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Blockchain meetup 2018/11/13/apunts/01

De teixidora

https://pad.femprocomuns.cat/p/sharebcn2018blockchainmeetup

Blockchain meetup

Share Barcelona 2018 - Sharing Cities Summit - 12-15 November 2018

http://www.share.barcelona/sharebcn2018/sharing-cities-summit-2018/

Collaborative notes to be transferred to Teixidora.net, documentation to share and reuse.

https://www.teixidora.net/wiki/SHAREBCN2018

(List of speakers separated by commas)
(Conference notes in chronological order)

Conference notes

We will be talking about different projects that bring together the Social and Solidarity Economy and Blockchain

Jon Hearty (Origin Protocol) originprotocol.com

At origin protocol we are building a blockchain platform for decentralized marketplaces. In the last 20 years or so, commerce on the internet has completely changed with companies like eBay and Craigslist that allowed two people to transact directly with each other. With blockchain you're able to do this in a truly peer-to-peer nature. Companies like AirBnB and uber claim to be peer-to-peer but there's actually a big centralized corporate company right in the middle that is hoarding all the data of the users and soiling that data and taking big transaction fees so there are several very important reasons to disintermediate these centralized companies:

1. the number one reason is to lower fees these companies usually take somewhere between 20 and 30 percent, sometimes higher of each transaction and when you can remove that middleman the fees go with it. 2. one of the other big reasons is to redistribute value much more fairly throughout the network so if you think about what the first uber driver is doing today he's probably still driving uber and he's probably making less money than he was on day one so because of these crypto Acton incentives you can actually incentivize the early users of these networks to gain value as the company gains value instead of just the investors making money and the founders making money the early participants of the network can also participate in the growth of these networks 3. the third reason is to promote free and open commerce so governments are notorious for regulating these companies in AirBnB in San Francisco 50% of the listings from AirBnB were removed in one day because the government came after AirBnB they are a single point of failure but when you distribute these and you put these listings on the blockchain there's no single point of failure to go after - for these regulations uber has been banned in many cities across the world so we're really excited about how the blockchain can allow all of these cities and countries to take advantage of these sharing economy applications.

It promotes free and open commerce, 50% of AirBnB listings when down before the government decided, Uber has been regulated all over the world. In order to use these services you need traditional financial systems (bank cards) lots of people don't have access to that, but they do have access to a mobile phone.

We want people who know javascript but doesn't know blockchain to be able to access, too.

Manuel Ruiz

We want to rethink the way the government gives services to citizens, with Pangea. At Bitnation, we work with organizations like Aragon or DemocracyOS. We are already showing our diplomatic passports at Pangea, they have already been stamped.

Bitnation.org

Samer Hassan

There is still a lot of research to do about decentralization of infrastructure. Entities are monetizing through data, so if you decentralize infrastructure, the users will have more impact on how the infrastructure is managed. Instead of having a single owner, we can have a democratic government of platforms, and economic models in which the value is distributed. We already have organizations in which the rules are integrated into the code. We are providing tools and reusing components of other technologies to facilitate the construction of services, combining building blocks, so everyone can decide what they want to give importance to. We are building infrastructure and working with communities to see how can we do a transition with big communities, we have 5  years ahead of us.

Plurall

We work on a different layer. On the human side of these solutions. Our vision is to find better ways to connect what is being exchanged. We don't simply go from a centralized to a decentralized one. We see people working at the protocol level and at the governance level. Who are the users using that? What is the value proposition for stakeholders in the system? We can't assume when we look at Facebook that people will behave that way with a decentralized model. It is important to communicate why we work with decentralized technologies, how do we take advantage of technologies. Let's build the infra and the software to imagine another future.

Marc Rocas

Doing research on distributed systems of government, we can talk about platform coops or we can talk about the commons. I have some comments about the rest of the presentations. About Origin what are you going to do to compete with Uber? How are you going to give citizens a value proposition that is more valuable than what UBER is offering now?

Virginia was due to attend the panel but Marc will represent her.

We have to recognize this (blockchain) is a young technology, some people come to me and ask 'I have heard I can implement the blockchain in my company' sadly the answer is often no, or maybe in a few years. Today we still have to face issues of scalability, trust, etc. Is blockchain the best tool to democratize the economy of Web 3.0? Could we eliminate intermediation and should we?

Samer Hassan

I don't like to say that blockchain is the best because there are multiple decentralized technologies out there. I do see some potential where the ownership of the platform is much more fluid. Even Wikipedia, in the end, has a single legal entity controlling the servers, who is controlling the code, how does the code evolve, these are thing communities are not questioning much, but these are important questions. There are some intermediaries that are creating value and some that are not. When we deal with totally disintermediated platforms, we always need intermediation, it is like this in society, nevertheless, there are intermediaries that...

Jon Hearty (Origin Protocol)

Self-sovereign identity, one of the main topic on the blockchain. How are you going to solve it in Origin protocol? We are using open source standard ERC20 token, ERC725 alliance, there are other projects that are using this standard. Facebook is famous for having these network effects, not just network effect in Origin, that identity can be used on multiple services that adopt this ERC standard. If you can solve identity it becomes easier to solve dispute resolution.

I think what will happen decentralization will force intermediaries to provide value for what they are doing. Middlemen will be forced to adapt in the long term. I agree you are not going to get a decentralized uber today. Users need the experience to be great, people are used to having this great experience on platforms It needs to be at par with what users experience today. Not everyone has access to AirBnB and Uber. So we are excited what cryptocurrency wallets on Android phones will do.

Question: Differences between centralized and decentralized identity.

That ERC725 approaches identity is it allows the user to make claims. The user has an Etherium wallet address, it can allow third parties so today on origin we use a phone book, email, facebook, AirBnB. You are cryptographically proving that the person in this wallet address also has this phone number, etc. A Facebook account can be as good as a driving license

Question: How BitNation is going to attract the masses and gain the reputation to have a diplomatic passport to identify yourself?

Manuel Ruiz: I understand, we have a team of 13 persons traveling with their bitnation passports, in some case they end up jail. We already have the passport stamped in some nations in the middle east. UNESCO gave us an award for providing an emergency ID for refugees. We need to find a way to prove identity. This is a way to protect from a Sybil attack. You have to make trading agreements, we have someone working who has created a token, ones a month to persons meet up and recognize that each other exists, we want the identities to be anonymous, it is a bottom line to protect people.

These will bring us to a meritocracy rather than a democracy, blockchain will bring us a future that is not democratic at all.

BitNation is blockchain agnostic, in the future users will be able to register with other tools. Bit Lattice is now in test net but its a technology that seems to be an evolution of Blockchain, fast, secure and with no scalability limits so we are open to leaving blockchain that was an important first step, but we are open to moving on to other things

How do you imagine the use of BitNation in 40 years?

Now we can already do commerce with citizens, without your public address. There is a book called The Diamond Era (Neal Stephenson) provides a vision of the future. It is going in this direction in science-fiction, You will decide your government service provider just like you decide your phone provider. Virtual communities will compete for citizens. Because at any time, just by pressing a button you can be in or out of the community.

Rafael Calcada

In blockchain, you have nodes that connect with each other interoperate, like in any network. To empower people to connect and make projects in the community. When we try to take the power away from intermediaries, the power doesn't simply disappear. Now we have a decentralized social network, but who moderates it? You are your own node but you have responsibility for the information you propagate. Our mission should be to support those things, but we need to understand the second order consequences. How we make this connection better, an easier process for the users and providers.

Do you think the technological part and the human part should be governed in two different ways? It is a transition

We still live in the real world, you still need to buy a house, its a process of transition, we won't wake up tomorrow and everything will be decentralized.

How do we work together with the cities, the communities? the government, also the lawyers, .. who has the power to decide, there are a lot of entities that have existed for years that can provide some value.

Marc Rocas

Can Blockchain be conceived as a common good? How can cooperative projects make blockchain projects more aligned with the common good?

It is how you define the common good. If we take this idea of the trust less system which is the design of the blockchain. Here we need that city councils push hard to support these kinds of solutions. There is a fear from the city council of giving voice to citizens. There is not just an establishment in the economic sector there is an establishment in the political sector. There is a long tradition connected with governance, with cooperatives, but we have a lot to learn from them for when we are designing protocols. You talk about tension between the administration and these projects, do you think we should wait for administrations to adapt, or should we work with projects like bitnation?

The answer is we can do both at the same time.

I think Crypto will be the money of the future Monero, ZipCash, that are not paying taxes How do you as a government work without taxes?

Rafael Calcada

We should support cryptos because this will lead to governments to work better. For example, if you choose to be in Barcelona and you believe in this government, the taxes are not bad but can we assert that the taxes are used as we want, if not do we have the options to use Monero, I think yes.

Marc Rocas

The transition between the system we have today and a decentralized one is regulation. There is a fear of regulating too soon or too late and not being able to solve the problem of the impact of the thing you didn't regulate.  This transition has to be done through regulation.

1.Samer Hassan - Looking at these projects you all presented looks like Blockchain can disrupt the collaborative economy. Blockchain can really be used to democratize the economy and participation? Could we remove intermediaries?

2.Virginia Mijes - (Question about gender, let me know if you are comfortable with it) If blockchain could help us to develop new ways to improve our cities and society, why we still see this little amount of women in blockchain projects? What we can do or change to have more women involved in this technology?

3.Jon Hearty - Identity is one of the main topics that Blockchain community is trying to solve, as it's not only a technological challenge but defiance that needs trust and agreements between different actors. Origin is one of the first projects working on it. How are you going to solve it?

4.Rafael ¿Gomes? - Blockchain allows multiple server nodes to connect, talk and interoperate. Could be also used to allow citizens to create better neighborhoods and improve the face2face relationships? How?

5.Manuel Ruiz - As Bitnation there are many projects working on decentralized jurisdiction like Aragon or on voting toolkits like DemocracyOS that allow anyone to create their own organizations and decentralized governance, but we still don't have real use cases. So, which are the challenges that will make Bitnation face the future and be used by the masses?

6.Dardan Isufi - Eva.coop pretends to disintermediate the ride-hailing system, giving power to the drives, not only by earning more money but also participating in the project. Why Blockchain needs the Platform Cooperativism or, on the other side, why the Platform cooperatives need blockchain?

7.Marc Rocas - I would like to close this round of questions asking your opinion about the parallelism between blockchain managed as a common good. Is Blockchain a common good? Can the Blockchain be the source or, at least, inspiration, of more common good projects?


(List of keywords separated by commas)
(List of keywords, in Catalan, separated by commas)
(List of projects separated by commas)
Bit Lattice, AirBnB, Uber, Origin Protocol, eva.coop, Zip Cash, Prulall, Unesco


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People mentioned

Neal Stephenson,

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