[FRIAM] Smart-Contracts: was UBI

[Steve Smith]

> Yes! I'd love it if someone more knowledgeable would deign to chip in. As I understand it, smart contracts would do the banal computation showing how various agreements intertwine. So, if I've signed 5 NDAs with 5 different companies, 2 of which were founded by the same yahoo, 1 of which is a deep pocketed hydra like SAIC, 2 of which are mid-sized startups, all of which have different terms, what are the implications of signing a 6th with a new one? Trying to "calculate" all the different domain crossover, especially given that I'm only called to participate in a handful of domains, is a PITA.
I think this would be a good early application.  I will keep my eyes
open in the Catalyst <https://cardanocataly.st/> portion of Cardano
(where they solicit project proposals) for anything afoot related to
that.   I depend entirely too much on good faith, best intentions, and
low-probability-of-occurence in such things (NDAs) and could easily find
myself turned into a pretzel if they ever collided.
> But I haven't followed the smart contracts area at all. So I don't even know if the current meaning of "smart contracts" means what (I thought) it used to. I know nothing about Cardano.
I would say that smart-contracts are more technical and specific than
your examples imply, but both *could* be built on top of such...   and
as always significant adoption would take time.   So far I can barely
sign most of the contracts I need to electronically...  it feels so
absurd to print a PDF, sign the paper and rescan it as a PNG.   I was
warned by one client that I must NOT affix a scanned signature to the
signed document, and being the scofflaw that I can, "printed to image"
the PDF,  gimped my signature onto the doc, and sent it back.   If their
tech people might have been able to see fingerprints of my methods, I
was sure the bureaucrats couldn't.   Of course it flew through.
> A similar *feeling* project was GitLaw, where laws were written with explicitly detailed, traceable revisioning.
The late 70's DoD High Order Language effort was trying to initiate this
with their straw/wood/tin/steelman thing as well as coining Ada (a pun
on the Cardano cryptocoin).
>  The open government project back in Portland was great in the sense that they would hold hack-a-thons to assemble data from various Portland municipal data sources into a kind of dash board for citizens, all open source, of course. I only went to one, though, for logistics problems.

It is satisfying that such projects are underway even if/when/as I
cannot (logistically) participate (fully).      

Today I went "shopping" for seeds at the Tewa Women's Council Seed
Library in Espanola.   I wasn't sure what they were offering though I
did read their website thoroughly.   The "contract" I signed to be
allowed to take seeds from the Library was pretty explicit about a bunch
of things that could have been considered obvious "norms" and "best
intentions" and "polite generosity", but the spirit with which it was
all handled left me feeling good (not merely "OK") about signing it.  My
hope was to be able to return more seeds than I took at the end of my
growing season (or before next planting season).   The majority of the
seeds were prepackaged from a variety of heirloom/indigenous seed
companies from the southwest (Seeds of Change, Native Seeds Search,
etc.), but a few were clearly locally grown and hand-packaged.   Even if
I fail to grow these out well (I have a brown thumb and adobe soil) and
return much if any seeds into the (re)generative effort, I am very happy
they exist and are aspiring to what they are.  Even negative results
(with me anyway) are a contribution.   It is a good example of a "gift"
economy where reciprocity is assumed and there is enough leverage (one
corn seed can yield several ears of hundreds of seeds each...) to make
it easy for virtuous cycles to emerge.

I don't expect anyone (else) to be familiar with Cardano yet, but I
think it will become more and more relevant as the myriad *closed*
blockchain implementations (and cryptos) gain steam based on rampant
speculation (crypto¢ and shameless promotion (NFT auctions)) and more
attention comes to smart-contracts, etc.   I am putting my energy into
it (Cardano) because I suspect it could well be in the same league say
as BSD Unix, GNU, and Linux in the OS world.


>
> On 5/10/21 1:36 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> Glen (et al) -
>>
>> I wonder if we (collectively) can discuss *how* smart contracts as being built on top of blockchain implementations can be independent of "money" as you properly (IMO) apprehend it (and it's limits).  
>>
>> I've been studying the Cardano ecosystem (weakly by the standards of more astutely technical of you here) *because* it is not conceived or designed to (merely) be the vehicle for managing an aspiring cryptoCurrency Bubble as the others seem to be (with smart-contracts an afterthought or inner-machinery exposed for civilian use.  
>>
>> As I understand it, cryptoCurrency (ADA in this case) is the "reference app" of choice on Cardano for lots of reasons (explicitly) other than creating and inflating a crypto¢bubble, though I can't articulate them well myself.   My NREL colleague and I are exploring how the Ouroborous <https://cardano.org/ouroboros/> (protocol/blockchain machinery) of Cardano and the Smart Contract language/environment (Plutus <https://developers.cardano.org/en/programming-languages/plutus/overview/>) and other fairly *technical* things about collaborative problem-solving environments. FWIW, his design/implementation environment of choice is Haskell.  His teenage son taps the family $$ resources via a webapp which implements a smart-contract that captures the family values around "allowance" or more aptly "allowable expenses".    I share this only for "flavor", not with an indication that it is anything more meaningful than a novelty reflecting his investment in understanding-by-application.
>>
>> However... I'm fundamentally *more* interested in how the same concepts (and machinery ultimately) can help us move on past a post-capitalistic socio-Economy toward something closer to it's close cousin Ecology which I believe would have a much stronger flavor of reciprocity, gifting and gratitude vs the nearly *required*??? U-O-Me nature of Money (conceived as IOUs, but distorted to UOMes by ?greed?).
>>
>> - Steve
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