I have some designs for a Plan9 kind of thing on top of ssh/git/torrent
Similar to the Holochain project, which is a distributed datastore with application layer and sums itself up on the homepage as "Think BitTorrent + Git + Cryptographic Signatures" but I don't enjoy holochain. It's one of the attempts to rewrite the stack tho, see also Urbit.
When I first ran across urbit I spent a few days trying to understand if they were building what I am building, because maybe I should just join them. When I discovered that artificial scarcity was involved, I felt confident that no, we are not building the same thing. But it did take quite a bit of research to come to that conclusion, much similarity.
I'll check out holochain, if just for contrast. I'm a bit leery about "chain" though, blockchains go to great lengths to achieve globally consistent outcomes, and I don't think people need that for most things. Even about money. Especially about money. If you're rich in here-dollars, and you go there, you shouldn't expect them to respect your here-dollars unless you earned them doing something that is also appreciated there. Liquidity comes from shared values, and different people often have different values, so like... drop the consistency criterion.
I know a few people with similar projects. We had put so much hope into what we thought the web could be, and we're pretty damn disappointed with what it is, so you've got a generation of nerds trying to build what we thought it could be.
I begrudginly respected the imposed scarcity of urbit if only to fund developement but yeah I was in the same boat, "oh good. someone already did it, I can just pay $15/month and relax" but unfortunately the peer discovery for installing apps is fragile AF
Holochain is unfortunately named since its about as much of a blockchain as git is (merkle tree, no proof of work mechanism) but they obscured it willingly by trying to integrate ETH [0] as a way to pay peers for cloud capacity / capitalize on the crypto hype.
edit: "Liquidity comes from shared values" this is an interesting axiom, I'll have to think about that. I've always held that the neat thing about money is it allows collaboration between groups with opposing values, because at least we have one motive in common
I realize that this is a hot take, but I think that
> money ... allows collaboration between groups with opposing values, because at least we have one motive in common
...only really holds if our common motive is that we both don't want to be killed by some Leviathan type thing (originally this a Roman soldier who would kill you if you didn't trade Caesar-face coinage above its buillion value). Money today is just a proxy for the same old violence as before.
This places a cap on how legitimate money can be. The have-nots, should they ever manage to coordinate, would be better off turning their backs on it. When a rich nation shows up and starts throwing money around, you can be sure that the poorer nation is getting screwed. Probably there's some kind of violence hanging around ensuring that they don't act up. See the history of US policy in South America in the 70's for more on this sort of thing.
If we want to move past all of this yucky stuff I'm talking about, we need to your acceptance of my money synonymous with me proving to you that I've done something that benefitted you specifically. As it is now, it's just proof that my activities somehow benefit a bank somewhere.
It's mostly notes and dreams, only a little bit of working code. I'm going to seem a little insane... but here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37972446 (or see cousin thread).
