Vril: The Ultimate Currency Project

hApps
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#122

Oh, hi! I guess you came from https://groups.google.com/g/rippleusers/c/3RABIJDzE1o? Just a guess though…

Anyway,

Well, I sort of did start the development, in fact even prior to publishing the draft (wouldn’t even have published the draft in the first place had I managed to get it up and running all by myself); kinda implemented the balance-sheet functionality (and the DHT linked-lists for currency swaps), structured-out all the entries (hdk entries) that deserved to be abstracted out, had a nice organization and a rough idea of where everything (i.e. code and functionality) should go (i.e., the rust modules), and was doing fine until it came the time to implement the core functionality of executing transactions… You see, there’s no convention around how to do countersigning yet (and frankly speaking, I have no idea if it’s even possible, especially for me, to be able to do it without the promised counter-signer type that’s expected to be shipped soon; though I remember I once read that it should be possible even without the counter-signer type, albeit with a lot of expertise around Holochain’s under-the-hood functionality; source: https://blog.holochain.org/announcing-and-unpacking-the-new-holochain/). Anyway, the code was so incomplete that I didn’t bother to put it publicly; I’ve sort-of abandoned developmental work as of present in the pursuit of designing (and merely designing) solutions worthwhile designing (one can’t rely on these gullible communists, who have no knowledge of economical praxeology whatsoever, however geeky they may be with regards to implementation, to come up with the distributed solutions the world so direly needs to get past this century; can’t compromise on humanity’s future).

In short, if someone from the Holochain team lends a hand for development, then that would be great! Or else I’d just wait for those RSM updates to roll-out… [You see, it’s a positive externality; it’s a public-goods problem; it’s not like I’d get to mine the first million coins (unlike Bitcoin), or that I’d get to keep some boring 1% transaction fee (unlike Holo-Fuel); felt like that was an interesting observation.]

Anyway, thanks for dropping by…

#123

I did not mean to call the Holo team (developing HoloFuel) “gullible”; my apologies there; in fact, I believe they are very smart and reasonable people. But they’re probably either too optimistic of the future, or are too positive about people’s interests, or are too over-confident of their technological prowess, or are downright ignorant of the fact that centralized allocation of credits (the way HoloFuel wishes to pull it off) is a beyond-NP problem (or maybe just NP; citation needed; but a hard problem nonetheless). So why even bother!

Here’s all you’ve ever wanted to know about HoloFuel (not really reigniting the old debate again; it’s just that I’ve noticed people asking outright blunt questions about its functioning here on other threads of this forum, threads where my mere presence would upset a great many unappointed moderators, threads where the question yet has to be addressed properly…).

So for those of you (the curious vigilantes) who’ve wanted to know, here’s:
HoloFuel Stripped-Off:

The consumer (the app developer) wants data to be hosted (the app’s clients’ very own source chains, as a matter of fact); the hosts have to host first, earn later (even if a second later, it’s “later” nonetheless; at least that’s how the traditional cloud infrastructure providers charge), as a result of which they get credited first (i.e., go positive, while Holo mints the equivalent fuel), and the consumer buys the Fuel later (from Holo, in exchange for either the filthy Dollar or some Gold-like cryptocurrency like BTC) to settle his very own debt to the host by transferring that Fuel to the hosts that he’s indebted to.

What this apparatus does is that it puts the end-consumer at debt to the Holo organization who’s indebted to the hosts; or in other words, the consumer (the app developer who wishes to make his app easily available to even those of his customers who have no balls to host their own source-chains; mainly the Kardashians and their fan-base, so to speak) owes (at every hosting-second, periodically, or maybe one hosting-hour, which is far more convenient, or maybe some other arrangement) to Holo who owes to the hosts.

Note that in this apparatus, the total Fuel supply is equal to the total amount of unsettled debt.

But in order to model HoloFuel as an asset (as opposed to a liability being paid out of responsibility), the architecture has been flipped.

A host goes into debt first. The host’s debt ceiling (or floor, if you visualize credit as up and debt as down) is decided by its hosting prowess, which is assessed by the Holo Organization itself. So, upon joining, the host goes into debt, while Holo mints the equivalent HoloFuel. The consumer buys HoloFuel (i.e., he buys an asset in exchange for other assets), which he spends on hosts in return for some hosting-service. The host redeems it (the newly earned HoloFuel) for the asset that the consumer bought it against (thanks to the LIFO reserve system); the price of a HoloFuel (in Dollar equivalents, for instance) being decided on by the Holo Organization (or the hosts, collectively, through some algorithmic voting of some sorts), but whatever that price be, it doesn’t matter much, since hosts can increase/decrease their individual hosting-price anyway. As an example, a host might start from -100, earns 40 HoloFuel, is at -60, but his debt-floor is at -100, and he wants to continue hosting (i.e., it’s not in the mood of closing its account) so rather takes the newly earned 40 HoloFuel units to the Reserve, and thereby takes home 5 Dollars (assuming 8 HoloFuel units equal 1 Dollar). This goes on and on… At any given point in time, the total HoloFuel supply is equal to the hosting capacity of the system.

Note that Holo is, in this apparatus, the very gatekeeper that it had been asking you to fight-against, all along! It’s the sole place where +ve balance gets minted. Plus, the fuel supply in such an apparatus is a direct function of the total hosting-power of the system, which is a colossal task to calculate (especially when you consider that sometime in the future, even everyday desktop-users like you and me will be able to become hosts, not just the HoloPort owners)! And so why should Holo give you more credit rating than me, for example! And what should be the basis of that discrimination? Even this question aside, you may say that the price (and the total Fuel supply) doesn’t matter, since hosting-price can adapt, and that the LIFO redemption system ensures that future inflationary prices don’t end up draining away the whole reserve; and that we shouldn’t care about whether the Kardashians get to use our future apps or not, but consider this: HoloFuel would be (especially if Vril doesn’t take-off due to the lack of any incentives for development) the world currency for the decentralized economies of the future. And knowing that there’s no way to prevent Sybil actors from inflating the Fuel supply (except via intrusive real-DNA-sequencing of every host’s human owner in an attempt to keep inflation in check by only allowing a fixed universal [x] amount of debt-floor to the unique human hosts, as though that were an option), the other economies built on Holochain and using HoloFuel as an external compensation currency would find them at a very disadvantageous position; add to it the fact that the Fuel supply might just be a fraction of the total value represented by all the distributed economies combined and you require that the velocity of money in such a system be extremely high lest the whole system comes to an abrupt halt (i.e., you must not sit on your money, lest you lose it, since by sitting on it you decrease the availability of the already low-in-supply money); and such a low-supply (and low-availability, possibly) society begs the question that why on earth should we choose HoloFuel as our economical driver (money)? Because it’s backed by this century’s fundamental need of hosting? Certainly not! As there’re more fundamental needs, such as the dichotomy of fear/faith needs that are very primal for us human beings, but that need has already been satisfied by Gold. So should we all stick to Gold (and BTC) on the premise that that’s the best that can be done for driving economies? Certainly not! We can certainly do a lot better; in fact, we ought to do a lot better!

If I were at the captain-seat, I’d flip things a bit; knowing that it’s not a self-sustaining system (that customers don’t provide back any service to the hosts), it’s clear that we need outside-compensation. Rather than being exchangeable for Dollar and BTC, I’d choose it to be exchangeable for other distributed Holochain (and non-Holochain) economies’ Vril tokens (and upon realizing that the great-many currencies of the distributed future would need discoverability and swap-ability, I’d invest my team’s time and effort in developing Vril first, and Holo later). And knowing that there’s nothing fundamental that Holo (and hosting, in general) provides, I would never advise HoloFuel to be relied upon for long-term holdings (it would be kept very clear that “the fuel burns; sit on it at your own peril, as it might burn your butt as well!”). I’d choose to call hosts our subsidiaries, and would want to know the hell out of them (i.e., not just know-your-customer, but know-the-heck-out-of-your-customer) if I were to do it in this centralized fashion to even begin with; bad hosts (with low or infrequent uptimes) would be downlisted on my centralized match-maker service; I’d (as Holo) want to be a tyranny to hosts and a servant to customers. As for inflationary measures, I might even flip the apparatus to return to the initial (ideal) scenario described above… But when one thinks about it, Holo really does seem to be trying to pull off the impossible! You see, my (as a Vril counselor and evangelist) advice to, let’s say Amazon, would be to simply issue as much Vril as their inventory contains. Their inventory might contain 100 billion Dollars worth of goods, and the cheapest good being 5 dollars. They might choose to issue 1 trillion AMZ Vril tokens, in which case that cheapest product would sell for 50 AMZ Vril units. In the case of Apple (the smartphone manufacturer, not the juicy apple seller we discussed in the document), they might have 1 million iPhones in stock at the moment of adopting Vril and might choose to issue exactly 1 million Appils (the Apple Vril tokens). Assuming an iPhone sells for 1000 dollars, the exchange rates between AMZ Vril and Appils would settle to something like 10000:1. But in the case of Holo, even that’s not certain as to how much hosting power we have… So, yeah, one would have to dissect the poor little hosts with the Swizz-knife that KYC is! Anyway, these are my ideas around HoloFuel. Didn’t discuss them in the document since none of my assumptions around HoloFuel’s future functionality are well-founded, so decided I’d discuss them here…

As for counter-signing, the problem is simple. I want to only sign it (publish a contractual entry) only if you sign it too (i.e., you publish the entry too). One naive way around doing so is to check in the validation routine as to whether the corresponding entry that this one needs already exists; but then that’s the same thing that the other entry’s validation routines are waiting for… So can’t really do it in the validation routines. One might just publish an entry that sort-of says that “take me seriously only when my counterpart is present too”, and when the counterpart entry also exists (published by the other party involved in the transaction), you can conclude that that was a done-deal (i.e, a successful transaction; my balance got decremented, yours got incremented). But then there has to be another entry that does this increment/decrement and whose validation function checks whether both those previously mentioned co-dependent entries exist or not. If they do, both our balances change, and if not, then the transaction fails (and maybe there’s some way to make the validation function just retry, but I don’t know)… Would love it if someone can share some insight on this subject. Has anyone (@guillemcordoba) done it before (in RSM, preferably)? Shouldn’t this be simple enough to automate it with the counter-signer type? But then why the delay? Are there some more nuances that I’ve taken for granted?

#124

I think you might be missing the aim of Holo and HoloFuel.

Holo is a transitional system that acts as a bridge from the old centralized internet to the new fully distributed one (or as you say: a way to get the Kardashians to use my app, without having to install Holochain on their own devices). Selling $HOT was a way for the team to raise funds in a slick yet honest way: they are paying it back by way of the 1% transaction fee on HoloFuel (once converted from $HOT). They raised around $20m (i think).

This ‘Initial Community Offering’ gave the Holo project and team capital in the real world. The team is using it to pay their bills. It is even paying some of hREA/Holo-REA’s bills (if I understood Arthur correctly in his comment above). That is the important part for me, that this gets the resources to grow. The air this fire needs to start burning brightly. Funding Holo funds Holochain. It was a way to tie up the destiny of both projects together (Holo is built using (and dependent on) Holochain anyway).

People who supported the Initial Community Offering want Holochain developed because this distributed computing pattern is novel. It doesn’t exist yet. Zero to one.

It’s an experiment. And a fucking exciting one at that.

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#125

Yeah, I guess you’re right. With that, we should close HoloFuel’s topic, once and for all. (We ought not to be doing experiments here, right? We ought to be world-building!).

There seems to have emerged two schools of thought in the Holochain community: the communist ramblers (the most predominant by far) and the free-market freedom-fighters & monetary-reformers (me basically).

I believe the differences in our opinions should not prevent us from helping each other overcome the technical hurdles, i.e., the Holochain community should be neutral in addressing the queries of both the pro-communist Holochain-adopters and the pro-free-market anarchists fiddling with Holochain. That said,

Went unanswered. So I’d like to ask again, as to how the future of counter-signing will look on RSM (can’t hold my curiosity). Would the counter-signer be a header-type, or would it be a macro (besides hdk-entry), or would it be a simple helper library? And most importantly, would I be able to do multi-level countersigning with it (note that multi-level counter-signing is in stark contrast with multi-party countersigning; in multi-party countersigning, multiple parties (let’s say 10 people) can counter-sign and agree to some common terms. Whereas in multi-level countersigning (the one I’m interested in), the countersigning is kind-of conditional in that B would only countersign with C if A would countersign with it too; or the way Vril has structured it: that A would only countersign with B if A would also get to countersign with C, and D, and E, and finally Z. It’s like counter-signing on counter-signing… How might one represent such a use-case with the (yet-to-come) counter-signer? It will be doable, won’t it be? Perhaps, you can shed some light on it, @thedavidmeister, who knows better than you…).

#126

i might be working on countersigning in the HDK soon, need to juggle some priorities

i’m thinking of it like this atm

if alice wants bob et al to countersign

alice commits a request for countersigning to her chain which opens the transaction

any further countersignature requests of the same type to alice’s chain will fail validation until the first is closed

entries unrelated to the in-flight transaction can continue to be committed, e.g. blog posts or transactions of a different type or whatever

the transaction can be closed by alice committing all outstanding signatures as a close success entry, or cancelling it herself by committing a close cancelled entry

either way, closing it out frees up her chain for more transaction attempts of the same type

validation of the transaction close entry runs against both the open and close entries as a pair, the system handles basic cryptographic validation of the signatures so the happ developer doesn’t need to get that right themselves

cc: @artbrock

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#127

the signature requests are just data, the countersignatures ‘locking’ the chain doesn’t say anything about the process of gathering the signatures

for example A can pass their signature to C who then passes it to B who adds their signature and hands it back to C who then has signatures from both A and B - and B can refuse to sign if A’s signature is not present and valid

2 Likes
#128

I’m really happy you are working on this topic. The details of distributed transactions in Holochain are critical. I’m not commenting on your proposals yet, but will follow along and run some examples in my head when I think I understand the ideas clearly.

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#129

of course

countersignatures are just a small detail :smiley:

#130

VRIL

luciferminireadings_2
luciferminireadings_22560×1614 117 KB

Symbol: ∀ (the mathematical logic symbol meaning “for all”)

3 Likes
#131

I don’t want to hijack this already expansive thread, but @thedavidmeister if I understand correctly, this won’t require Alice and Bob to ‘lock’ their individual chain states via call_remote while negotiating a countersigning, because the validation rules will enforce valid state. The only details left for the app dev to work out are (a) collect signatures, as you’ve said, and (b) have all parties wait for network ‘acceptance’ of the pieces they’re expecting from their counterparty, to avoid (but not completely prevent) becoming the victim of a chain rollback.

It also sounds like it should only be used when you want a countersigning to close quickly, or you’re okay being blocked and unable to initiate more countersigning requests in the near future.

Am I right?

Re: failing validation of future requests until the previous one is closed, I wonder if that’s always necessary. It seems that what’s really required is Alice’s commitment to countersign something, plus the validity of her attempt to commit to it (e.g., sufficient balance, given all previous open/closed countersignings)… and something about her hopeful counterparties being able to see her commitment accepted by the agent activity authorities before they participate.

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#132

countersigning optimistically then ‘waiting for validation of the completion’ sounds not very different to ‘locking a type of countersignature until you get valid data’ in practical terms

i could go either way, it’s a tradeoff between assurance that your signature will be accepted when you sign (as the counterparty) vs. ability to canvas multiple people for signatures in parallel if you think they won’t sign, then you need to find out later whether someone signed ahead of you before you know if yours is the ‘real’ transaction

my preference at this point is the former because i think the UX of signing something then having the potential that some other user can oust you from the transaction could be a bit jarring, it has echoes of MEV and front-running on blockchain to me, but i’m open to doing it differently if parallel signature requests are needed for some reason

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#133

I love (since a few years, not too long) the original concept of Vril as “life energy”.

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#134

Exactly. :–)

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#136

I have to admit, I am a novice and have been spending much time learning about blockchain and holochain. I understand the limitations and issues with blockchain which holochain endeavors to mitigate and replace blockchain, where holochain technology will make way more sense as a technology platform. However, reading A Mans comments does give one pause as to the eventual value of holofuel and likewise the current value of $Hot. What more though, is reading your article on Medium titled Holofuel The Worlds Stable First Stable Digital asset where you present a very convincing argument of the ponzi scheme that is blockchain crpto, (I agree and don’t buy crypto), but then you follow with the a lengthy talk where you adulate HoloFuel as truly viable “asset” because its based on Holochain and wax Holofuel as the greatest future asset as if its already a sure thing, and nary a mention that there are serious possibly fatal flaws that have yet to be worked out to really make it all work as true asset, as A Man has postulated. As an outsider, and part of the the 99% of the population that agrees with you that blockchain isn’t the future, your going to have to do more to prove HoloFuel is worth more than any other fantasy cryto, as you refer to blockchain crypto in your medium article. Truly that article was written to sell your story to the crypto gamblers or as it seems to me, as it talks all holofuel adulation and mentions no flaws. I certainly am not here to bash anyones integrity, I am just calling it as I see it as an outsider. Lastly, @artbrock, the tip off for suspicion, again as an outsider, was this:

Your creating the holy grail of technology platforms and hard selling HoloFuel as the “next Bitcoin” except a real future asset, yet you present here a total fabrication of how banking works? Are you serious? Bankers are the elite that get to create money from nothing, charging interest and transferring massive amounts of wealth to themselves?? You obviously do not really mean what your saying, or you have no idea how banking works. I’m truly afraid that its the latter because you don’t seem to know that long term loans do not pay all interest up front, quite the opposite its paid on an amortization schedule with mostly principal paid up at first and the principal in turn in most cases pays back the institution that the bank is borrowing from at a lower interest rate, almost always government funds. What makes this very scary for me is that someone that is hard selling the future uber asset in forums and on medium doesn’t seem to have a clue how banking and for that matter capital monetary systems work. Again, @artbrock, nothing personal meant by my comments, and I would very much love a response or an article to address my (and A Man’s) concerns on a layman’s level, but your own medium article does use similar rhetoric against ponzi scheme blockchain cryto companies fooling the 1% of blockchain believers, I would like to understand how it is that without directly addressing the current non solved problems but still pushing holofuel, you are any different from the blockchain companies that know their platform is crap but are still selling it anyway. Again no harm intended, I truly want to believe in holofuel. I look forward to your reply.

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#137

One more thing; as I am very convinced that holochain technology is the future, how about offering a way to invest in the company itself or better yet, tell the public that $hot will become warrants to buy shares at a certain date down the road (if thats legal).

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#138

Exactly! That’s what I’d like them to do as well! :+1:

#139

Correction (“I was tired when i wrote this forgive that it went astray”); amortizing payments for loans does have more interest being paid upfront but that’s only because its purpose is to provide stable payments throughout the loan. By simple math one must pay more interest when the loan is a higher denomination than when it shrinks. So the amortization table allows for the payment of principal in a smaller way upfront, added to the actual interest payment and as the loan shrinks more principal is added. That’s because there is more room in the stable payment amount for more principle because the interest payment is lower when the principal is less with each and every payment. As far as money lending by banks in the US; banks rarely every hold the loans at all they sell them after the loan is made. It begins with funds provided by the government at a discounted interest rate to the banks. The banks make loans at the prevailing market rate to the public and close the loan. If they decide to hold the loan they service it and make profit on the spread. However, most institutions sell their loans either to Fannie Mae, or to wall street firms that bulk loans and securitize them where the public can invest in mortgage backed securities and other real estate asset backed securities. Again, anyone planning to change the work of money who doesn’t understand simple banking or have a deep understanding of economics is extremely myopic in the best case and in the worst case, doing exactly what he claims the ponzi schemers are doing with blockchain. Again, Art, I do not know you, but you seem to be very genuine and I hope the former is the case, but some of the things I’ve read from you seem to be panting a different picture. I would love a comprehensive reply that addresses all these concerns with real world solutions. Thanks

1 Like
#140

The Death of Gold

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_6GV5mKoA1nbJ-3N-3psMoiXB9lnsvca/view?usp=sharing

A no-nonsense article I wrote on the future of crypto.

Readtime: 3 minutes

I hope you find it interesting…

[Also, after having sorted out all my non-programming vocations, I’m back on a coding spree (finally). Hence, won’t be available for length discussions… Apologies if I don’t respond.]

#142

I want to be respectful. The first sentence of your white paper is grammatically incorrect.

As an animal society matures, it gives birth to “specialization”.

The period should be within the quotation mark. It’s minor, but we are speaking of a space with exacting expectations. I will continue to read.

Holochain for Global Cooperation
#143

https://qr.ae/pGGLip

In the days when printing used raised bits of metal, “.” and “,” were the most delicate, and were in danger of damage (the face of the piece of type might break off from the body, or be bent or dented from above) if they had a ‘"’ on one side and a blank space on the other. Hence the convention arose of always using ‘."’ and ‘,"’ rather than ‘".’ and ‘",’, regardless of logic." This seems to be an argument to return to something more logical, but there is little impetus to do so within the United States."

My preference to resort to programming-style syntax with respect to the linguistic English grammar was deliberate. The ." syntax is just too dirty for me… I hope my programming-syntax-style ". (in contexts like the one you highlighted) becomes your convention as well… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The programming style grammar syntax makes extensive use of nested quotations, nested brackets, and even discriminates between the different types of braces (the brackets [], the braces {}, the parentheses ()). Often it uses single inverted commas (or just plain commas) to separate a phrase from another. For instance, consider this sentence: Sarah gave a bath to her dog wearing a pink t-shirt. It’s an ambiguous sentence. The programming syntax (for substituting grammar) is often a great aid, especially for those who are accustomed to writing long complex sentences. For instance, “Sarah gave a bath to her ‘dog wearing a pink t-shirt’.”, vs “Sarah gave a bath to her dog, wearing a pink t-shirt.”. In academics, especially, there seems to be a growing adoption. For instance, just when I saw the above messages, I was reading this document: https://www.math.ias.edu/~avi/PUBLICATIONS/MYPAPERS/AW09/AW09.pdf. And coincidently, the sentence I was on said:

Universality, or, how do we resolve P versus NP?

Let us consider another question, “Trunk Packing”.

Question 4

Given the dimensions of a set of suitcases, and of the trunk of our car,
find a way to pack them all in the trunk, if possible.

Looks like there’s hope for the new syntax at least in academics…

Then I recommend reading the latest article on the subject; it’s spot on! I’d be open to any comments on what that the article mentioned…

Roughly speaking, “The Death of Gold” is “The Birth of Vril”. It should suffice as a good overview of the Vril system of value exchange; in fact, the article was written precisely for economists and professionals discovering this space, unlike the (I admit) “silly” original document on the subject (which was written for myself and other prospective co-programmers so as to serve as an official specification for any concrete implementation of the said protocol).