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freedom software ideas - starting with 2 ideas

One idea is a variant on crypto. The other is a way to solve the censorship problem. I am not claiming any of this is original. I don't care if it's original or not; I just want it done. I want to record the ideas even if it turns out someone else has.

I tend to use the plural below. I find it irritating when people use the plural without obvious reason. Right now, I have no one else in mind, so it's just me. I use the plural speaking to whomever wants to join me in launching this. It's not something I'm going to do myself for a number of reasons. Also, please go do it without me if you want. You can be the "you" and form a "we." For that matter, this is doable as an "I." Go for it.

crypto variant

Cryptocurrencies demonstrate that people will accept a currency that has nothing to do with a government, bank, or any such institution. That is very encouraging, and we need to elaborate on that part. A currency should maintain a consistent value for decades and centuries, though, and crytpo has utterly failed on that count. Also, extreme decentralization potentially causes more problems than it solves.

Crypto also demonstrates that people will accept total openness in one sense--everyone knows the to and from address of every transaction. We should keep that level of transparency.

Rather than extreme decentralization and extreme redundancy, I propose a set of local currencies, where local does not necessarily mean geographically local, although that should be part of it. Local may also mean a trade mechanism within a community, even if that community is to a greater or lesser degree virtual.

I propose software to allow many local currencies. My vision is that only a few hundred or perhaps a few thousand people would use one specific currency on a regular basis. In the other direction, any given person might use 2 - 3 currencies on a regular basis, or perhaps somewhat more.

A currency would be centralized in the sense that a handful of servers would keep track of transactions and balances. Anyone's PC should be able to handle the load on their home internet. The transactions may be released as a blockchain for anyone to mirror and cross-check, but it would not be necessary to start the blockchain from the beginning if you started running a node. The design would be something to the effect that the chain would resolve into a stable state every few hours.

I propose a handful of administrators who are probably known in real life to the currencies' users. One benefit is that money could never be both stolen and remain stolen. The money would have no way out of a small, closed system, and the admins would have the power to reverse transactions.

Money would come into existence as a set of coupons for "free" goods or services within the user community. A spent coupon for 10 units would become 10 units in the account of the service provider. Once a system is to a certain point, the admins and infrastructure providers could fund their work by simply creating and issuing currency. The currency should always follow the rate of economic activity within the community--a balance of supply and demand of the currency itself should keep it stable. Each unit issued would have a generation / version number. If more currency is needed, issue coupons or the admins fund their work. If less currency is needed, holders of 10 units, generation 1 will the next moment have 8 units of generation 2.

I should point out that a coupon usually indicates excess capacity on the part of the one issuing it. It's a great way to balance supply and demand. I suspect that it would not be hard to keep the value of the currency stable, although I'd imagine it would take some trial and error at first.

compare and contrast to the Federal Reserve Note (FRN the so-called US dollar)

One reason the FRN always inflates is that every single FRN comes into existence based on a debt with interest. The entire currency is loaned to "the people" at interest. If the entire currency is loaned at interest, it's impossible to ever pay the total debt. The banks do create the FRN out of thin air. If they can do it at interest, we can do it without interest. Switzerland recently had a ballot referendum where the question was whether to revoke the private banks' power to create money. ("The Swiss sovereign money initiative of June 2018, also known as Vollgeld.")

Other than the constant inflation due to that cause, the US banks to a degree do keep inflation down with a supply and demand model. Their inner circle has some degree of self-interest in this matter. If a few thousand people had their own self interest in mind, we could keep the value stable.

a censorship (and server cost) solution

Years ago (roughly before 2014), Clark Howard would complain about server costs and have a commercial at the beginning of his downloadable podcasts to pay for the servers. As of roughly mid-July, 2022, Stillness in the Storm has the same complaint, and they almost certainly still do right now, a few weeks later.

We should solve server costs and censorship at the same time. I propose a decentralized protocol that makes is cheap and easy to distribute almost whatever you want. Child porn should get a SWAT team or even a mob on the perp's doorstep within two hours. I would tend to ban adult pornography because there are US regulations around it, and they can fund their own selves. The system should tend towards supporting "fair use," but that might get tricky. The main point of the system would be to distribute content whose creators want it distributed. Jordan Peterson is a mixed bag, but his notion of a platform allowing anything not banned by a US court is a pretty good standard.

The protocol would have a lot in common with the BitTorrent protocol. One difference is that if we can fend off copyright-assertion attacks, our equivalent of BitTorrent servers and magnets and such should remain relatively stable, as opposed to their getting shut down every few days or weeks. BitTorrent does have peer to peer discovery, too. That should work.

We can also borrow from or even use IPFS. While reading about IPFS, it appears that people volunteer to store whatever they find worthy of storage.

Given that the protocol is open, anyone can write clients and peers and to whatever degree they are needed, servers. A publisher would use a client / peer / node to publish and distribute. There would be a combination of anonymous authors and ones who are at least id'ed by a public-private key. When an author goes to publish, they enter keywords and such. The system measures the size of the content. The request goes out to at least some of the nodes. At least the metadata should default to widespread distribution. The content distribution would depend on the popularity of the author (if available) and various users' settings. There should be a feature to automatically divide large content and / or compress it to allow faster preview and then users' determination whether to distribute in full.

I would think that a vast percentage of what a handful of people ever watch on BitChute would get distributed, and the slightly more popular channels would have redundant copies.

Anyone should be able to post the content to their own websites such that custom apps are not needed. Given an open protocol, though, custom apps should eventually come out.

Curated lists of content would start to form, curated by different users.

page history

  1. 2022/08/12 23:21 EDT / America/New_York timezone / (near) Atlanta, Royal Colony of Georgia - first version almost or completely written. Hopefully this is a good enough sketch of the ideas