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Opportunity



Roger Wagner gave me this link, which I’m passing on to occam-com. It is extremely interesting — not least because of its source.

The thing that interests me personally the most is that there will be no way to describe the behavior of the ENTIRE decentralized community except through CSP-like or occam-like code structures, putting the communication links explicitly on the top level of the program description (“wide computing"). A key quote:

And we have to be careful we don’t exchange the tyranny of gatekeepers for the tyranny of code.

This danger can only be avoided by introducing some kind of “localism” — a realistic nearness function that usually activates only the connections that are to peers who are in some sense close. If all peer connections all over the world have to be treated as equivalent, the “tyranny of code” is unavoidable. That creates an opportunity for some very interesting structures which are not necessarily fixed but at any time are local. These would fit a lot of stuff that we already have, that is now being done ad hoc.

Larry Dickson