Holochain has been a project simminging in the background of the blockchain space for several years now. The promise has been a panaceaic solution to the performance and scalability issues facing decentralised hosting platforms. It’s an oft heard claim, but, as founder Arthur Brock expounds in this interview, by giving up our insistence on global consensus in favor of discoverable and verifiable local state, a world of options is opened to us. This kind of discussion follows from the Secure Scuttlebutt and Urbit episodes. It raises, and offers answers, to questions of data vs agent based ontologies. But most interesting of all, it forces us to reconsider why we wanted to use a blockchain in the first place.

Arthur Brock from Denver ColoradoInterested in alternative currencies in 2001Self organising companies are just a form of currency hackingDiscovered what a huge leverage point for change currency isChange the business incentives and all business will reshape towards those incentivesThe Future of Money, Bernard Leotard2003 alternative currency became main gigMetacurrency project 2004Met Harris BrownCurrencies as more than money - symbol systems that we use to coordinate at scaleOut of metacurrency project came Ceptr 2006Interact/transact with anyone else without intermediaryRequired a reinvention of most of the communications stack. Modeling on nature - biomimicryPrototyped for rewrite of computation, communication, commerceTook piece of Ceptr and built Holochain, completed in Go in 2017Bitcoin neither blindsided nor felt like a culmination of workSeemed like a ham handed designQuestionably successfulHas captured a large followingHas not achieved what Arthur Brock wants to achieveNot to dismiss blockchain - if nothing else it has prepared public consciousness and awareness for dealing with these problems.Blockchain has altered the discoursePulled discourse in a crazy directionRecreates unhealthy patterns turbochargedDefinitely need new money but need to do it in a manor that does not amplify volatility and wealth concentrationRecreating old problems won't get us somewhere newCore issue is validation, not consensusEveryone must use the same validation scheme to participate in consensus [validation is more fundamental than consensus]Push for global state is a lazy way of modeling problemsIn reality there is no global state or time. Only relative state and time.Holochain uses an Agent Centric approach rather than a Data Centric approach.Each agent has their own chain for an application, only tracking the agents activity.Genesis block of each chain includes a hash of the source code of the application.

Holochain.orgHolo.hostArtbrock.comCeptr.orgMetacurrency.org

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