Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Implications of License Approaches for Giving Economy and New Social Good

Well, one thing is certain if you are analyzing licensing options when developing anything that is intended to foster a "giving economy" and a new social good:  Your head is going to hurt.


"It seems to me this is the culmination of three prior digital disruptions... One of which is commerce going digital, the second is peer-to-peer exchange going mainstream... The third is the digitization of social. (...) (This) has started to bring online some of the real-world assets, like reputation, like histories, like social capital, that will be the trust infrastructure for the sharing economy."
(...) "(R)egulation perhaps can be supplanted or supplemented by these digital institutions."
- Arun Sundararajan, professor and NEC Faculty Fellow at New York University's Stern School of Business, speaks about a "sharing economy" and "digital disruption" at Techonomy 2012. 

Based on the record of software development in particular, there is strong evidence that the license approach that you choose, apart from the merits of your proposal, can (in many situations) make or break your project in terms of its potential to be used widely.

For example, Microsoft's NetBSD for eMIPS (which refers to a "dynamically extensible processor" - a mechanism for building and developing a processor or providing machine instructions) has a license which is known as a 2-clause BSD license (see more information on BSD licenses here).  In 2011, the NetBSD project adopted Microsoft's eMIPS port. Such licenses are highly permissive, which enables use of code in almost any way so long as copyright notices are conveyed with it.

Bitcoin, which has the highest market capitalization of any decentralized protocol utilized as a cryptocurrency, is released under what is known as the MIT License. That license is considered to be compatible with the GNU General Public License described below, but what developers want to do with the software they are developing will influence what sort of licenses they choose (in terms of MIT versus GNU General Public License) as well as influencing the circumstances in which the license(s) will be applied.

The GNU General Public license scheme, and some others that are similar, are detailed here.  This license also relies upon the copyright concept, although it utilizes the "copyleft" concepts to help ensure free use of the software regardless of whoever uses it.  This approach is not as permissive as the BSD license, and was successfully used for many software projects, including Linux (GNU/Linux).  In 2008 alone, GNU/Linux was thought to have resulted in revenue that was approximately equivalent to nearly $36 billion USD.  The Linux kernel was used to build Android, which is now used for over 80% of the mobile phone market (by any measure, the market is currently dominated by Android).

Copyright-dependent licensing schemes are not the only options out there.  There are, for example, systems which exist that are intended to coexist with copyright law, while generally rejecting modern notions of intellectual property.  One such example is the Unlicense, which has been used for many projects.

These are just a few examples of licenses used in software development, but further complicating the issue is that multi-licensing or dual-license concepts can also be employed.

The licensing approach has significant implications for modern developers of the giving economy and any new social good.  The terms you use and the licensing approach you choose are significant considerations that must be given serious thought in any endeavor intended to promote a 'sharing' or 'giving' culture.

Recommended reads:

ABIS Protocol on github - a protocol concept to enable decentralization and expansion of a giving economy and a new social good.  (Initially presented using the GPLv3 license.)
Airbnb case (sharing economy related) to be decided by January 18, 2014.
BitMonet, which has just added support for TypePad.
North American Bitcoin Conference to be held at Miami Beach on Jan. 25-26, 2014.
South America: Crowdfunding with Bitcoin.
(Idea.me to receive $2.4 million USD Series A Funding in March 2014)
Sharing Visionaries Unite:
Andreas Antonopoulos, Katie Chin, Chelsea RustrumStanislav Shalunov (of Open Garden), and others speak at Sharers' Talks on Dec. 17, 2013.


Wednesday, December 11, 2013

What, Exactly, does Decentralization Change?

Decentralization in many parts of the world is increasing (see, for example, this recent study published in the Journal of Public Deliberation on the development and politics of subnational decentralization).
Some studies have examined decentralized versus centralized markets, and have shown, for example, that in certain conditions, a decentralized market is more efficient than a centralized marketplace.  Decentralized markets generally produce superior outcomes in the context of surplus when friction is reduced, or exists at a minimal level, and is small.  This raises the question of how "frictions" should be evaluated in the information economy, and suggests that "official attempts to manage economics" should be reduced wherever possible.  Organizations - including governments - that fail to either implement or adapt to decentralization will be absorbed by individuals, associations, and firms that demonstrate capacity to navigate an increasingly decentralized society.

Here I am not speaking of administrative decentralization, but rather a larger view, which includes political, fiscal, economic, and even personal and familial identity decentralization.   In this larger view, individuals and associations are empowered by their new-found realization that they can, merely through collective participation in the decentralization of financial systems (including individuals' and collective choices as to what we will fund in a giving economy), do away with most of what has traditionally been accomplished by government - and either continue it through funding of certain activities, or discontinue it by not funding others.  This also affects how people will in the near future develop the internet itself.  Broken trust in the common Certificate Authority (CA) system means more people will be turning to decentralized and open source solutions (such as TACK) to alter or replace the standard CA system, which until now has been assumed to be "just how things are done on the internet."

Wherever a potentially beneficial result occurs from government policy, such as reducing the potential for economic collapse via implementation of the Volcker rule, there should be maximum flexibility granted to innovators and participants in the new economy.  It should be understood that as part of this process, not only will some governments disappear and be replaced by  new organizations (or be done away with entirely in the transition to a new civil society), but as well, traditional financial institutions will eventually fade.  A good area to examine these developments is in the decline and death of banks as we understand them today.  The transition to a decentralized economy is accelerated by development of privacy enhancements (to the extent that those enhancements also spread in a free, open source, and decentralized fashion, which reduces the previously mentioned frictions).  These enhancements are now beginning to be implemented in not just one, but various decentralized currency protocols, which marks a historic point in what could be described as a revolution of purchasing power imparted to the individual.


"Bitcoin is really that revolution... I call it the seed of the resistance."  - Max Keiser

And that's all for this week, folks.  See you next Tuesday (that's a promise.)

Recommended Reading:

How to use bitcoin anonymously
Thoughts on alt-coins and diversification
FreeBSD moves away from Intel, Via
Cryptabyte - free cryptographic messaging service
KryptoKit -  one method for using bitcoins anywhere, even with places that don't yet accept them
Darkwallet - open source, decentralized wallet supporting bitcoin transaction anonymity, now 200% funded (over 100% of target level of USD donations, over 100% funded from bitcoin donations)
Sparecoins - open source, decentralized bitcoin wallet - in your browser.
The Largest Investment in a Bitcoin Product in known history:
Coinbase to use equivalent of $25 million USD to protect customers' bitcoins offline.
BitPhone - turns decentralized virtual protocol (namecoin) into a phone.  Yep, a phone.
"By using an autonomous, distributed communications network based on BitCoin principles, BitPhones require nothing but a shared network to send & receive messages, make voice and video calls, share photos, transfer files or run applications of all sorts."
BitPremier
BitGive Foundation (Give a Bit This Holiday Season)

Recommended Video Interview (added Thursday, Dec. 12, 2013):



"One of the problems that decentralization solves... is the difficulty of information moving around within centralized systems... Instead of... giving money to a central group of individuals... the best thing is to actually go to the source itself.... Instead of going to a centralized point.... you go to specific points and you've done away with a big part of the knowledge problem...."
"Sometimes peer-to-peer systems are the right approach.... or sometimes you really want both, because both lend themselves to some aspects of the problem."
-- Max Marty,
Co-founder and Chairman of the Board; former CEO, Blueseed.co
Co-founder and CEO of Spotsell (as of Nov. 2013)

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Crypto Diversification & New Public Good

If you've been watching decentralized virtual currency developments at all over the past week or so, you've run into some interesting news.  Litecoin has shot up again, edging over $37 USD per LTC on the btc-e exchange as of the time I'm writing this post, and is approaching $39 (well over 241 CNY) on the OKC exchange. (Note: by the time this post was finished, litecoin was at over $40 USD on that exchange.)  In the process, jurisdictional arbitrage is providing users of various alt-coins with newly found wealth, even if they are not cashing out to their fiat currency of choice.  Five days ago, news broke in Forbes describing litecoin breaking the billion dollar mark for market capitalization, with namecoin breaking a 100 million dollar mark. Four days ago, the Guardian talked up not one, not two, but nine alt-coins, including quarkcoin -- which has now increased by over 500% in value. (It's also dropped quite a bit in value and has generated controversy over early mining efforts.  You can track what's happening with quarkcoin in real time at Cryptocoincharts.)  That's a coin that can be mined just with your CPU, and word on the street is that in addition to the areas where quarkcoin (and many other alt-coins) can be traded at present (Cryptsy, Coins-e, Bter, and Btc38), it is anticipated that quarkcoin (and other lesser known coin not yet in currency pairs on most exchanges) will be traded on btc-e as well, beginning at some point between December 15 - 20, 2013.
Bill Still (who will film the Dec. 19 Keiser report on Dec. 16, 2013) does a pretty good job of explaining quarkcoin, and covers it in an interview with Kolin, one of the quarkcoin developers.  (Kolin has a perspective on bitcoin (referring to it as "fantastically centralized") that I don't agree with, since bitcoin is a decentralized protocol. However, I've put the video here, so you can decide what you think. In my view, we will see development of many more coin types in the near future, and people who watch these developments closely, enter new markets early, and trade out at the right times, will be well-positioned to benefit.)



You would be right if you are thinking that you should engage in some 'crypto diversification.'  Beyond bitcoin, the march of decentralization has led to a proliferation of protocols, and huge surges of interest in the same.  But what about that new public good and the corresponding protocol development I alluded to in the prior post?  And, what are some ways to easily mine - to produce for yourself - namecoin, quarkcoin, and the like?