Holochain Workshop Part 2: Siddharth Sthalekar on How Holochain Can Manifest?

Yes, I see you. You want to share your screen?

Sure. Is my audio okay?

Yes. And while you do that, I'm gonna introduce you. So Seed Experience span both ends of the economic spectrum, from heading South Asia's largest trading desk to exploring distributed economic paradigms in the Gandhi Ashram in India. Sid is the founder of Sacred Capital, an organization that builds economic infrastructure for a more expressive society. By activating reputation currencies, they enable new patterns for social coordination over the internet and in distributed networks. Works. Such patterns will be visible in the Hologenic ecosystem later this year through projects like Neighborhoods and Bazaar, and I will share the website and his Twitter account on the chat. It's all yours.

Awesome, thank you Virginie Glaenzer. I'm just gonna click present and I hope it's all working. Yeah. You can see the screen, right? Great, thanks for the introduction Virginie and my perspective is largely as someone who's building a project on Holochain and you will find it might differ from Paul's because I'm purely looking at it from an application perspective, and more importantly, you know, how some of— like how we perceived it. And I think one of the challenging features of Holochain is some of the new rules that it introduces are so, I think, radically interesting that we don't exactly know how this might land and what kind of applications we might even see over the next few years. So if you're an entrepreneur or a project builder or someone who's excited about Holochain, I would say, you know, look at the next few slides that I'm talking about as just a starting point. And I would urge you to push, you know, some of these thoughts at your end and maybe even come up with other ways in which Holochain could manifest. So yeah, this is not a final documentation of how Holochain manifests. I think it's just a starting point and I'll kind of frame it in 3 different ways. For me, or for our project, which like Virginie said activates reputation currencies, what was really interesting about Holochain was the contextuality that it brought about. So As this slide suggests, it's a move from global consensus to what we're calling contextual validation. And you might find most blockchains or even centralized data systems are obsessed about consensus. And by that I mean—

Once you understand what Cardano is doing.

Sorry?

If everyone can mute themselves, that would be fantastic. I'm going to mute again.

So most blockchains are obsessed with global consensus, which basically means creating some kind of snapshot of what is an agreed truth between the network, which is great, I think, in scenarios like generating cryptocurrencies or making payments or pretty, you know, monetarily critical operations. But I think it tends to limit the kind of information that you are tracking. So for example, Holochain focuses on contextual validation, which basically means you as an entrepreneur, app creator, you have the choice of deciding how many people need to validate some piece of information.. So for example, if I'm interested in giving Anna Marie, if I'm saying your name right, 5 coins over a crypto network, we might want, I don't know, a million people to validate it. But let's say, you know, I've uploaded a photograph and I've received a like from Virginie Glaenzer. Maybe that doesn't need a million people validating it. Maybe it just needs about 25 people in my social network to validate it. And so that means these two bits of information, which is, you know, 5 coins to Anna-Marie and 1 like on my photograph, hold completely different importance in different contexts. And for the former, which is, you know, 5 coins transferred to Anna-Marie, like usually those kinds of transactions have some kind of monetary value associated with it, which is why you wouldn't mind having a million people validate it. Because if a million people are going to validate it, it's going to cost you a decent chunk of money. Like it might be in the order of cents, you know, in the case of efficient blockchains. It might be in tens of dollars on some of the older blockchains like Ethereum. But if it's, you know, likes on a photograph or the number of blog posts I might have posted or maybe timestamps, not all bits of information have an immediate monetary value.. And so what Holochain really opened up for entrepreneurs was the opportunity to say the spectrum of value that I can capture, or the community can capture, is now broadened. Like, it's not just monetary, but it starts becoming so much more. It could be reputational, it could be related to, you know, data in the environment. There's no, there's no, there's no, you know, end to that list. And so I think it opens up a portal of sorts where we can start validating new dimensions of information. And so I'd urge, yeah, I'd urge most people to go and, you know, plug into that and try and explore where that could take you. And so this is a little phrase we have, like it's a shift we're making from the monetarily critical to the contextually relevant. And so as an app creator, that is, I would suggest, a possible new way to think. And from our end, like, like I said, we're building reputational infrastructure, we can start nudging micro networks and communities to validate not just monetary value, but also reputational value, because the burden of validating it, you know, isn't very costly. Like, the overhead is extremely low, and as a result, you can start tracking more information. The second shift that I've witnessed has to do with modularity. I think most of us are, you know, have— are familiar with developing projects or applications in pretty centralized environments. And in those environments, you learn how to build a project in a fairly monolithic way, which is, it's my stack. I'm going to be responsible for the identity layer, the, you know, the informational layer, the reputational layer, where it's hosted. And so there's this almost a sense of almost like you tend to build a silo around your project. But a massive shift we've noticed within the Holochain environment is a shift towards shared infrastructure, which basically means, you know, if you're an entrepreneur who's thinking about building projects, you have to— I think it's like a different kind of skill set because it's not about going out there raising capital and building your own stack, but looking around, collaborating with different projects, and realizing like you may not need to build your entire stack. So there might be reputational infrastructure that's around, there might be monetary infrastructure that's around, and so the stack that you actually have to build as an entrepreneur is really slim and really modular. So it's almost like, you know, coming into the environment, you look around and you find a bunch of Lego bricks, Lego blocks lying around, and you can actually stitch together applications using these Lego blocks, which is kind of threatening as an entrepreneur, because business models have evolved around, you know, that siloed approach. You've developed a bunch of skills that are all about like your identity and your egos is built around building that massive stack. So it can be unnerving as an entrepreneur, but I think it's also rewarding because you start spending time on stuff that's actually more important and more relevant, which is focusing on like creative use cases as opposed to rebuilding stuff that 25 other people are already building. So again, I would say like that's a mentality shift. And so when you, you know, if you think about engaging more with the ecosystem, say on the Holochain forums or in the chat rooms, I would say first step, maybe, you know, look around, try and explore what projects are being built so you can, you know, almost build around them. And third, And the final shift for me was this approach towards bridging, which is, I think, an interesting conversation because, you know, when we often talk about moving away from consensus, there's always this conversation that invariably comes up around, well, how are you going to coordinate globally? How are you going to operate at scale? And to that, I think the answer lies in bridging, which basically means Holochain's incredibly modular and agent-centric, which means I have like every, you know, micro network or individual in, you know, in the environment or in the ecosystem has agency over the information, which means they can actually help bridge it across DNAs, as we say, or across applications. So you notice there's almost this bleeding of sorts across membranes. So in most centralized applications like a Facebook or Twitter, it's almost impossible for you to be able to port your information across membranes because that's the way the stacks have been structured. But because Holochain's agent-centric, you see the ability for information to bleed across membranes, which is Again, very interesting as an entrepreneur, because when you're building an application or like creating a community of sorts, you can actually allow agents or individuals to port their context across communities. So when they show up in your application or in, in communities, they're not showing up as strangers who've, you know, just signed on to Instagram and their feed needs to be curated by you. Instead, you're actually, you know, asking them to allow some of the data to bleed across membranes. And you can start allowing them to deepen or accelerate their engagement based on the context that they've brought it in. And I think this is a massive shift, again, from centralized to distributed environments. Because in distributed environments, you never have the benefits of this centralized overarching dashboard of what's going on in your application or in your environment. You almost have to encourage or nudge allows individuals to drive their own engagement. And so I think it also models real life a little better. Like if I were to throw a dinner, you know, host a dinner party and invite Paul and Virginie and Douglas, it's quite likely that Paul and Douglas know each other from the gym. And so they can actually strike up a conversation among themselves. And I think that's a great analogy for the way the distributed web works. Instead of a reliance on centralized AI, you see people shifting towards distributed webs of social intelligence and engaging, you know, engagement being driven on the basis of that. So, which is where we think reputational information plays a major role because reputational currencies allow you to start engaging with people within communities and algorithms to be driven by reputation rather than some kind of artificial intelligence that's centrally driven. So again, as an entrepreneur, it's very unnerving, because we've developed business models that are completely reliant on curating users' feed and like surveillance capitalism thrives on being able to capture that data. But instead, here you're actually, you know, allowing people to anchor their own engagement based on their context. So it's an interesting shift, that one. But it's also really fun if you're willing to slide down that rabbit hole. And so where does that really take us? Um, this, I mean, I'm just going to leave this here for, for future conversations perhaps. But as apps, or as these, you know, like I mentioned, things get really Lego and Lego-like and modular within the Holochain ecosystem, you might see situations where, um, apps become really generic and widget-like. Which means the drivers of social coordination may not be apps like they are in the centralized economy. They might actually end up being something wholly new. We think it might take the form of neighborhoods, which is genetic apps stitched together using specific culture-specific reputation systems. But that's to be seen. And To be honest, I think no one really knows how this might pan out. But I do think it's exciting because the organizing principle itself might be due for an interesting disruption. Yeah, so I will leave it at that before I hand it over to Virginie.