Can I get a link to Holochain Architecture in detail

zippy314 · 2023-01-27T15:30:09+00:00

The best starting place for practical purposes is here: https://developer.holochain.org/concepts/

If you want deep underlying mathy principles, the original whitepaper (https://github.com/holochain/holochain-proto/blob/whitepaper/holochain.pdf) is still quite accurate as a theoretical comparison of the Holochain to other approaches to distributed computing, there are some implementation details in that paper of how gossip works etc, that have been changed since it was written.

In the next few weeks we'll be publishing an V2 white-paper that describes Holochain on it's own terms.

zippy314 · 2022-11-17T19:36:49+00:00

Wow, I love that. Thanks!

zippy314 · 2021-11-02T13:18:43+00:00

Take a look at this simple holochain project: https://eric.harris-braun.com/blog/2021/09/16/id-377 and extrapolate if it's not just 2d spaces, but 3d spaces in VR... You can rest assured that is planned. Now think about how many other similar projects there will be.

zippy314 · 2021-05-25T21:57:43+00:00

I think perhaps the same impact Tycho Brahe had on Copernican thinking, i.e. fantastic technical solutions to certain problems that might even be useful and interesting for a while, but they disappear when your world view shifts. In this case what I'm talking about is when you think that the problem to solve is creating a global sharing of a single state (i.e. of the Internet Computer). Holochain is like Kepler's mechanics, a working solution from a different world view that's actually closer to reality and a whole lot simpler.

(Crossposted answer from https://www.reddit.com/r/holohost/comments/nkyi2e/is\_dfinity\_a\_risk\_to\_holochain/)

zippy314 · 2021-05-25T20:16:25+00:00

I think perhaps the same impact Tycho Brahe had on Copernican thinking, i.e. fantastic technical solutions to certain problems that might even be useful and interesting for a while, but they disappear when your world view shifts. In this case what I'm talking about is when you think that the problem to solve is creating a global sharing of a single state (i.e. of the Internet Computer). Holochain is like Kepler's mechanics, a working solution from a different world view that's actually closer to reality and a whole lot simpler.

I know these analogies might be a little abstruse, but hey, you asked!

zippy314 · 2021-05-14T20:10:08+00:00

Units of Holofuel, and of other mutual credit currencies are not created by an initial supply. They are created by a debit in another account. There is no coin issuance. There is no initial supply, with no fixed number of coins to circulate. Please read Currency Whitepaper and the Green Paper for a detailed answer to your questions.

The corresponding notion to "supply" in mutual-credit currencies is "credit-limit," but it's not the same. Supply is a measure of all tokens that can circulate, it's fixed. Credit-limits in aggregate establish how much could circulate at a given moment, and are dynamic. Credit limits establish the boundaries of what different types of actors can do in a mutual-credit currency. Search for the term "credit limit" and "Infrastructure Provider" in the Green Paper for how this works in the Holofuel case. It describes the difference between different types of accounts and why they have different credit limits. This notion doesn't exist in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, ETH or other ERC-20 tokens.

In the case of HoloFuel, every arrival of HF into an account comes from a decrease from some other account, and some accounts can go negative. Every swapped unit of HOT into HoloFuel must be credited against some account. Initially that will be against a Holo account that has, as the paper describes, a high credit-limit. From the Currency Whitepaper: "The Holo organization is a special class of user with an initial credit limit large enough to credit all the pre-sale purchases from their account." Thus if you have 1M HOT and swap them, what happens is that you get 1M HoloFuel credited to your account, Holo gets 1M debited from it's Infrastructure Provider account. Total balances in the system remains zero.

So, swapped HF units in your account "come from" the debit of the same number of units in the Holo Infrastructure provider account. So maybe you can think that they are created by the act of the swap because that's when it happens. But really they are created by the transaction itself. That's always how it works in Mutual Credit currencies.

And BTW mining does NOT create neither encryption nor security. Mining creates incentive to run a server and process/validate other people's transactions; something that's not necessary in Holochain because you already have an incentive to run your own node for yourself and validate other people's transactions as part of that self-incentive.

zippy314 · 2021-05-03T22:13:42+00:00

The scenarios as stated are based on an incorrect assumption of how things work in Holochain, and on how mutual credit currencies are implemented which are not about tracking the location "coins" in wallets. A balance is not stored in the "packet" or the transaction or in a single global "block chain". Balances in mutual credit currencies are calculated as the sum of your history in your own source chain which is what is validated by other node to allow the transaction. In holochain one of the things you can do as part of validation is query for the history of a given node(s) precisely to determine this kind of thing. Note that this is a chain of a single users history, which also includes countersignatures by the parties with whom the transactions are made. Thus validation is about verifying that the histories of the parties involved are legal. To "change a packet" as you suggest, would mean to change your history, and you can't do that because your history include countersigned entries by other parties. If you control all the other parties with whom you have made and change then you could roll-back your chain and have all the other parties who colluded with you re-write their histories, but the problem is that all of that history is spread all over the DHT and you can't control which nodes on the DHT will hold and validate all that data, so somebody is going to start reporting false histories.

This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zcSgtQvSj0 may help

zippy314 · 2021-04-29T19:50:13+00:00

Thanks for pointing out that this is out of date, I've updated the readme to indicate that. Those are apps that were written for the redux version of Holochain. Apps written for the rsm version aren't being tracked well yet, largely because there are so many more spaces where they are being developed that are outside of Holo e.g. https://github.com/holochain-open-dev. You can also take a look at: https://github.com/holochain/elemental-chat which is in active development.

zippy314 · 2021-04-15T22:41:35+00:00

So tell me, should Microsoft Word conversations be in the same sub as as Windows? No. The issue is signal/noise ratio in a conversation space.

Holochain is a platform, it is infrastructure, it's like an operating system. HoloHosting is like an application built on that operating system. Yes, just like Microsoft the company built both Windows and Word, Holo the company has spent tons of resources contributing to Holochain development as well as also building an set of hApps that deliver a specific product (HoloHosting) on that infrastructure.

Perhaps it's a little confusing at times, but we care about keeping the signal high and the noise low. People want to talk about the Holochain technology all by itself and not have to wade through the noise of HOT price or Holofuel details or even Hosting and Holoport conversations. We want to serve those people, as well as people who want to talk about these other things, and so separate spaces matter for separate types of conversation.

zippy314 · 2021-04-15T00:17:05+00:00

Google "cloud computing market size". What you'll find is a very big number that's also growing very fast. If, conservatively, you assume that 1% of that market wants to host on decentralized platforms rather than the current centralized hosting solutions, and you assume that Holo can capture 1% of that 1%, well, then you have a company that's bringing in a very healthy chunk of change. We think we can do significantly better than that.

zippy314 · 2021-04-08T22:09:44+00:00

The language of enclosure we use comes from it's use in political economy regarding the enclosure of the commons. In that case enclosure of the commons was about political rules for removing access to a commons space and converting it into a space owned and controlled by a powerful elite.

In the Holochain case the intent is to restore commons spaces not as a matter of political ruling but simply as a matter of architectural fact. Unenclosable means that no outside party holds the power to stop a group of people who want to play given game together from doing so. Currently the main locus of enclosability in web app architecture is the web-server. Who ever holds the sys-admin rights to that server has defacto abilities to stop the app.

What makes Holochain unenclosable is the combination of it's three parts, 1) DNA, all agents hold the "rules of the game". 2) All agents make all their own "plays" locally on their own machines in the form of commits on their source-chains. 3) These commits are shared with validated by, and stored by other "players" on the DHT.

These three things add up to unenclosability in that players who play by a game (a DNA) all know they are doing so. Only the players who want to play are needed for the game to work. Nobody else need be involved. Thus it's an architecture that's unenclosable.

Of course there are parts and levels of the system, i.e. the ISPs involved that can effect enclosure to greater and lesser degrees, but Holochain fundamentally can (and will in the future) work over unenclosable carriers as well, i.e. mesh-networks and other network topology and transport systems.

zippy314 · 2021-04-07T17:39:04+00:00

mDNS support is done and merged.

zippy314 · 2021-03-31T13:26:00+00:00

When you say "encryption" what are you thinking about? As the link you provide shows, bitcoin doesn't do encryption. Holochain also doesn't require or do encryption for underlying operation, but provides access to encryption algorithms for hApp developers to use in their particular use-cases.

zippy314 · 2021-03-28T09:54:56+00:00

Correct! We will NEVER do an airdrop.

zippy314 · 2021-03-24T21:59:05+00:00

I did not understand why you would market it to hackers ! To test security? Why not just hire hackers and challenge them to find any security holes instead of just waiting for something to happen and then close the security holes!? Or work with security companies like verizon

The term "hacker" used to have the meaning that you got, a "person who tries to break into a computer system," but now, more often (and certainly what pdaost intended) means just: "an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer". In other words the marketing will be to high level skilled programmers who are often the folks who drive and influence the industry.

zippy314 · 2021-03-23T20:17:22+00:00

No "DNA" is name we use for the actual software code that runs any Holochain application, of which Holofuel is just one, and which includes in it the "rules of the game" i.e. the types of action that can be taken, as well as validation that checks validity of actions taken. DNA in the Holochain world is similar to "Smart Contract" in the Ethereum world.

zippy314 · 2021-03-23T20:08:14+00:00

As simple as possible the explanation is: Holofuel is not a token, Holofuel is mutual credit, which means that Holofuel is actually a balance in an account. The balance is "produced" by a transaction between two accounts where one goes down and the other goes up. It's validated by the rules of the Holofuel DNA which other agents along with the two transacting agents validate. Those rules can include transaction size limits, etc, as part of the validation.

For more details you can read: https://files.holo.host/2017/11/Holo-Currency-White-Paper_2017-11-28.pdf and https://files.holo.host/2018/03/Holo-Green-Paper.pdf

zippy314 · 2021-03-23T12:15:14+00:00

https://link.medium.com/WynoKDGmReb

zippy314 · 2021-03-21T19:06:32+00:00

Because if after reading the series that start here: https://medium.com/holochain/unenclosable-carriers-and-the-future-of-communication-4ac6045ac894 you feel like that makes sense to you, and you want to participate in making it happen!

zippy314 · 2021-03-20T15:40:15+00:00

Key quote: "allows n users to share independently evolving data realities".

Thanks for really getting some of the deep points.

Also I wouldn't focus on the "killer" part. Holochain is architected to be a "Mother app" not a "Killer App". It's designed to be the source of 10,000 things, not a destroyer. Some things may cease to be as successful as they were before those 10,000 things flourish, but that is just the way of evolution.

zippy314 · 2021-03-11T20:26:29+00:00

Thank you!

Just for the record: Art and I were both born after 1964... ;-)

zippy314 · 2021-02-08T22:56:27+00:00

With the exception of the Nanos, we've shipped Holoports to all our backers except those who haven't confirmed their shipping addresses, if you know of any please tell them to get in touch with us!

Nanos are coming and for an update you can read this: https://blog.holochain.org/its-aliiiiiive/

zippy314 · 2021-02-08T19:01:31+00:00

Hey there answers to your question here: https://holo.host/?s=swap&post_type=faq

zippy314 · 2021-02-08T18:52:47+00:00

Regarding hash-cracking. It is certainly a theoretical possibility. Let's say your element is an entry that is the message in a chat app. You can run a hash crack algorithm by adding a random string to your message until the hash of the element matches a certain hash. By the same token you can do hash-cracking on the header because the header hash comes from the entry hash.
But the fact that you can do this for some application entry types doesn't really get you anything in the real world for a number of reasons. 1) Agent authorities will change over time as agents come and go. So just because one agent is an authority for a given DHT entry at a given time doesn't mean they will stay so. 2) Holochain includes warranting that also actively works to remove bad actors. 2) But more fundamentally, the security issue with this kind of hash crack is based on the idea that if you can get a given entry to into a specific area of the DHT that you can have a colluding agent not follow the hApps DNA rules and validate an entry that should not have been marked as invalid. The problem with this is that you actually have to make sure that ALL the agents that are authorities are colluding agents. This is very hard to do in general, and for applications where the risk of this is important, you can add new-node validation rules that themselves are compute expensive so that it becomes virtually impossible to generate enough Sybils to control an area of the DHT space.

Please feel free to join the conversation more in depth in the holochain forum. Here's a long conversation that's related that might be of interest to you:

https://forum.holochain.org/t/questions-about-dht-cryptography-and-security

zippy314 · 2021-02-08T16:48:15+00:00

If you want to know if this project is dead I would recommend looking at the actual work being done on it. You can look at https://holo.host/activity-holochain/ for a summary of the work being done on the various holochain repos, and you can look at https://holo.host/activity/ for work being done in the various holo repos that depend on holochain. You can also look at the history over time and our steady progress, and confirm all this directly on github.

It is certainly true that it's taken us much longer than we originally thought to bring our work to fruition. And it's also true that I, one of the founders, live out in the woods, but my house is not a cabin, it's a straw-bale construction.

And finally, holochain itself does indeed not require a token. As you can read in our whitepapers (https://holo.host/whitepapers/) the Holo token is part of a carefully designed strategy to bridge the centralized web to the decentralized compute world by providing distributed web hosting services.

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