect storm: building a crypto-utopia in Puerto Rico – video | US news | The Guardian

Posted in applications, bitcoin, critique, issues/conflicts, Research Notes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILJaqAQctyE

In a time of vulnerability, crypto investors are moving to Puerto Rico, attracted by lucrative tax incentives. They plan to regenerate the island using blockchain technology. But not all of the locals support their bold plans

Source: The perfect storm: building a crypto-utopia in Puerto Rico – video | US news | The Guardian

Cryptocurrency Markets Lost $18 Billion Overnight – Slashdot

Posted in bitcoin, ecosystem, opinion, Research Notes

Blockchain exists for ~10 years and still there are no mainstream use cases where it replaced the incumbent tech, other than illegal activity. There is a fundamental reason for that.BCh offers a single unique feature: distributed trusted transaction (DTT). DTT competes with a centralized transaction == transaction with a trusted third party (T3P). DTT is by definition distributed and as such is *always* more expensive than a T3P all other things being equal: reaching consensus with multiple parties is harder than with a single party. In order for DTT to be competitive with the old tech T3P, the distributed nature of DTT must offer some advantage for people to be willing to pay the required premium. So far the only use case where people or willing to pay this premium is circumvention of regulation, when the trusted third party does not exist. This brings us to this list of use cases:1. Circumvention of regulation.This is the only meaningful use of DTT.China has capital flow controls which effectively bar companies and individuals from moving money out of China. To get around these regulations people buy video cards and electricity in China for CNY, mine cryptocoins, sell them in the States for USD. That’s the largest market right now, much bigger than buying drugs on the likes of Silk Road. This use case also includes ICOs and other pump and dump schemes.2. Selling picks and shovels.Derivative of (1). If 1 goes away, 2 will go away too.https://finance.yahoo.com/quot… [yahoo.com]3. Marketing & FMOAdd blockchain to the company name and see your valuation pop.”We must work on blockchain because it’s the future”.All kinds of blockchain projects in banks, etc which are going mainstream “any time now”. All of them can be done easier/cheaper/more reliably with a T3P, no exceptions.Reply to This Share

Source: Cryptocurrency Markets Lost $18 Billion Overnight – Slashdot

Brock Pierce: The Hippie King of Cryptocurrency – Rolling Stone

Posted in bitcoin, blockchain, discourse, identity, issues/conflicts, nonsense, people, politics, Research Notes

Pierce, meanwhile, was about to try to repeat his success in e-sports when people began mentioning cryptocurrency to him roughly a year after the first Bitcoins were mined. Pierce was shocked that he’d never heard of it. “There were no storytellers who knew how to convey the information in simple insights, so it required a lot of real heavy lifting to figure out,” he says. “I didn’t have the time to appreciate the power of decentralization at first. The day I got it, I knew that was it.”Bannon recently took a leap into cryptocurrency as well, not just because of its financial implications, but because of its political ones. “This whole populist revolt is going to come down to this concept of currency,” he says. “You can see the forces that are aligned to take advantage of it. Every smart person that I admire in the world, and those I semi-fear, is focused on this concept of crypto for a reason. They understand that this is the driving force of the fourth industrial revolution: steam engine, electricity, then the microchip – blockchain and crypto is the fourth. There’s going to be a war for control for this.”Once Pierce caught on to the potential of this new digital cash, he became an evangelist, giving away Bitcoins to everyone he could, whether to an influencer or to the audience at one of his talks. He eventually stopped giving the money away because “no one appreciated it, then they lost it, and it was a waste of my fucking time. I get messages all the time from people saying, ‘I think of how much I lost because I didn’t take it seriously.’ ”

Source: Brock Pierce: The Hippie King of Cryptocurrency – Rolling Stone

The Blockchain Stack – Mechanism Labs – Medium

Posted in algorithms, blockchain, ecosystem, hardware, Research Notes

At a fundamental level, blockchains are composed of multiple distinct layers, similar to other technology protocols like the internet paradigm (Link, Network, Internet, Transport, Application). Here, we present a framework of the layers that compose blockchains. The layers are defined such that each layer depends on the one(s) below it. Here, we discuss what each layer provides as opposed to how each layer is implemented.

Source: The Blockchain Stack – Mechanism Labs – Medium

Crypto Tokens: A Breakthrough in Open Network Design

Posted in applications, decentralization, discourse, governance, justice, opinion, Research Notes

The cryptocurrency movement is the spiritual heir to previous open computing movements, including the open source software movement led most visibly by Linux, and the open information movement led most visibly by Wikipedia.1991: Linus Torvalds’ forum post announcing Linux; 2001: the first Wikipedia pageBoth of these movements were once niche and controversial. Today Linux is the dominant worldwide operating system, and Wikipedia is the most popular informational website in the world.Crypto tokens are currently niche and controversial. If present trends continue, they will soon be seen as a breakthrough in the design and development of open networks, combining the societal benefits of open protocols with the financial and architectural benefits of proprietary networks. They are also an extremely promising development for those hoping to keep the internet accessible to entrepreneurs, developers, and other independent creators.

Source: Crypto Tokens: A Breakthrough in Open Network Design

Algorithmic regulation and rule of law | Mireille Hildebrandt

Posted in algorithms, law, papers, Research Notes

In this brief contribution, I distinguish between code-driven and data-driven regulation as novel instantiations of legal regulation. Before moving deeper into data-driven regulation, I explain the difference between law and regulation, and the relevance of such a difference for the rule of law. I discuss artificial legal intelligence (ALI) as a means to enable quantified legal prediction and argumentation mining which are both based on machine learning. This raises the question of whether the implementation of such technologies should count as law or as regulation, and what this means for their further development. Finally, I propose the concept of ‘agonistic machine learning’ as a means to bring data-driven regulation under the rule of law. This entails obligating developers, lawyers and those subject to the decisions of ALI to re-introduce adversarial interrogation at the level of its computational architecture.

Source: Algorithmic regulation and rule of law | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences

GERMAN LAW JOURNAL

Posted in blockchain, law, papers, Research Notes

Michèle FinckBlockchains: Regulating the Unknown

Source: GERMAN LAW JOURNAL

The Future Of Network Effects: Tokenization and the End of Extraction

Posted in blockchain, decentralization, governance, Research Notes

When designed properly, decentralized, open source, tokenized cryptoasset networks solve the problem of incentive alignment between network creators and network participants. When the software is public, and the organizing body is a nonprofit rather than a for-profit, the Extraction Imperative is eliminated — because there are literally no longer shareholders with a claim on cash flows. The value is held in the network itself, represented by token ownership. Everyone who participates in the activity of the network, using and accruing tokens in the process, is effectively a network “owner.” Because there is no division between owners and participants, there is no point at which their incentives diverge.

Source: The Future Of Network Effects: Tokenization and the End of Extraction