Holochain Workshop: Summary and next step.

A few weeks ago, more than 250 people registered for this workshop, and we hosted two After 2 sessions, I started to reflect on the workshop and I decided to summarize what I had learned and what I'm seeing as next steps. In this workshop, before we could brainstorm as a group on new business models for the next economy, we first had to go back to what we've been taught around economics and money to really understand where we came from and what we have to leave behind. We started with economics and we paused for a few seconds on reflecting on some words. Social science, is that what economics is? And making choices on allocating resources, what do you think of those allocations? Do you feel you have a say on how it's being allocated? I think it's important to start from what we believe, because when we change filters through which we see, our understanding also changes. I ask another question: is economics a social science, per its definition, or is it the creation of scarcity. Then we looked at money, and we remembered the standard story by economics like Adam Smith that tells us that we have evolved from gift to barter to metal to debt. But interestingly, there's another story about money, one that is hidden and even controversial. Anthropologist David Graeber says that Adam Smith's story has it all backward. The story should be told with debt to metal to barter. Why does this matter? Simply because if the first story of money which is in our history book is inaccurate, what other stories have we been told that are also inaccurate? And then to end on money, we discuss how money today is loaned into existence by banks. Banks are not intermediaries loaning you money from other people, not at all. They create new money when they simply give out a new loan. It's that simple. When you sign a loan contract The bank says it's an IOU, the bank, I, owe you money, which they buy from you and put it as an asset in their balance sheet. The trick, and that's the entire money supply engine, the bank records the same amount on their payable liability account but instead, they bank deposit. They just add more money and more liability because their banking license gives them the right to accept deposits. So they invent new liabilities on themselves. In short, banks do not lend money. They simply create money from debt. Anyway, that was a fun part and interesting discussion. You can check my presentation Part 4 and get a glimpse of the time scale of 100,000 years of human history. Thanks to Arthur Brock, founder of Holochain, who made his presentation available online. After this first introduction, I was left with this realization: when we look at the economic model created under the ideology of capitalism, socialism, or communism, these models have three things in common: One, they focus on scarce resources. Two, their currency is the medium of exchange. And three, wealth is accumulation. And we'll come back to that in just a moment. What connects those models and their systems all together, all together is this. Today, businesses use centralized database which means they own our data. Two, they impose their rules of the game through command and control. And three, they thrive through competition and extraction. There is a global movement of organizations, platform people, all trying to serve the creation of a more beautiful world. They do it by bringing together four pieces, specific pieces of a puzzle, a puzzle that forms any living ecosystem: value, community, governance, and technology. To build a new economy, each of those pieces are in need of being rewritten. Value is a set of beliefs. Today's values are equality, inclusion, respect of nature, which in time creates a new society's culture. Community. We no longer want to be told what to do and be part of a hierarchical organization, but we want our voice to be heard in a community. A group will develop open relationships from a proposal of shared values and purpose. Governance. Our new culture and our desire for communities shows up in how we want to be led and lead others. We're seeing workers' co-ops, stewardship ownership, multi-stakeholders co-op, B-Corp, and other forms of decentralized leadership structures empowering a sense of inclusion, and belonging with more transparency and trustworthy systems in its legal form, decision-making, and even the way we make budget. Finally, technology is the last piece to complete this puzzle. New types of infrastructure are emerging, enabling the communities and a new governance to become a reality. The purpose of this workshop was to explore the latest technologies that can bring together all the pieces of this puzzle. My own takeaway is that ledgers built in blockchain, smart contracts, and in digital currencies eliminate our need for centralized authority so we can move to a more transparent and trusted game. Why? Because in a centralized system, only one party owns all the data, and they get to choose how to use it. Paul Dowse and Sid Staticaur gave us wonderful presentations on Ledger, blockchain, Holochain, and reputation, and I strongly encourage you to watch part 1 and part 2 and listen to their talk. In our part 2, Paul Daust from Holo started describing the key feature of blockchain. Blockchain key benefits are reducing centralization, ensuring access, fostering transparency, removing intermediaries, and finally improving availability. Paul then goes on into the details of how Holochain works and how it compares to blockchain. Holochain has a different approach and a set of promises. Agency: you own your own data, you always get to choose how you want to participate. Cooperation: each participant takes responsibility for following the rules which builds trust amongst peers. Everyone knows and consents to the rules of the game. If anyone sees someone breaking the rules, they take their own action against them and signal an alarm to others. And context. Information without context is incomplete, so another promise from Holochain is to preserve the richness of multiple perspectives. Holochain key benefits are respects privacy, tolerates failure, eliminates infrastructure, outperforms blockchain, and finally adapts gracefully. After hearing Paul, I arrived at a second understanding. With the emergence of intelligent organizations, we understand that the economy is not in a recession, but rather it shows an end of an era. Technology is a game changer because this is creating abundance and it's giving birth to peer networks and open knowledge. So the information age doesn't revolve around scarcity, and for that reason we need new models. So how do we power a new economy? The first step is to question our perception of wealth by moving away from thinking about economics to thinking of wealth, which is not accumulation. In her presentation and part 4, Belinda Knox invited us to ask ourselves how we experience wealth. She reminded us that there is one thing that we all experience, and that is pain. Value happens when someone experiences less pain. If we can monitor, measure, and reduce pain, then we can create value. Now, some might say, well, that's what businesses do today by solving customers' pain. Not quite. Think about it. First, we only solve pain that people want to pay for. Marketers only focus on the visible pain that can be monetized. Two, businesses are just reducing the symptoms because they're never addressing the root cause. Actually, getting rid of the root cause would mean that they're getting rid of the solution, their solution that they want to sell. Belinda leaves us with one question: how can we use technology to reduce pain rather than thinking simply to make money and accumulate power? What if technology could help us address different kinds of problems? With peer-to-peer technology, built on the promise of giving the power back to individuals, we can create value by making invisible pain visible and transform people's experience of it. This becomes an opportunity with a system like Holochain that validates trust and promises. In his presentation, Part 2, Sid Staticar, founder of Sacred Capital, describe how we, we could shift from global consensus to contextual validation. And we can move into an agent-centric web where we can port our data across multiple communities and create neighborhood structures. My real aha moment was when I combined the notion of wealth with the notion of trust and the idea that a community can hold the debt of each individual. That's when I realized how mutual credit makes sense. To me, the future looks inevitably with digital currencies and mutual credit, but not just as money, rather as current and flows of values. During the breakout room, our intention was to move out of the present and create the possibility for a new future, create what is invisible. So we sent everyone to 4 breakout rooms to come up with new possibilities of business model in a specific reality. Some people loved it and some people found it difficult. Let me give you some context and details of each of the rooms. Growth. This is our current reality. And it is the exclusive way of doing business by building fences to make scarcity appear. Examples of current business models are membership fees, gated advertising model. The room came up with many ideas. One was using Holochain in a business model where the revenue of a platform would come from the collaboration and creation between users, not from their data. Collapse. This is the second reality where urgency and time becomes the key element. As an example, the Institute of the Future charges $80,000 a year for a 10-year forecast, which they made free during a short period of time. Another example of the collapse business model is the product life cycle, selling on eBay versus in a garage sale. The room came out with a business model of the common, using good incentives to make people shift. The third reality, discipline, is where business model integrates trade-offs to extend the timeline.. As an example, Misfit Produce is a New York City or New York produce-based selling unsold fruit and vegetables that would be otherwise destroyed. In this reality, the room discussed an economy of enough, preventing waste from the root, and coordination along the value chain of food, clothing, and housing. Finally, in the transformation reality, where today we can find the gift economy, old business models of PBS or NPR doing membership drive, community decision models like crowdfunding and on Kickstarter. In this reality and in this breakout room, people explored tracking and tracing attribution distributing value and re-quantifying the material commons, as well as flipping the zero-sum game of the financial market on its head to make it generative. What beautiful things would you want to do if you had all the money? Listen to your answers and do it anyway. Despite the money. In a new world of abundance, energy flows in various forms. You could be meeting with someone who knows an investor or connecting idea which will provide you with the needed resources. I am reminded day after day that the time to wait for others to tell us what to do, how to live, and which rules to obey is over. Each of us are the ones we need right now. Actually, our true power as individuals is in our choosing daily what we eat, what we buy, and what we invest in. We also have the power, power together. So I want to invite you to join me and others in the next session that we might put together and host in September, October, during a weekend. If there's enough of you, we'll make that happen. Think of it as a hackathon mixed with imagination, curiosity, and creative session to build something new. You will find a link to register in the text below, but please do sign up or leave comment because I won't be able to do it on my own and I need you to do it with me. I want to thank all all the people who made this workshop experience possible. And I want to thank you who's watching and listening, uh, this podcast. Thank you for taking the time to pay attention to this. If you have questions or feel a desire to get involved, please reach out to me anytime.