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1. h (h)'s status on Tuesday, 27-Feb-2018 22:46:02 CET h

   Further thoughts.

   Re:

   - Transparency for the institutions.

   - Privacy for the individuals.

   Re:

   - You need permanence for transparency.

   - You need mutability for privacy.

   Then:

   - Mutability implies you need to arrive to a consensus on the current state of reality.

   • h (h)'s status on Tuesday, 27-Feb-2018 22:49:36 CET h

     in reply to

     Beyond:

     - A distributed consensus system has been discovered. Its name is #blockchain. Not very good as a distributed database in its original implementation, and but it's possible that the distributed consensus part will be necessary to implement more sophisticated privacy control.

     The difficult question here is more social and philosophical than technical.

     How can peers agree to a fact, without knowing the nature of the fact that you must accept or reject to build consensus?

   • h (h)'s status on Tuesday, 27-Feb-2018 22:55:23 CET h

     in reply to

     The social solution humans have used for millennia is to build trust relationships.

     On the surface, it would seem that we're running in circles here, because we're introducing the element of trust again.

     If you look deeper, however, trusting institutions is a very different thing from trusting individuals.

     The range, degree, and depth of trustworthiness of an institution may be computable by distributed consensus of individuals.

   • h (h)'s status on Tuesday, 27-Feb-2018 23:00:33 CET h

     in reply to

     The difficult social problem is how to build more and better social relationships with more individuals, and less long-lasting relationships with institutions.

     There's a bandwidth and energy problem of how much can humans cope with. How much can humans interface with other individuals.

   • h (h)'s status on Tuesday, 27-Feb-2018 23:02:12 CET h

     in reply to

     Among other things, a primary function of institutions is to work as abstractions, so you don't have to talk to Jenny in the legal department to make sure your yoghurt is safe to consume, or Joe in petrol logistics to be guaranteed your car will be pumping tomorrow.

     The institution abstracts all that away so you can get yoghurt in the morning.