Matthew Schutte explains Holochain as a peer-to-peer alternative to blockchain that doesn't require mining or cryptocurrency. It grew from the Meta Currency project and uses agent-centric design to skip global consensus. An alpha launched in October, with Clutter, a Twitter alternative, as a working proof of concept.
Questions this video answers
October (year not specified in this chunk).
A peer-to-peer alternative to Twitter (proof-of-concept demo accompanying the Holochain alpha).
This is Benjamin Davis here in Davos at the World Economic Forum. I'm here with Matt. Matt, could you introduce yourself to our audience and let them know what you do?
Yeah. My name is Matthew Schutte, I'm with Holochain. We are an alternative to blockchain. We built a different infrastructure for running truly peer to peer applications with no mining, no cryptocurrency. It's just a different pattern altogether.
So would you hope that next year in Davos, instead of block everywhere it says Holochain?
It may be next year, it may be the following. We've already got code in the market, we're an open source project. We're making ourselves as easy as possible to play with. We actually don't even have a business model for Holochain itself because we're trying to make it something that anybody can take, make use of without even having to interact with us. So it's a way of running applications that requires only the devices of the users themselves. My showing up as a user is also me showing up as a host, and so I'm paying my own way. It's a different pattern that we think people are going to find pretty darn useful.
Yeah. So did this idea come about because you saw problems with the blockchain that you wanted to fix, or was it just a complete idea that you had, regardless of whether that happened?
So this is the latest project coming out of something called the Meta Currency project. And we've been working on this stuff since before the Bitcoin white paper. So this is actually, this is a simple piece relative to the rest of the work that we've been doing over the last decade. But we saw that the next layer that we needed to build in our own system was a distributed data integrity layer. We had mapped out an architecture for that. We realized the rest of the world's excited about blockchain. Let's set that up as a standalone entity, its own little modular thing that we can use, but others can use as well. And that'll start to kick start a much more vibrant ecosystem than us just playing with it by ourselves. It's a little bit of how it works. Without going into too much detail, we take a little bit of the stuff that blockchains use, some tamper resistant logs, a little bit of the stuff that BitTorrent uses, distributed hash tables, and we end up using a solution that doesn't make use of consensus. So our goal was not anonymous currency, it was facilitating new forms of social coordination that are actually antifragile so we were trying to enable communities to interact in ways that work for them, and when it stops working for any of them, they're able to start playing by a slightly different pattern. So we were trying to build a whole ecosystem that doesn't center around an application or a protocol, but centers around an agent and that agent's ability to bridge between protocols. So this is sort of the step one in that ecosystem.
So could you maybe give a hypothetical use case?
Sure. So I mentioned we have an alpha release that came out in October. Along with it came something we call clutter. Clutter is a peer to peer alternative to Twitter. The first version is just a proof of concept. It's just something there for developers to be able to look at and go, oh, this is how you build something like this. And that makes it so that you're. I'll frame it this way. There's a lot of things that people in the blockchain world are really excited about building, but blockchain's limitations in terms of scale, speed, cost, prevent them from actually being able to use truly distributed technology to do or solve their problems. So whether it's peer to peer, uber, peer to peer, Facebook, peer to peer, Airbnb, great, you can actually build those systems and have them be functional, and you can actually have the individual bridging between their Facebook and their Twitter. They don't need to have an API that runs directly from one application to another, because anything they can read out of one context, they can write into another. And that enables new forms of automation that look much more like a natural ecosystem. And the bridging functions of, you know, I take in carbon dioxide and water, I'm grass, and build glucose. The bridging functions of transforming one thing into another that are actually a requirement of all regenerative systems.
Thank you very much. It's very interesting. I hope to see more of it in the future.
