The Distributed Application Revolution: Foreword
Or: How I Learned to Stop Using Middlemen and Embrace the Ledger
The following is a guest post from AlphaBlock Capital, who aim to help accelerate the mass adoption of distributed ledger technologies through strategic investments in protocol level infrastructure. This post is the first in a series of samples from their upcoming book. Enjoy.
Welcome to the foreword for our upcoming book, The Distributed Application Revolution.
We decided to syndicate our content via the LXDX blog as we feel the LXDX platform is uniquely positioned to solve the problems facing institutional capital trying to allocate capital to the emerging distributed ledger token ecosystem. Bringing battle tested high frequency trading technology from Wall Street into the space is an important step towards the mainstream adoption of this new asset class.
While other trading platforms are beginning to offer the custodial solutions and insurance instruments needed to protect these new assets, serious institutions will not commit capital via trading platforms that charge excessive fees by allowing slippage to occur when executing orders. Real financial markets have incredibly tight bid asks that cannot be easily manipulated, and so should token markets.
The goal of writing The Distributed Application Revolution is to provide a thorough explanation of what this emerging asset class is from both a technical and socio-cultural perspective, agnostic of any specific distributed ledger technologies.
We feel the overwhelming majority of content about the token space is oriented towards promoting individual projects to retail investors, and stops short of explaining how distributed ledgers work as a unified macro thesis.
Instead of looking at the markets from a “what-can-it-do” perspective, our world view is skewed towards asking “how-can-it-break” and “who-will-survive”. Use cases like crop insurance, recording real estate titles, stock exchanges, etc. are already proven business models. The distributed ledger is less about upending how these existing systems work, and more about porting the logic that runs them to provably secure distributed platforms.
This view paints the token market as a globally liquid venture capital ecosystem where participants are betting on the ability of teams to execute advanced mathematics in the most resource efficient and provably secure ways possible.
Thus, the book attempts to straddle the divide between oversimplification, and excessive technical detail. To accomplish this, we present the material in an often colloquial and informal manner, using speculative fiction and metaphors as devices to help explain these complex topics.
We hope you enjoy the first chapter of the book. Stay tuned for updates as we will be publishing subsequent chapters periodically onto the LXDX blog, as well as our website, and hashes of the content directly onchain to preserve an immutable record.
Caracas, Venezuela (Near Future)
Completion time: 1 hour 42 minutes 7 seconds
Completion time bonus: 177 HBX
Median pass score: 178
User pass score: 194
Pass score bonus: 4832 HBX
Admission hash: d13947eec78b1eabcf3c25fdaff78bf00c8615222181f2ada38e8ec417f5f106
Current exchange rates: USD-HBX: 1.342 / PETRO-HBX 78.902 / BTC-HBX: .00001603 / STR-HBX 14.873
Welcome to Harvard!
Xoana excitedly pours over the results of her test again and again. She thought for sure she had botched the last section and was destined for MOOC purgatory. Sure anyone in the world can take the pre-recorded course for free, but she didn’t spend the last nine months preparing to settle for an automated professor.
Out of 47,328 global test takers, she secured 1 of only 500 “live” spots in Harvard’s prestigious political science fast track program.
For passing the exam at such a high level, the school deposits 5000 HBX tokens in a wallet application on her phone. Her wallet contains over 20 other asset tokens including coffee shop loyalty points, Brazilian Reals, US dollars, and one ounce of silver her grandfather gave her as a high school graduation present.
While the program can be completed entirely online, students are encouraged to attend a week long orientation program in Cambridge to meet face to face.
Xoana looks at the combined value of her tokens and dismays that she will not be able to afford the trip. Fortunately, a wealthy alumnus group has funded a smart contract for just such an occasion.
She submits an application for a travel scholarship which consists of nothing more than a blank text box. All relevant information including her age, performance in school, performance on the entrance exam, geolocation history, social web, frequency of her phone usage (including charging patterns and length of time spent in all of the other apps on her phone)… is automatically transferred to the smart contract Artificial Intelligence for review.
The AI is not confident enough to make a determination, so it schedules a quick video chat between Xoana and one of the alumni. After the call, not only does Xoana have enough to fly to Cambridge, but has also made a new friend.
At the airport Xoana places her index finger into a fingerprint scanner. Her encrypted ID seamlessly talks to databases at the Caracas airport which verifies she can leave the country, the Boston airport which verifies she has a travel visa, and the airline which verifies she has a valid ticket.
Because Xoana converted her Alumni gift into airline loyalty points to book the flight, her fingerprint also gives her access to the airline lounge.
Once past security, Xoana converts her Venezuelan Bolivars back into a more stable mix of US dollars and Bitcoin she can use while she is in the US. All currencies that are not Bolivars are officially banned by the government, but this is only a formality at checkpoints as untraceable privacy assets can be purchased on a decentralized network of global exchanges just as easily as Bolivars.
While at orientation, Xoana notices the value of her HBX tokens has increased.
HBX tokens represent ownership in the endowment that runs the political science program. A recent global ranking report placed the program back at number 1 in the world which in part increased the price students (via automated trading bot proxies) were willing to pay in tuition.
Xoana happily sells 1000 of the HBX tokens she was awarded for doing so well on the entrance exam. Unbeknownst to Xoana, Bill purchases her tokens off the exchange to guarantee a spot for his son in the live program who was just short of the threshold needed to gain entry.
The road ahead for Xoana will not be an easy one. Every class has a certain number of HBX tokens up for grabs, and competition is fierce. As a scholarship recipient she needs to be ever diligent as the top global performers in the free program can take her spot if she ever drops into the bottom decile of her class.
SYSTEMS
Is this vision a world we want to live in?
On one hand, we have:
- Strengthened the grip of totalitarian state control that can prevent people from moving between borders, or even attaining basic goods and services without the blessing of an all powerful system.
- Reinforced a capitalist system run amok which continues to entrench a wealthy ruling class based increasingly on the cognitive ability to jump through pre-defined mental hoops.
On the other hand, we have:
- Lowered geographic barriers that have traditionally prevented billions of people in developing countries from having access to stable stores of value, investments, education, and other privileges available only to the wealthiest and most well connected.
- Created entirely new incentivization structures that reward new kinds of behaviors, and lead to new kinds of social structures.
Thus, this book is about really about systems viewed through the lens of Distributed Ledger Technology. Our real focus is not on explaining the raw technology itself (though that is an important building block), but rather about how applications of DLT can solve real world problems including:
- The entire harvest of bananas lost from one Salmonella outbreak because location data was not shared between members of the supply chain.
- The laborer that loses 1% of her wages every time she tries to send money home.
- The marauding silicon valley big data giant making 18 dollars per user per quarter on advertising, while providers of the data unwittingly feed a closed source artificial intelligence for free.
If any of the use cases below interest you buckle up, we’re in for a wild ride.
TARGET AUDIENCE
We feel three distinct groups will benefit the most from reading this book.
- Family offices, sovereign wealth funds, and other institutional investors looking to diversify into an emerging non-correlated asset class that will run the monetized infrastructure of the new internet.
- Entrepreneurs and corporate intrapreneurs looking for the best platforms to launch their new ideas on, and what the potential pit falls and opportunities are when creating distributed applications.
- Retail investors and lay professionals looking for a more nuanced and holistic view of the space to hedge their personal portfolios by participating in the ecosystem as early adopter users.
OUTLINE
In a distributed system, two people can transact value with each other without the need for a middleman to facilitate the transaction. For the first time in history, “trust” is now distributed instead of centralized.
Applying new computer science and cryptography principles will allow us to fundamentally rewrite how our institutions work, increasing transparency and accountability throughout the value chain.
Part I: How It Works
We will begin by giving every reader a crash course in how distributed ledgers work from a high level computer science perspective. From zero experience in the space, to complete technical mastery of all things blockchain, we feel all readers can benefit from these first few introductory chapters.
We will attempt to demystify the blockchain by explaining the rapid evolution of the technology from its humble origins in the Bitcoin blockchain, to more recent implementations that will enable a global network of interconnected distributed ledgers to form the backbone of an entire new internet of value.
After a brief introduction, Part I consists of five fairly dense technical chapters, each with a main concept that builds on top of the last incrementally:
1.1 dApp Revolution: An explanation of what “distributed” applications (dApps) are, and how they are fundamentally different from existing centralized cloud applications.
1.2 Brute Force Consensus: The Bitcoin chapter where we explain how Bitcoin works, and the core elements that make it successful.
1.3 Other ways to Make the Sausage: The “Altcoin” (not bitcoin) chapter where we explain how competing systems (called protocols) attempt to do what Bitcoin does at a larger scale and more efficiently.
1.4 Good Architecture: An overview of how these new protocols are designed as many distinct overlapping layers. These layers interact with each other efficiently by only performing actions in the part of the subsystem most relevant to the task at hand.
1.5 High Assurance: Our final push will explore the continuum on which we trust the developers writing the code by learning how high assurance functional programming and formal verification paradigms work.
Part II: How It Really Works
In an ideal world, the best system would immediately be discovered and adopted. However, the real world is a complex adaptive system with many agents acting in their own self interest both rationally and irrationally.
Thus, Part II is a deep meditation on the motivations beyond the technical that drive success and failure in the distributed ledger space.
2.1 Fitness Landscape: Competition is fierce. Trillions of dollars of capital are on the line for whoever can capture the most market share from entrenched centralized players in every major industry from banking, to media, to supply chains. Framing the conversation in terms of evolutionary biology will help guide the rest of part II by giving a backdrop to why the life cycle of innovation, adaptation, and ultimately death is a natural part of all business processes.
2.2 Life cycle: Distributed ledger projects are inherently centralized as tokens first need to be created before being distributed. The ways in which tokens are distributed vary as much as the protocols themselves, and change as projects evolve over time. From projects with fixed supplies, to highly inflationary supplies, to bounty based distribution, to “airdrops” (giving owners of existing tokens ownership of a new project) each strategy creates different incentives among participants in the system.
2.3 Decentralization: We will dissect the continuum on which applications can be run in a decentralized fashion, and the myriad of social, technical, and regulatory implications when attempting to run applications on an (im)mutable network of interchangeable computers.
2.4 Interaction: Distributed ledgers cannot succeed unless new capital is onboarded into them. We will explore the development of the exchange industry from its origins in early exchanges like Mt. Gox, to custodial and KYC issues faced by incumbent centralized exchanges, and the emergence of decentralized exchanges which have the potential to undermine any attempts at regulation.
2.5 Force of Will: At the core of all great projects lies a convincing story. We will explore how corporate and governmental partnerships, conferences, key hires, and social media twirl together to form an over arching narrative that drives project success or failure.
2.6 Correlation and Killer Apps: We will explore the platform app token ecosystem, and what drives developers to choose one distributed ledger platform to launch their distributed applications (dApps) on over another.
2.7 Bear Case: We will end part II by summarizing all of the ways distributed ledgers could fail either through catastrophic technical failures, lack of adoption, or continued market share dominance (forced or voluntary) by centralized systems.
2.8 Bull Case: As a counterpoint to our bear case, we will lay out a road map for catalysts that can spur more widespread adoption including custodial solutions, tokenization of real world assets, and many other breakthroughs both technical and socio-cultural.
Part III: Where it’s Going (Speculative Fiction)
Our final section will present versions of the future we will be forced to confront sooner rather than later.
3.1 Avocado Wars: An explosive mix of water rights, property rights, and human rights collide when trying fill an unsatiatable global supply chain that demands a constantly increasing supply of avocados.
3.2 Permanent Record: From birth every doctor’s visit, report card, purchase, paycheck, and communication is stored in a global database unequivocally tied to a unique DNA fingerprint. Unless you go dark..
3.3 Big Data Jury: Families of 300 people killed in a fatal plane crash are seeking damages that threaten to bankrupt a major decentralized airline with millions of investors. 12,000 of the world’s top jurors will decide the case.
3.4 Take Your Pills: Healthcare premiums can be so much less expensive… if you agree to simply place your pill bottle on a small scale each time you take your medication. Each successful dosage yields one health savings account token. There are no fake medications or mass recalls, the chain of custody is traceable directly from the factory to each individual consumer.
ONWARD
We hope by the end of this book a new generation of investors and entrepreneurs will be excited about leveraging distributed ledger technology to create a world that pays more than lip service to “being more open and connected”. This means leaving idealism and egoism at the door to take a deeply introspective look at the ramifications DLTs pose to the daily lives of billions of people.
A helpful way to keep this egoism is check is to place the Macbethian melodrama that was Theranos in the front of our minds as we take this journey together.
At Theranos, the rewards for creating a blood testing machine that could perform hundreds of tests with a single pin prick of blood were immense. Unfortunately, the realities of how diluted a sample of blood could be before causing issues with the sensors in the machine (e.g. the laws of physics) got in the way.
As much as we want to downplay the gravity technology plays in our lives, at some point distributed ledgers will be life and death.
- An inmate is put to death based on a record in a database.
- Who gets a kidney transplant and who doesn’t is based on a record in a database.
- Who is considered a political dissenter is based on a record in a database.
Unlike Theranos’ technology, distributed ledger technology works today in a crude but effective form, and will continue to advance over time by incrementally solving the next set of computer science challenges. Many projects will fail for reasons honest and duplicitous, but the collective body of work will live on as successive generations continue to innovate.
Release Notes
Current Version: Open Alpha 0.1
In the open Alpha release all concepts in this book are still being formed. As such, there will be numerous spelling and formatting issues, and content will change often.
Once the Alpha is finished and a full length book is available, we will begin an open bug bounty contest to fix spelling, syntax, and formatting errors. More importantly, we would love your best steel man arguments to help improve the book. REACH OUT
BCH address: qp7fvjgt9zudfevlt9zw4n0tfkqfdm2dhc8flkg2rm
“It was in keeping with the practice of mankind for us to accept an empire that was offered to us, and if we refused to give it up under the pressure of three of the strongest motives, fear, honor, and self-interest. And it is not we who set the example, for it has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger. Besides, we believed ourselves to be worthy of our position, and so you thought until now, when calculations of interest have made you take up the cry of justice — a consideration that no one has ever yet brought forward to hinder his ambition when he had a chance of gaining anything by might. And praise is due to all who, if not so superior to human nature as to refuse dominion, yet respect justice more than their position compels them to do.”
— Thucydides: The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (432 B.C.)
