2015-10-26 20:58:11 +03:00
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---
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sort: 4
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2015-12-02 04:27:10 +03:00
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title: Network architecture: goals
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2015-10-26 20:58:11 +03:00
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---
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# Design of a digital republic: part 1, goals
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2015-10-20 20:51:45 +03:00
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Some of us remember when the Internet was a social network.
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Today, the Internet is a modem.
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It's a wonderful modem. It connects you to all kinds of great
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online services. Some of which are social "networks," but only
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networks in the MBA sense. Really they're social *servers*:
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giant virtual mainframes running one hardcoded program. 1976
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called — it wants its acoustic coupler back.
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2015-10-20 20:51:45 +03:00
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So, you prefer 1996. So, you wish you had your decentralized
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Internet back. So, you don't seem alone in this. So, we know
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one thing: wishing hasn't made it happen.
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## John Perry Barlow
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It's interesting to go back and read John Perry Barlow's 1996
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manifesto, the [Cyberspace Declaration of
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Independence](https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html),
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Some parts of the *Declaration* are dated. Many parts seem
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fresh, even urgent.
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But in 2015, what stands out most about this document is its
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incredible confidence that the Internet is inherently free, and
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easily strong enough to announce and defend its own freedom,
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against "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of
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flesh and steel."
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Well... hindsight is 20/20. But in hindsight, even in 1996
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things were starting to head south. Usenet — the brain of the
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Internet, when the Internet had a brain — was already
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disintegrating under the barbarian invasions. And where is the
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WELL these days? (John Perry Barlow is probably still on it.)
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While the Net has certainly scored a point or two against the
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State, the State has scored a lot more points against the Net.
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If the State wants your domain name, it takes it. If that's
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independence, what does utter defeat and submission look like?
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Worse: whatever state tyranny exists, it's obviously dwarfed by
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the private, free-market, *corporate* tyrannosaurs that stalk the
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cloud today. We can see this clearly by imagining all these
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thunder-lizards were *actually part of the government*. "Private"
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and "public" are just labels, after all.
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Imagine a world in which LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and
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the NSA were all in one big org chart. Is there anyone, of any
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political stripe, who doesn't find this outcome creepy? It's
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probably going to happen, in fact if not in form. While formal
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nationalization is out of fashion, regulation easily achieves the
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same result, while keeping the sacred words "private enteprise."
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Reading Barlow's _Declaration_ is a lot like reading the real
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Declaration, in an alternate history where Jefferson lost. In
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2015, do we still believe in these goals? Arguably, we believe
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in them more than ever. We basically live in 1996's nightmare.
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We know exactly what to be afraid of. It's already here.
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But we've lost the ability to believe we can *achieve* these
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goals. 20 years ago, digital freedom seemed inevitable. Now it
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seems impossible.
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## Engineering digital freedom
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Don't panic! This is a simple case of cause and effect. Digital
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freedom isn't inevitable. It's also not impossible. It's quite
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possible. It just requires *actual engineering work*.
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If you think a result is inevitable, but it's not, you won't do
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the work and you won't get the result. So, let's do the work.
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Dealing is way better than worrying. 1996 worried about the
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problem; 2016 ought to deal with it.
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A constitution is not a declaration. It's not a list of ideals.
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It's more like a bridge — an actual structure, that fails unless
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it stands up to genuine load. A bridge isn't a bridge unless it
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works. If you want a bridge, you have to build a bridge. It
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doesn't typically happen that you set out to build something
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else, but at the end it turns out you've built a bridge.
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The designers of the Internet did not, of course, intend to
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implement any of John Perry Barlow's ideals. How close they came
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is in a way remarkable. Perhaps it was possible for the
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designers of the Internet to build a global, decentralized social
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network. They weren't trying to, and they didn't.
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If we want a decentralized social network, we can't do it without
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rigorous engineering work. And we can't limit our work to the
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world of code. A decentralized network has to work not just
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technically — but politically, economically, and socially.
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Where do we go from here? How do we get back to 1996? Admit
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we've failed, and try again. How else?
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## Two axioms
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It's rarely worth arguing over an ugly truth. Either you know
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it, or you can't be argued into it. Or it's not true. So it's
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better to just give it as an axiom. Two axioms:
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One: the Internet can't be fixed. We *can't* redecentralize the
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Internet. It has too many accumulated administrative and
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technical misfeatures.
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Two: there is no practical, completely decentralized network.
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Government is a human invariant, in the digital world as in the
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real world. Even Bitcoin has a central government.
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We can't force you to accept these axioms. We'll just assume
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they're true for the rest of this document. This means we're
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designing a new, self-governing network on top of the Internet.
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## On digital republics
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The English word *republic* is from the Latin *res publica* -
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"public thing." A republic is a government run as a public
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trust, without any single point of failure - person or
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institution.
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Every (real) democracy is a republic, but not every republic is a
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democracy. The distribution of both formal and actual authority
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within a republic need not be in any way uniform. (Arguably, it
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never is.)
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The design goal of a republic is effective, durable and stable
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governance. Humans and servers are inherently fallible.
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Therefore this goal cannot be achieved without what humans call
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*pluralism* and programmers *redundancy*. Or in other words,
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decentralized governance.
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Both the old Internet of the '80s and the distributed social
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network built on top of it - Usenet - were very much digital
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republics. ICANN still thinks of itself as a republic, but to
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some it looks more like a corporation. In previous decades,
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influence over collective decisions was more about personal
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reputation than corporate authority - the way IETF still works.
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A republic needs a constitution - a set of formal processes that
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guides and shapes the real questions of governance, which are
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always informal.
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The republic is in a healthy state if its actual power structures
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match this constitution. The Soviet Union had a fine
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constitution. Its actual authority structures had little to do
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with its official structures.
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Again, the digital republic is a machine - if it's not
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well-engineered, it won't work. There are three categories of
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engineering we have to get right: political, economic, social.
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## Political engineering
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Our ideal network is actually not designed to *be* a digital
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republic. It's designed to *become* a digital republic.
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The most basic principle of political engineering is that there
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is no one true constitution; the constitution has to fit the
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polity. And our polity cannot succeed without changing. And we
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care what it ends up as, much more than how it gets there.
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### On young networks
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In a young, small network, digital freedom is irrelevant. There
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is no structural conflict of interest between the government and
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the users. Everyone in the network is a pioneer, and all
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pioneers have the same goal: found the republic. Anyone who
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stops believing in the network just leaves.
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The young network is a high-trust society in two ways: trust
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between users, and trust in government. The main purpose
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of decentralization is to prevent conflict among the distrusting.
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Decentralization is superfluous in a high-trust society.
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A young network can't be decentralized *even if it wants to be*.
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Consider the early days of Bitcoin. Somewhere between the
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initial release and now, there's a point in time T such that
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before but not after T, Satoshi himself could have rebooted the
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blockchain.
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Not even with a 51% attack - but *just with an email*. He could
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have said: I screwed something up, here's a new genesis block.
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And everyone would have switched to the new blockchain, at the
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mere verbal whim of Emperor Satoshi.
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When Bitcoin was young, it was a centralized network, even though
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it had a decentralized constitution. In practice, Satoshi was
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above the constitution. Even if he didn't use it, he had an
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authority above cryptography.
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### Political engineering in Bitcoin
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There are two layers of sovereignty in Bitcoin. The highest
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layer is the choice of blockchain itself - the rule that the
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longest chain is best is completely informal. Or to put it
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differently, it's the principle that makes Bitcoin Bitcoin and
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everything else an altcoin. No math is involved here - just the
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agreement of human beings. Or in other words, politics.
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Even the cryptographic layer rests on informal foundations.
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The 51% attack on Bitcoin is well-known; any coalition that can
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construct one is sovereign. But no such coup has happened, or
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will - why?
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Because the coalition is plural. Since each coup supporter would
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be acting against its own self-interest by damaging the
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reputation of the currency as a whole, the coup requires
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self-destructive folly from multiple serious actors. Suicidal
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collusion is never a realistic risk - or if it is, nothing can
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mitigate it.
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Even if one miner controlled 51%, their incentive against an
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attack would be enormous, because they would destroy the
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blockchain they captured. On the other hand, not everyone
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responds sensibly to incentives. The purpose of a republican
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constitution is to eliminate single points of incentive failure.
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Bitcoin is a stable, mature republic - but it is *not* secured
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just by cryptography, but also by political engineering.
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### Political engineering in Reddit
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Compare to an unstable, mature non-republic: Reddit.
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2015's Reddit civil war is a dead ringer for one past conflict:
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the English Civil War. As Marx and Pareto agree, all major civic
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conflict arises when a new social class develops a collective
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sense of its right to govern. The danger is most acute when a
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governed class senses that the governors do not live up to the
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standards of the governed.
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Much as the Puritans looked down on the Cavaliers as immoral,
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atheistic fops, the Reddit moderators looked down on the Reddit
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staff - or certain parts of it - as faceless corporate drones.
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When you've attained real political status in a community,
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through hard work and genuine talent, it's contemptible to let
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yourself be governed by people without the basic skills to even
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pass as competent, much less exceptional, in this community. As
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Napoleon said: every regime is safe so long as it is ruled by its
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most talented citizens. And if it's not, it isn't.
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But technically, Reddit couldn't just have a French Revolution.
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Reddit is an inherently centralized site. It looks like a bunch
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of different places, but that's an illusion. It's actually one
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big mainframe. The Reddit staff is stuck running this mainframe.
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The users have a lot of social capital invested in it.
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If there was a technical mechanism that let the users of Reddit,
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collectively and coherently, fork Reddit and take ownership with
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a Tennis Court Oath, they certainly would have done so long ago.
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The result could only be a digital republic. But they can't, so
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Reddit's future is unclear. Man may be born free, but mainframe
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guest accounts certainly aren't born free.
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### From monarchy to republic
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In real-world history we see a curious pattern: not only are
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republics fairly rare, but every successful republic (from Athens
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to Rome to England) started out as a successful monarchy.
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Perhaps this is also the right way to build a digital republic?
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Another way to state the political engineering problem that our
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new network has to solve: maximize the chance of producing a
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mature digital republic. There are two failure cases: failure,
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and a mature non-republic. We should prefer the former - "range
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safety," as a rocket scientist would say.
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Our conclusion is that a young network is a monarchy (whether
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under a BDFL or a faceless corporation), whether it likes it or
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not. But the network must be technically designed to *evolve*
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into a mature republic.
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And - most critically - the republican evolution *cannot* be
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prevented by the monarchical admins. When the evolution has to
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happen, the monarchy has every incentive to help it succeed. If
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it chooses to interfere instead, it will just get run over.
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Reddit couldn't have a revolution; its code wasn't designed for a
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revolution. A new network can and should be designed for just
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that. Revolution may not be the ideal way to give birth to a
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republic, but it certainly works and it's better than nothing.
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Thus what seems like an optimal political design: the ugly,
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centralized, young larva that's designed to molt into a
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beautiful, mature, decentralized butterfly. And once mature, the
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larva must molt or die — not keep growing into a gigantic,
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man-eating caterpillar of death.
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## Economic engineering
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Economically, a new network should bootstrap. It should be
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designed to generate revenue that funds its own development.
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Ideally, its operators accept no traditional investment at all.
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A digital-token business is no novelty in the age of Bitcoin.
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But a network address space is not at all the same thing as a
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digital currency. When we look at current address spaces of
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meaningful economic weight - DNS domains, IPv4 addresses, even
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Twitter handles - we see not digital money, but digital *land*.
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### On digital land
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Digital land is very different from digital money. People mine
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gold, but nobody mines land. Transactions in money are common,
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fungible, and should involve minimal friction. Transactions in
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land are rare, unique, and involve significant friction. And
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most important, land has intrinsic utility; money does not.
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For example, Bitcoin needs a blockchain to solve the double spend
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problem. A blockchain is very expensive. If we consider mining
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dilution as a cost, a Bitcoin transaction costs multiple dollars.
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That cost is exacted as a dilution tax on all holders (arguably,
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correct accounting in BTC uses a "normalized BTC" unit which is
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the fraction of all BTC outstanding), but it remains a cost.
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For certain values of "solved," the double spend problem is also
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solved by a trusted escrow agent. For digital money, escrow is
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not a workable general solution. For digital land, it may be.
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Escrow is certainly orders of magnitude cheaper than a blockchain.
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Digital land in a decentralized system still needs to be owned
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cryptographically, like Bitcoin. But as with real property,
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it doesn't need to be mathematically impossible to steal digital
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property. It just needs to be realistically impractical. If we
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can ensure that those with the power to steal lack the motive,
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and those with the motive lack the power, our design works.
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For digital land, a blockchain is an unnecessary expense. So
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digital land has no mining. But from the Bitcoin purist's
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perspective, any altcoin without mining is "100% premined" - ie,
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probably a scam. Digital land is not digital currency, but it's
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silly to argue over definitions.
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### A moral theory of digital land
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The libertarian philosophy of Murray Rothbard is the normative
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belief system of Bitcoin. It's easy to explain digital land in
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Rothbardian terms: ownership is on the homesteading principle.
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Property in land, as anything, is owned by those who create it -
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which in real land means enclosing and cultivating it. Digital
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land is just the same, but creation is a simpler process - and
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it never involves conquest and/or genocide of previous owners.
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All this is precisely according to Dr. Rothbard.
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Intuitively: if you didn't do any real work to create your
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premined altcoin, it's a scam. If not, not. It's not necessary
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to appeal to Rothbard to see why this makes sense.
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### Economic dynamics
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Any bootstrapping address space can define a metric which is the
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fraction of namespace value recycled into development cost: the
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erecycle rate*. In a sense, if the recycle rate is 100%, the
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network does not leak economic energy.
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(In a scam, this non-leaked economic energy non-leaks into the
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scammer's pocket. In a non-scam, it goes back into the engine.
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It's expensive to settle any new America; if that America has
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positive general utility, its value when settled should subsidize
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the cost of settling it. Or at least, a design that doesn't work
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this way is like Newcomen's steam engine, not Watt's.)
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One tradeoff against perfect recycling is the importance of
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ownership decentralization. If you own an entire network because
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you created it, you can increase the value of the whole address
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space by giving blocks away. You may even increase the value of
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your own position.
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A monopolized network is not politically healthy. So its
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2015-10-26 20:43:19 +03:00
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economic value is lower. So — if the network is properly
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designed and structured — it can be stably demonopolized. The
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2015-10-20 20:51:45 +03:00
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monopoly power achieved by combining large positions is smaller
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than the reputation cost of remonopolization, so centrifugal
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force dominates and the system stays decentralized.
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Mining is one way to create initial demonopoly. But if it's not
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actually necessary, mining has a recycle rate of zero. In a
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blockchain network, mining is a necessary service and pays for
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itself. In digital real estate, it would be a bad design.
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The objective of demonopolization isn't necessarily a *fair*
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distribution of real estate. Fairness is nice - but from an
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engineering perspective, to create the incentive structure of a
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true republic, all that's needed is nontrivial decentralization.
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Not much is needed to maintain the stabilizing incentives.
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## Regulatory engineering
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There's another kind of "political engineering." Our new network
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is a sort of second-level political entity; but it exists within
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a first-level entity, the real government.
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Minimizing bad interactions with the real government involves
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three simple steps. First, don't look like you're breaking the
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law. Second, don't break the law. Third, *really* don't break
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the spirit of the law.
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Fortunately, digital land (such as DNS domains or IPv4 blocks)
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already exists and is largely unregulated. Or rather, it's
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regulated perfectly well by standard property law.
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This isn't just an accident of history. If DNS domains became a
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useful way to launder money, or any kind of sink of financial
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skulduggery, carders, pedobears, etc - the baleful eye of the
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real government would rapidly fall on them.
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It's incumbent on anyone creating a new network of any kind not
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just to avoid using it *yourself* for criminal purposes, but to
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design it so that *it's not useful* for criminal purposes. A
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darknet is not a machine for producing digital freedom. It's the
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opposite - an excuse for installing digital tyranny.
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## Social engineering
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Bringing people together is an easy problem for any social
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network. The hard problem is keeping them apart. In other
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words, the hard problem is *filtering*. Society is filtering.
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A society without filters is a whirling, beige mess of atoms in a
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blender. Beigeworld is an inhuman antisociety. A digital
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|
republic is a garden; not only does a garden smell good, but
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every flower smells good. An unfiltered network is a sewer. All
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sewers have exactly the same smell.
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There are four orthogonal classes of filtering: topic, community,
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flavor and quality. Filtering should be orthogonal to content
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type: the topic filter "sci.physics" can be a chatroom, a
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|
preprint archive and a streaming video channel.
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### Filtering: topic
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Users themselves want to keep themselves apart in structured
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ways. Topic filtering is the most basic. Imagine a Reddit or a
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|
|
Usenet with only one group. It would consist only of noise.
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For topic filtering, the ideal network has a single, organized
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|
global topic tree (ontology). Call it half Usenet, half
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|
Wikipedia and half the Dewey Decimal System.
|
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|
|
### Filtering: community
|
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|
Every topic deserves a community. But not every community is a
|
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|
|
topic - a node in the ontology. To put it differently, not every
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|
|
community should have a global name. The existence of small,
|
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|
|
informal, private communities - tribes and microtribes - is
|
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|
|
essential to a healthy network.
|
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|
|
The most inhuman form of community filtering is the form in which
|
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|
|
"communities" are inferred algorithmically from an unstructured
|
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|
|
social graph on a social server. A community is a tribe, not a
|
|
|
|
proximity cluster. Humans are a tribal species and have
|
|
|
|
exquisite instincts for interactions in medium-sized groups.
|
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|
|
|
|
|
### Filtering: flavor
|
|
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|
|
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|
|
Flavor filtering is the only major filtering class that's poorly
|
|
|
|
developed in presently deployed systems.
|
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|
|
|
|
|
Suppose you're building an online grocery store. Suppose one
|
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|
|
feature of your store is a profile setting where users can mark
|
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|
|
that they're vegetarians.
|
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|
|
There is no use in asking vegetarians to shop for meat. At best,
|
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|
|
you're trolling them; at worst, you're boring them. A cooking
|
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|
|
site should not show them recipes for rack of lamb. Etc.
|
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|
|
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|
|
More broadly, many forms of discourse have vibrant flavors which
|
|
|
|
other users are inherently uninterested in tasting. Like topics,
|
|
|
|
these flavors naturally form trees - some users may naturally
|
|
|
|
block all sexual content, others just a subset.
|
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|
|
|
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|
|
But flavors are not topics. Topic can imply flavor - the bondage
|
|
|
|
board will have bondage-flavored content. Not all communities
|
|
|
|
are topical. Not all all topical communities stick to the point
|
|
|
|
in every single communication.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A key component of flavor-oriented filtering is the principle
|
|
|
|
that flavor is marked by the content author, and enforced by
|
|
|
|
social convention in the community. A well-run community - and
|
|
|
|
not all communities will be well-run - enforces flavor marking
|
|
|
|
even among the locally dominant majority.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Anyone reading this has been subject to speech codes, of one sort
|
|
|
|
or another, since they were old enough to talk. There's a reason
|
|
|
|
for this: blasphemy and/or heresy is disruptive and antisocial,
|
|
|
|
absolutely regardless of its actual intellectual merit.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
If we have a technical way to filter out blasphemy, we don't need
|
|
|
|
to suppress it with coercive force. Imagine a world in which,
|
|
|
|
not just in theory but also in practice, you could say anything
|
|
|
|
you wanted - so long as you marked it as what it was.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
### Filtering: quality
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
All other filtering problems are unimportant next to quality.
|
|
|
|
Any successful digital republic must be in some sense a successor
|
|
|
|
of Usenet, whose defeat by the barbarians is a matter of history.
|
|
|
|
Alas, no one really knows how to do decentralized quality
|
|
|
|
filtering. (Even centralized filtering doesn't work well.)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Fortunately, a young network is inherently high-quality.
|
|
|
|
Low-quality content is parasitic. It develops only as a network
|
|
|
|
matures. There's plenty of time to work on the outer walls while
|
|
|
|
the network boots up.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
And we can state one social-engineering goal which is not
|
|
|
|
*sufficient* for barbarian resistance, but perhaps almost
|
|
|
|
*necessary*. This is *expansion resistance*: the difficulty of
|
|
|
|
creating a new identity.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
If expansion resistance is zero, anyone can create infinite
|
|
|
|
numbers of identities; Sybil attacks become trivial. Expansion
|
|
|
|
resistance is negligible in email; spam filtering works, kind of;
|
|
|
|
it can save SMTP, it certainly couldn't *create* SMTP. Email has
|
|
|
|
a lot in common with 14th-century Constantinople.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Metafilter (which anyone can join for $5) has solid expansion
|
|
|
|
resistance; it may not be perfect, but it's certainly spamless.
|
|
|
|
And the grand champion is certainly the '80s Arpanet, where where
|
|
|
|
creating an identity involved applying to a university or getting
|
|
|
|
a tech job - effectively, infinite expansion resistance.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Imagine a genuinely abuse-free global, decentralized network,
|
|
|
|
where no one had ever heard of a firewall. Usenet was a fragile
|
|
|
|
flower that could only exist under this glass bell. We can't
|
|
|
|
go back to the Arpanet, but we have to understand why it worked.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Broadly, disposable identities and sockpuppets are the enemy of
|
|
|
|
Internet civilization. The principle of one identity per person,
|
|
|
|
persona or corporation is an absolute principle of netiquette.
|
|
|
|
Genuine multiple personas exist - it's one thing to split your
|
|
|
|
own identity between person and persona, name and *nom de plume*
|
|
|
|
or *nom de drag* - but they're rare, and an easy exception.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
One of the most praised texts in 20th-century political science
|
|
|
|
is s James Scott's _Seeing Like A State_. Scott points out that
|
|
|
|
successful governments encourage social structures which are
|
|
|
|
structurally governable, like a forester planting rows of trees
|
|
|
|
in straight lines. People today have names like "Carter" because
|
|
|
|
medieval English barons made their peasants take surnames, just
|
|
|
|
so their tax databases would have valid primary keys.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A naive libertarian might call this a bad thing. Simplicity is
|
|
|
|
not tyranny; simple government is good government, which is the
|
|
|
|
opposite of tyranny. The simpler its task, the less energy the
|
|
|
|
government must exert to achieve the same output. Anarchy and
|
|
|
|
tyranny are cousins; so are liberty and order.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
# Conclusion
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Goals and ideals are different things. An ideal is something you
|
|
|
|
want. A goal is an ideal, plus a realistic plan to get it.
|
|
|
|
Goals are more interesting than ideals, don't you think?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Goals and features are also different things. What are the
|
|
|
|
features of a network that attempts to achieve these design
|
|
|
|
goals? In the next installment, we'll look at how our own
|
2015-10-26 20:58:11 +03:00
|
|
|
network — [Urbit](http://urbit.org) — measures up to these
|
2015-10-26 20:44:44 +03:00
|
|
|
yardsticks.
|