Hi Steemizens! This is my first post on Steemit. I’ll write a proper introduction in a not-too-distant future. I also plan to submit continuous updates on Bitnation, along with broader thoughts on the future of Virtual Nations and City States, Blockchain Applications, Virtual Jurisdictions, Cryptoanarchy, and more. I think Steemit is a wonderful way to empower Open Source Software (OSS) movements. But first, I want to give a yearly update on the STATE OF THE NATION: Bitnation
/ Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, BITNATION Founder and Chief Unicorn
(Image beneath featuring me and Alexandre Van De Sande in Rio de Janeiro, working on the DBVN protocol)
Background
BITNATION started July 14th, 2014, when I shared this Google document on Facebook, providing an overview of BITNATION’s plan to build the world’s first Blockchain Powered Virtual Nation. Within a few minutes volunteers from around the world gathered on Facebook and Skype and started discussing and promoting the concept.
Starting Bitnation was challenging at first, because the concept was untested, and largely unheard of. Initially, the greatest confusion was around the word governance, because many people associated governance with decision making platforms, like democracy applications and other ‘organizational governance’ applications, rather than governance services, such as jurisdiction, security, etc. Two years on, the landscape is different. We’ve implemented multiple proofs-of-concept (marriage, land titles, birth certificates, IDs, etc), explained the concept thoroughly in media, at meetups, and conferences, and a handful of others have leveraged the idea, and started implementing their own vision of it. The conceptual progress is tangible, but the greatest obstacle remains: mainstream adoption.
With mainstream adoption in mind, we spent over six month doing market research on what type of applications were used to conduct business in the fastest growing markets - emerging markets - where our services are needed to most, and in what way they were used. The result spoke loud and clear: smartphone chat applications. From WeChat in China, to WhatsApp in Brazil: everyone was on it, for business as well as pleasure. Hence, the road forward became obvious: we had to ditch the previous Pangea code, and start from scratch again, this time building our Blockchain Jurisdiction with a mobile phone chat interface.
Staying true to our principles, we had strict requirements: the application would need to be end-to-end encrypted, distributed and pseudonymous. After researching and testing several dozens of different codebases, we found Secure Scuttlebutt (SSBC), and its frontend applications, Patchwork and Patchbay. And thus, we begin Year 2: The Year of Pangea
Further Reading:
The Year in Review
Highlights of the Past Year:
The ‘Accidental Proof-of-Concept’: Citizens, Embassies, Consulates, Allies and Nations
While we were preoccupied with building the initial Pangea Proof-of-Concept on the Horizon blockchain, what turned out to be the actual Proof-of-Concept, the Bitnation website, emerged more or less accidentally. It started with a discussion about the Team Page while we were renewing our website. I stated that the conventional hierarchical ‘team page structure’, with executives, employees and so on wasn’t quite philosophically consistent with our decentralized governance movement. Instead, we should adopt a ‘no-barriers-to-entry model’ like the Swedish Pirate Party initially embraced, enabling anyone who wanted to be part of the Team to simply join and start contributing, without the need for approval from any kind of formal nor informal authority. Said and done, Amin Rafiee implemented it beautifully.
Hundreds of people signed up as team members in the next few days, and many of them asked: “Does this mean I’m a Citizen now?”. Rather dumbfounded by the overwhelming request to become a Citizen through signing up on the website, we renamed the page to ‘Citizen Directory’ instead. And the signups kept on coming…
Inspired by the instant Citizen signup success, we then added sign up as an Ally, sign up as an Embassy or Consulate, and most recently, sign up your Nation. Then the inevitable question arises: “How do we know these are real, well intentioned people, rather than spam accounts?”. Someone bumped around the idea of manual vetting and approval, but it was quickly discarded by the community, for being a centralized and non-scalable approach. Instead, we came to consensus to experiment with a basic reputation system, a simplified e-Bay style implementation.
As the website gained more and more traction, a range of services were added, from our Public Notary, to Education and Security Services. In short, the website became a veritable governance service portal, within just a few months after its public launch in Q3/Q4 2015. At the time of writing, there are approximately 4000 Bitnation Citizens, as well as Embassies, Consulates and Allies spread throughout all continents (with the exception of Antarctica), connecting with the community, and using our governance services.
And just like that, boom - a centralized and non-encrypted website, far from our puritanical Pangea vision, and devoid of any fancy code to speak of (besides the Blockchain ID and Notary) - became our rather arbitrary Minimum Viable Product (MVP). There it was, and it worked. Our much desired, yet very accidental, proof-of-concept :)
Decentralized Borderless Voluntary Nation (DBVN) on Ethereum
One year ago I estimated it would take Bitnation approximately five years to reach full decentralization. Luckily, I was proven brutally wrong. Thanks to the Ethereum technology, and Ethereum based applications such as Backfeed, the space has evolved exponentially in a surprisingly short time frame. Regardless of what one might think of the now-infamous The DAO - the initial enthusiasm surrounding its rather spectacular launch indicated a clear market desire for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO’s), a moment I had been eagerly awaiting since I started to research and write about DAO’s at end of 2013.
Earlier this year, in January, I was in communication with Alexandre Van De Sande, a very talented Ethereum designer and frontend developer. We were both in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro at the time, and we decided to get together in person to launch Bitnation’s organizational structure on the Ethereum blockchain, as a customized version of Ethereum’s MIST Wallet DAO code, the DBVN.
Key differences between the DAO and the DBVN protocols are inclusion of the constitution on the blockchain, as well as code that attempts to reflect a more holocratic decision making processes, instead of the more commonly adopted democratic process. In my view, democracy is an outdated form of ‘coercion by the majority’, and from what we’ve been privileged to observe over the last decade, organizations such as The Pirate Party, The Pirate Bay, Anonymous, Linux and, to some extent, even Bitcoin itself, a holocratic model appears to offer greater degree of personal autonomy.
As with most things blockchain, the DBVN code is in an early experimental phase at this time, our concept is significantly more ambitious than its current implementation. Fundamental to our philosophy, the holocratic elements will need significant improvements -- more specifically; the ability to instantly create ‘holons’ - autonomous and semi-autonomous groups which remains a part of the ‘Genesis Nation Holon’ infrastructure. This brings us to our second DBVN Code ambition: a full merger into the Pangea protocol.
The aim of Pangea isn’t merely to be an OSS Blockchain Jurisdiction --- beyond its own dispute resolution services, its intent is to enable groups and individuals to create their own Nations and Holons straight onto the Pangea platform, without the need to fork and modify the source code, or have any coding knowledge whatsoever. We’re in the process of designing the Nation and Holon creation functionality through SSBC/ Patchwork/ Patchbay’s public nodes and chat channel infrastructure.
DBVN Ethereum Address: 0x5aaeb6053f3e94c9b9a09f33669435e7ef1beaed
Contribute to the Code:
https://github.com/Bit-Nation/BITNATION-Constitution/blob/master/DBVN.sol
https://github.com/Bit-Nation/BITNATION-Constitution/blob/master/profit-share.sol
Read the first Code Audit, and Patch: https://medium.com/@crypto_nation/report-recursive-call-vulnerability-in-dbvn-sol-471d99e30659#.skrvxtg4i
Additionally, to foster increased innovation in the ‘Virtual Nation Building’ space, we have set up a hub for aspiring Nation Founders, where we can connect to, support and learn from each other. There’s also Virtual Nation building resources, including OS Constitutions, Codes of Laws, DBVN setup instructions, and more. We hope this initiative will help other Virtual Nations to blossom, to create an amplifying effect on social and technological development speed in our shared space -- our shared ambition.
During the DBVN process, we also recreated the Bitnation dividend paying cryptoequity token, XBN, on the Ethereum blockchain, to replace the XBNX tokens previously created on the CounterParty protocol. We have not yet released XBN on the market, because we’re in the process of burning the previous XBNX CounterParty tokens, and enabling an XBNX to XBN Swapbot for the tokens that are currently in circulation. (If you have experience in the token burning and automated swapping field and want to contribute, please reach out to us)
For decentralized fund allocation amongst the contributor community, we’re working with Backfeed, a Slack chat plugin built on the Ethereum technology. Backfeed enables the contributor community (whether they’re developers, administrators, marketing people, or others) to create projects, submit contributions, and get paid instantly for it, without the need for any type of top-down approval. Amongst all the ‘organizational governance’ applications we’ve tested, from Colony to Boardroom and SwarmBot -- Backfeed is by far the most suitable to Bitnation’s open and rapidly evolving community nature.
We’re currently using many centralized platforms for our own organizational management, from Slack to Trello, Taiga to Google Drive, etc. However, I believe we’ll be able to replace those applications -- eliminating the most significant centralized points of failure in the near future -- between the implementation of Pangea and Backfeed, and other technologies, like IPFS, Swarm etc. All these technologies exists, but they’re generally in early Alpha or Beta, and many of them lack a non-developer friendly frontend, making its usage rather non-intuitive, as for now.
For our public communication needs, overtime we plan to shift our efforts from traditional platforms like Facebook and Twitter, to emerging blockchain based platforms, such as Steemit and Synero.
In the Spotlight: BITNATION Refugee Crisis Emergency Response (BRER) and Public Notary Partnership with Estonia’s e-Residency Program
Second of September 2015 the photo of Alan Kurdi, the 3 year old Syrian boy in a bright red shirt, lying dead on a beach in Greece, shook the world, and the Bitnation community -- many of whom are open borders advocate, digital nomads, migrants, and more often than not, consider ourselves ‘World Citizens’ first and foremost. As Alan’s photo made it around the world media, I was already living with stateless refugees in Turin, northern Italy, trying to assist them with their asylum processes, simply because they were my former employees from years back, during the time I worked in warzones, and I felt it was my duty to try help them to the best of my ability, just like they had always helped me when I was in their environment.
One of the magical aspects of Open Source Communities and Movements, is their ability to instantly gather and rally around a cause, as we’ve seen movements like the Pirate Party and Anonymous do - and that was precisely what happened. Instantly, hundreds of activists gathered on our Slack chat, and in less than a week we had built a website for refugees, including a free Blockchain ID, Bitcoin Debit Cards, maps and forums. Later on, we updated the ID to the more sophisticated WORLD CITIZEN ID, which is also free.
One thing led to another, and while we were speaking to various UN agencies and NGO’s to get the IDs accepted as temporary ID documents for paperless people, we were approached by the Government of Estonia. Most of the Bitnation community are dedicated anarchists who are not generally keen on working with governments, but in our enthusiasm to help refugees to cross borders, we realized we needed more recognition for our Nation from legacy entities, and Estonia’s e-Residency program is famous for having an open mindset when it comes to ‘global citizenship’: hence we entered into a partnership with them to build a Blockchain Notary, and thus we became the first Virtual Nation in the world to be recognized by a Nation State. To put it in e-Estonia’s own words:
"In Estonia we believe that people should be able to freely choose their digital/public services best fit to them, regardless of the geographical area where they were arbitrarily born. We're truly living in exciting times when nation states and virtual nations compete and collaborate with each other on an international market, to provide better governance services." - Kaspar Korjus, Estonia’s e-Residency Director
And thus, the Public Notary was built a few weeks later, including login and digital signatures, and has since been used for everything from Marriages to Wills, to Birth Certificates, to Business Deals, Employment Contracts, and Lending Contracts, and the list goes on...
3rd Party Applications and Services - Basicincome.co, Dragonfly and Exosphere
Core to the governance service proposition, is the aggregation of services, which includes selection and vetting of vendors and bulk price negotiations. To that end, we have identified and partnered with a few cutting edge organizations for peer-to-peer insurance, security, and education. We aim to increase the number of partnerships in the year ahead.
The Exosphere bootcamp program is on its second round, offering Bitnation citizens a 1000 Euro discount. Special thanks to Moritz Bierling from Exosphere for organizing it. You can read about the first round here. The first insurance component to be enabled is Johan Nygren’s Basic Income protocol, based on voluntary participation, similar to that of a mutual insurance. Johan has worked on the protocol for several years, and has lately been developing it on Ethereum. We’re preparing to run the first tests of a simplified version of the protocol within the Bitnation core contributors group.
Challenges and Lessons Learned:
Technical Challenges I - Blockchains and Smart Contracts
The foundational document for Bitnation stated our intention was to build on Ethereum, because of its near Turing completeness enabling Smart Contract functionalities. Ethereum at the time, however, was far from being released, and the community felt the urge to produce a proof-of-concept to get real world testing and usage of our idea. In retrospect, it might have been better to build on the Ethereum testnet right away, rather than using other blockchains. But social and financial pressure pushed us to choose the most suitable alternative out there at the time: the NXT/ Horizon technology, and make the best out of it until Ethereum became functional. We’ve now switched over to Ethereum development, as originally planned.
However, Ethereum isn’t a ‘silver bullet’ either - suffering from internal governance issues, security vulnerabilities inherent to Turing capabilities, and an immature infrastructure in terms of exchanges, wallets, etc. Hence, Ethereum is also a bit of a ‘wild bet’, albeit a very promising one - due to its original ideas, stellar implementation, and a large, vibrant community backing it.
Rootstock - a Bitcoin blockchain based smart contract platform - which will likely be publicly released this year and, from what I’ve read, they’ve pledged to use the same Smart Contract language as Ethereum - Solidity - to increase cross-platform portability. Ultimately, we would like to give people the choice of what blockchain to use for their agreements as easily as they can choose their code of law and arbitration method on Pangea. That’s of course an optimistic ambition at this time, but if the crypto community stays as innovative and active as it currently is, I do dare to believe that some sort of bridge functionality we can incorporate into Pangea will emerge in the next year ahead.
Another platform we’re keeping tabs on is Tauchain. Tauchain claims, among other features, to solve some of the security issues around smart contracts, through not being Turing complete. We’re looking forward to see how it will pan out, once it’s been released and tested on the market.
Technical Challenges II - User Behavior (Chat versus Social Networking)
Social networking platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, has been the dominant social media arena over the last decade. Thus, it’s intuitive to attempt to replicate that format. But the numbers don’t match up -- in the fastest growing markets, the emerging markets around the world where our services are most needed, the so called ‘next eleven’, Facebook comes across as rather ‘yesterday’. Albeit a +1 billion person adoption, more and more people are switching over to chat applications to conduct their day-to-day bussines (special thanks to Gene Vangryeb from Tradle.io for his insightful thoughts on this). The change is largely due to the choice of smartphone rather than laptop as the go-to-device, and it turns out chat is more intuitive as a way to communicate on a smartphone, rather than a ‘publishing platforms’ such as social networks. Using social network platform as an inspiration was a significant mistake, indeed, our one most significant mistake. All transactions starts with a conversation. Whether getting married, or trading a real estate asset, it’s all based on a dialogue between mutually consenting parties. More and more of these conversations take place online, as business as well as personal relationships increasingly move into the digital sphere.
Chatting with a blockchain as a backend infrastructure is incredibly expensive -- imagine paying miners’ fees for every chat message you send. Sure, there are ways around it, like using a blockchain testnet instead of the live blockchain, and other fixes, but those are all rather clunky ‘solutions’. Hence, we decided to swallow our pride, ditch the code, and start from scratch again. This time around with a decentralized communications protocol as the source code (SSBC/ Patchbay) and integrate the blockchain functionalities (timestamping and smart contracts, more specifically) ‘on top of it’ instead, hence not being dependent on any one blockchain.
Lack of Documentation
One of our most fatal mistakes, in the first iteration of the Pangea software a year ago, was the lack of documentation. When we initially created Pangea, we were eager to produce a proof-of-concept, to make our idea more tangible to the community and early adopters. In the speed and enthusiasm that unfolded in the early stage of development, the documentation suffered. As much as we produced code, there was nearly zero documentation to support it. In an Open Source Software (OSS) environment, dependent on volunteers coming and going, on their own initiative, throughout different time zones, languages and cultures, it’s key to be able to provide a direct, comprehensible and actionable overview of the software being built, so community members can instantly understand what needs to be done, and where their skills fit into the picture. However, we failed to do so. Hence, we became dependent on a few contributors, rather than the community at large, indeed a risky place to be in. Many volunteers wanted to contribute to Pangea, but there was no documentation to instruct them how to take it forward. In other words, the code was a jungle.
It was a hard lesson to learn, but I’m happy we learned it early on in the process, and can change our ‘modus operandi’ for this Pangea iteration. We’ll now put documentation at the highest priority, even if it means delivery speed might suffer as a consequence at times.
Objectives For The Year Ahead:
Bitnation Pangea Development
Why Build A Jurisdiction?
A nation is a broad definition, covering several aspects, from its original term of ‘people with shared culture and values coming together with some sense of political autonomy’ - as per the Wikipedia definition - to our modern definition of governance service providers, and governance service aggregators.
Today we expect governments to provide us with nearly everything - from education to energy infrastructure, food regulations to social security - and the list seems to grow by the day. However, if we break the government down to its essential functions, according to the ‘Nightwatchman State model’ as championed by Robert Nozick - the government's core purpose only really comes down to the protection of property - i.e. the provision of security and jurisdiction. Note: property is a broad term, not solely referring to property as in land, items, etc. Property starts with ownership of yourself, your body, your time, your aspirations, etc.
In the digital age, security and jurisdiction are increasingly becoming the same thing, as more of our assets (money, asset records, work etc) become digital. Furthermore, the extremely rapid development of Smart Contract technology opens new horizons in terms of creating online agreements with a range of built in automated functions (fund and token distribution, escrow, insurance, timestamping, decision making levels, etc). Hence, it makes sense for Bitnation to focus on building a Blockchain Jurisdiction as its core functionality.
Within the smart contract functionality, sophisticated governance applications can already be built directly by end-users, such as mutual insurances, constitutions, etc.
Imagine solving a dispute by sending a heart <3 emoticon. An emoticon that calls upon Ethereum Smart Contract functionality - including an embedded escrow account - according to the code of law and the arbitration method that you have chosen for yourselves - and all of it in less than two minutes, from the comfort of your own phone. Our aim with the Pangea platform is to empower people to make sophisticated legal agreements simply through the use of emoticons in a smartphone chat interface. The frontend will be built using React.JS, as originally planned, because it’s better suited for mobile first applications.
Initial Technical Overview
The codebase we’re using is Secure Scuttelbutt (SSBC), a distributed and end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol, and its frontend application Patchbay. It’s more decentralized than other chat applications currently on the market, including Signal.
Decentralized storage will be done through integrating IPFS as well as Swarm (the Ethereum powered storage application) on the frontend layer. Initially our plan is to integrate functions calling on the Ethereum chain for smart contract creation and execution, but we hope we’ll be able to use Rootstock and other protocols in the future, in addition to Ethereum. The platform however is not blockchain based.
The pseudo-anonymous ID/ Verification/ Reputation functions will be built from the ground up, on the advice of Dominic Tarr, the SSBC inventor, although we’ll use some of the digital signature features developed for Bitnation’s World Citizenship ID by Johan Paulsson, Andrew Golighty, Mawo, SGShankar and others. Additionally, we’re drawing inspiration from the identi.fi philosophy, developed by Marrti Malmi.
Participants, Messages & Channels
Pseudo-anonymous identities provide the critical separation between a citizen’s thoughts and actions and the potential for coercion of their physical bodies in order to restrict or control those thoughts and actions. Pseudo-anonymous identities are thus, by design, a declaration of independence from centralised governance models. For them to have meaning they must have three elements. Firstly, and obviously, the protocol that enables pseudo-anonymous identities to to be created, secondly the process for verifying an identity (which can range from social network verification to uploading a copy of a utility bill, for instance), and lastly, and most importantly, the reputation system, which is built over time and represents the judgement of each citizen’s community of their willingness and ability to honour and arbitrate contracts.
For internal management, BITNATION uses a holacratic governance model. The underlying principle is that all BITNATION citizens are free to create their own holons, and ultimately their own Nations, without any barrier to entry or need for technical knowledge. SSBC provides the means for BITNATION adherents to create their own holons and Nations without any requirement for centralised approval.
Contracts, Contract Arbitration Models, Contract Enforcement Models and Incentives Models
Sovereignty starts with the ability of individuals to make consensual agreements with others. We consent to give our sovereignty to Nation States by believing their rhetoric: that only Nation States can uphold those agreements. But what if we could make and enforce contracts without third party intermediaries who choose to use that power to enforce their methods upon us? Just as citizens can choose their own code of law, they must also be able to choose their own preferred method of arbitration. These can range from choosing a trusted arbitrator to mediate contract disputes to utilising a crowd jury to make final judgements. A voluntary contract must also mean that citizens can choose from a range of enforcement methods. These could include reputation, escrow or physical enforcement (peer-to-peer security). We anticipate that the most widely used form of contract enforcement will be the reputation system.
We believe that financial incentives hold promise for the future. To that end we are exploring a range of financially incentivised models for dispute resolution where participants get rewarded for honouring contracts, building their reputation, and providing arbitration services. However, there will be no ‘dispute resolution’ token anytime soon, although we’re monitoring current token platform incentive models for potential future usage.
Potential Synergies
In light of the release of Ethereum, and the subsequent growing Smart Contract field, many initiative centered around peer-to-peer law, security and jurisdiction services are being experimented with. I would like to take the opportunity to mention a few of the most interesting ones in our field, whom I hope, moving forward, we’ll be able to learn from, and potentially collaborate with.
Bitrated: Bitrated was the first well known attempt to implement Bitcoin based dispute resolution. They created a user-friendly, intuitive proof-of-concept, including basic escrow and reputation features. We’ve always been impressed and inspired by Bitrated, and hope we can collaborate in the future.
Decentralized Arbitration and Mediation Network (DAMN): DAMN is an Ethereum based dispute resolution protocol proposed by the well known Bitcoin expert Andreas Antonopoulos and the Attorney Pamela Morgan. The aim of DAMN differs from Bitnation, in the sense they aim to create a legal platform compatible with existing Nation State Jurisdictions, rather than creating an independent blockchain Jurisdiction. However, we’re positive we can gain valuable insights from their work, and we will follow their progress closely.
ULEX: ULEX is an attempt by Chapman University Professor Tom W. Bell to code a simplified and modulable code of law, based on Common Law. While Bitnation firmly believes in Polycentric Legal Models, i.e. multiple competing codes of law, we recognize this particular code of law holds a lot of promise, and will work to integrate it as soon as there’s a working version of it.
Reputation Systems: I would like to give a shout out to Steemit and Synereo for their work on token based reputation systems, which we’ll study in depth for potential future usage, as well as identi.fi, a non-blockchain based reputation system, which we draw most of our ID/Rep inspiration from, specifically in terms of ‘good anti-social behaviour strategy’ in the context of whitelisting versus blacklisting methodology.
Thank you for the interesting technologies and the community contribution you’re doing with your work.
Join The Governance Decentralization Movement
"I am the seasoned traveler
Of the Labyrinth.
The genius of alacrity,
Wizard of the impossible.
My brilliance is yet unmatched
In its originality.
My heart’s filled with potent magic
That could cast a hundred spells.
I am put together
For mine own pleasure
I am the Monkey"
Chinese poem on The Year of the Monkey - 2016