Description: Koru is a proposed enhanced mutual credit system building off its predecessors to provide a new monetary and governance paradigm. The system has 5 core components:
Mutual credit+multihop: Original mutual credit for day to day transactions. For small transactions outside of network we can use RipplePay’s concept for credit clearing.
Reputation: Democratically determined creditworthiness. Opportunitiy to work with Neighborhoods cc: @sidsthalekar
Intercommunity converter: As published in Credit Commons by @matslats . A method to link communities by converting currencies. Creating a network of currencies tuned to local need rather than a universal currency.
Fiat/crypto liquidity pool for on/off ramps: To interface with legacy systems and for mixed community lending.
P2P governance: collective decision making for financing businesses, community projects, parameter management.
As an open source P2P project, Koru provides the blueprints and components. The ‘product’ is created, owned and managed by the community. Any additions can be locally created or shared from other communities (ie. quadratic voting, demurrage, etc.).
Blockchain based governance systems (Ethereum improvement proposals, Cardano Voltaire)
Guillem’s PoC mutual credit
I am at:
Implementation and fundraising: This project requires a team and a team requires funding.
Skills required (team skill level in brackets):
Holochain knowledge: 7
Front end: VueJS (8), Electron(2),
Back end: Rust (5), NodeJS (9)
UI/UX: CSS(3)
Others: Business dev (6)
Commitment:
Full time
What do I need?:
Developers: Interested in making a change? Don’t be afraid to reach out!
Business network willing to beta test: To avoid a “build it and they will come” scenario we are looking for a community that is willing to be a part of the iterative loop.
Community support: Know anyone that would be interested? Simply spreading the word is a huge help.
Fundraising support: Got any ideas or know someone wanting to fund a project like us?
Expertise support: Critiques and ideas are welcome.
Feel free to reach out to me at imran@koru.finance
I scanned the whitepaper and found it interesting and thoughtful (among other things happy to see the “tax issue” acknowledged - a part I’ve been struggling with myself when thinking about real world adoption at scale of these kind of systems)
One thing I missed/failed to find though - it would be great with more info around team/people behind Koru.
What I’ve realized (and what I think @resilience-me knew since the beginning) is that replicating a Ripple-like network on Holochain would lose you all the benefits of going multihop, to begin with; thanks to Holochain’s shared DHT and DHT-replicated validation results, to prevent a gibberish injection attack you would need to make the happ “closed” (meaning a non-empty validate_agent() callback) which essentially ruins any benefit you get from multihop. You’d have to invent some form of gate-keeping just to keep the bots out! But since you’re happy with
gate-keeping (or some form of human verification) shouldn’t bother you much.
I don’t really get Holochain still. Multi-hop mutual credit in itself doesn’t need any public validation at all, each person can just validate their own balances with their own people they trust. But exactly how to organize the IT part of that, I don’t know what is best. Ryan Fugger was working on a similar approach as Email, anyone could run a Ripple server and people could sign up for accounts, and then also interact from server to server. This would be where I would start myself, not being aware of a better approach. But if other services could have any use for whatever Holochain’s “validation” is doing, and they also benefit from a currency, they could run Ripple on it even if Ripple itself would not need that “validation”.
Yep I know. Happy to see. Just to avoid misrepresenting “Holochain”, since I do not really know what it is, and since I don’t know how to best do the rest of the IT part around Ripple, even if public “validation” is completely unnecessary data packages still have to be routed from person to person, network and transport layer of the internet, maybe something like “Holochain” could help out there idk. And if something like “Holochain” has other good use cases, but needs a currency, it could still benefit from having Ripple on it even if Ripple itself would not need all those functions.
The cool part is multi-hop mutual credit can be truly private. Just as private as people sharing information with their own trusted friends and family and partners, physically, by speaking. It does not need to be public, at all. No one needs to know anyone else’s business, it still adds up. At least if transport and network layer of OSI model of internet are ignored. I’m studying basic electronics and computer science this fall actually to be able to better understand how to best do that. So that is why I emphasized that so much, it does not necessarily mean “Holochain” and Ripple could not benefit from one another, just that Ripple in itself actually has the potential to be truly private and have true information secrecy, an actual true “crypto system” in the traditional sense of the word “cryptography” (I consider what people call “crypto systems” to be more about making information public, rather than hidden, and like to call it “phanerography”, public writing, instead of cryptography. )
Multi hop as you noted is not very necessary within a holochain network. The main value I think, comes from value transfers across networks. For example, if two towns have their own holochain network and you dont have a direct line with the other town members, how would you transact? The multi hop cant replace foreign transactions but it can at least clear small amounts of credit.
The main assumption is that communities spin up their own DHTs. But that can change if there is a better way.
In terms of application, a joining proof is important for each DHT but how to exactly define cross DHT interaction still needs to be explored .
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