Networks of networks

This is just a first draft... I copied this text from an email and will add to it later. Last modified on Mar 02, 2022

 

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Living systems theory is at the core of p2p. 

Life requires flow. Organized flows require support and structure.

 

All the p2p talk is about new forms of living systems, open networks. That's the new thing and the novelty makes this field interesting, because we need to understand the potential of these new creatures. Are they going to coexist with hierarchical forms of organizations and be dominated by hierarchies or are they going to dominate hierarchies? Is Bitcoin (or an OVN similar to it) going to replace banks in the future, which rule the world of exchange?  Are Youtubers going to crash mainstream institutional media?

Open value networks have always existed, but we have never considered them seriously for organizing society. What makes them interesting now? Their potential is much greater today, because the Internet acts as a medium that allows open networks to grow and spread to global proportions.

Coase made us understand why large scale networks can exist. Benkler showed us why they can out-compete hierarchies. But open networks are nothing like an open community, which can be seen as a unit. Open networks are fractal. They are made of smaller open networks and can themselves easily coalesce into larger open networks. In other words, open networks "try to discover" new ways to connect among themselves. It's in their nature.

This trend is clearly happening in the blockchain space, with new blockchains sitting on top of other blockchains (L2) or connecting/linking other blockchains together. Blockchains are open networks (the permissionless ones, not the fake ones).

I think that we should not need intermediaries to be able to connect open networks together.

Paula: Connecting networks (provided they are on the same platform?)

Open networks should not need to be represented on another platform to be able to connect. They should just plug into each other without the need of an intermediary platform. In other words, all open networks need to build their own "attachment sites" and share some type of protocol. This is how biology works, molecules and proteins interacting together based on their internal structure, their affinities, and based on some "rules" described by biochemistry. This type of permissionless linkage doesn't lead to chaos or disorder, if the affinities are well specified and the rules are clear. The fact that I am here typing on this keyboard is good proof that it works well enough. But unfortunately today we are still trapped in the platform paradigm. For example, https://automate.io and  https://ifttt.com are interconnectivity services built with the wrong (platform) approach. They offer the connection as a service and act as a middlemen. Today there is a need for that, because every service has been designed as a stand alone, with little consideration for interoperability (other than providing an API to grow an ecosystem in which they are at the center), which is a platform mentality, wrong. All these connectivity services will be put out of business once the design paradigm shifts to consider interconnectivity as a design priority, which is the next logical step. A lot of web development effort today goes into integration. We see that with Discord, things like Bots or Webhooks, which do not necessarily depend on a third party but act as a direct pipe between Discord and Github for example.

These linkages among open networks allow new flows, of various types. 

 

New web3 crowdfunding platforms like Gitcoin play an important role today, they are a source of funding, which

1. increases the metabolism of every network
2. stimulates networks to build connections among themselves, if this flow feeds different networks at the same time

In neuroscience they say that neurons that fire together network together. Networks seem to connect if they are rewarded together based on their concomitant interaction with the environment. Luckily, Gitcoin has built a nice feature that allows grants (proposals) to be bundled together as collections, so that they can present synergy and be discovered by donors at once. This is a grant that sensoricans created, which can be put into a collection with other grants, perhaps TaoDao and use a portion of the funds to build internal structures for each of these networks that allows them to interconnect. Shared funding as a stimulus to grow new connections between open networks. 

 

By Tibi