Hello to the Holochain forum,
My name is Adam Rosszay and I am the founder of Citizen’s Cafe — a company of global citizens building our future culture and raising human consciousness by offering civic empowerment technology which is designed to maximize individual freedom for the express purpose of increasing a person’s ability to effectively create positive change in the world.
I’ve been designing and creating Citizen’s Cafe and our first application, Reality Finder, since about 2006. The vision that I am working towards became clearer to me in 2017 when I read the Bitcoin white-paper and learned about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. In addition to the company and the civic empowerment technology, the other component of the vision includes a decentralized …I don’t even really know how to describe it… reality-verification network, where coins are ‘mined’ by a network of individuals who participate in online investigations. I call it a ‘social’ cryptocurrency - something where all individual humans are equal.
The amount of existing wealth doesn’t affect the amount of social cryptocurrency you can mine - only your ability to connect online. Individuals need to participate in an investigation with their time and effort in order to earn the reward. There is also a monetary cost required to participate. The cost is derived from the effort taken and resources needed for Citizen’s Cafe to provide network participants the ability to connect with one another on a trusted basis to conduct investigations. However, since the social cryptocurrency is a decentralized network, natural competition will emerge on the network where other organizations may find ways to lower the cost of mining for individuals. In this sense the cost for mining is NOT equal among all participants on the network if they are accessing the network from different organizational ecosystems. The intention for Citizen’s Cafe is to provide our users with the best user experience at the lowest cost possible.
At the outset, the network is centralized by the stewardship of Citizen’s Cafe. However, over time the stewardship will ultimately transfer to self selecting members of the decentralized network participants (the intention is to keep Citizen’s Cafe as an active member of this larger decentralized group, but as with any other member - we will need to earn our keep in the group). Anonymous mining is possible to occur on the network, but rewards can only be distributed to known entities. This design provides incentive for network participants to share in the cost of operating the network. Entities become known to the network via an identification registration process. In addition to this, entities gain power in the network via a transparency sharing level up process. This design facilitates the core aspects of security on the social cryptocurrency network.
It’s impossible to purchase more mining power as each individual participating in the system earns the rewards. The concept is similar to Bitcoin mining, but think of it as benefiting human beings instead of the machines. Similar to the nature of Bitcoin mining, teams of course can be established and coordinate their mining efforts to earn the social cryptocurrency. In this sense, existing wealth does have an impact in the ability for any given team of individuals to earn more social cryptocurrency than others. However, it is important to state a fundamental difference in the dynamics of the Bitcoin network and the social crypto currency network - and that is, with social crypto currency there is no currently known maximum total supply. The nature of social cyrpto currency mining involves solving investigations about the objective reality of our world (that’s why the first application we are building on top of this network is called Reality Finder). In this sense if existing money helps the human species as a whole better understand the objective reality we share, then we see no conflict in this matter. From my perspective, that’s the definition of healthy competition. In fact, I envision tournaments and world-wide investigation competitions to occur eventually if the network is successful and achieves global scale. I’m not sure if social crypto currency whales can even exist, but perhaps they can. I see the monetary value of social cryptocurrency manifesting out of market dynamics, similar in fashion to how each crypto currency has manifested its monetary value. The point being - you don’t need massive amount of wealth to mine the coins or earn a stake - you do need time and human energy to conduct the work of solving an investigation online together with other human beings and share the cost of participating in the network.
If you are interested in learning more about the company and project, you can check out the website at www.citizenscafe.com
As part of my introduction, I’d like to mention that I’ve been envisioning and building Citizen’s Cafe for many years now. I can only provide a surface summary description of the concept here in this introductory post. However, I am curious to know how the Holochain community feels and what they think about the ethos of Holochain being expressed via an external brand, like Citizen’s Cafe for instance? Is this something that is welcome? The reason why I ask is because much of the concepts and ideas that I have heard Eric Harris-Braun, Arthur Brock, and Matt Schutte discuss (among others) are in 100% alignment with my understanding and vision for how civic empowerment technology should work. Namely, a techonology that works in an agent-centric way and is designed to facilitate maximum individual freedom.
Furthermore, if indeed a company like Citizen’s Cafe is welcome by the Holochain community, then my most pressing and urgent need is to collaborte with others in hopes to find the right people to work together with and with enough luck and effort, form a cohesive team to start developing the Reality Finder hApp. Unfortunately I won’t be able to figure out all the aspects of this system design on my own and 100% need others on board this spaceship in order for it to fly and help create a more positive future culture and human experience worldwide. Please reach out if Citizen’s Cafe resonates with you, I would love to chat and explore possibilites. I can confidently share that I have gotten as far as I can on my own with this project. I have built a high-fidelity vaporware protype that we can leverage as a tangible core for further discussion and learning. The world desperately needs Citizen’s Cafe to be hard at work solving problems, so please reach out if anything I am sharing resonates with you.
Also, lastly, I would like to mention that I recently became organizer of the Boston Holochain Meetup and am excited to meet others in the local Boston area that are interested in learning more about Holochain and building with it. If you happen to be in the Boston area, please feel free to contact me, so we can work together on ideas and implementation for Meetup events.
Cheers,
. Adam .
. I really look forward to meeting the community 
and yes, we do need to network their traditional knowledge for an applied solution that includes biodiversity, celebrates biodiversity and healthy ecosystems, food, water and air, not necessarily in that order.
