View source for Ceptr

'''= "an evolvable, fully distributed framework for coordination and sense-making on all scales".'''

URL = http://ceptr.org/

=Description=

Arthur Brock:

"Ceptr is a:

* Cooperative framework for distributed applications
* Quantum leap in large-scale collective social intelligence
* Peer-to-Peer platform for building new Commons
* Pluggable protocols that let everything talk to everything
* Organically organized computing architecture of fractal receptors

Breakthroughs in our capacities to communicate and coordinate restructure society. Language birthed culture and hunter-gatherer tribes. Writing forged kingdoms and agriculture-age empires. Printing enabled nations and industrial-age economies. The Internet launched a new restructuring of society, but is constrained by computing tech designed for centralized control. Learning from nature's blueprints, Ceptr provides an evolvable, fully distributed framework for coordination and sense-making on all scales."



=Characteristics=

Arthur Brock:

==Stop the Nonsensus!==

(Nonsense Consensus): Systems will never scale if you require global consensus for local actions by independent agents. For example, I should not have to know where every dollar in the economy is when I want to buy something from you. That adds an overhead of ridiculous complexity to something which needs to follow the principle of pushing intelligence and agency to the edges rather than center. Likewise, an atom should be able to bond with another atom (see cartoon below) without accounting for the status of every electron in the universe. However, Bitcoin and blockchains are built around authorized tokens embedded in every transaction/record, which embeds unnecessary complexity and limitations for scalability into every interaction. Tokens are not what makes a decentralized system work, cryptographic signatures and self-validating data structures are.
 

==Intrinsic Data Integrity==

For a long time, data integrity has been conflated with the hosting, control, and access to the device on which the data is stored. So banks, for example, have used big firewalls to keep you from hacking in and changing your account balance. However, today we have self-validating data structures, like hash-chains and Merkle-trees, which leave evidence of tampering by breaking structural integrity, cryptographic hash, or counterparty signatures when the data is altered. This makes it possible to distribute the storage and management of data and ensure that the people holding it can't tamper with it. In other words, you could be an authority to show your own account balance, yet not be able to tamper with your account history. When implemented properly, this is the key to enabling massive scales of storage and throughput by enabling auditable data to be stored anywhere/everywhere instead of requiring agreement on a single shared ledger.
 

==Distributed Process not Consensus==

Let's learn a bit from tracking how scalable systems in nature and the real world get things done.  For example, cells each carry a copy of their instruction set (DNA), rather than a record of the state of every cell. Similarly, speakers of a language each carry the means to generate sentences as needed, we don't store every sentence ever spoken in some gargantuan global ledger. To build collective intelligence, what you need to distribute is reliable processing according to rules that have been reached by consensus -- not try to establish consensus on every element of data. The data output from the process can be used to validate the integrity of the processing, rather than be the medium upon which processing is executed. When you start with a validated copy of a process, then you can proceed authoritatively, trusting your code to enforce the rules and produce valid output, without having to wait for the rest of the network to validate, verify and update itself with your state.
 

==Agents not Coins==

Instead of starting with cryptographic coins or tokens as the fundamental things that exist, start by having the agents/people/organizations (or their keys and account IDs) be the primary things that exist. When each person has a copy of the process needed to participate, and their records are stored with tamper-proof, intrinsic data integrity, then two people can perform a transaction without requiring the approval or consensus of anyone else. My process audits your transaction chain to make sure you're in a valid state to proceed. Yours audits my chain. Either rejects the transaction if it puts someone in an invalid state according to the coded agreements. (I know, you probably have a lot of questions about how to make sure this happens reliably, but I'll have to drill into that in a future post.)
 

==Fractal not Global==

You would think that the existence of the web would have taught us already that we can have shared access to pretty reliable, referenceable information without us all needing to have  identical copies of it. Starting by creating a global ledger where each copy has to be in the same state is a totally different problem than having a fractal process for creating and organizing data which can be referenced by anyone, wherever that data lives. It can still provide globally accessible agreement about data, but that agreement is constructed from fractally assembled reliable parts instead of requiring each part to reach global (or majority) agreement to commit each element of data. One of the beautiful outcomes from this is such a massive reduction in the processing and storage requirements that it becomes feasible to run a full node on a mobile phone instead of requiring specialized mining hardware."
(http://artbrock.com/blog/perspectives-blockchains-and-cryptocurrencies)


=Details=

Ceptr Sub-Projects:

"* Protocol for Pluggable Protocols: Complete interoperability ; No more silos and brittle APIs. Self-Describing protocols and a universal parsing system allows anything to talk to anything.

* [[Holochains]] for Distributed Storage: Go beyond Blockchain bottlenecks and global consensus ledgers for scalability which ensures data integrity and distributed sharing.

* Truly Distributed Apps: Take cloud computing to a whole new level by enabling truly distributed applications and hosting: on laptops, phones, routers, devices, and servers.

* [[Sovereign Accountable Commons]]: Organizations incorporated in distributed app code instead of legal codes enabling new patterns of self-governance and mutual sovereignty.

* Neural Internetworking: By supporting sticky requests which send data whenever conditions are matched, we enable neural-like behavior across all applications.

* Ceptr Core: The fabric which binds all these capacities into an integrated framework, plus: Virtual Machine Host, Fractal Receptors, Parallel Tree Processing, and more."


=Status=

* organisational phase shift: http://ceptr.org/blog/2017-06-12-phase-shift

[[Category:Crypto_Governance]]

[[Category:Cryptoledger_Applications]]
[[Category:P2P_Infrastructure]]
[[Category:Technology]]
[[Category:Commons_Infrastructure]]