[liberationtech] Digital Social Currency Design

[Jonathan Wilkes]

On 05/13/2015 08:04 AM, Jaromil wrote:
> Dear peers, friends and colleagues, comrades and futurists,
>
> I hope this email finds you well. I'm writing you because in the past,
> in a way or another, we have chatted, conspired and dreamed around the
> scenario of cryptographic blockchain technologies and what Bitcoin meant
> for all of us and our networks.
>
> In the context of the D-CENT project we have just published the D4.4
> document, a milestone for our research concerned not just with technical
> or tactical aspects, but also social and political considerations that
> we intend to translate into our future development.
>
> You'll find this document as a PDF in attach, or also available to
> download from the short url http://ow.ly/MQr1j
>
> and in the resources section of D-CENT http://d-centproject.eu/resources
>
> This deliverable focuses on the technical and design elements that shape
> Digital Social Currency as a way to legitimate the bottom-up process by
> means of auditable cryptographic blockchain technologies, respectively:
> decentralized storage, ubiquitous wallets and ad-hoc social remuneration
> systems.
>
> I hope this document can contribute to our collective understanding of
> the topic, spawn debates and reactions and more in general inspire our
> communities. Feel free to distribute freely and reply me with your
> thoughts, proposals and criticism.
>
> best wishes

Hi Jaromil,

Boy, there's a lot in there.

Three quick observations:
1) You don't have a bootstrapping algo.  Leaving the bootstrapping up to 
individual actors or organizations is as likely to succeed as leaving 
the chaining of the blocks up to individual actors or organizations.

2) Social relations aren't fungible.

And a quick question:
Why not work on Gnunet?  Their docs and code seem to make sense, at 
least in theory.  It's also in dire need of basic UI work.

Until there's robust, well-used infrastructure for a minimal kind of 
anonymity, I don't think any of your ideas can function in practice.  
(And at the moment Tor is only workable for read-only anonymity, unless 
you _really_ know what you're doing and are willing to take on large 
technical risks.)

-Jonathan

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