Holochain solved scalability problem, so I’m interested. As far as I know, HoloFuel is the currency used on Holo which is a market for distributed apps.
Will I be able to pay HoloFuel for food and various services rather than distributed apps? Or, should there be new cryptocurrencies running on holochain for other kinds of goods and services?
Is Holo subject to censorship pressure? mastodon.social suspended my account for posting David Icke videos on it. Can Holo suspend my account for posting David Icke videos or any video that goes against WHO(World Health Organization) guidelines on a distributed app rented from Holo? The global elites control hundreds of trillions of dollars and can buy anything that people are willing to sell.
Is HoloFuel subject to censorship, too? I haven’t seen any scalable digital currency that is not subject to censorship by the global elites.
Good questions. Others can help answer better, and here are some of my thoughts.
@artbrock has repeatedly said that HoloFuel is optimized for thousands of micropayments a second. Paying for hosting services requires that sort of speed and small transaction amount. So while HoloFuel could be used for good and other services, it might not be the optimum method to do so. The design of Holochain makes it easier for other mutual credit currencies to be designed and traded with Holofuel.
Since Holo is partially centralized through the Holo Hosting network it might be possible to be censored. Until people design their apps and we get real world use cases it will be hard to know for sure what can and can’t be blocked. It’s more about how any given app is designed as to how it can be abused to censor people.
AFAIK there is no way to block a HoloFuel transaction. If you and I want to do an exchange, being agent-centric, I check that you are able to exchange and you check that I am able to exchange. In order to “black list” me from an exchange I would have to violate one of the rules of HoloFuel. It seems to me that the Holofuel code would have to include some sort of way for a governing body to simply say we don’t like what someone is doing over her, and we will block all their transactions.
All of Holochain is designed to minimize any 3rd party from arbitrarily preventing two people from interacting. But the rules (DNA) of any give hApp can be set up for community censorship and hopefully anyone joining that community is informed of all the rules before joining.
I hope @artbrock or some other developers can bring more clarity to the discussion.
Great responses @LifeSMyth. They’re accurate so I’ll only add additional perspectives:
You should be able to pay for any goods and services, but the deeper question is why you would want to? Holofuel is simply an IOU between you and an app provider. So if someone wants to ‘buy this loan that you have given’ off you, sure, that’s fine. It’s important to note HF doesn’t derive it’s value from more people wanting to buy stuff with it the way crypto does. Personally, I would be happy paying for traditional goods and services with whichever currency is most convenient. If someone doesn’t accept HF there’s always going to be a liquid market to convert it to a popular currency.
Steven’s covered the Holo aspect. However, there’s no way Holochain can be censored since it’s open source software that can run off your device.
I think this is related to point 1. If we stop thinking of this as a global currency, regulators won’t look at it with this lens either. It’s just a record of who owes whom what money.
Why don’t you guys make the Tfuel usable in real world use cases? We want to use this to pay for stuff. Icecream, bills, foods, fuel for our cars, etc. You got the money, you got the people, give us the investors something to look forward to.
The actual real question is why would we NOT want to pay for goods and services with Tfuel? Why not? Why else would people want to stake a token? So, we can get a good income stream to pay for goods and services. Why not allow us to sell the tfuel back to you guys for that exchange? Seem’s like Tfuel may in fact be useless and people will know.
So your worried about it becoming a “Global currency” and that it will be regulated? So what is the point of making a staking token and giving the people a useless Tfuel? Why else would anyone in today’s society want to stake a coin with no real use cases, or even value? Tezos is a staking coin and I make about 100 USD a week in it and almost 600 a month. They are not concerned about it becoming regulated or… even a global currency. Why are you guys worried about it?
Be honest and transparent, is this a true scam to rip money out of innocent people’s pockets or are you guys actually going to make a difference in the crypto space and make staking worth while?
I wonder how long it will take for one of the real Holo guys to answer back
Interesting points @aali95. I must say upfront I am NOT a part of the team. I am someone who’s building on Holochain and deeply vested in its overall acceptance. I’m also a fan of the design behind HoloFuel, and hope to incorporate it into my project.
I brought up these points NOT because I’m against using it for goods and services but because I think there’s deep value in the currency itself that we sometimes forget to acknowledge. Holding HF is a representation of money someone owes you on the Holo network. It isn’t a cryptocoin in the traditional sense that ONLY derives value from people circulating it more.
I’m not sure what you mean by staking a token in this context. If you mean holding HOT, it makes sense to hold it because you believe its trading at a deep discount to where the hosting price will eventually stabilise. The hosting credits are the embedded value here.
With regards to paying for goods and services: there is NO restriction. HOT will trade for a while, after which I’m guessing it will be easy to move HF to other networks.
Arthur himself has said that it could be used for anything that people want to exchange for. Based on the demos so far there will be a HoloFuel hApp where anyone can send HF to anyone else. Invoice and paying for Hosting will be at least partially automated.
HoloFuel is not optimized for large dollar (euro, pound) transactions. I haven’t done a currency design course, so I can’t speak to what those differences are. The important part is that (again, according to Arthur) it will be easy to design the currencies to “be interoperable.” That means exchangeable. But someone in the community will have to build those features into their own hApp. Holochain is focused on the data integrity part not all the applications on top of that.
I’m not very interested in exchange part. I’m more interested in a scalable general-purpose currency built on top of holochain. If it was private or anonymous, it would be better. At least, I want it to be pseudonymous.
Hello, @aali95. I see this is an old thread and your concerns might have been solved now with the other responses.
I am not part either of the Holochain team, but after studying monetary systems closely, I arrived at the conclusions that our mindset around currencies needs to be radically changed, as our interest-bearing, national currencies create many frictions for borrowers and systematically increase social inequality and drive natural exploitation (Charles Einsenstein has some great, through explanations of these workings on Sacred Economics).
The Metacurrency Project, where Holochain stemmed from, is aligned with this need for new forms of money and they see the future in communities having the autonomy and ability to create currencies specially tailored to their needs, perhaps those appearing for several different industries.
Once that principle and innovation in currency technology is understood, the way Holofuel was designed makes perfect sense, while having only one or a few major currencies for all economic activity stops sounding like such a good idea.
However, if all HoloChain currencies were specialized currencies, we would have to wait for a few decades until HoloChain currencies will be of any practical use for people.
Agreed! I love that it’s up to us as a community to decide what is needed and build it, rather than a top-down approach leaving it up to Holo or another organization to fulfill our needs
There’s an Oxygen cost to everything, for digging, for movement of overburden, for sifting, smelting and casting, then transportation of Gold or mining bitcoins with non-renewable energy, either way it costs Oxygen; doesn’t it? How cheap on Oxygen can a currency based on Holochain be in comparison?, to mint and exchange? Let’s not forget hardware costs to the last bit of rare earth in a speaker magnet, as set up costs, to get this right. Now who would transfer Gold or BTC if it were clear which used more Oxygen? How do you design and deliver a currency that’s unsurpassed in efficiency as far as Oxygen consumption goes, that’s tighter than BTC on security and one that will also will make people grow things in order to earn more, rather than speculate and hedge to earn more?
@oxygen-cat right on, Im glad to see other people fired up about this. I believe the Holo team is passionate about improving life for this planet and everyone on it. the Holo infrastructure has the potential to be a ‘one-stop-shop’ in a sense, however please consider that this entire industry is in its infancy. what Holo is doing is absolutely revolutionary, and I love how theyre being very upfront and transparent from the beginning. imo alot of the success will depend on the quality of dHapps built, as well as the efficiencies of economy, hosting, gossip, GUI/onboarding, and interoperability. its design contains all of the necessary building blocks and flexibility, but like with anything in the 3D world, it requires tangible action by consistent participants. it is up to us to come together as a species to promote a collaborative, fair, and efficient civilization.
@aali95 your concerns are legitimate. perhaps tackling the discussion regarding value and value flow as they relate to value based systems could alleviate them. for example, if provider A of particular good/service wants to accept holo fuel, then nothing in theory should stop customer B (holo fuel owner) from agreeing to the exchange if it is desirable.
an important aspect of the Holo architecture is that its design intends for many current-“sees” to be built on top. choice is left to the users as how to decide their value, use cases and adoption. the beauty of it is the freedom of creativity.
I recommend checking out @artbrock 's occupy wall street presentation
@sidsthalekar and @LifeSMyth make really great points. I am not part of the team either, but am also a huge fan of Holo for several reasons Im happy to discuss. my main goal is to help answer questions and engage in productive dialogue.
