So this past Saturday, July 30th was my second weekly fractally meeting. I missed last week because my internet was down.
The Superpower of Fractal Governance
So I wanted to start with the big core ideas first. @joshua put out a video called The Superpower of Fractal Governance where @dan explained that fractal governance is a superpower. Fractally can be the most trusted blockchain network because there are real people contributing and voting and they aren’t captured by whales. The trusted fractally consensus process can help the network do things no other blockchain can do. For example, instead of resolving hacks using a process based on the idea that the ‘end justifies the means' and relying on the arbitrary power of core developers and insiders, fractally creates a more fair and honest system based on the idea that the ‘means justifies the ends’. The human consensus process becomes the primary foundation of the network rather than code 'as law' or technology. The process is also critically important for IBC solutions.
Means Justifies the Ends.
The ‘Means justifies the ends’ is one of the core principles of More Equal Animals. It’s a very powerful philosophical and moral concept. I will summarize the True Democracy chapter in More Equal Animals where he discusses this important concept.
Independence
@dan also expanded on the foundational principle and root of his book More Equal Animals when Jorge asked about the difficulty of coming to consensus on polarizing issues such as vaccinations. Dan explains with true democracy, members and smaller fractals should have the ability to secede. Fractally requires everyone to be responsible and independent instead of co-dependent on any fractal. There must be interdependence and the system must allow both ostracism whereby a group removes the individual and secession whereby the individual secedes from the group fractal. Otherwise there could be mob rule. Hence it’s the obligation of each person to be responsible, self-reliant and be part of more fractals and communities so he/she can leave some of the fractals if necessary. Fractals should start as local as possible and expand out into larger fractals. The biggest challenge in explaining the fractally idea is that people think that policies of one fractal will be forced on everyone rather than the idea that power ultimately begins with smaller, modular & independent fractals.
Got Top Rank This Week!
In our weekly breakout session we had the following 5 members other than me: @jseymour, @berliangor, @daodejing, @drew-bop, @hahn.ryu
- @daodejing started off describing his development contributions to the tool that allows the fractal team to retrieve the rankings that are posted on Hive.
- @jseymour worked on a tool with the team to retrieve rankings from Hive as well as a Kanban task manager using dework.xyz
- @berliangor worked on improving a ranking tool that we used for the meeting (https://www.galaxy.do/vote) and also using https://excalidraw.com/ to visually display our contributions with an image.
- @drew-bop was representing the Eden Fractal team and discussed the team contribution.
- @hahn.ryu's contribution was to attend an Eden Fractal meeting. (He was an Eden Chief Delegate before)
- My contributions are listed here:
https://hive.blog/fractally/@merivercap/fractally-contributions-july-16-30th-merivercap
Below is the screenshot of our contributions on excalidraw.com:
After an initial split vote we came to a consensus that I’d get the top ranking. It was initially a split vote because I voted for @jseymour and thought the Kanban system would be really useful and @jseymour is always one of the most active on gofractally. He did mention part of his efforts are paid so he didn’t need to get the entire amount of respect for his activities. @daodejing @berliangor’s tools were great, but the consideration was more about how much work was done this past week. @daodejig and others recognized that since I missed the last meeting, that my contributions for the two weeks counted. I had a question about @drew-bop and how team contributions were evaluated. He also asked @dan this question after the meeting. It seems for now we mainly consider individual contributions, but in the future the team leader will be the one representing the team and the rewards would go directly to the team leader before the team decides how to split the rewards among the team. Other than that with six people participating the time limit seemed short and having a contribution tracking tool that people can pre-fill would help save time.
Anyways it felt good to achieve the top rank and be recognized for the contribution!
Pre/Post Meeting Discussion & Notes
@dan discussed his latest writings on ordinal rankings and the challenges of mathematically modeling things in response to @mattlangston's post. @dan mentions that value scales are multidimensional and non-transitive so any statistical anomaly @mattlantson identified may just be an artifact of these properties. The distribution of tokens is based on a mathematical model of the expected value of member contributions across many different value scales. Millions of people will have different value scales and ordinal rankings was a good way to average everyone’s opinion into a pareto distribution. He also noted that it’s easy for people to rank the most highly valued (ie. priceless family members) to the lowest ranking, but hard to rank the middle.
@dan is also contemplating using the average level of team members to determine rewards instead of having a 1 to 1 matching. He also had a good meeting with lawyers for the new member contributor’s agreement and opinions on tax consequences for Respect tokens. He also hopes to have the open-source beta of the blockchain software and demo app by the end of summer.
Q: @shakhruz asked about the resource billing model post.
A: @dan mentioned the new resource model: 1) as similar to a prepaid account that makes accounting easier and acts as a toll fee that tops up 2) that automatically buys the amount of resources needed in real-time in internal markets and where smart contracts can subsidize user resources. The outcome would create less overhead and less user squatting. RAM is paid on-the-go by end users or subsidized by developers. There will be a floor in price that is around one cent cost that will be burnt in the system.
Q: @brindleswan from the Bitshares community asked about the possibility of having parallel blockchains with different parameters run as experiments with incentives.
A: @dan mentioned it would be difficult with resources, but different fractals will have the ability to make some parameter changes.
@dan mentioned he’d like to see a Hive fractal or an outreach to the Hive community.
Q: @shakruz had a question about block producers and what resources would be required.
A: @dan - Fractally will run the chain initially and will go through releases and is currently at a stage similar to when EOS was between Dawn 1.0 and Dawn 2.0 and some possibility of a beta launch in March 2023. The new database tech should allow BPs to use less RAM and more storage.
@mattlangston made a call to other fractals to collaborate with him to perform ranking analysis on their data.
Pascal created a fractal T-shirt and @dan mentioned it was a good way to show team/community spirit and have fun.
Greg mentioned the time limit for posting the rankings on Hive will go down to 5 minutes
Felix, Dan Singjoy & Patrick all invited Dan and team members to eden Fractal meetings. Felix wanted to dispel the notion that @dan and the fractally team has left Eden. Jorge stated he made a strong case that the Eden fractal is contributing and creating a symbiotic relationship rather than taking value away from Eden.
@dan acknowledged the request and mentioned the challenge is that they can’t be part of every fractal. @dan stated he wants to enhance Bitshares, Steem/Hive, EOS. Bitshares couldn’t get funding because of governance. Ned would downpost Dan’s posts on Steemit. @dan has been trying to solve governance from the beginning as early as his post about the island nation before Bitshares.
Collaboration creates more value.
Q: @Brindleswan asked about incentive structure for local teams meeting in person. (He mentioned freedomcells.org)
A: @dan strongly supports local teams, expects fractals of fractals and local fractals to have local meetups. That’s the way to scale.
@dphillipi mentioned that Alien Worlds is granting 100,000 TLM tokens for the AW fractal weekly meetings. He asked how different fractals will integrate with other fractals. @dan mentioned that any network would have to migrate keys/accounts with a snapshot to fully leverage the tools of fractally.
Jorge mentioned that noise is an important parameter to model systems. After studying complex systems its important to have effective feedback mechanisms and to identify bottlenecks in processes. He also has a Pomelo grant here
Dan says biggest bottleneck is software development. Dan has some ideas on IBC that are controversial, but doesn’t want to share at this time, but he plans to have IBC with all chains including Bitcoin.
That's all for this week. See you next time!