탐색: 메타커런시 프로젝트를 찾아서 4 - Ceptr Revelation 읽기

※ 메타커런시 프로젝트(MetaCurrency Project)의 개념과 역사에 대해 탐색해 가면서 아울러 현재와 미래에 걸쳐 동반 탐색자의 출현을 기대하는 공개적인 탐구용 게시물(A personal exploration to learn about something related to the ideas of the MetaCurrency Project and its history, having some hope to find some people interested esp. in Korea though).

• 최초 탐색: '메타커런시 프로젝트'를 찾아서(1): '보이지 않는 대학 연맹'에 집결된 자료들
• 직전 탐색: 탐색: 메타커런시 프로젝트를 찾아서 (3)
• 추적 문서의 위치: The MetaCurrency Project(Ceptr) > Ceptr Revelation(자료 형태: 구글문서)
  ※ All the italics are of my own. It'll be better for anyone interested to go directly into the original.

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Make it “Unenclosable” (Open and Peered)

We are committed to having an open architecture, but it turns out our understanding of “open” had to evolve significantly. The original MetaCurrency web site explained what we were building in four simple elements:

• Open Identity: We never wrote much about our design for identity. Our plan was to borrow a lot from folks we thought were getting this right with XDI / XRI / iNames. Ceptr's identity model is similar in many ways with the biggest differences being that we use contextual name resolution instead of having a global top to the namespace.

• Open Transport: Most people think of the internet as already providing an open transport, and much of its success in spreading was because it was much more open than proprietary network protocols. However, the fact is that there is a central authority for addresses and names (even if they delegate some powers to ISPs and registrars). ISP choices diminishing toward regional monopolies, the structure of root servers for DNS, and governments implementing “kill switch,” point to some of the reasons why we need an even more open infrastructure that could operate completely peer-to-peer.

• Open Data: Adapting ideas from Ian Grigg about triple-entry accounting and Ricardian Contracts, we made presentations and published information about decentralized data models with signed transaction chains to ensure ‘Intrinsic Data Integrity(probably Refer 1, Refer 2─marked by this reader)’. Variations of this approach that have become popular are git as distributed code sharing and versioning system and the bitcoin blockchain as a cryptocurrency platform.

• Open Rules: Having a format for sharing the rules, actions and actors in a currency or collaborative system as simple as HTML. We initially implemented this with XGFL(eXtensible Game Format Language [주]§1). You could drop an XGFL spec into a flowspace and the system would render the correct interfaces and perform the proper operations. We then discovered the issues of interoperability between rule-sets were much more complex than could be sensibly addressed by an expressive capacity akin to XML.

The word “open” as in Open Source or in our four elements above wasn't clear enough. It sometimes means “transparent” or “visible.” Sometimes it means “shared.” It also seems to mean “interoperable” or something like “own your own” (data & identity). Calling all those things open sounded nice, but we quickly discovered we needed clearer requirements to guide what we built.

Our experiments in building an infrastructure appropriate for the next economy made one thing very clear. In order for next-generation digital currencies to solve the core problems of our existing economic system, immunity to these problems would need to be built into the most fundamental levels of the tools used.

For example, operating on a network with “kill switch” or the ability for a handful of ISPs to filter out “undesirable” packets was unacceptable. So is the power imbalance stemming from banks being the only ones allowed to create money, which enables them to manipulate the economy, our politics and the value that everyone else creates. These problems would not be solved by digital currencies shifting the control from bankers to system admins. Since a system that can be corrupted will eventually get corrupted, we needed to make sure the underpinnings of what we were building had freedom from undue control, influence, manipulation or abuse built into the core of its DNA.

Looking at models in nature made it clear that we mean something like universal (rather than transparent), unenclosable. Finish clarifying “open.”

If “open” means fundamentally unenclosable, then it is also clear that Ceptr must be decentralized. This means a fundamental shift toward Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing architectures.

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※ 위 소절의 마지막 결론 중 하나: ‘오픈(open)’의 의미는 ‘unenclosable’이다. 그렇기 때문에 Ceptr는 decentralize되어야 하며, 이것은 근본적으로 P2P 컴퓨팅 아키텍처로 가는 것이다.

• 이에 대한 Alan Moore라는 사람의 코멘트(2015년 7월 15일):

“While decentralization is an important property in nature, the fundamental building block of life is the cell membrane(세포막), a ‘semi-closed’, partially permeable structure. We take inspiration from this─it might inform some of your thinking as well.”

• 이 코멘트에 대한 Arthur Brock의 답변(2015년 9월 9일):

“Yes, Alan! Every receptor has membranes. It can allow signals or data to pass through those membranes conditionally (semi-permeably), or transform it [into─this reader] the process of passing through the membrane. ”

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다음 소절: Foster Coherence and Follow Convergence

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※ 다른 주소인 'Ceptr 백서 목록(https://ceptr.org/whitepapers)'에도 같은 문서가 html 형식으로 있지만, 워드 형식인 위 구글문서로 읽는 것이 더 낫다. 워드 형식이 더 깔끔하기도 하고, 이 프로젝트 가담자들과 여타 관심자들이 서로 의견을 제시하고 답변한 흔적들도 있어서 이것도 공붓거리가 될 수 있다.

※ 분산 원장을 포함해 더 광범위한 분산 컴퓨팅을 구현하려는 이 설계자들의 개념은 블록체인과는 비교도 안 되는 더 근본적인 지점에서 더 일찍부터 시작됐음을 짐작할 수 있다. 그 결과 중 하나가 이미 홀로체인(Holochain)이라는, 당장 공짜로 내려받아 개발에 써먹을 수 있는 도구로 구축되어 있는 상태고, 가르쳐 주고자 열의에 차 있는 사람들까지 존재하는 도구다.