Hi all,
Some of you have heard of Sardex (business mutual exchange currency in Italy). I met with them about a year ago and they are very very interested in switching over to Holochain (currently using Cyclos).
I think that would be a wonderful opportunity … instantly there would be a hApp up and running with 20,000+ users with a successful projects.
Anyway, let’s at least start the conversation.
Cheers, Ken
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Interesting. What would be the value gain from switching from Cyclos to a happ?
Maybe someone should redo Cyclos with holochain…
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Yes Sardex is indeed interesting. They have been growing for 10 years. It actually shows that mutual credit can work in practice! And encourage members that add productive value and getting credits in a sustinable/non-rent seeking ways. Another interesting network is Swiss WIR bank who are around since the 1930s. I wonder if there are also opportunities for holochain to partner with them?
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Hi, thanks. The reason for the switch is scaling up. Cyclos is a wonderful project is but it was designed for little towns in New England or farming coops in Sussex…Sardex is now upwards or 30K members stretch over the entire island and they are starting projects in Veneto, Lazio, etc. etc.
In Short, YES, wouldn’t it be possible to take the freeware of Cyclos and make it a hApp. I am very willing to throw lots of energy, money, and time to such a project.
Cheers,
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Hello. Thanks for the input. Yes, WIR Bank is great because of the history. It is now also a “normal” banks (granting loans at interest in Swiss Francs, etc.) I have never met with them … would like to. Of course if we build a real world workable mutual exchange credit currency hApp it could be applied to WIR, Sardex, and many wonderful projects yet to come!
Again, I am willing to contribute to this … not sure where to start. I actually live not so far from the Cyclos office … of course now with COVID …
Hey ken, so nice to see you passionate about holochain and also on the prospect to do something with sardex. Btw, is there any stats on sardex website which shows important figures like memberships, transactions vol done etc? I went to the website and check it out but the language is in italian, which i dont understand. 
Hi Sol,
Cheers for the kind words. By big interest is alt finance … I sincerely be the current financial system hampers human development. Mutual exchange such as Sardex is a major step forward and Holo is an ideal part of that (the decentered nature etc.)
Anyway, yes, everything is in Italian, that’s on purpose since they are locally focused. The English skill in the office are actually pretty good.
Did you have a specific question … I could go into my notes. Off the top of my head, the membership is nearing 30,000 and the volume is something like 12 million.
I should work with them to do an infographic.
Anyway, ask any questions you might have … I have pages of notes from my meeting there.
Stay safe and safe,
Ken
(where are you in the 1.0 world … I know I saw you posting on one of the Asian meet-ups … I’m in the Netherlands, educated in the US, married to a French woman hahahaha you see why I like decentered networks like Holochain 
)
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I believe the best approach would be to get in touch with Cyclos and see how open they are to redo Cyclos with holochain. If I remember correctly, its currently done in java so there is nothing much we can re-use codewise but the design can be reused. Also it would be interesting to ask them how they handle the scalability issue. More java servers? I’m sure @artbrock has some thoughts on this subject.
Wow @Ken, it is really nice to hear of your varied background and also keen interest in decentralised network. I am from Singapore. Have a bit of programming background. But more BD, investing focused although i tried to learn as much as possible on holochain/holo. I had organized holochain events in Singapore before.
Yes, i am keen to know more about Sardex. I actually read up about them. Will think through of some quick questions and ask here again if you dont mind
thank you, that is very sound advice. I will try to follow up on it. I could literally ride my bike to the NGO that developed Cyclos, BBBBUUUUUTTTTTTT … just registered nearly a 40 degree fever. I’m not going anywhere for a while…probably just a tad of flu from overwork.
Anyway, will keep in touch.
Cheers, and bon weekend,
Thank you, Sol. I’ve only spent a few very jet lagged hours in Singapore, but I loved the mix of cultures. It was clean and safe even by Dutch standards (but better weather and food hahahahaha) My cab driver told me I was staying a slum … it reminded me of a high rent district from my time in NYC hahahaha. Anyway let’s keep in touch … lots of fun and interesting and worthwhile and profitable work can grow from this. Cheers.
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Please let me know if you ever come to Singapore! Would love to hear your experience interacting with Sardex. Cheers!
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I believe Holochain is itself a kind of replacement to Cyclos. With shared UI across happs, you could easily fork a mutual credit happ and modify it to fit your community’s needs. We just need the initial happ, and I believe the HoloFuel happ is a good starting place.
Cyclos doesn’t has a scaling problem, you can run a million or more customers on it. Holochain would be only better when you want to introduce intertrading or having a decentralised architecture in general. BTW Cyclos is a huge and complex stack it would need a lot of ressources to migrate this to holochain. And it would need a mature Holochain to run it. Much easier would be to use a modern business application stack and slowly migrate some of the business logic to holochain. As for instance in my proposal Holobiz, a hybrid framework to bootstrap the p2p economy
Thank you for your input. My comments about Cyclos and scaling come directly from the tech folks at Sardex. They’ve built and big and good project so I tend to trust them. I can’t envision a motive for inventing a problem that wasn’t there.
As far as your other points, let me read the materials you hyperlinked.
Cheers,
Oh yea? Thank you, Josh. I will try to track him down. Cheers.
Interesting discussion about this on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbauwens/status/1250775410406612992?s=20
Even if the scaling claim were to be true, it would require maintaining multiple servers running java, so the benefit of holochain would be lower server costs and no server maintenance required.
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Thank you for this!
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