Humanizing the Singularity

The problem is climate change. https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/can-the-world-computer-s… Smart contracts are the best shot we have of doing carbon, methane etc. tracking, managing offsetting payments and everything else required to start getting a grip on the CO2 emissions of the consumer economy.

He's the CTO at Adjoint, see for example this article about their tech https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/adjoint-distributed-ledg…

"Programmable money" is one shorthand example for smart contracts. As a simple example, you could create a payroll smart contract that pays a fixed amount of coins/tokens/whatever at a certain time each month to a given ERC20 compliant address. You can contrast this with Bitcoin, whose two main functions are securely storing and sending bitcoin (limited by design). For a more in-depth answer regard smart contracts, here is an article by Vinay Gupta where he sets the context for Ethereum, smart contracts and blockchain against the existing way of organising and sharing data (SQL, the web, how organisations share data, protocols, and more): https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/by-the-end-of-this-artic…

Ah interesting. I guess when I think of abstraction, I think of a boundary over which complexity is reduced, and therefore information is lost. My more personal sense is that a ton of human misery comes from poorly chosen abstraction. Or abstraction where there should be none. The idea of "the tyranny of the database" was where I first encountered this: > At a higher, more semantic level, a subtle distortion in how we perceive reality took hold: things that were hard to represent in databases became alternately devalued and fetishized. [...] Once in awhile a technical counter-current would take hold and try to push back on the tyranny of the database, but the general trend held firm: if it does not fit in the database, it does not exist. > You may not think you know this world of databases, but you live in it. [...] Every time a customer service assistant shrugs and says “computer says no” or an organization acts in crazy, inflexible ways, odds-are there’s a database underneath which has a limited, rigid view of reality and it’s simply too expensive to fix the software to make the organization more intelligent. https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/by-the-end-of-this-artic…

just to clarify this a little, stephen is/was (the status of adjoint is unclear but from what i can see it is now defunct) the CTO and co-founder of adjoint and he blocks anyone who raises this in public. https://twitter.com/billywhizz1970/status/1469277866160500742 he now seems to be a full-time anti-crypto propagandist. i'm not sure how he makes a living from that, but he seems to spend all day every day talking about it for at least the last 6 months and has gained a large following on twitter due to it. personally, i find it hard to trust anyone on either side of the debate who is this invested in their extreme position and unwilling to engage in any meaningful debate with anyone who critiques their positions. here are some more links about adjoint for anyone interested in some more background. http://internetofagreements.com/2017/12/18/stephen-diehl-adjoint-smart… https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/adjoint-distributed-ledg… https://web.archive.org/web/20190513032812/https://www.adjoint.io/ "Adjoint empowers enterprises to achieve new levels of efficiency and control by delivering blockchain technology built specifically for the needs of the financial…

In a naive implementation, yes. But to implement this properly, the real estate title should and would not serve the same purpose a bitcoin 'title' does via it's private key. In case of bitcoin, a private key is literally the ownership of the bitcoins. In case of real tangible assets, the private key would serve as a pretty solid proof of ownership (but not THE ownership itself). So, in case of a dispute over the ownership of a real estate property, you can point out that you had the ownership of the property via the blockchain. In case of a theft of the keys, you must provide supplementary documentation regarding the prior ownership of the stolen keys. A pretty neat solution for the blockchain identity is being described by Vinay Gupta[1]. A simplified version is, imagine if the private key using which you purchased the house is stolen from you, then in front of the arbitrator, you present receipt from Amazon, where you used your private key to pay for goods which were delivered to you in your name, an affidavit from your bank which shows that you did business with them (using your real identity) and connected with your private key. All these 'documentation' (which Vinay Gupta describes as 'insurance') is very hard for the thief to produce. The same is not the case with bitcoin theft, where loss of private keys means loss of control of the assets (and not merely a 'dispute'). I hope that helps to explain it. 1.…