ECSA Stack

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= the toolbox for disintermediated value creation and distribution, by the Economic Space Agency

URL = https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HxqlId13F9Dw7SbAEi3MgC5VAMJAaMtbIfo1B5V7560/edit


Description

Status as of June 2018, by Akseli Virtanen:

The ECSA Stack:


A. GRAVITY is a resilient distributed application runtime that empowers safe computational semantics, cryptographically secure protocols and orthogonally persistent state. The Gravity protocol is a language based on lambda calculus, prototypes, object capabilities and message passing to create distributed applications. Gravity Applications are executed on top of this runtime, and selectively share protocols, state and computation.


Less technically: Gravity is a "post-blockchain" cryptographic object capable computational fabric, that is, a network of programmable object capable VMs for creating different customizable network topologies. So in Gravity, programmable VMs and their network comes first, and shared verifiable data structures only second. You can think of it as Ethereum's architecture upside down, starting from a network of interoperating VMs, not ending up with only one. The interoperation between VMs is based on a computing paradigm called cryptographic object capabilities (see about Mark Miller below). It basically allows us to move from operating with a global verifiable state to operating with verifiable stateful protocols. Gravity is really a protocol for protocol creation, a protocol creation factory. A new computational infrastructure for creating and operating next gen organizational, economic and governmental cyber-social systems in a resilient, reliable and from bottom up interoperable way. It makes possible do-it-yourself interoperable blockchains (and other shared verifiable data structures). The Gravity Virtual Machine is now in pre-alpha private review (alpha release scheduled in 4 weeks). If you are, or have someone highly technical who you think would understand and be interested, Jorge (the Gravity Architect) is happy to include him/her in the private review. We are selectively inviting competent and respected computer scientists and open source developers to start kicking the tires. You can find a technically precise



B. SPACE is a SDK for cryptographically enabled decentralized economic-organizational applications AKA “economic spaces”, “tokens 2.0”, “littleDAOs”, “autonomous economic agents”, “economic pets”. Space is a modular pattern language for economic interactions, that is, a protocol for designing and expressing Offers, Tokens & Governance/business logics and their different modular combinations (or what we call "economic spaces", kind of 21st century economic games and their business and governance models). Space enables not only decentralized exchange, but decentralized value production, its organization and governance (modular design of decentralized programmed organizations and economic logics). If Gravity is a protocol factory, Space is a modular lego set for designing their economies-governances.


While waiting for Gravity to mature rapidly (which will express Space in its full powers), we are right now implementing Space as a set of open source models in Rholang programming language, which will make Space RChain compatible, providing infrastructure for Space's functionality and security (but not limiting Space's implementation to RChain) and opening a possibility for RChain to start firing up an ecosystem of economic spaces on top of it. The pre-alpha is expected to be released with the RChain testnet by the end of July.


C. ACCELERATOR is a distributed incubator-accelerator for collective designing, prototyping, implementing and funding of new economic spaces. Accelerator’s task is to create space for exploring new ways of doing economy, engineering new economic space and collectively learning to break away from the patterns of the old economy. We have just set up a formal cooperation – a joint economic space incubator - with Stanford university at campus (School of Engineering/Center for Design Research), agreed to organize a full 14 weeks undergrad course on Cryptoeconomics at NYU/Stern, are working with The New School and Pratt in NYC (on social derivatives and cryptocurrencies as hybrids between art and finance) and are committed to start cooperating this autumn with Aalto University in Helsinki and Stockholm School of Economics (on cryptoeconomics and token engineering) and with Berlin School of Creative Leadership & Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam (on economic pets and wild financial instruments).


4. The background: object capabilities. We carry forward the DNA of a quarter of a century serious design and development work in secure distributed computing. Cryptographic object capabilities (communicable, unforgeable tokens of authority which allow for much finer granularity than asset ownership) are the secret sauce that enables secure, resilient, distributed cooperation of the Gravity VMs in the Gravity Network. Ocaps draw their power from converting the familiar reference graph of object-oriented programming into an access graph that conveys authority to perform actions. They were at the core of Project Xanadu, Lucasfilm Habitat (the first virtual reality in the 1990s), American Information Exchange (the first smart contracting platform in the 1990s), Electric Communities (one of the hottest startups in the first dotcom boom), E-rights, Dr.SES. We are integrating Ocaps with the newest thinking in political economy, finance and decentralized organization. The result is a cyber-social infrastructure that is able to unlock the possibilities of collective, disintermediated value creation.


Maybe you saw this announcement last week, backed by ZCash, Naval Ravikant and Polychain: https://www.coindesk.com/new-startup-zooko-naval-betting-better-crypto-contracts

Mark Miller (who is our important advisor and Jorge's mentor) published now his own Agoric project (for which he got the idea from us! => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzkFBhOFyRA&feature=youtu.be&t=327). This is very good news as together we will get much more attention to object capabilities approach – Mark has a stellar team and nobody can question Mark Miller didn’t know what he is talking about. The point: Gravity is based on the same object capabilities security approach Mark is talking about in his announcement, and on the same secure subset of Javascript (ECMA script) allowing web developers actually to become cryptoeconomic developers. It will also be a huge thing for the adaptation.

5. ECSA token. We are right now thinking and designing the ECSA ecosystem token offer which would allow contributors to gain exposure to the performance of all three projects."