Holo: A Cloud for Every Crowd
We stand at the edge of a new Industrial Revolution, and at this precipice it’s important to remember that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. What began in 2007 as an American sub-prime mortgage crisis quickly spiraled into an international monetary crisis, billions of bailouts across the globe, and eventually the Great Recession, and the European debt crisis.
In parallel to these failures a new type of currency was created, which attempted to rise from the ashes of tragedy and address the problems that caused an avalanche of consequences within the finance world. A little over a decade down the road, cryptocurrencies shouldn’t be facing the same “Too Big to Fail” issues that the traditional finance industry has, if they have truly addressed those problems.
So why isn’t blockchain the great Phoenix it was supposed to be?
Then as Farce
Too Big to Fail isn’t just a tragic oxymoron; it is a direct consequence of the organizational design failures of previous Industrial Revolutions which reward reaction over adaptation, and extraction of resources instead of conservation. We created a cryptocurrency ecosystem with a market cap racing towards $1t, while simultaneously struggling to handle current transaction volumes, despite making up only 0.1% of the traffic handled by a single major credit card processor …while not understanding that centralization and security weren’t the only problems to be addressed.
Today a single Bitcoin transaction burns more electricity than an average American household uses in eleven days. Unfortunately, as Bitcoin gets larger, so does the amount of electricity required to mine it, so this problem isn’t likely to slow down. This is the farce. Barring a complete redesign, blockchains will buckle long before they actually reach regular consumer adoption.
Industrial Revolution?
Murphy’s Law tells us that “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. This is especially true if we can’t analyze what really causes organizational dysfunction in the previous three Industrial Revolutions as we move into the Fourth.
- The First Industrial revolution was driven by mechanization, and steam power creating industrial cities.
- The Second was driven by electricity and more efficient division of labor creating entire industrial regions of mass production.
- The Third was driven by electronics and information technologies creating Global production networks and automated mass production.
- The Fourth is driven by cyber-physical systems like IoT, Artificial Intelligence, big data, and robotics which finally allows for automation of complex tasks at mass production scale.
The previous revolutions had to optimize their systems for scalable efficiency, focusing on how quickly resources could be extracted and processed into goods and services. The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent, disrupting almost every industry in every country, and the depth of these changes transform entire systems of production, management, and governance.
The Right Things
In this new era, we must focus on scalable adaptability instead, which sounds complex but it breaks down to “doing things right vs. doing the right thing”.
We currently have problems assessing what the “right things” are at scale, and, even if they are highly visible, we have a hard time reacting to them once they’re noticed. This isn’t a personal problem, this is a problem with the ways we organize systems and collaborate within them.
Data as New Oil
In the 20th Century oil was the key to global collaboration, but in the 21st century data is the new oil. The number of IoT devices will be more than three-times the global population by 2021, reaching 3.5 per capita. That alone will produce staggering amounts of data. The last century didn’t go very well for those who changed slowly and gave up their oil at too cheap of a price. The Fourth Industrial Revolution gives us a unique chance to learn from history and change things by empowering people to take control of this resource for themselves, instead of empowering corporations to dole it out to them. We need new platforms that put the resources in the hands of the people while still maintaining adaptability at scale against these exponentially fast paced changes.
Solving Today’s Issues
Blockchain alone isn’t the answer to this data resource problem. It is still solving the problems of the 20th century. It has optimized for efficiency only and is not adaptable. That’s how cryptocurrencies fell into the “Too Big To Fail” paradox, so how can we stop this tragedy/farce feedback loop? We have to make the way we organize ourselves more organic. Natural order doesn’t solve for one problem at a time, it adapts and reacts fluidly to many problems.
Adaptable and Efficient
This is why we broke our project out into parts to solve many problems in parallel. Starting with Holochain; a distributed application infrastructure that is like a distant cousin of a blockchain, it addresses efficiency and adaptability out of the box. Holochain is the distributed web, where the user contributes a bit of their own device’s capacity to support the applications that they want to use. Each application is run by its’ own community, with no corporate middle men watching everything you do or dictating how your applications should run. This gives participants control of three things: their data, how their applications function, and how each application connects to and interacts with other applications. Instead of a corporation doing the work and reaping the reward, your machine does the work and you reap the reward.
Mainstream Access
Holochain alpha has already been built, so you can create and run Holochain applications today. But this isn’t a complete toolkit for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It’s not enough to provide a better future, if it isn’t easy for people to make use of, and participants deserve to be compensated for their devices’ work, outside of the reward of controlling their data and interactions. That’s why we’ve set out to build Holo, an incentivized application hosting platform. Holo makes it easy for anyone to connect with a Holochain application through a web browser, and then pays the application host in cryptocurrency for enabling this connection.
Why is that important? To make it effortless for even your Grandparents to connect with Holochain applications, and get paid for hosting them. Holo serves as a bridge between the distributed internet of tomorrow and the web browsers of today. It provides the infrastructure, the incentives, and the currency system to allow anyone to get compensated for using some of their device’s spare capacity to help ordinary people connect to the distributed web. If you access an app through Holo, it will look and act just like any other website — but with one big difference, on the other side is a community rather than just a company.
Making it Easy
To help enable the rollout of the distributed infrastructure of Holo, and since Holo’s currency is actually backed by hosting services we created a hosting machine called a HoloPort. This device is available through our indiegogo campaign, all you have to do is plug it in and pick which apps you want to host. It is sort of like mining on a traditional blockchain, but instead of simply generating currency, it actually supports access to the network itself. Unlike an Ethereum mining rig which can run you $5000, HoloPort is available at $99, $449, $949. Because Holochain hosting is much more efficient than traditional blockchain mining, it will not run up your electricity bill or drown your house out in noise.
Seeding an Ecosystem
Ensuring that a rich and diverse ecosystem of Holochain applications grows quickly is paramount to consumer adoption, and we realize this takes more than just making code available for use.
- We have bootstrapped a development pipeline to be easy and fast.
- We are supporting familiar languages (javascript and Go),
- We are hosting meetups and hackathons around the world to educate and build vibrant communities.
- We have released 2 white papers, a “green” paper, and our core platform of Holochain is in alpha with 4 distributed apps currently running on it.
- We even host live Q&A sessions each week.
Funding
All of this takes funding though, and to accomplish this in a data-driven, meticulous, and most importantly an ethical manner, Holo is raising funds through a capped ICO. This means the maximum amount we will accept is 25 M euros. Upon launch, we will only make 2.5 M Euros available. Daily currency supply will then be determined through traditional burn-rate style estimates, with scope of operations indicated through direct demand demonstrated by the successful Indiegogo campaign of our plug and play HoloPorts along with developer engagement. With this funding we expect to launch Holo & Holochain on a consumer level in Summer 2018, and are well on our way to that goal with our Indiegogo HoloPorts shipping in the next few months.
We want to optimize collaboration for the current Industrial Revolution, and one-dimensional solutions just won’t cut it like they did before. Holo isn’t simply putting the crowd in the cloud, it is allowing the crowd to put itself in the cloud, and paying the crowd to be there.
