Nice to see different local communities getting set up.
For the dev team -- anything more that can be discussed in terms of what the original "skeleton keys" are evolving into, specifically around how the network will "license" different "agents" to enable the different capabilities discussed in Atomic, but in a what should be amore distributed and resilient way than other solutions? A drawing or 1 pager on this would be awesome to help people (including me) -- understand....
Also -- this helps the developing network of ambassadors start to plan how an initial communications and education role in a local community would be able to develop into a business. Snoops 2nd reddit update expressed that better than I ever could.
Love seeing the consistent progress from Ashot on the system nodes. Would just be great to have some visibility for the community into the work Artem & Chaositec are doing as well.
I don't think people who haven't been to one of the meetings quite get the scope of the project, and the potential of using different keys to unlock different capabilities within a crypto systems -- and not just using the keys to sign a transfer of tokens, but having more uses for the keys and more uses for the tokens too....
And when you think of it that way it is also obvious why having a cryptographer like Artem involved now is essential (thank you defunctec!).
I've had to step back from actively working on CRW for personal reasons -- but this project is different than anything else I've come across in crypto, and has much more potential than anyone really appreciates (in my opinion).
Every other decent project I looked at (including bitcoin and ethereum) has been "captured" by some limiting factor -- either a fundamental architecture problem or an core economic community or interest group or a specific application. By building on lessons the core team learned from other projects and also just working quietly during this year's coin frenzy -- Crown may be in the process of managing to sneak up on the competition... or that is what I would like to believe.
I tend to read and think too much -- but the problem that we are really trying to solve with these networks isn't a "token" problem -- but to create a system for managing a Common Pool Resource -- a commons. First off, you can't create a commons with an ICO -- it has to be built on top of a community... The most iconic work on this subject is probably Elinor Ostrom's nobel prize winning notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom -- and her principles for the management of common pool resources. And within this -- all these guys who want to create a new internet are kind of screwing up too... sorry IPFS... you aren't creating a network -- you are using a network to create a common pool resource. The problem has been a problem of composition / framing... and damn I have taken a beating from some for making this point -- because most of us have only read about one thing or another and we are too specialized in our knowledge.
A crypto-commons or kerckhoff social network (fuck the whole crypto-currency thing -- it's so 2009)... but a crypto-commons which is a common pool resource managed by the governance structure of the network and with it's resources allocated by the token which is intrinsic to the network... and where that commons has an interface on iOs & Android (2.6 B smart phones at current count) --- well this is a new sort of nervous system for, well, the world... and that is when your Ostrom needs to be informed by Stuart Kaufmann's insights into networks, complexity and evolution. I was introduced to Kaufman by someone I met on the Crown Mattermost who used to work with him decades ago and suggested that an understanding of Kaufmann's work was what I was missing.... and he was right. The key to Kaufmann is in understanding the characteristics of different network structures and the range between rigidity and chaos -- which helps one think about how to structure a network which is a mix of stability and chaos... or where you push the edges of the network to the edge of chaos, but keep the core of the network stable... there are plenty of examples of this in nature... the book to start with on Kaufmann is probably At Home in the Universe -- chapter 4. Kaufmann's insights on networks actually help explain why 2 tiered governance structures are so common and stable -- a unified structure is too rigid, but as you get into 3 or more layers -- it gets exponentially more complex (roughly) to get agreements, so it becomes to unstable -- so 1 is too rigid, 3 is too fluid.... and it turns out that golidlocks was wise beyond her years.
Then the final step in the back ground stuff -- is that Kaufmann ultimately connects to the importance of the sacred -- or something which is taken as given at the core of a system. I think of this in terms of Gödel's incompleteness theorem -- we must start with an assumption and that assumption is what is sacred... for Crown, the assumption that I imagine that it starts with is that human agency and freedom are what is sacred -- or what is assumed to be good. And this is where I lose many folks... and where I think most of crypto would say I am full of shit... but this is where the opportunity is too... because there is some reason everyone is doing this? For many it is probably a sort of gambling addiction and just fun -- but we are playing with amazing technologies which can do a lot more than laundering money and avoiding taxes or providing amusement...
You just have to step into a different frame and imagine what could be if you start with the idea that human agency should be sacred and encouraged, and that we have a network structure which can be designed with evolutionary principles to be both self-governing and stable at the core and dancing on the edge of chaos with different agents out on the edges, and owned by no one, but governed by itself following the principles we have learned from observing the goverance of other common resources in societies over centuries.
Just an idea... this is the shared imagination referred to in the first of the crown papers. But it doesn't exist yet -- people have to build it.
