Fractalide:

A Cryptocontract Marketplace

Summary

  • Terminology
  • The Problem
  • How marketplace entities structure themselves.
  • What is Fractalide?
  • How Fractalide maps to a healthy marketplace
  • Conclusion
  • Sources

Terminology

  • A "contract" means an agreement between two or more parties or software components.
  • "cryptocontract" disambiguates
  • I might use the words "component" or "node" interchangeably

The Problem

Ethereum Classic is currently a speculative currency.

The Solution

Understand how crypto{currency, contract} users organize themselves, then build a set of development tools that compliment their workflow and provide a means for them to sell their work.

 

This will assist in evolving from a speculative currency to utilitarian currency

How marketplace entities structure themselves.

Supply and demand isn't so interesting

What's more interesting is how each organization structures itself. 

- Frederic Laloux

Laloux Culture Model

Every level up unlocks an order of magnitude in power

Red organizations

  • Red organizations found today: street gangs, mafia, mercenary armies etc
  • Guiding metaphor: Wolf pack
  • Primary characteristics: Power, Fear
  • Magic / Tribal era
  • 10,000 years ago
  • Useful in situations of chaos
  • Alpha leader instills fear.
  • Unstable system, with younger stronger people taking out the alpha leader
  • Red concepts used:
  1. Command authority
  2. Division of labour

Red organizations

Reason for evolution

Instability of fear based power structures could not accomplish long term projects

Amber organizations

  • Amber organizations found today: most government agencies, public school systems, Catholic Church, and Armies
  • Guiding metaphor: Army
  • Primary characteristics: Hierarchy, Stability, Control
  • Cast system
  • Traditional / Agrarian era
  • 5000 years ago
  • Amber concepts used:
  1. Formal hierarchy
  2. Replicable processes
  3. Long term outlook

Amber organizations

Reason for evolution

Entrenched Amber organizations were unable to adapt to changing conditions

Orange organizations

  • Orange organizations found today: Multinational organizations, Wall Street
  • Guiding metaphor: Machine
  • Primary characteristics: Competition, Profit, Objectives
  • 200 years ago
  • Scientific / Industrial era
  • Pyramid structure remains
  • "Command and Control" becomes "Predict and Control"
  • Orange concepts used:
  1. Innovation
  2. Accountability
  3. Meritocracy

Orange organizations

People feel the profit motive is not fulfilling enough and often become disengaged with the organization's view of them as cogs in a machine

Reason for evolution

2013 Gallup poll showed some 70% were disengaged

People are seeking more meaning in their work

Green organizations

  • Green organizations found today: Southwest Airlines, Ben & Jerry’s, Zappos
  • Guiding metaphor: Family
  • Primary characteristics: Delight customers, Shared values, Engagement
  • "Culture eats strategy for lunch"
  • Post Modern / Information era
  • Post WW2
  • Resembles a family, with the CEO as the parental figure
  • Green concepts invented:
  1. Culture over strategy
  2. Empowerment
  3. Stakeholder balance

Green organizations

Green hits it's limit when consensus building results in overly slow decision making 

Reason for evolution

The hierarchical structures still existing in Green begin to conflict with peoples' desires to have greater autonomy

Teal Organizations

  • Teal organizations found today: Patagonia, Morningstar, Buurtzorg
  • Guiding metaphor: Living system
  • Primary characteristics: Anti-fragile organization, Higher purpose, Distributed decision making (using the advice process)
  • Consciously operate as complex adaptive systems with distributed authority
  • Teal concepts used:
  1. Wholeness
  2. Self-management
  3. Evolutionary purpose

Teal Organizations

  • Autonomous teams
  • No bosses or organization chart
  • No job descriptions or job titles
  • Distributed decision-making
  • Set own salaries 
  • Advanced self tracking tools
  • Open Information flow
  • No unilateral dismissals
  • Conflict resolution

Teal Organizations

  • Bank in your pocket
  • Fast, cheap, convenient, programmable international tranfers
  • No need for business registration or company bank account
  • Immutable contracts that uphold business logic.

Cryptocurrency holders (especially the programmers) have the right conditions to form into a sprawling Teal community

Cryptocurrency can push Teal further

Conway's Law

organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

— M. Conway

If the parts of an organization (e.g., teams, departments, or subdivisions) do not closely reflect the essential parts of the product, or if the relationship between organizations do not reflect the relationships between product parts, then the project will be in trouble... Therefore: Make sure the organization is compatible with the product architecture.

— James O. Coplien and Neil B. Harrison

Therefore: Make sure the organization is compatible with the product architecture.

Therefore: Make sure the product architecture is compatible with a decentralized (Teal) community.

What is

?

Fractal

An object whose parts, at infinitely many levels of magnification, appear geometrically similar to the whole.

IDE

Integrated Development Environment

The NoFlo IDE

Flow-based Programing

flow-based programming (FBP) is a programming paradigm that defines applications as networks of "black box" processes, which exchange data across predefined connections by message passing, where the connections are specified externally to the processes. These black box processes can be reconnected endlessly to form different applications without having to be changed internally.

- Wikipedia

Flow-based Programing

Flow-based Programming is a particular form of dataflow programming based on bounded buffers, information packets with defined lifetimes, named ports, and separate definition of connections.

- Wikipedia

This is an "Agent"

It does one thing, and does it well

Read File

It reads a file's contents

Classical UNIX philosophy

This is a named port

path

Read File

A port receives data via a bounded buffer

#[derive(Clone, Debug)]
pub struct FsPath(pub String);

We call it an "Edge"

path

Read File

#[derive(Clone, Debug)]
pub struct FsPath(pub String);

text

error

#[derive(Clone, Debug)]
pub struct FsFileError (pub String);
#[derive(Debug, Clone)]
pub enum FsFileDesc {
    Start(String),
    Text(String),
    End(String),
}
#[macro_use]
extern crate rustfbp;

use std::fs::File;
use std::io::BufReader;
use std::io::BufRead;

agent! {
    input(path: FsPath),
    output(text: FsFileDesc, error: FsFileError),
    fn run(&mut self) -> Result<Signal> {
        // Get the path
        let mut path = self.input.path.recv()?.0;

        let file = match File::open(&path) {
            Ok(file) => { file },
            Err(_) => {
                let _ = self.output.error.send(FsFileError(path));
                return Ok(End);
            }
        };
        // Send start
        self.output.text.send(FsFileDesc::Start(path.clone()))?;
        // Send lines
        let file = BufReader::new(&file);
        for line in file.lines() {
            self.output.text.send(FsFileDesc::Text(line?))?;
        }
        // Send stop
        self.output.text.send(FsFileDesc::End(path))?;
        Ok(End)
    }
}

Contents of the "Read File" agent

All logic is kept in one place and not spread out all over the code base.

Making the code easier to reason about.

path

Read File

text

#[derive(Debug, Clone)]
pub enum FsFileDesc {
    Start(String),
    Text(String),
    End(String),
}

Print File

input

This is a contract between two nodes

Data description can be arbitrarily deep scaling up to describe complex interactions between organizations, not only simple inter-node descriptions

path

Read File

text

Print File

input

path

Print File

This is a Subgraph

A Subgraph hides implementation details and allows for powers of abstraction

Supports arbitrarily deep nesting

path

Read File

text

Print File

input

path

Subgraph

path

Read File

Agent

 

Allowing us to use familiar Graph Theory terminology "Nodes and Edges"

Node =

#[derive(Clone, Debug)]
pub struct FsPath(pub String);

Edge =

A Subgraph contains other Subgraphs and/or Agents

 

An Agent contains code

An Edge passes data

Flow-based Programming is reusable in nature

But each node has a life cycle and it becomes hard to manage the life cycles of a thousand nodes

We need to make every node reproducible!

Reproducibility is essential for the Scientific Method

Every dependency is deterministic so it's a pleasure to reason about

{ agent, edges, mods, pkgs }:

agent {
  src = ./.;
  edges = with edges.rs; [ FsPath FsFileDesc FsFileError ];
  mods = with mods.rs; [ rustfbp ];
  osdeps = with pkgs; [ openssl ];
}

We use the Nix Package manager.

We now have a Reproducible, Reusable and Composable system.

Many consider this the Holy Grail in the software world.

How Fractalide maps to a healthy marketplace?

Domain Specialists

  • Scientists
  • Mathematicians
  • Engineers
  • Biologists
  • Non-technical users

Programmers

Read File

Print File

Subgraphs

Snap subgraphs together like lego. They don't need programming knowledge

Read File

Agent

#[macro_use]
extern crate rustfbp;

use std::fs::File;
use std::io::BufReader;
use std::io::BufRead;

agent! {
    input(path: FsPath),
    output(text: FsFileDesc, error: FsFileError),
    fn run(&mut self) -> Result<Signal> {
        // Get the path
        let mut path = self.input.path.recv()?.0;

        let file = match File::open(&path) {
            Ok(file) => { file },
            Err(_) => {
                let _ = self.output.error.send(FsFileError(path));
                return Ok(End);
            }
        };
        // Send start
        self.output.text.send(FsFileDesc::Start(path.clone()))?;
        // Send lines
        let file = BufReader::new(&file);
        for line in file.lines() {
            self.output.text.send(FsFileDesc::Text(line?))?;
        }
        // Send stop
        self.output.text.send(FsFileDesc::End(path))?;
        Ok(End)
    }
}

Agent Source Code

#[macro_use]
extern crate rustfbp;

use std::fs::File;
use std::io::BufReader;
use std::io::BufRead;

agent! {
    input(path: FsPath),
    output(text: FsFileDesc, error: FsFileError),
    fn run(&mut self) -> Result<Signal> {
        // Get the path
        let mut path = self.input.path.recv()?.0;

        let file = match File::open(&path) {
            Ok(file) => { file },
            Err(_) => {
                let _ = self.output.error.send(FsFileError(path));
                return Ok(End);
            }
        };
        // Send start
        self.output.text.send(FsFileDesc::Start(path.clone()))?;
        // Send lines
        let file = BufReader::new(&file);
        for line in file.lines() {
            self.output.text.send(FsFileDesc::Text(line?))?;
        }
        // Send stop
        self.output.text.send(FsFileDesc::End(path))?;
        Ok(End)
    }
}

Free and Open Source

OR

Time out Free and Open Source

#[macro_use]
extern crate rustfbp;

use std::fs::File;
use std::io::BufReader;
use std::io::BufRead;

agent! {
    input(path: FsPath),
    output(text: FsFileDesc, error: FsFileError),
    fn run(&mut self) -> Result<Signal> {
        // Get the path
        let mut path = self.input.path.recv()?.0;

        let file = match File::open(&path) {
            Ok(file) => { file },
            Err(_) => {
                let _ = self.output.error.send(FsFileError(path));
                return Ok(End);
            }
        };
        // Send start
        self.output.text.send(FsFileDesc::Start(path.clone()))?;
        // Send lines
        let file = BufReader::new(&file);
        for line in file.lines() {
            self.output.text.send(FsFileDesc::Text(line?))?;
        }
        // Send stop
        self.output.text.send(FsFileDesc::End(path))?;
        Ok(End)
    }
}

Agent Source Code

May publish their source code

May choose to adopt a 2~3 year timeout license. Such that the code automatically publishes after you've made a profit

Programmers

Read File

Bob

Print File

Alice

Read File

Print File

Carol

Non-programmer Domain Specialists

End User

Print File

Dave

Making it easy to use any currency and associated applications

n+1

n+1

IoT

Conclusion

  • Described different structures of organizations.
  • Which type of organization Fractalide is suitable for.
  • Described the modular nature of Fractalide.
  • Illustrated how first principles engineering allows for reusable, reproducible and composable applications.
  • Described how Fractalide's marketplace works.

Sources

  • Reinventing Organizations - Frederic Laloux 
  • Flow-Based Programming, 2nd Edition: A New Approach to Application Development - J.P. Morrison
  • http://www.github.com/fractalide/fractalide
  • http://fractalide.com/pdf/fractalideCOP.pdf
  • Wikipedia - Conway's law, Flow-based Programming

A Cryptocontract Marketplace

By stewart mackenzie

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A Cryptocontract Marketplace

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