Okay.  Hello ladies and gentlemen and
welcome to another live AMA.
I'm Matthey Schutte from Holo and let's get straight into it. So this is AMA number 18.
I'm gonna start with some 'thank yous'. I want to thank our incredible Telegram admins:
TVG, DHTNetwork, LuckLight, Lannister,
Sander, Marcel, Brooks, Baud-ha, Frederick,
JoeCryptoKnight, Brian Arundel and many
others. Some announcements:
This week we have the Holochain Rust refactor. We've been hard at work on the
Holochain Rust refactor and our core functionality set and
we're dramatically simplifying app
development, improving code development
experience and we're
launching the AssemblyScript HDK as
well as introducing a modular framework.
The Rust refactor should allow us or
will allow us to support Holochain
running native on mobile phones.
We're pretty excited about it.
We're only partway through the refactor
but we've got pieces out and live and
people are making use of them already.
Stay tuned for a detailed update in the
days ahead
I want to share a SCAM ALERT. You may
have seen some notices on our social
media channels but a fake store was set
up by someone claiming to be selling HoloPorts.
This is not affiliated with
Holo or Holochain.
HoloPorts will be available for sale on our holo.host website and nowhere else.
So please help to spread the word on that. We did manage to take down that web website, but I'm
guessing that others will try to pop up
as well. Our first online Holochain DevCamp
is wrapping up today. We've had
dozens of people over there learning and
if you missed it, don't worry there'll be several
other chances to participate in a
DevCamp in the coming months so stay tuned
for more on that
We have some upcoming events but first,
since this is the primary one, let's
start with Pittsburgh. Most of you will
have heard by now about the tragic mass
shooting that happened there earlier
this week. One of our team members grew
up in that community and so this tragedy
feels particularly close to home for us
We at the Holo team all want to send
our heartfelt condolences to all of
those impacted by this tragedy. As we
speak, many of us on the team are on our
way to Pittsburgh, because for months now,  our... one of our team members has
been working to create a whole week of
Holochain events there at Pittsburgh
taking place at Carnegie Mellon
University, the University of Pittsburgh
and the Ace Hotel Pittsburgh. So, let's
dive into a little bit more about those
events. Tomorrow, Tuesday, collective
intelligence expert Jean Francois Noubel
will be at Carnegie Mellon
University for lunch and at the Ace
Hotel from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.
giving a talk at each of those places
about the intersection of collective
intelligence and distributed technology
Wednesday we're gonna take a break for
Holoween, but we'll be back on Thursday
where I... when I will be presenting at the
University of Pittsburgh crypto club
I'll be talking both about Holochain
and more specifically about networks
versus ecosystems. On Friday, Holochain
co-founder Arthur Brock will be present
and he'll be participating in a panel on
the future of wealth and money alongside
a handful of Carnegie Mellon University
professors. And then, that evening from
7:00 to 9:30 p.m. there will be an intro
to Holochain event with Art Brock
myself and a number of other members
from the Holo team. This session is open
to the public but is also part of the
developers workshop happening at
Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz
School of Public Policy all weekend.
There are still tickets to this workshop.
If you're in the area and are interested
in how to design and build distributed
Holochain apps or if you just want to
get some face time with the Holo team, I
highly recommend this workshop as
it'll be the last one on the East Coast
for the foreseeable future.
We expect to be focused on cities outside the United
States in early 2019.
The final event of Holochain Week Pittsburgh is a talk
that Arthur Brock will be giving on
Monday at Carnegie Mellon University's
CyLab Security and Privacy Institute on
how to bring distributed apps or dApps
mainstream. You can find all these
details and more at holo.host/pgh.
There's also a link on that page to
tickets for the developers workshop.
Tickets for students are free and $35
for everyone else, which covers lunch and
snacks on Saturday and Sunday.
So, we havesome upcoming meetups as well. On November 1st, there's going to be a
meet-up in Seattle, on November 8th we
will have a meet-up in Barcelona as well
as one in Toronto, Canada. On the 9th we
are going to have a hackathon in Denver, Colorado.
You can find out more info
about that at holo.host.
And in late November, we're going to have a meet-up in Cyprus in the middle of the Mediterranean.
You can e-mail events@holo.host if you'd like to attend that one.
Meetups are an essential part
of the Holochain ecosystem.
They are places where people both become aware of the project and
deepen their understanding, where
projects get started and connections get
made that support our peer-to-peer
community. If you are interested in
hosting a local meetup contact, events@holo.host, again
that's events@holo.host. A huge
thank you to all the meetup organizers out there.
Holo and Holochain just wouldn't
be possible without you.
You can always review our upcoming
events on holo.host or Holochain.org
Those are our two website. Some
important links, places where you can
find more community focused on Holochain: Telegram is at t.me/channelholo
Reddit, you can find
conversation at r/holochain.
For those of you interested in doing some
software development on Holochain
you can find documentation at
developer.holochain.org
and our online chat community is at chat.holochain.org.
Alright, let's get into the questions.
Again a couple of reminders for those of
you on the live stream, we are taking
questions in English.
If you speak English poorly, you can write your
message in your language and use Google Translate
to translate it into English
and then share that translated version into the chat.
Alright, a few questions-
this one came from from Telegram from
some conversation that happened on
Telegram. People seem to be a bit
confused about the fees for Holo.
They don't...apparently there's some
confusion around what we mean by up to
1%. So one of the questions is: is the 1%
fee only for hosting or for transactions,
too. So let's let's go through this all at once.
First, fees are only for
Holo, not for Holchain.
Holochain doesn't have any fees as part of it. So people can run peer-to-peer applications with no fees.
Fees have to do with the
Holo ecosystem, where people are paying
one another for doing useful services.
Now that Holo ecosystem was primarily
designed to support web hosting, in other
words, people serving websites to
outsiders and getting paid by let's say
the developer
who's wanting that website to be hosted. When they do that,
when they make a payment for that, we take a 1% or
less transaction fee.
So the promise that we're making there is that we're never going to charge more than 1%.
One of the questions is, is that
only for hosting or is that for all
kinds of transactions? Well, it's for any
kind of transaction.
So, if you were sending somebody Holo Fuel to pay for a
cheeseburger instead of hosting,
we're gonna be charging up to a 1% transaction
fee for that as well.
That is something that we believe is cheaper than any
other payment processor out in the world
at least for small transactions and it's
useful because it helps to subsidize not
only Holo, but the entire Holochain
ecosystem. That's literally the place
where nourishment is coming back into
the ecosystem to support the build-out
of all these underlying tools. There's a
question here about interoperability and
how it works,
but I'm not sure if that refers to
Holo Fuel or something else. The basic idea with Holo Fuel is if you do hosting work
and you get paid in Holo Fuel for that
hosting work, you can redeem into a Reserve Account.
So you can exchange that
Holo Fuel for dollars if the Reserve Account held dollars,
Eth if the reserve
account held Eth, Bitcoin if it held Bitcoin, etc.
So, that's the way in which
Holo Fuel becomes interoperable with others.
That doesn't even include all of
the ways in which external exchanges may
begin to support Holo Fuel as well.
That's just our own internal stuff.
The other thing that I should mention is
that these transaction fees, even though
they're only 1% or less,
those transaction fees themselves are
going to be generating revenues for Holo
and over time we're actually planning to
have the community itself guide how
those revenues are being spent.
So initially we think this will be some
tiny portion but over time we're
expecting to have more and more of those
revenue streams controlled by the
community itself so they can decide what
are the kinds of work that
that community itself wants invested in so
that their needs are met, whether that's
investing it in new user interface
development or different security
protocols for particular instances or
educational materials. It's important for
us to have our community helping to
steer that and though initially that
will be small, because -to be totally
honest- right on in the earliest
Holo will steer this stuff because, as a community, we won't have gelled or matured
much yet. Over time, through practice, we
expect that those processes will become
fairly robust and we'll be able to hand
over more and more of the guidance to the community itself.
Another question we had:
Can we use old computers for HoloPorts? Yes, the whole point of Holo is to and Holochain is to
enable us to be making use of the spare
capacity on existing devices.
HoloPorts are a way that we were bootstrapping that Network into place. We wanted to
make sure that initially we had devices
on the network that were easy to use
that had the level of quality in terms
of processing power and storage that
would lead to good user experiences, but
it was really a bootstrapping pattern for us.
You don't need to buy a HoloPort from us in order to participate in hosting websites on Holo.
You can use your existing laptop, desktop, old server etc to do hosting work
and my expectation is that we will see a lot of that over the next few years.
There was
one meetup that I had forgotten to
mention and some of the other folks on
the team mentioned it. They said
Sao Paulo is also doing a meet-up on
November 8th, so November 8th is gonna be
a place where we're having meetups on
three different continents,
in Barcelona in Europe, Toronto in North America and Sao Paulo in South America in Brazil.
Next question: How many developers are
contributing on the project now?
Well, it's an open source project, so that's
kind of hard to say, but we have dozens
of developers that I know of that are
working on Holo and Holochain.
We also have a lot of other developers that are building hApps already. We have developers
inside of our team, we've got people at
our meetups and our hackathon events
that have been building Holochain
applications. We've also got companies
that are building Holochain apps, some
of which are building applications for
governments, some of which are building
applications for private companies.
Others are building it for their own use.
There's an online blog that has
this last week put out their first blog
running on Holochain where they're
actually serving it out to the world
wide web, so they're kind of doing
not exactly Holo, but they're doing an
internal, you know, for computer web
hosting thing and they are called humm.
That's H-U-M-M, so go check them out.
They're an interesting project and we're
glad that they and others are doing work.
Every one of those bits of development
contribute to the Holochain ecosystem,
because it's not just the core Holochain development that matters.
It's the pioneering of
application patterns, the experimentation
and the sharing of that knowledge with
others that really is going to help
accelerate this whole ecosystem. I'm
grateful to humm because they're
documenting their journey and going 'wow
this worked and this didn't' and 'you
might want to watch out for that' in
their blog, so please do go check them out.
Another question from KK: If it's not
on a blockchain, is Holo susceptible to
DDoS attacks, in other words distributed
denial-of-service attacks, or man-in-the-middle attacks?
So, we'll talk about man-in-the-middle attacks:
When people are taking actions in a Holochain application, they're always having
to sign those with their private key, so
the things that would be happening in the middle,
somebody else would have to
have access to your private key to try to impersonate you.
That's the first
piece.
For distributed denial-of-service attacks, the network is a distributed network. To think about this...
one way to think about it is, if you had a
centralized system and you have a bunch
of other computers that can all point
messages and basically bombard that
single machine with a bunch of messages,
they could basically drown it in traffic
making it so that nobody else is able to
talk to that machine,
but a Holochain app isn't a single machine, it's a bunch
of machines and so you would need to
attack all of those machines
simultaneously.
Well, overwhelming many machines at once is much harder than overwhelming a single machine.
This distributed
architecture is actually the thing that
underlies the internet itself. It was the
original reason that the internet was created.
In the 1960s, the realization
that nuclear war as a possibility could
take out the entire telecommunications
infrastructure of a nation
just by knocking out one or a few
buildings meant that researchers started
looking for more resilient architectures
and in his paper on the topic in 1964
Paul Baran mapped out the difference
between centralized, decentralized and
distributed networks, pointing out that
a distributed architecture meant that
many facilities could be attacked and go
down and yet communication would
continue to be available to all of the
other nodes or many of the other nodes
on the network. Far more resilience was
literally the reason why the internet
was built in the first place. We've got a
question from Reddit:
How can the DHT check if a piece of data is valid? For example, with the Twitter clone if I
tweeted something, to save this piece of
data, it should be included in my DHT and
some other agents DHT as redundant, so
when others try to retrieve this tweet
they find an agent with the tweet
included in his DHT, in his part of the DHT.
My question is, and it may seem
absurd as I don't know much about how
DHT is work, how do I be sure that a
specific tweet is legit and not edited
by some malicious actor? Are tweets
signed with the private key of the
original poster to make it immutable or
something like this?
Yes, actually you've exactly guessed it. So with the signature of a private key, you basically take the
content of a message, you then hash that
content and encrypt it with the private key.
Later, somebody can take the message
- and that that serves as your signature -
later you attach that to this to the
message, when the person receives this content,
they shouldn't just receive the
content, they should receive the signature and
when they do that, they are able to check
the content, they read it, they run it
through a hash, they decrypt the
signature using the matching public key
which is publicly available and they
check to see if it matches.
Does this match the hash of the piece of content? If it does, yep you can be confident that
that content was unedited. It came in the
original form that the party who held on
to that private key sent it. This is
probably too deep and technical and in the weeds,
but the long story short is,
yes, it's signing that makes it so that
people can be confident that information
has not been changed.
However, that's actually a slightly separate question from validation.
Validation doesn't have to do with whether or not this content has been changed,
though that's an important thing, it has to do with whether or not this content played by
the rules of our application in the
first place.
So if it was a Twitter app, it would include something like it's only supposed to be 140 characters or less.
When that content lands with a
party, they check their own copy of the rules.
Now, they can sign that they claim
it's valid
they might also collect a bunch of other
signatures from other users of the app
and when you ask for that tweet, they
hand you that piece of content but they
also hand you all of those validation
signatures. Now of course you can always
check the content yourself. You're, at
least with something like that, able to
see if it's more than 140 characters and
apply your own rule. You've got a copy of
the rules, of course, in any Holochain
app, every participant has a copy of the rules
So validation is really about the
social agreements of the community and
the enforcement of those social
agreements through this signing process.
Volturi from reddit asks: A grandmother
wants to use 'HoloTube' to watch her
granddaughter's videos. She pays for the
ISP for a traditional internet access
and uses a browser that is pre-equipped
to run Holo-based applications...
Like 99% of people, she does not know how the internet, Holochain or any of this
actually works. So if 'HoloTube'
was a Holochain App
there's not necessarily any Fuel. In that
instance her device itself would also be
helping to store and validate and serve
the videos that are being played as part
of that 'HoloTube' app. However, if she
is just using this from a browser and is
not participating in helping to run the
app, if she's using it through Holo
then the developer of that application is
likely the one who would be paying for the Fuel.
In today's Internet landscape
or the landscape of the world wide web
developers will not only create an app
but they will then pay a hosting company
to serve that app. Now, for most
developers, that hosting company ends up
being Amazon Web Services. In a Holo
world, that developer could instead pay
the members of their own community to
serve out that website or that app.
The Holo Fuel is the currency in which
they would be making those payments so
that's who would be paying, the developer,
just like today it's the developer who
pays the hosting costs, but that's of
course only in a context where the
members of that community are trying to
serve videos to outsiders.
In other words, people who aren't also running the Holochain app that underlies 'HoloTube'
'HoloTube' as a peer-to-peer application.
So yeah, if she's using it as a visitor
and not a member,
cool, it's got to be served by someone
and it's probably developer who is
paying for that hosting and they're
paying using Holo Fuel.
Another question:
Having a group of people want to seriously challenge Facebook and come up with HoloBook,
how will they get paid for their efforts?
How can it be turned into a profitable business?
I want to say that just like anywhere else in the world,
you've got to come up with your
own business model. It could be ads,
it could be subscriptions, it could be that
there's no business model in the middle.
In fact, I think a lot of
the social networks that are going to
emerge over the next few years are
actually gonna be social networks
that don't have a business
model needed at the center.
They may be things where people are providing
services or additional offerings that
ride on top of that core functionality,
kind of like Red Hat and Linux.
Red Hat gives away Linux as open source
software. They're contributing to this
thing that's underpinning enterprise and
government, computing systems all over the globe
but they have a business model
that has to do with service and support
right, they're customizing things, 
they are literally seen as experts in the field
for making Linux better. They
just got sold for tens of billions of dollars to IBM.
So, there are business
models that you can have that don't
necessarily have to do with monetizing
the one single layer.
There's a wide variety of these, and for those who are interested in thinking about business models
in some different ways, the
business model canvas is a really useful
tool for helping you kind of get outside
the box in thinking about ways to
generate value for others and then
nourish that effort itself.
Obviously, we think that a lot of people are going to be mimicking the pattern that we are
using with Holo and Holo Fuel for
different contexts as well.
So that's a pattern where people are trying to facilitate flows of resources,
they're designing a set of crypto currencies,
actually, some of them being monetary-like currencies
but some of them being
reputation style crypto currencies.
In the Holo example, we don't just have
payments, we've also got information like
latency and uptime. Those are other bits
of information that enable people to
steer wisely in terms of who they're
going to turn to and how they're going
to recognize those contributions of
effort.
That type of pattern is going to get used not just for web hosting. It's already being
deployed in other contexts like
agricultural production, taking raw
agricultural products and converting
those into finished or refined food products
We expect that it'll be made
use of in things like peer-to-peer
electricity grids, etc. So that's a
pattern but there are a wide variety of
patterns that people can use if they're
trying to create a business on Holochain.
That said, you don't necessarily
have to have a business in order to have
an application that's functioning
amongst a member of a number of users.
We have another question, Arnott from reddit says:
With all of the current animosity towards tether, and Coinbase launching their own stable coin,
when will Holochain start to market this piece?
Well, market... we're not really focused on the promotion.
We've designed a
cryptocurrency with mechanisms that are
that are intended to make the currency
relatively stable, but that doesn't come
from pegging it to some other resource,
so it's not that the that the currency
will be stable because we've tied it to
dollars the way that tether tried to do
it's that the currency is stable because
if the price starts to go up
other people start offering hosting for
cheaper, which should create a downward pressure on the price.
That responsiveness, we believe, will keep the
price of Holo Fuel relatively stable
once it finds a relationship that is
related to the costs, the hosting costs,
right. We don't expect people will be
providing hosting and lose money. If
you start losing money, you're probably
not going to be choosing to participate
in that game for very long.
So we expected that hosting will at some point reach a level of profitability that is
well, the kind of profitability that
occurs in a fairly competitive market
and at that point, it will be fairly tied
to hosting.
Now, it's not to say that other things won't
impact it, they might but that's the design.
The design is that if other
people attempt to drive up the price
of Fuel for some reason, others will go 'cool' and they'll start offering hosting at a different rate.
So because hosting
is the backing for Holo Fuel,
Holo Fuel is literally designed to be
redeemed for web hosting.
It serves as a bit of an anchor, or a pool, a gravity well that should stabilize currency.
We've got another question from Mohamed
Zion a Dean:
Will you attend Davos this year? I attended last year. I don't know yet, I've had a couple of people
mentioned that they'd be interested in
having us be there but I haven't made
plans to be there yet. I'm interested if
any of you have events that you think I
should be participating in, or others of
our team should be participating in at
the World Economic Forum in Davos, let us
know.
Hilton says: Everyone's talking about Holo quantity and that Holo Fuel payments will happen in small increments.
Does this mean Holo Fuel
will always stay in cent value and never reach anywhere near the dollar mark?
I don't think that we can say that.
One, we're gonna have decimals with Holo Fuel, so decimals allow you to send small increments,
just like right now with
Bitcoin. A single Bitcoin is worth a lot
but people can send fractions of a
Bitcoin thanks to Satoshis.
So, no, I don't think the fact that
individual Holo Fuel payments will
likely be small is necessarily going to
tie the price of Holo Fuel to the the pennies mark.
You can think of Holo Fuel,
a single unit of Holo Fuel, as kind of
being like a single dollar, but whereas a
dollar can only be divided a hundred times
at least in terms of physical payments of currency
with Holo Fuel, it may be
divided many more times.
The grammar on some of these questions is amazing to me.
William says: When Rust alpha? This is in
the same framing as 'when Lambo' and 'when moon'? When Rust alpha? So, we've got parts
of the Rust alpha out now, the sort of
single-user components are out
but the networking components we're still
working on. I don't have a deadline on that.
We're working feverishly to try to
get Rust alpha out as quickly as we can.
You can follow our Github repo and see
our progress there.
Why is everyone in the Holochain, why does everyone on the Holochain team sound like a yoga teacher?
That's amazing, thank you CryptoBatman. I have no idea why we sound like yoga teachers.
It's probably because this work comes from a almost spiritual place.
For a lot of us, this feels like
life's work and it feels like we're
drawing on patterns in nature that have
to do with flow and connection and yoga
and the tradition that yoga comes out of
is kind of focused on that sort of stuff as well.
So, that'd be my best guess is to why we sound like yoga teachers. Thanks for making it fun.
89MyCube says: What is the next step of the roadmap of Holohain? Thank you for your reply in advance.
The next step, we're trying to get Holochain Rust out the door in a sort of full way,
but there's a bunch of next
steps, right, we've got all the meetups happening,
we have hackathons happening,
we just are wrapping up our first dev camp today
that happened over the last
few days, that's an online training for
helping people get familiar with
building apps in Holochain Rust.
We are going to have more dev camps over the next couple of months
Holo, the application, will be launching
in the next few months
HoloPorts will be shipping, our HoloPorts store will go live at holo.host soon
so there's a whole bunch of
steps all kind of happening in parallel
but hopefully that gives you a quick
overview.
IAmTheMcLovin: what kind of partnerships or industries
will Holochain need to join to make Holochain stronger?
No names, just types of industries needed to make Holochain greater.
Off the top of my head...
I don't know that there's any one thing here
I mean this is... it's sort of like how do
you give birth to an ecosystem, right?
You start by trying to help a bunch of
different actors solve the problems that
are relevant for them. That said, one of
the places where we could use help is in
in peer-to-peer networking, specifically
NAT traversal and punching through firewalls.
This is a an issue that we're
working on that lots of other people
have been working on. Some folks who have done some some decent jobs with this
kind of stuff in the past include
BitTorrent and Resilio, one of their service offerings.
I'm sure Cisco and some of the other big
networking firms have incredible benches
filled with security engineers that
would be helpful in in making this part
work better, but that that would be an
important one for from my perspective.
We're working with a bunch of different
communities trying to help foster
significant economic activity.
We are also working with some, well, we've got some people that are working with governments
and we have some folks that are working
with nongovernmental organizations to
try to deploy pilots that solve problems
that people just haven't been able to
solve before because they didn't have a
actually peer-to-peer applications
infrastructure like Holochain. So,
at one level it has less to do with who
are the partners and more to do with
what kinds of patterns can get pioneered
so that others can see those, borrow them,
build upon them. So I'll leave it there for now.
Nick asks: how far away are we from potential partnerships with mesh networks?
I don't know the answer to that.
Right now, we are mostly focused on the
application layer and, for those of you
who aren't familiar, mesh networking is
an adjacent layer, so mesh networking is
peer-to-peer connectivity whereas Holochain is mostly focused on peer-to-peer applications
One of them is literally
the passing of packets back and forth
the other has to do with how a community
ensures that it is playing by a
particular set of rules and makes
available the stored content of the community,
whether that's a Twitter like
thing or a cryptocurrency.
My hunch is, mesh network partnerships and collaborations are going to follow the
rollout and maturation of some of the Holochain core,
this early layer of apps and app hosting, so as we start to get that more mature and more
Holochain apps become available, then
moving into more peer-to-peer
mesh networking support trying to make
it so that those types of projects
really take off. That sounds
likely to me.
The last thing I'll say about that is, we are really excited about mesh networking and we've built
Holochain so that it is routing
agnostic, meaning you can run Holochain
on mesh networking now, so, sweet
and some of the use cases that we're
building this for are specifically that.
The kinds of partnerships that I see
happening in a mesh networking world
actually have to do with creating
economic incentives for other forms of
recognition to foster a more vibrant
mesh networking ecosystem than is
available today. In my mind, that probably
ends up mimicking some of the Holo Fuel
patterns. It may not be identical, it may
be a little different, but Holo Fuel is
mostly focused on storage and processing
I could see something similar for mesh
networking for the passing of content
along and being recognized when you are
doing that work.
Another question from IAmTheMcLovin: how can Holochain create a safe environment and hosting experience?
Some people are concerned
about illegal activities able to be used through Holochain.
So, there's a couple
of things here. One, you get to decide
which applications you're running, right.
So if you're running Holochain,
you're deciding whether you're running a
specific app. If there's an app that you
think might include some illegal
activity
maybe pornography or something else,
right, that you're not a fan of
you can choose to not use that App. It's as easy as that, there's no one big Holochain, right.
So you're, it's an opt-in
situation. The other side here is that
because Holochain hasn't been optimized
for anonymity, it's not necessarily the
best fit for a lot of illegal activities.
Now that's not to say that people can't
get anonymous use of a Holochain app.
They can, they just are needing to deal
with that and 'anonymizing' at a
different layer. Some of the people that
I've spoken with in the past who are
really focused on enabling anonymous communication,
people like the folks at
Orchid, etc who are focused on sort of
anonymous routing, they get excited
because Holochain can enable the people
inside of a community to be able to
interact in a way that works for them,
so they actually do have sort
social currency, they're able to build up
credibility over time, while all of that maybe invisible from outsiders,
people who aren't members of that community. Now, we're not designing Holochain
for that particular use case, but I have
no doubt that people are going to decide
that they're going to use Holochain in
that way. Now, some of us might think of
illegal activity as if it's necessarily
a bad thing, but you know I've been in a
few countries this year where many of
the things that are illegal are illegal
not because they're bad for this society
but because they're bad for the specific
people who are in government at that
particular moment and so a lot of the
things that are 'illegal'
have to do with enforcing tyranny and so
though it's not the primary focus with
Holochain, we're focused on enabling
communities to organize themselves in
coherent ways, in ways that work for them
for the participants themselves. There
are instances where it's important for
people to be able to do that without
having that be publicly visible to
everyone else. So, for instance, if a group
of people were trying to coordinate
their activities to protest in a country
where those kinds of protests are not
desired by the powers that be, that
'anonymizing' layer at an adjacent layer
would/could nonetheless be fairly
important.
Nick asks: how much of an impact do you think GDPR will have on the hosting environment and your growth rate?
This is pretty much a guess in the
dark for me at this point, and we will
see how it all pans out, but I believe
that GDPR is actually really going to
accelerate adoption of Holochain and
Holo. When participants are running
something as a community and there's not
necessarily a business model in the middle,
GDPR ends up impacting and....you have control
over who you're sharing content with, 
feels like... which is the pattern that
Holochain makes use of, that feels like
it's much more in alignment with the
intention behind the general
data privacy regulation (GDPR) that has
been brought forth in Europe. That is
really intended to move us away from a
world where companies are siphoning up
all our data and using it in ways that
don't align with our desires. That's a
very different paradigm than the kind of
thing the Holochain is trying to
bring into existence and so though I'm
guessing there will be ways in which the
legislation as written doesn't perfectly
map to Holochain as it ends up being
architected, my hunch is over time there
will be iterations and I believe if the
pattern is right, if the pattern that
we're creating makes people more
empowered, proves useful for them and
leaves them feeling like they are in
control of their own lives, mismatches
between the architecture and GDPR
will get resolved, my guess is by
amendments to GDPR because people who
find themselves being constrained from
communicating in ways that they want
will probably put political pressure on
the powers that be to change that.
What else, Eise says: is there going to be a
marketplace-like UI? I have no idea...
I can barely read this: is there going to be
a marketplace like-UI for the ones who'd
like to be hosts and for the ones who'd
like to be hosted, letting them communicate with each?
Is it going to be like an auction? Okay, so, in terms of communication,
I'm not certain about
chat-like communication, but people
are going to be offering services and
they're going to be publishing or
communicating attributes, so those
attributes may include their uptime,
it may include their latency, it may include
their jurisdiction
because for certain kinds of
applications - for regulatory purposes -
it may be important that this content only
be housed within a particular jurisdiction.
Those are the kinds of
attributes that people will be
communicating and then others will be
deciding based on those attributes
whether that particular host meets their
needs, whether it meets their needs in
terms of regulatory burden, whether it
meets their needs in terms of uptime and
latency and all of that, whether it meets
their needs in terms of how cheap it is,
right, if they ask in too high a price
then they decide nope we're going with
somebody else,
so in that sense it will be kind of like
an auction but it's not just a
one-dimensional auction, it's not that
price is the only factor. We're trying to
make it so that hosts and those who are
purchasing hosting, generally application
owners, are going to be able to
communicate about a variety of different
attributes that are relevant to their
hosting and web... their hosting and host
provision decision-making, I'll frame it that way.
Snickter says: in the white paper it
says app providers have to go through KYC if they want to host their app on Holo.
Does that really mean you can only
host your...you only can host your app on
the network after going through KYC? So,
two points here, one- there's Holochain
and there's Holo. The KYC has to do with
payments. If you're wanting to redeem out
Holo Fuel as part of... you do hosting and
you redeem out Holo Fuel and you....
want to get paid some currency, we need
KYC for paying others. That main that
That main, that Holo/KYC stuff in the white
paper is probably mostly about the HoloToken presale
in the HoloToken presale, that's part of our regulatory burden.
We had to collect
'know your customer' (KYC) information which
banks require in order to be able to
accept payment from other people.
That has to do with our regulatory burden, the hoops that we have to jump through
in order to be able to make use of the
existing banking system.
That said, Holochain doesn't require KYC. Holo as a hosting network doesn't necessarily
require KYC, but when you start trying to
make use of Holo Fuel and you want to
redeem it through us, we need
the 'know your customer' (KYC) information.
We need, essentially, identity information in
order for us to be able to pay you
because otherwise we're not able to make
use of our banking services.
We wouldn't be adhering to the regulatory burden that we have to be held to.
'When HoloPort in Brazil?' asks JordanBrasil. The same time as everybody else!
So, our aim is near the end of this year, fingers are crossed, but that's what we are aiming for
and so whether it's at the
very end of this year,  beginning of next year,
it should be about the same time
everywhere in the world we're not gonna
be shipping to any one place before
others. Now, that said, we will be doing
some trial stuff early on, but the
jurisdictions are going to be the same.
PharmD says: is there any communication
or ideas with Holo and the United Nations and mutual credit systems?
Do you know anything about this Matt?
There are definitely people who are affiliated with the United Nations in various ways
and that's a giant body, right,
so all those crypto speculators just
hold your horses. There are definitely
people who are affiliated with the
United Nations and there are other large
intergovernmental organizations and
non-governmental organizations that we
are talking with that are interested in
mutual credit systems
and the ways in which those types of
currency systems can facilitate flows of
activity. What we often think of as
economic activity, but that aren't
necessarily going to have to be relying
upon traditional accounting and currency
designs. So yes, there are conversations
happening there. It's early days on all
of those and we'll see how those mature.
There will be announcements made in
those regards whenever there are
projects that are live and ready to be
announced.
We've got about 10 minutes left
Pravine says: Matt, when will we see your
AMA on 'HoloTube' running on Holochain?
I don't know. I'm not building
'HoloTube'. I'm interested in seeing that one. We'll see.
TheyBrooks ask: have you met a lot of Solidity or other mainstream BlockDevs who are switching to Holochain?
If so, what reasons do they give for preferring Holochain?
Awesome! Awesome question They. So yeah, I've met a number of them,
some of which are on our team, actually, we had people who'd been building on
Ethereum in the past and there's a
couple different issues here that
they've brought up. One was somebody who I won't name, but he's a dear friend and
when he first started using Holochain,
it was at our very first hackathon in
February of 2017,
our very first Holochain hackathon to be clear.
He said 'oh wow this is like a
distributed system except actually distributed'
because Ethereum and the
other projects run on a distributed
network of computers, but they're a
centralized architecture and that was
kind of mind-blowing, and one of the
comments that he and other developers
who had worked significantly on smart
contracts in Solidity
one of their main things that I said was,
'oh my, oh this is so easy'.
With Ethereum there's this... you're sweating bullets because if you get anything wrong,
like once you ship it, it's out
there and you're locked to it and so if
you made a mistake in your code, like
you're screwed, you're not able to kind
of claw it back afterwards.
Whereas Holochain is designed to
be really adaptable and you can sort of
update, update, change, update, change
You can test things locally very easily.
So, that was one thing. Another was just
Solidity is a new language to learn and
it's weird and hard and different
whereas with Holochain you can build
apps in just JavaScript, which is the
most widely used website... language that people using for web development around the world so
And with WebAssembly, which we're enabling support in in Rust, in this Rust refactor, we're going to be
able to support development in a bunch
of other languages soon as well so
just the support for languages that
people are familiar with
which means libraries that are already
mature and built out those are big the...
I guess the framing would be the 'butt-pucker' factor. 'oh oh shoot should I really hit the 'Go' button?'
On Ethereum, the code being
scary because of its once you fire it
off you don't get to change it. But the
main reasons to be totally honest why
people are jumping over to Holochain from Ethereum that I've heard doesn't have to do with Solidity.
It has to do with Ethereum. It has to do with transactions per second, it has to do with scale and
it has to do with cost, right. There's
lots people who've done ICOs and
raised money, and, or haven't but they
have some ambition to build a system to
solve some real problem in the world, and
then they went and tried to build that
on Ethereum and realized 'oh my god it
would cost millions of dollars' to run
this thing that, you know solves a
problem, but doesn't solve a problem that
can generate millions of dollars in
revenue.
So they are looking for something
that's lightweight. They're looking for
something that is efficient. They're
looking for something that does scale.
They're looking for something that is
fast. They're looking for something that
doesn't have the same costs.
That's what's been driving Ethereum
developers to start building things in
Holochain.
Tushar asks: what about transactions
speed per second? So the question is often
'how many transactions per second'?
This is a funny question because it
actually, it's something that gets so
focused on in the blockchain world and
it's framed because the network as a
whole has a bandwidth limit, because in a blockchain,
though it's running on
decentralized network, there's the
bottleneck of global consensus and so
the network only is getting updated once
every so often, right. In bitcoin for
example it's once every 10 minutes
Bitcoin ends up with something like
seven or ten transactions per second
That's because of that point of
centralization. Not centralization in it
being run on a single computer, but
centralization in that all of the
computers are having to move in lockstep
with one another. A Holochain,
because it enables parallel processing
of transactions, means that I might be
doing a transaction with Tushar while
Michael is doing a transaction with Billy.
And while Tushar and I are are engaged in a transaction,
we're not able to interact
with others, our chains are sort of locked,
but everybody else is free to go
about their business, right, they can
interact in parallel with us, and so that
capacity for being able to have multiple
actors doing things in parallel makes
the transaction speed thing a little bit
weird the way that Arthur, one of our
co-founders, likes to describe it is
How many words can be spoken in English? Well, it depends on how many English speakers you have, right
If you have five English
speakers well there's not that many
words that you can speak at a time. If
you have five billion English speakers
well there's a lot more words that you
can speak because they're able to be
speaking them in parallel with one
another.
Heart Hacker asks: you said you guys want
to keep the price stable, then why would investors invest in HOT coin or Holo Fuel?
So, just to be clear here, our belief is that the price will become stable. That's not to say that it will stay at
its current rate, that once hosting goes
live the price will likely stabilized
relative to the costs and business
models of doing web hosting.
And we believe that we had sold crypto, our
cryptocurrency, our Holo Fuel -initially HOT-
at a rate that is, the way to frame
this appropriately is, that we were
charging much more per unit of Holo Fuel
for hosting than our ecosystem will
eventually be able to deliver. Meaning
that other people will be able to sell
hosting services for less, which means
that the amount of computing that you
actually get for Holo Fuel will be
more. So the value, at least in computing services
will go up. But at some point, it
should find a level ground, right, like it should
the market will lead us to a
point where the the price of hosting is...
the price of Holo Fuel is fairly
stable because the price of hosting
isn't changing dramatically from one day
to the next. I should not say the price,
the cost of hosting, like the cost hosting, the cost of having a hardware and
running the processing power and paying
for electricity. That's going to be fairly stable.
Tushar asks: what about scalability of
Holochain? Yes,  a Holochain is
incredibly scalable, again, because it's
actually a peer-to-peer framework.
There's not one big Holochain App, so
if I'm running an application with you
we're going to run that App while other
people are running something else.
That parallel architecture is actually how
all living systems work
it's what enables me to be doing, you
know breathing and drinking water etc
while somebody else is having a
conversation in a different room
That's what enables scalability... is parallel  processing of information.
Rick asks: speaking of anonymity, can you give an update on Promether's relationship with Holochain?
We don't have any updates
at the current moment, so I'm gonna let that one go.
WXXXTX (I don't know
what the name is there) ask: Matthew can you
explain more how the Reserve Account
works and the dynamic supply?
The idea of Reserve Accounts sounds like centralized control, the team can adjust however many as you like.
So the idea with
reserve account has to do with redemption.
It has to do with our promise
to pay people in a different currency
when they want to redeem Holo Fuel
that was earned through hosting.
Now, if they don't want to redeem Holo Fuel, if they instead want to trade it on an exchange, they can, right
But it's really
just about the promises that we are making.
We are obviously the people who
are starting this ecosystem,
but we not the only ones who are going to be participating in it.
So, Reserve Accounts are really designed to enable people to move into other forms of currency and
when people pay us in that currency,
that's what fuels the Reserve Accounts.
So if somebody gave me, gave Holo 100 eth and purchased
Holo Fuel for a hundred Eth, hey that
goes into the Reserve Account.
Later others are going to be able to cash out that Eth but only if they've done web
hosting and earned Holo Fuel through that.
So they can bring the Holo Fuel and
cash it out at the present rate.
McCool asks: how can we introduce this in Dubai?
McCool, the easiest way would be to get a
meetup group started, just like anywhere
else in the world, whether it's Istanbul,
Prague, Seoul or Sydney.
Email Us at events@holo.host. We would love to help get you and others that you know started on
having conversations and learning how to
build Holochain apps together and
we're trying to connect meetup groups
with one another, so that things that
people learn in one community can
propagate and spread to others this the
whole idea here is that together we're
able to learn far faster than we would
be able to separately. So, again please
email please email events@holo.host.
All right
I will take one or two more questions
and then I'm going to go through the...
we're gonna go ahead and wrap this up
IAmMcLovin says: once Holochain is up
and running at full capacity, is there
any way for government to get into Holochain and mess it up somehow with laws or whatever they can think of?..
...and I'm referring to the United States.
I have no idea. I mean, I believe it will be
difficult. I am sure that there will be
I don't know that it will be the United
States, but I'm sure there will be
governments who will attempt to suppress
people being able to communicate in ways
that they want to communicate. I'm
guessing that will happen, but there will
be technical pushback, there will
probably be political pushback
that doesn't mean that that will win in every
instance, right. It would be nice to say
yeah the world always gets better, but
that's just not the truth when you look at history.
At the same time because, Holochain is distributed in its nature
it's much harder to attack than a
centralized alternative,
so it's much more likely
that people who are trying to
communicate in a Holochain based way
are going to be able to be resilient
against attacks on that attempt at
communication, they would be...
Angel asks: are we getting
any more NYC hackathons?
We had one just a couple weeks ago, so I don't think we're gonna have another one in the immediate future,
but we are having an
event in Pittsburgh, so if you want to
get on a train, this week in Pittsburgh,
we're gonna be doing a bunch of
Holochain events including, essentially a
hackathon, a dev workshop over the
weekend starting with a kickoff event
Friday evening.
You can find out more information on that at holo.host/pgh.
Finally Jason asks: do you envision Holo Fuel becoming a payment currency in the future?
Well, Jason, to be totally honest Hole Fuel is designed as a payment currency.
It's designed as a payment currency for
hosting. I don't know whether it will
become a more general payment currency.
That, the future will tell.
That's not what we designed it for. We designed it to be a micro payment currency
specifically for Holo Fuel, but we're not
preventing people from transferring
Holo Fuel for other forms of work, so it could get used for other things.
My guess is it's not gonna be the only currency in the world, but it may be the
first viable micro payment currency and
as a result it may find itself being
used for a bunch of use cases that are
that people have dreamed about for a
long time but aren't currently available.
All right with that I'll make just a few repeat announcements of the stuff that I
mentioned at the beginning.
The first one is we're gonna be in Pittsburgh this week. There's a number of us from the
team who are going there, I'm in Portugal
at present, but I'll be flying in a
couple of days to Pittsburgh, but you
don't have to wait for me.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, Jean-Francois Noubel, who is amazing, he's one of the leading experts
on collective intelligence in France,
he's going to be at Carnegie Mellon University
for lunch and at the Ace Hotel in the evening.
Go see him speaking about Homosapiens transitioning to Holosapiens
It should be an interesting talk.
On Thursday, I'll be presenting at the
University of Pittsburgh Crypto Club on
networks versus ecosystems.
On Friday, Art Brock will be participating in a panel on the future of wealth and money along
with a handful of Carnegie Mellon
University professors.
That evening, Art, myself and a few others will be doing a intro to Holochain workshop from 7:00 to 9:30pm.
That session is open to the
public, but it's also part of the
developers workshop happening at CMU's
Pine School of Public Policy all weekend.
You can still get tickets to that
workshop, so if you're interested and
you're in the area, you want to learn how
to design and build Holochain apps,
come get some face time with us. I highly
recommend these workshops.
It will be the last one on the East Coast for
the next little while so please do make
your way there if you are in the in the
Northeast. Just to be very clear,
we did a hackathon a few weeks ago in
Amsterdam and we had people fly from
Australia, we had people fly from Ukraine,
we had people fly from all over I think
we had something like 14 countries
represented, so a short drive is not
that long if you're here anywhere
near Pittsburgh.
You can find more details about all of those Pittsburgh events at holo.host/pgh
The last one is going to be happening
next Monday at CMU's Cylab Security and Privacy Institute.
And Art Brock is going to
be giving a talk on how to bring hApps mainstream.
Again, meetups we've got meetups on November 1st in Seatlle,
November 8th in Barcelona,
Toronto and South Paulo.
November 9th we're doing a hackathon in Denver and in late November we have a meet-up in Cyprus.
For those of you who are
interested in putting together a meet-up
please reach out to us, we want to help
support meetups in your local community as well
You can contact events@holo.host. A big thank you again to
all the meetup organizers out there. We
literally could not do this without you
Finally, the links:  you can go to t.me/channelholo for our Telegram converstions.
You can go to r/holochain for Reddit
Our develpover documentation is that developer.holochain.org
And you can always chat with us on Mattermost at chat.holochain.org.
Until next time, thank you everyone, have a great great week and we will see you soon
online or in the real world. I'm Matthew
Shutte, take care, bye.
