Babble is a new network project, which will provide
discovery through a search engine
content through a content platform
a marketplace for buying and selling
secure communication
money system
a public record
and cloud computing
to all people, for free.
It will provide universal access to a network which could provide opportunities instead of boundaries.
We want to hasten the transition to a peer to peer internet.
Babble addresses the problem that web 2.0 has failed to meet the promise of web 1.0, that consumers are exploited,
the digital world has gone online, and become a means of control, surveillance.
It is time for change, pressure is building for online security, trust, and accessibility.
Babble is here to do its bit.
Babble is a peer to peer network hosted on micro-servers (or "personal servers") in the home.
It is, in one sense, nothing new. It is in another sense, a radical, exciting, groundbreaking, disruptive and new.
How can this be? Babble is a synthesis of existing ideas and technology, put together in a way which has never been done before.
Each personal server (Brainbox) puts the household and personal information of the householder and their family at their fingertips.
It helps them manage their digital life, which increasingly IS their life.
Importantly it also hosts a peer to peer node for the Babble network.
Nodes are cheap and plentiful. Anyone can buy a single board computer, install the code, and ask for an invite to join.
Node hardware can be manufactured at home with some DIY skills, the instructions are open source.
The node code is open-source and hosted on Github (or a similar repository not onwed by Microsoft).
It is a Content Addressable Network, based on a collection of SHA256 keyspaces.
Data, content and links to content are stored, edited and retrieved as hashes on the network.
File storage uses the IPFS protocol.
The network is addresed with webapps served from the node.
The network is self-organising and built on a small world model.
The network grows organically because it offers incentives, both functional and financial.
As households join the network they add to its infrastructure, increasing its speed, capacity, and resilience.
Nodes are free, and joiners are paid to join. The more we give away the stronger the network is,
the stronger the network the greater the utility and value of the network, the more the users benefit.
Use of the network is earned by owning and running a node, which is a trivial overhead.
The network is self-actualising, and acheives this because it is a DAO, a Distributed Autonomous Organisation.
The DAO works to coordinate open source code and organisation documents.
A DAO working in this way is a galatic first, and a DAO which is a network is a cosmic first.
The DAO regulates itself, network apps, and nodes.
The DAOs vision is a free, open network for all people (without regard to any conventional social distinction) on which they could share, trade, and discover.
Its overriding goal is to maximise the properties that make it so.
It expects to be open, permissionless, community-led, and fair.
It will encourage diversity and acceptance.
Positive feedback loops are built into the network design, barriers to entry a low, and participation gives rewards.
Its growth and usefulness will be an emergent property of a complex adaptive network, based on some simple rules in the most advanced DAO on earth, and the only one of its kind.
Carbon-based lifeforms can work for the DAO, the network, network applications, or Brainbox server apps.
The network will be self-healing with its own immune system.
The DAO will adopt the playbook used by government, the military, pressure groups, corporates, lobbyists, billionaires.
The DAO will work to create helpful conditions for the network, so it can thrive and grow.
Connecting to ISPs outside of the fixed ISP offered to the user.
The DAO will tirelessly make the network transparent, efficient, easier to understand and use, more adaptive, versatile, robust, flexible, quicker.
It is likely to have unexpected emergent properties.
It is unstoppable, open to all and free to use.
The network has its own utility token, a webnote, divided into 100 webcoins. Tokens are issued for contributions to network utility.
So joining nodes are given tokens, tokens are granted for monetary contributions, for work done, proposals implemented, security holes fixed, nodes built, and so on.
The consensus protocol is fast, and does not required proof of work or proof of stake, it is proof of node.
There are no transaction fees, the settlement speed will be very high, there is no storage intensive blockchain,
transaction are secure and anonymous, using zero-knowledge proofs.
Smart contracts or programmable money are coming in the roadmap.
The tokenomics have been designed so that there can be no whales, no cornering of tokens, no collusion,
no concert parties, no takeovers, no miners, no fees, no validators, no energy waste, no proof of stake,
no technical jargon, no dogs or cats, no CEO, no organisation. Just a plan.
There are fascinating extensions of its capablity, we will start work on grid computing, VPN capabilities, the infrastructure for Artificial Intelligence applicaitons,
expert systems, and swarm optimisation applications.
Babble will be self-marketing. Its story is simple, clear and spread widely and quickly.
Users will be drawn back to using it because it is so useful, it saves them money, saves them time, and gives them peace of mind.
We hope that Babble is going to be a major feature of Web3, the emerging distributed internet.
It combines the exciting new technologies of cryptocurrency, programmable money, distributed networks, DAOs, and the new personal server concept.
It will create the world's first self-sufficient, self-funding, self-growing, self-organising, self-healing, self-securing, self-regulating and self-governing network.
The elephant in the room
Why is Babble a thing?
it is all about computing devices. Personal computers, servers, mobile phones, tablets, wearables.
They have a number of common attributes. They are hardware, with software, and available through contracts.
The hardware, software and contracts are used to exploit consumers.
How does this happen? Mostly by exploiting existing barriers to use, or creating new barriers.
This is the author of all things we don't like about where we are now.
What is wrong with the web?
When the world wide web was invented by Tim Berners Lee the vision of the early pioneers was distributed, or decentralised.
The web requires servers, web files (web pages), a communication protocol and discovery (an index).
Then commercial interests moved in and the web became centralised. Collaborative projects like Wikepedia showed that distributed editing could work.
Projects like YouTube, Reddit showed that distributed content could be amazing. Th
Peer to peer projects like and others challenged commercial interests, but lostis was web2.
Financial distributed projects like ZOPA and Funding Circle showed that peer to peer funding could be done, but they have closed.
Open source projects like Mozilla, and open source directories like DMOZ showed that distributed curating of directories could work, but it too closede.
Projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum showed that value could be a Content-Type and be an outcome of a peer to peer network.
Linux has proved that open source projects rock.
RISC open source CPU architecture has shown that the best computing is open source.
ARM showed that they had the best CPUs, though they are commercial.
Centralised server resources that made technical, risk-taking and well funded men very rich are being challenged.
Centralisation is often a reasonable and rational outcome of a technology which is useful but has high barriers.
Those barriers might be cost, size, scale, how hard it is to make, or understand or use.
My toaster for example is not centralised. I don't not need to open an account with an American GiantTech Inc. in order to use one.
However, if I want a clever learning thermostat for my house, I do. If I want to buy some Bitcoin, I do.
Barriers were understanding, expensive servers, technical.
Babble exists to take the challenge a lot further, all at once. This is web3, it is coming, and fast.
It is 1993 all over again.
We want to slide in on a shrimp sandwich. Meaning?
Do I own the device I bought?
In short, no. You don't own the hardware, you don't own the software, you don't own the data you save, or the data collected from you.
contracts
start low, end high
based on churn
lock-in
easy to join, hard to leave
unreadable small print
software
you don't own it
firmware updates that brick
apps that fill up your phone
encrypted, not public
law suits if you jail-break (Apple, Microsoft)
IP protections
copy protections
hardware
you don't own it
poor support
no repairs
poor documentation
must replace hardware to keep up with software
wasteful, short life by design
expensive (iPhones, iPad)
data
you don't own it
websites you don't own
too big to get back
Why is technology not feminine?
flightdeck approach
features no one wants or uses
no help
unintuitive
Engineered by engineers for engineers, let's make it more balanced, let's put the woman back into tech
Where has my security gone?
insecure until https, that now works well
little end to end security
ISPs track you
VPN won't help you, TOR does well, but not for streaming
your browser tracks you, Brave is doing well
your search engine tracks you, Duck Duck Go working well
the websites you visit track you
your phone tracks you
your smart speaker tracks you
your smart thermostat tracks you
your wearable tracks you
your smart weighing scales track you
your smart fridge tracks you
your smart speaker records you
your smart thermostat records you
You get the idea.
None of this is actually technically necessary, it was put there to exploit you.
Why do I get unwanted advertising?
What is all this prying about? Your tech providers want to package your life and sell it to companies.
Most the Web2 has been built on advertising revenue, it is chock full of companies screaming for your attention.
A Web3 wouldn't have any unsolicited advertising. People and companies are welcome tell us what they offer,
but only after we ask them to. This would return power to the household, and households would be offered the respect they deserve.
Why do my devices not talk to each other easily?
Most devices don't talk to each other, that is by design, comapnies who make them want to carve out everyone esle.
they don't want you talking to others.
There are common standards like HTTP TCP/IP, when these are adopted, the technology works for people not companies.
Brainbox will work with any mobile device, car, TV, laptop, wearable or tablet.
So will Babble.
Brainbox integrates with a host of smart devices, and retrofits into most homes.
Sliding in on a shrimp sandwich
Can it be put right?
That is a perceptive question. Yes it can be put right.
The open source movement has been a significant counterbalance to proprietary business models.
We now enjoy open source software and open source hardware.
The open source hardware movement has been embraced by makers, hackers and tinkerers.
The Raspberry Pi and Arduino devices were made with these excellent people in mind.
There is a positive, rewarding, culture around these philosophies that we mean to be part of, and we want you to be part of it too.
Babble proposes to add an open source network to all this lovliness and bring it all together in one amazing project.
Babble has been designed to form the possibility of changing these things to the better.
It will bring together open source software, open source hardware, and an open source network.
Rebalancing tech to make it less exploitative, empowering rather than enslaving,
and rebalancing toward the feminine.
Open source tends to encourage explosive innovation, as Bitcoin and many other projects have proved.
We hope and expect Babble will do the same.
What about the criminals - how do we stop them?
It has been pointed out that online identity is important.
There are two ways at least to verify a users identity, either their human biological identity,
or their logical identity - their right and ability to use the protocol or the network.[2]
The first of these is invasive and personal, and not necessary. It is biometric identity, it is becoming the preferred way
but it opens the door to social control.
The second is respectful and just as or probably more secure than the first.
A valid node on the network is created by a human bean buying or making one, having a valid IP address, being invited to join,
running the proper software with the proper protocol, and being validated by its peers and the inviting node.
All these things must happen before a node becomes a valid node.
The right and ability to use the network is proved by the valid node that the user maintains for the network,
and the very fact of their messages to the network proves they have a right,
and proves their logical identity at the same time. Bingo.
Network functions
What is a network function?
There will be 2 types, those which are built-in at birth, but may get better over time.
And those which are developed by the core team as the project matures.
It begs the questions whether open dApps can be developed and distributed like an Apple store.
I think those are server apps,
Search engine
DNS domain name discovery and registration
Immutable public ledger (asset or ownership registry)
Content creator hosting
Image content creating
Things
People and services
Places
Events
Information
Machine data
Personal server apps and network dApps
What is a personal server app?
The node is both a network node and a personal server which runs in your home.
Rustie called the personal server Brainbox, because it was a box which had brains.
She compiled it to run its own services (programs that listen and respond to you), and household applications that run on it,
that were designed to capture your personal and household data so make life easier for you.
She tried to join up these apps to make them even more useful, and designed them to accessible from any of your network devices,
like your tablet, phone, PC, iPad, iPhone, car, watch, or TV.
What is a dApp?
Dapp is short for distributed app. The dapp is downloaded to the Brainbox node, which gives it to the user's device,
the device can then communicate with the Babble network to provide useful stuff for the user.
For example the network features a distributed search engine, so a dapp can search for content, images, people, businesses.
It is free of adverts and free of Google, secure and no is watching you.
]
Brainbox personal server apps
Brainbox runs a number of services including a web server running Apache 2, a data service, PBX service, and more.
These apps work on the LAN (Local Area Network) also known as a HAN (Home area network). The home router handles routing.
Web server (Apache)
Telephone server (Telephonebox )
learning thermostat (Warmbox)
light control (Switchbox)
music server (Squeezebox)
file server (Apache)
email server (Postbox)
Chatbot server (Chatterbox)
WebRTC signalling service (Signalbox)
Database and file backup service
Smart meter service
speech service (Voicebox)
Dynamic DNS service
DApps
dApps are distributed apps which are served from the personal server web server in the home,
but which communicate with the Babble network.
The DApp has html, css, javascript, service worker, icons, and manifest files.
The user fetches the DApp into a browser or starts their native app.
The DApp can only communicate with the user's own node.
Their DApp will use AJAX fetch calls to their node. They will register their native app to their node when inside their own home.
Or sign into their Brainbox, this authenticates their messages.
Their DApp will send formatted messages depending on the nature of their query to the network.
They may query for knowledge, websites, assets, or send payments, make contracts, or settle, or communicate, or retrieve content.
Nodes
What is a node?
Nodes ares a computing device which connect to similar devices over the internet to form a a peer to peer network.
It is both a client and a server.
What is a server?
In the 1970s computers were noisy, hot, smelly, expensive, as large as a room, energy guzzling, technical and hard to understand and use.
Engineers, technicians, mathematicians, scientists used them.
Then Apple, IBM and Microsoft made them cheaper, smaller, easier to use, and accessible to the general public.
They ended up in homes, and became affordable.
Rustie set out to do the same with the server. She imagined a future where everyone could have the power of the server in their home.
Servers are specialised computers which are used by institutions and companies
They are expensive, large as a room, technical and hard to understand and use. Sound familiar?
A server is immensely powerful, and Rustie feels everyone should have access to one.
Rustie designed and tested a microserver called Brainbox.
What is Brainbox?
It is quiet, runs cool, is sweet smelling (not really), affordable, very small, very low energy (battery powered),
non technical and easy to understand and use with the interface Rustie designed.
As the Bitcoin took hold and the new crypto industry developed into Ethereum, smart contracts and DAOs Rustie realised that this could also be the host for a peer to peer network and began working on the Babble concept in 2019.
Brainbox v0.3 was the first node, based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
Rustie wrote all the first reference implementations of apps on Brainbox, and being an OG, she wrote most of it in a terminal or a text editor. Respect.
Babble/Brainbox overview
Brainbox is designed to connect to your household devices
Brainbox connects together lots of useful apps
It will communicate over many communication protocols
Brainbox is able to connect to other devices and services
What is a Raspberry Pi 4?
About 10 years ago Eben Upton designed a mass-producted computer on a board the size of credit card, costing a few pounds.
Nodes can be based, or hosted, on these low-energy single board computers.
The first single board computer prototypes were on a Raspberry Pi.
The RPI4 was a cheap SBC with 4 cores, 1.5Ghz clock speed, 4Gb of RAM, some USB and other inputs and outputs.
Pretty basic but immensely powerful in the right hands.
It was used by hobbyists and children to play with computers and physical computing. That is why one person told Rustie
not to bother with her project because it was a hobby project and would never make money.
Nodes could also in theory be hosted on larger servers, or even in the cloud, if a unique IP can be secured.
Nodes began life as a concept which Rustie called Brainbox, which was to bring "the cloud" into the home.
The founder has also established a company called Datakey.io, a London-based technology startup.
Datakey is on a mission to make them accessible to the general public and get them into homes everywhere.
Why would anyone make a node?
Manufacturers are incentivised to fabricate nodes and sell them.
Manufacturers are paid in Webnotes for their authenticated machines when they join the network.
The node software is open source and therefore anyone can manufacture a node.
[how is this going to work in detail, deducted from the joining airdrop, fixed by the network,
there would have to be an authentication of the manufacturer? and a destination for the payment]
Is the network and nodes energy efficient?
The hope is that nodes will be based on ARM chips, which are very energy efficient. Nodes would run at the maximum possible efficiency.
The network would be many times more efficient than the present cloud. The present cloud uses [100] billion watts per day.
[Enough to power most of the homes in the world.] Babble would use only [1/10th] of that power for the same storage.
Large centralised players are taking steps towards being more green, but Babble starts out on the right foot.
why would anyone buy a node?
We want the network to be affordable. So your node can be free.
If someone wants to charge you for a Babble node, ask why.
In fact you can get paid to connect your node the network.
We get away with this apparent magic because of the strange properties of a network which has its own currency and payment system.
Manufacturers, inviters and joiners are paid webnotes when a node joins.
Ok, so that's amazing but why else would anybody get a node?
Some people simply want to participate in such a cool project,
Some people can see the the economic benefit of buying and node and holding it.
They contribute positively to the network, without doing very much, positive contribution is built into the network design.
content creators have a platform which is their own, and can earn micropayments from users who like what thy produce.
Home and small businesses have a web presence which they own, which costs nothing to run, and which has built-in discovery, communication and settlement.
people will rush out and join the network, it is free money, there is an incentive to join
the act of joining creates more value, more incentive to remainder, the incentives fall as the network grows
this creates incentive to join now not later, incr demand
Is anything being distributed?
I'm glad you asked that. Yes, we are doing many things, but one important one is that we are distributing the cloud away from datacenters and centralised server farms
and into the home. This endows ordinary households with tremendous power.
We are distributing personal data away from big data grabbing tech companies.
We are distributing services away from companies so that benefits are spread out more evenly.
We are distributing internet ownership and participation, empowering households over corporations, elites, and the strong.
We are distributing control of currency away from banks, who never had a formal licence to create it, but did so by the black magic of fractional reserve accounting. [have a look at this if you don't believe us]
We are returning power to the householder.
Content addressable network
What is it?
The network forms a abracted data overlay in the form of a content addressable network, also known as a CAN.
Data can be converted into a hash then stored, changed or retrieved on the network using that hash as a key.
A hash is a number which is unique to a a given data structure, file or string.
The network is in effect a giant geographically-spread physical hash table.
The network as a whole has a SHA256 keyspace, it is very large. [how large]
Data can be inserted, updated and deleted from the network.
Why do we need a CAN?
In around 1995 two Google founder devs Brin and Page decided it would be cool to tear up the knowledge catalogue and replace it with a inverted index.
We love using the Google search engine. (https://m0.her.ie/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/22080405/Google.jpg)
In the old days it was cool, it was new, it was efficient.
They combining an inverted index with a ranking system based on authority measured by hyperlinks.
It is clean, without clutter, it is fast, we are impressed with 2 billion results in 4 milliseconds.
But there are problems
1 gaming the algo
Most searchers will no look beyond the first handful of results most of the time.
This behaviour and this algorithm incentivised webmasters to try to game the aglo, and eventually led to them paying for precedence.
In the stone age times of the early internet (1995-2015) this kinda worked.
E-commerce was just getting started, the world was nowhere near as digital as it is now.
You could search the whole of the web with Google's index and it was ok, but not any more.
The whole world has moved onto the world wide web. Amazon and eBay and PayPal and so on have moved most shopping to the web.
Most micro businesses now have a website, and those that don't will need one very very soon, or die.
The use of search engines to navigate the web has increased, so now we hear "just Google it" all the time.
2 bias to the big
At the heart of the search engine algo is a bias, the bias was once towards the biggest websites. If you are big you stay big, if you are small, well good luc$
It encapsulates a kind of cognitive bias, producing positive feedback loops for the most well connected, most powerful, most well financed.
3 conflicting interests
or the bias to the well-heeled corporate. On top of that it has created a bias to those who pay Google for that bias.
Google's interests are those of its customers - the businesses who pay them - and themselves. Their interests are aligned with yours, a little, but no much.
Google's founders knew this "“Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers”
(http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/)
4 just regular old-fashioned bias
the autocomplete function
location bias, US vs the rest
language bias, English speakers don't get Arabic, or German, or Japanese websites.
This might be ok for some, but can I choose? No
5 old websites disappear, dead links, old info and beliefs and ideas are lost
Websites, blogs, other stuff disappears from the web, there are a lot of dead links, and they are increasing.
The use of search engines to navigate the web has increased, so now we hear "just Google it" all the time.
6 it is not categorised enough, we cannot search parish records, names, shopping, data, geography very well
how many times have you searched for something to buy, or somewhere to go, or somebody, or some piece of information and been given
bucket-loads of sites that are completely irrelevant to you? Your search is a search of EVERYTHING. Once upon a time, when the web was young this was ok.
Not any more.
There is a desparate need for something better.
The salve
There are alternatives to Google which solve the tracking problem, thank you Duck Duck Go.
Just are there are solutions to the tracking problem with the browser, thank you Brave browser.
We propose a distributed search engine on the Babble network.
The CAN will use a protocol variation of the Kademlia protocol.
Separate hashspaces for separate information domains
There will be a CAN for different types of search. A search based on geography, on people, on places, on things, on information, on data.
If a user is primarily intereste in location they will use the location approach.
Alice for example has a nail bar in Hanover, Germany.
She has a mobile-first ecommerce website hosted on her Brainbox. She uses her Brainbox
to create a record of her business on the network.
She creates a hash for her geographic coordinates, and hashes categorising her business.
She uploads the record(s) to the network via her node.
When Bob searches for nail bars in Hanover on Babble he gets a link to Alice's website.
There are about 200m active websites on earth, and around 1.5bn adults who are connected to the web, give or take (https://siteefy.com/how-many-websites-are-there)
That means about 10 adults for each website. If we assume a future in which everyone would have their own website, we might expect the
current 10% penetration rate to reach nearer 80%-90% over the next 20 years.
This migration, if it happens, will be to GoDaddy,Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google servers. That is not cool.
[how many servers are there?]
[how many servers in private hands are there?]
Hashspace overlay
A hashspace is the range of values contained in a given hash.
Babble uses a SHA256 hash and its hashspace is 2^256, or around 10^80. This is a very large number.
There are around 10^80 atoms in the universe.
This massive keyspace translates into a hashspace by conversion to hex.
Each node is responsible for a sector of a hashspace.
Each node is allocated a sector by other nodes when it joins the network.
It stores any data that relates to that sector.
There is more than one overlay. Each one is allocated to different functions,
such as a search engine, data, documents and more.
Knowledge hashspace
There was a fully developed system already in place before google, it was based on centuries of evolved thinking.
There is a hashspace mapped to knowledge categories.
There are at least two existing cataloguing systems for human knowledge.
The Dewey Decimal system and the Library of Congress.
The point is that the whole of human knowledge may be mapped to a code.
If we map this code to our SHA256 hashspace then we may allocate any data on the network to any number in that sector.
The hashspace is rather larger than the keyspace of library systems, which means that each key of the knowledge system will cover a sector of the hashspace.
In the early halcyon days of the internet when I was but a nipper and Google was just a big number,
we had directories of webpages. One important one was DMOZ. It was simple and divided the
we can take the directory listings of DMoz or other similar dir, and simply take a hash of the category string
SHA256("category string here") => 5H5omn878.......hBGASS
if we agree in advance on the categories and subcat, we may have an index of a few hundred or a few thousand subcats.
we can allocate all subcats to node 0, which passes half the data to the next joining node (node 1) along with resp for half the SHA256 hashspace.
Any node joining the network is allocated a portion of the hashspace from a node, and any related data is transferred (or copied, for redundancy).
At present most search engines do NOT allow users to search a category. This is about to change.
User-generated content hashspace
* remove redundancy (stop words)
* stem
* create inverted index
* pick 3 most common words
* pick directory sub index for subject, ie Dewey system
* get its hash origin (starting index)
* create arr of combinations in string form of 3 the common words ie ["abc"] ["acb"] ["bac"] ["bca"] ["cab"] ["cba"]
* take SHA256 hash of each of the 6 strings add the dewey subject hash
* push 6 messages into the network
* each node runs a content index engine, ie collects hash key:value pairs relating to content (blogs, websites, documents)
* the messages will be stored in nodes relating to the dewey hash, using its content index
TO FETCH (the protocol)
the user types a search string
the client cleans the string and creates the 4 or 6 hashes, creates the retrieve message
sends to the users node, using RPC and AJAX calls
the node routes the messages using the dewey hash
the replying node fetches matching data, it may have 1+ matches (urls) for any given hash
Asset hashspace
There is a public register application on the network.
It is backed by a record hashspace which would be used to record ownership of something in the physical world.
Babblers can add something they own to the public ledger for instance.
It might be a document, pet, car, house, fridge.
It must be linked to the real world object by some kind of real world id, but also by photos, and documents.
The link might be a serial number, numberplate, machine id, and description, perhaps an RFID code,
or barcode, or stock number etc.
Babblers can then flag the item as missing, stolen, recycled, destroyed, lent out, or sold to another Babbler.
This means that any item found by anyone in the world can be identified by that person on this globabl
database, and the status and ownership determined on a phone, tablet, or wearable on any OS, in any country,
by any person.
Images hashspace
Users can add images and tag them, the network can use image recognition to tag objects.
The network acts like an image database.
Users can be paid for reproduction of their image.
This allows the network to be a distributed stock photo library.
It offers an alternative to Shutterstock, Getty, istockphoto.com, istock.com, unsplash.com.
Geolocation hashspace
A keyspace is mapped to latitude and longitude squares on the surface of the earth, so that every 30 square
metres have hash.
DNS/IP hashspace
IP addresses and hostnames have hashes, so that looking up the hash of an IP address returns the domain name
and vice versa, forming a global DNS system.
Inserting
How is data added to the network?
Data to be inserted is hashed and posted to the network with a formatted insert message.
Nodes route the message to the node which controls that hash. The responsible node saves the data
and returns ok to the inserting node.
Selecting
How does a user retrieve (select) data from the network?
Searching nodes create the hash of the data they want and post it to the network, which routes it to the responsible node, which returns the data. Each node has a hash
table for each data point.
Updating
How is data changed on the network?
We have two choices, either we delete the data at the first key, create a new hash and then insert that, or update the data at the.
I think it has to be moved.
Data to be inserted is hashed and posted to the network with a formatted insert message.
Nodes route the message to the node which controls that hash. The responsible node saves the data
and returns ok to the inserting node.
Deleting
[formatting message to delete]
DAO
What is a DAO?
A DAO is an organisation embedded in a network. A "Distributed Autonomous Organisation".
The purpose of the DAO is to maintain and improve the network, causing it follow its vision and mission.
It is collectively used by people that are using the network.
They participate in the DAO by interacting with the network.
It is embedded in very many connected machines, which govern how its users can relate to one another.
A DAO provides a framework for humans to coordinate, cooperate and collaborate.
The DAO has rules, and the rules are established in protocols written into the software that each node runs.
The rules can be any rules, a little bit like the rules of a game.
The network enforces the rules through its protocol.
Changes can be made to the rules of the DAO and the DAO can take action based on decisions its members make.
They make decisions by voting, usually each member has an equal vote weight, so all voices count equally. [are there exceptions]
Voting is handled by the network, and cannot be gamed, it is automatic and trustworthy.
DAOs can have a treasury, a digital pot of value, which its members can make decisions about.
Node owners automatically have a voice in all decisions that are taken by the DAO.
Their ability is not a right, nor is it anything legal. It is a property of access to their node.
Each node can contribute 1 vote to any decision of the DAO.
Node owners can propose actions to be taken by the DAO, node owners can contribute a vote or abstain.
The technology and philosophy of the DAO is tremendously powerful.
In effect it enforces rules of good behaviour, and can't be bribed, threatened, cajoled, persuaded, or bullied.
Can the network do harm to its users?
The network is a large number of connected machines, it is neutral, it cannot do any harm.
The question might be "can someone, or a group acting together exploit other users, or take control of the network?".
It is impossible for a node owner to exploit the network.
It remains to be seen whether collusion or concert parties could exploit.
It is hard to organise inside a DAO because the node owners are anonymous and are geographically and socially disparate.
Traditional forms of human social manipulation should not work.
What is the vision of the DAO?
Imagine a world where there was a free, open network for all people without regard to any conventional social distinction,
on which they could share, trade, and discover.
What is the mission of the DAO?
The mission of the DAO is to achieve this vision by enabling and constantly improving a network
which is universal, secure, anti-fragile, open source, and useful.
The utility of the network is its usefulness to the greatest number.
All decisions must further this primary aim. This provides the focus for all improvement proposals and implementations.
Cardano has a foundation who has a mission which is very wide, and is focused on the protocol, not its implemenation, or human use.
Ethereum has a foundation, which does not seem to have a focus. When improvement proposals are made they cannot be assessed, and the conversation is unstructured and undirected.
How does it focus the mission in practice?
We can think of the DAO as a computer game or a really good board game.
It has players, rules, levels, roles, and an objective.
Babble however is a bit more complicated, because it is also a swarm.
The network operates as a swarm. Each node has a human behind it, and they and their node make an autonomouse agent.
The game or network objective is to optimise a network functin which we will call B.
B = Sum ( a + b + c + d + e ) B = the utility function set out in the mission of the DAO. And a,b,c,d,e are network metrics to be optimised.
Network engineering style
We think that software and hardware engineering should follow some simple principles:
be simple
be nimble
be flexible
be quick
be secure
It has a purpose, but how is it going to realise it?
In order to assist in decision-making, there are secondary aims which are there to help in the first aim:
increase node autonomy and equality
increase node numbers
increase node hardware efficiency, and design
increase node and network and protocol security
increase distributed properties of the network
increase network speed
increase range and quality of apps
increase awareness of web3 philosophy
assist other web3 projects including semantic web, EFF [others], W3C
promote research toward the vision
is it postmodern? Yes it is the intersection between consumer exploitation in the digital world (a cultural tension)
and giving back ownership of the digital world to the consumer, where it came from, who own it, and where it belongs.
This is a kind of rebalancing, a shifting of power relationships away from the Surveillance Capitalists [n] and back where it belongs - in the home.
How do people collaborate to achieve the network mission?
Virtual advocates
The DAO will have virtual coordinators, advocates, leaders, executives, officer. Call them what you will. It's all the same.
We will have a creative advocate. But this role is made up of self-appointed individuals. There will be as many as there are.
The role is self-organising. It is open, it will be in flux.
They will coordinate themselves, collaborate, share, and develop ideas, initiatives, and proposals, and action.
What kind of advocates do we envisage?
Storytellers - tell everyone the story, experience the story (marketing)
Story writers - write the story, maintain the story (brand manager)
Providers - get the box for you, plug it in, turn it on (sales and installation)
Supporters - troubleshooting, assistance
Continuing communication - the user is valued
network defenders
hardware improvers
core developers, with playground, testnet, sandbox
connected device makers
DAO game engineering
Focus on documents and code
We use open source code and open source documentation.
The docs are divided into areas of interest, and those are aligned with the overall network objectives.
The secondary objectives (aims) can be broken down into smaller tasks, however this is not how Bitcoin has developed.
It is likely that parallel lines of communication (slack, email, IM, chatrooms, forums ) would be used to futher debate.
Each area of interest will attract people of differing skills and knowledge.
Anyone can work on the project and in any area, no permission is required.
Only members of the network can assist in committing work. You have to be in it to win it.
The open source workflow features pull requests, code reviews and commits, with branches.
The network must contain a copy of itself, so the complited binary of the reference implementation of Babble core.
This gives the network resilience, and self-sustainability.
will be copied to every node, and available to anyone over https. In due course the whole of the source code will be available as a distributed open source code base.
Players (network members) can leave or join the game at will. Players can take on roles.
The roles indicate people who have specialised activities in the game. Anyone can take on any role with any permission.
The roles are to be decided but are likely to be things like "moderator", "editor", "proposer", "network grower", "coordinator/organiser", "researcher",
Players can earn skill badges, reputational scores, and other stuff which has been used successfully on Stackoverflow and such.
The game has rules, these rules and the objective are hard-coded into each node. The nodes follow the rules.
The rules can be changed, but the overall objective cannot be changed. Therefore any rule changes must be to optimise the objective.
What does "decentralised" mean really?
The politics
It has always been a political and social model, resonating with ideas of freedom, liberty, equality, opportunity.
It has always been a model of devolution, democracy, ownership, and local governance.
It is naturally inclusive, levelling, open, transparent, respectful and accepting.
It is contrary to exploitation, coersion, and control.
It is broadly the terms of reference of most political parties.
The layers
We imagine the network in several layers (a stack, in developer terms). [Note 3]
Developer layer
Token distribution layer
Blockchain layer (chain reaction)
Infastructure layer
External layer
Most crypto projects fail on one or more of these, often this is evident when something awful happens, like a hack, crash, departure, fraud, or project death.
We believe it is both possible and necessary to be as distributed as possible in all these areas.
The developer layer means there must be a diversified group of developers, geographically and in terms of skills. No keystone individual, no rock stars.
The SEC [Howey test] considers who and how many people are setting a public expectation of profit from investing in a project.
The token distribution layer relates to the tokenomics of the token or coin, the distribution or vesting of the token, protocol changes, and governance.
Projects with whales, or companies who control or dominate the network are a no-no.
It means no company, foundation or group can fork the network (Ethereum), turn it off (Terra-Luna), hijack it (Steem-Tron) [examples of it going wrong]
The blockchain layers relates to node numbers, node locations, validators, and node hosting. Bitcoin has around 15,000 nodes, Etherum around 6,000 nodes, Solana around 1,500 nodes.
These are the biggest, and many projects have multi-billion dollar values on the back of just a few hundred nodes. We hope to have millions of nodes.
Many projects have node instances running on centralised servers, run by the biggest, most centralised, companies in the world (AWS).
Peer to peer does not involve Amazeone. That's kind of the point. That doesn't work for us.
When AWS goes down so does the network, but is not the reason to avoid it, the reason is Amazon is what we are trying to dissolve.
The infastructure layer relates to wallet software and online exchanges.
Wallets must be free, open and always available.
Wasabi wallet and MetaMask are controlled.
Exchanges are on-ramps to most people from the fiat-verse to the crypto-verse.
This is both a control point and a bottleneck. We don't want controlled access, we want open access.
We can sort this in 2 ways, first by airdropping tokens to a valid joining node, controlled by the protocol, and second, by Shopifying everyone.
Everyone will have access to a payment gateway on their server. BOOM.
We don't need KYC (Know Your Customer) because there is no customer.
The external layer relates to project website hosting, code hosting, messaging platforms, and internet gateways (Internet Service Providers or ISPs).
It also includes blockchain key custody. This is now being taken over by legacy organisations (Blackrock).
The answer to this is in projects like Helium, a peer to peer wireless network, with a utility token and a brilliant idea.
Why is it important?
Its social importance should be obvious, who doesn't want to live in world where we cooperate together for mutual benefit?
Who doesn't want to live in world free of exploitation and coersion?
But it is also important because a decentralised network will be largely free (for now) from the sticky fingers of goverment regulators.
Regulators would love to wrap up a network in their icy vampire grip then suck the life out of it.
How do we spread the word?
Humans understand the world in stories. We are going to tell a story.
We are using a DAO to focus the story and grow the network.
The story will be focused by the network brand, and maintained by the DAO.
A brand is an abstraction creating a coherent way of communicating the purpose and values of a collective or organistion.
It helps to organise stories about the collective, and makes the collective approachable, understandable, and connected to the individual.
In order for people to acquire a Brainbox node they must
hear the story
like it, feel it
want it
find it
connect it in your home
use it
The growth strategy must revolve around encouraging and handling each of these simple steps.
Who is in control?
This is a good question. The answer is no-one, and everyone.
Just like Bitcoin and Ethereum have no CEO, no board, no shareholders, but they have grown and grown.
Can an organisation be disorganised?
I like the way you ask all the right questions. The answer is yes. It is a little counterintuitive.
We like counterintuitive because the world is giving us an opporunity to learn something,
to dare to be different. We have grown up with hierarchies, with social levels.
Rustie has always been a crypto-anarchist, in both senses of the description.
It is a fascinating feature of natural social oranisations that complex and efficient behaviour
can and does happen without any central control or command. It happens spontaneously.
This is the feature of swarms. We have had it in human society as well, we just really notice it much.
The history of science and mathematics is one of disorganised organisation. Scientists have a shared problem,
they all know it, because they read about it and share it with other like-minded people who also understand
the problem. They go away work independently on the problem, then share their efforts in papers, conferences, books.
We have been doing this since the Royal Society begin 350 years ago.
The internet has shown us that people can work independntly on a common project without any coordination.
Just a sharing platform is required. Wikipedia showed that millions of independent editors can produce amazing stuff.
So yes, there can be rules without rulers.
DAO will still have functions and areas of focus, much like a legacy company
A helping hand
Just in case the child network needs a helping hand itself, we propose that the network have a parent DAO,
a mother and father DAO. It will be created at the outset, and raise some value outside of the Babble network.
It will have meatspace representatives, and go to conferences, and write code. But it will dissolve itself after a year or so.
But how do contributors get paid?
This is also counterintuitive. We all know that nobody works for nothing, right? Wrong.
Creative people will create, whether they are paid or not.
Innovative people will innovate, designers will design, coders will code.
There are millions of talented people, youtube and social media have shown that, in spades.
The internet has begun to free up a massive amount of untapped talent.
We have been brainwashed into believing that only professionals (who get paid) are competent,
and that amateurs (who do what they do for the love of it) are incompetent.
This is (com)patent nonsense. Most of the greatest acts of creativity and imagination and hard work
were done by amateurs for the love of what they do. Great art, great science, great theories, great innovations.
What motivates them?
Some do it for the reputation, some because they want to contribute to something that excites them,
some like working like this, some know that contributing to a global tech project is good for their CV,
some get useful coding experience, and developers tend to work this way anyhow.
Are there network rules?
Sure. The DAO demands good behaviour, so we can set out positive rules like those on Reddit forums.
The network could have an overall administration protocol, it could have policies,
network improvement proposal NIP (BIP is used by Bitcoin), requests for comments RFC,
like the w3c, with engineering-like approaches, and a drive for interoperability, and common standards, and cooperation between tech companies.
It would probably be better to administer these outside the network
where are the docs?
These are great ideas, but where are they set out? If there is a kind of charter, magna carta, declaration of indepence
where is it? The mission/articles of assoc/rules/philosophy in a file with IPFS hash on the network or outside of it
How do we increase utility?
Improve the network speed, security, application power
The DAO is structured to reward contributions to the network from everyone and anyone.
There are rewards for network improvement to developers, creatives, engineers, designers.
The network vision is that anyone who contributes to the utility of the network in any way should be rewarded.
Open source projects often reward developers with reputation, which they may ormay not be able t oonetise,
but we feel that they should be rewarded with value as well as recognition. They are, the words of L'Oreal, worth it.
How does it help the greatest number?
Increase scale
The DAO will work energetically to give Babble network access to every home that has an internet connection.
Nodes are free and easy to get running, understand and use. More here.
Improve network access
UVery large numbers of the human biological units do not have access to the internet.
Some only have access through via datalinks over a mobile network using their phone and SIM card.
The DAO will work to extend network access to those who don't enjoy it.
Can the DAO hold things of value outside of the network?
Yes. Existing DAOs hold digital assets recorded on other networks.
It is not yet clear what the legal implications of DAOs are.
This form of human collaboration is so new that it has not been tested.
Can the DAO be a communication provider?
Wow, that is a really good question. You are asking "can a DAO be an ISP or SIP gateway"?
Nobody really knows, we will have to address it, and conclude.
Can the DAO employ people?
In theory a DAO can employ humans, manage them, direct them, but we don't really want to reproduce inefficient and exploitative corporate behaviours.
The DAO can hold legal title to land, buildings, assets, bank accounts, race horses, collectibles, bonds, gold, and transactions on other networks.
Wowzas. if babble nodes ran a bitcoin wallet, or eth wallet etc, the node could handle the cross chain transaction
What is the legal status of the DAO?
I am very excited that you asked that question, because nobody knows.
In practice the DAO is a simple partnership in most Western juristictions.
The DAO would probably have to be registered as a Limited Partnership or some such, in a crypto-friendly jurisdiction like Switzerland or Malta.
What does the future look like?
The second law of thermodynamics prevents us from answering that question truthfully with information.
But we can look at how communication channels have evolved on the internet so far, and project just a little further.
Digital communications over the internet started with sharing content, mainly cats and sex.
Then came data sharing via APIs (Application Protocol Interfaces), the semantic web has not yet taken off, but there is still scope for it to happen.
We forsee distributed manufacturing in the form of machine instructions to 3D printers, purchased over the net, and
manufactured locally by fabricators using the purchased machine instructions.
The network
How is it structured?
What is its topology?
All networks have a structure, also known as its architecture.
The Babble network structure is that of a small world network.
A small world network has many local peers, closely connected with other local peers,
but also has a small number of random and distant peers.
This creates the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, so that no node is more than six hops from any other node.
The distant nodes are distant both geographically, but also logically in terms of the hashspace they control. More of that later.
The number of peers of each node will grow with the network size,
and will reach equilibrium of around 33 unique peers if the network reaches 3bn nodes.
We can imagine it as a manifold, a 2 dimensional surface mapped onto a 3 dimensional sphere.
It has a fractal dimension between 2 and 3.
What has it got to do with Bitcoin?
Well nothing really. However, it is possible that we could use the Bitcoin blockchain block hashes to create
node IDs which are deterministic and related to those blocks.
The key point of interest here is that the block hashes are public, easily retrieved, determined, and immutable.
If we have a function which uses them to create a hash for a given node number, we have a node ID which must be true.
function(node number) = derived hash
Mechanics
Nodes are invited by existing nodes, this is the only way they can join.
Joining nodes are allocated peers by the inviting node, which will allocate from its own peers
first, but also look for more distant nodes, with more hops.
Distant peers are selected to be geographically remote. Each node has an IPv4 address.
IPs are allocated by ICANN, a US private organisation (wtf!), so their geographical spread can be known.
They are also selected to be logically remote in terms of the CAN.
The network self-organises as it grows.
Sectors of the IP address space are allocated to these regions, after a whole load are reserved for the military (not kidding).
The peer-forming protocol should take account of this.
Alternatively we could create eight geographic sectors
promote kickstarter nodes in all sectors
squash all land masses into all of 8 sectors, if in doubt go to country level
How big can it get?
There are around 3.5 billion households globally, and about 60% of those have an internet connection (Src: here),
penetration of 60% is growing rapidly in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Middle East.
Even at today's level there are about 2bn households with internet (perhaps 1.6bn, src ICANN ), this is max poss size of a p2p network.
That is rather large. The data on the network would expand as the network nodes and users grew, so it will never suffer from too much data on too few servers.
The maximum size of the network is around 3bn nodes, so it could nearly support a node for every household,
but many more households would have to be connected which don't have a connection now.
We believe that a network running on domestic low-energy micro-servers is the missing piece of web3. What do you think?
how do kickstarter nodes join each other?
Each winning node is sent the IP address of a genesis node.
The winning node sends its JOIN REQ to that IP address.
We allocate the kickstarter nodes equally to genesis nodes.
We already have 5 or 8 genesis nodes which are interconnected.
How does it start
It starts with a small number of nodes, just as ARPANET did in the 1960s.
These will need to be geographically spread, and mapped to the necessary regions.
After the C3PO the successful bidders join the genesis nodes, to form the embryo network.
After that the DAO will coordinate to finalise the Brainbox server apps and Babble reference implemenation.
Then the network will go live, and the DAO will coordinate the storytelling, and providing, and supporting.
How does the node swarm coordinate itself?
all nodes have global values, like a swarm optimising agents
network rules are intended to generate optimisation, they have local values too, and use both to optimise
whatever we decide to optimise. Probably node numbers, protocol communication efficiency.
Each node would have a range of network variables, which will be agreed with other nodes, and percolate
when updated. They would act like local and global variables in swarm algorithms.
[a company is a body of individuals cooperating together.
that should be something capable of swarm modelling.
each agent has a small set of rules, they have a state, they communicate with their neighbours,
they don't have a strategic direction, ants don't have a big picture, they have a local picture]
Complex emergent behaviour should arise from this Complex Adaptive System, which is also a DAO, and a game, and a network, and a swarm.
Who owns it?
Nobody owns the network. Nobody owns the protocol, nobody owns the code. They are gift, to each other.
Users own their own node, and their own data, their own content, their own products, their own opinions, their own lives.
Your ownership of your node gives you access to share in the network's utility, its choices and its direction.
Where is it?
It's everywhere and nowhere, baby. Each node lives in someone's home. But the network itself is an overlay.
It exists on top of the world wide web.
The www is geographically global or diverse.
The Babble network is geographically diverse as well.
The globe is divided into eight sectors on the surface of a sphere.
The all land masses are mapped to a sector so that all sectors are used in a nearly equal way.
What is its capacity?
The network capacity grows faster than the network demand.
Most new users do not require the capacity they bring to the network by joining.
The network gets stronger as it gets bigger.
We can think of its data capacity, file storage capacity, and computing capacity.
Content
Content in the form of text, images, videos in various web-friendly formats is created by content-producers.
The capacity of the network is similar to that of file storage.
Raw data
Structured data would be available over an API or embedded in a webpage with semantic html tags.
There is effectively no limit to data on this network.
File storage
The storage capacity of the network would be approximately the number of nodes muliplied by 1Tb.
Each node has a sector of its hard drive avaialble to the network.
If the network grows to around 25m nodes, or 1% of maximum penetration, the combined storage space would be equal to the combined size
of all the largest cloud service providers in 2022 (Src: here).
A petabyte PB is 1024 TB, so 2bn households running a node would create storage of 2 000 000 petabytes.
By challenging cloud providers with a distributed cloud a giant amount of money would make its way to the network providers (households).
Computational cycles
Using a grid computing concept it would have capacity of n x 2 cores where n = number of nodes,
and assuming 2 of the 4 cores of the most basic hardware platform were made available to the network.
How does it grow?
Community and relationships
When a node joins with other nodes a relationship is created, and the community is extended.
Each node owner is incentivised to bring in new nodes.
Does the DAO help?
But we won't leave it to chance. The DAO will employ an advocate in network growth, their job will similar to a business development manager.
They will work to promote the growth of the network as fast as possible, and keep the DAO incentives under review, for improvement.
The DAO has a brand, and the humans can work for the network by promoting the brand and so the network.
We would hope for advertising and promotion across most traditional communication channels.
The DAO could have a communications budget.
Why does it grow?
I'm so pleased you asked that. The network is self-growing as it contains incentives and viral node reproduction.
It will attact users wanting access to content, storage, discovery, services and the Brainbox personal server.
As people join they contribute to the network capacity, and hopefully will contribute commerce or content.
They are paid to join the network, getting free hardware, and free useable tokens. They are paid to join.
Once on the network they are paid for every new node they introduce. They can sell nodes from the open source instruction set.
They can contribute software work, or marketing or sales work for the DAO.
In the future they will be able to work for network services like expert systems, machine learning training, and more.
The network uses the token economy to encourage positive network behaviour as each owner is rewarded for bringing more owners in.
This drives adoption very quickly. Exponential growth would be expected.
Metcalfe's law would suggest the value of the network will be related to its social network strength.
As the value of the network money grows the incentive to join the network and obtain the free joining bonus increases.
It can grow by piggy-backing the network on another useful service. A household micro-server, which provides its owner with other very useful functions,
media, documents, data, smart device control, telephony, all household and personal data at the users fingertips.
How secure is it?
I heard about "bad actors", they don't sound good. Yes, bad actors are people inside and outside the network who try to harm it, or users on it.
The network protocols ensure that if you try to cheat other nodes you will be thrown out!
A network based on content-addressing and where access to the network is predicated on contribution to the network is safer, and less prone to bad actors
Nodes are grey-listed for minor infringements or while inconsistencies are being resolved by the network.
Nodes are red-listed for major issues. A red-listed node may no longer participate in the network.
they must invest in a new node, new IP and new ISP connection,
Their Webnotes are reassigned to the DAO for use in maintaining the network.
This may be a significant cost to the user.
There will be integrity in numbers. When Bill Gates wanted to influence the debate around free speech
with Elon Musk he considered employing 3,000 people to balance things his way. When the United Nations wanted to
amplify their COVID message and suppress the expression of other views they recruited 110,000 people to monitor
social media [src]
That number would be vanishingly small in the context of 1m nodes, 10m nodes, 100m nodes, 1bn nodes.
It will be impossible to influence or change or control a network of autonomous users at this scale.
There will be integrity in anonymity. If users make contributions, changes, vote or work for the network
and do so as numbers not people, they are protected from adverse influence. No-one can check whether they voted for or against,
or did or didn't do something on the network. This obviates normal human adverse influence, coersion, blackmail, or whatever.
There is integrity in crypto
There is integrity in nodes joining by invitation, by node reputation, by protocol sanctions, by peers validating their peers,
by Merkel trees which validate peers joined to peers.
How do we keep track of growth?
Network size is recorded by the network itself.
A small group of nodes act as record keepers.
Introducting nodes inform the record keepers when a new node has successfully joined.
The recording nodes are self-organising, and will appoint a replacement node when one drops off the grid.
They maintain consensus, and may be queried for the network size with a formatted message.
Tokenomics
Are there any tokens?
Yes, the network features a built-in utility token.
The unit of account of the network is a webnote, it has a subdivision of 100 webcoins.
Babble is a layer 1 network, and its tokens (Webnotes and webcoins) are layer 1 tokens.
Other layer 1 networks are Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, Cardarno, Polkadot, Terra, Avalanche, Polygon, Algorand and TRON.
Nodes are allocated Webnotes when they join the network, more of that later.
Nodes hold a record of their own balances, but the balance is proved only by their peers.
Nodes can transmit part of their balance to any other node, more on this later.
There is no wallet, as there is only one balance and no public or private keys for the balance.
However, we will talk of the node having a wallet because it is easier to understand, the node in essence IS the wallet.
There is no blockchain, and transactions are validated by peers, the tx node, the rx node and the protocol. More on this later.
How does token supply increase?
Webnotes are created on four occasions.
at the birth of the network
an airdrop allocated to new nodes when they join the network
an annual bounty allocated to running nodes each year based on uptime
a contribution bonus allocated when someone wants to contribute utility to the network
How are Webnotes allocated at birth?
A number of Webnotes are created and allocated at the birth of the network.
The kickstarter funders are successful bidders for genesis nodes. The kickstarter is run by a DAO on the Ethereum network.
The DAO commits suicide on completion of the bidding and allocation of the nodes.
Token vestment at birth
Founder
1,000,000
Pre-launch developers
500,000
Kickstarter funders
1,000,000
DAO
1,000,000
What about joining nodes?
Newly joining nodes are rewarded with an airdrop of Webnotes.
The network will reward those involved in joining nodes in this way:
Cost to network of new nodes
Who?
Minted
Owner
70%
Introducer
15%
Manufacturer
15%
The number of Webnotes airdropped to joining nodes is adjusted for the size of the network as it evolves.
The airdrop is halved each time the network increases a decimal order of magnitude.
Airdrop evolution
Less than n nodes
Joining airdrop
10k
1024
100k
512
1m
256
10m
128
100m
64
Airdropped Webnotes are awarded by the network. Specifically the peers of the new node.
Nodes are rewarded each year with a bounty for running a node.
What about the annual bounty?
Node availability, or uptime, is rewarded. Nodes are rewarded for being and reduced for misbehaviour.
Bounty is halved each time the network doubles.
Node rewards and punishments
Behaviour
Reward
Downtime reduction
1% bounty per day
Each node introduction
1k
Greylisting reduction
50% of bounty
Redlisting reduction
100% of Webnotes balance
The annual bounty is reduced in a fixed way as the network evolves.
Annual bounty evolution
Up to n nodes
Node bounty
Max issuance
100
10,000
1m
1k
5,000
5m
10k
2,500
25m
100k
1,250
125m
1m
625
625m
10m
30
300m
100m
3
300m
What about BIMP contributions?
If a developer raises a network improvement proposal (BIMP) and works on it with others, and the proposal is implemented, the team nodes are airdropped with n tokens.
What about cash injections?
However, if users want to contribute more utility to the DAO, they can offer to swap their currency for Webnotes and the DAO can issue new Webnotes in return.
This does not dilute the utility of tokens held by everyone else, as the token supply increases, and so does the network utility.
All increases in token supply are directly related and proportional to network utility.
All increases in network utility are spread equally between all Babble users.
That is because Webnotes are analogous to a fungible currency. Each webnote is exactly equal to all other Webnotes.
Does the supply of Webnotes get out of balance with demand?
Hopefully not. The supply of Webnotes is likely to be always in balance with the demand for Webnotes.
The total supply of Webnotes increases as the network size increases.
The increase in users brings an increase in tokens from joining airdrops.
Any increase in demand for tokens from users can be met from adding capital contributions to the DAO.
Some increase in demand may come from the market price of Webnotes increasing more rapidly than other tokens.
When the network is mature, its growth will slow, and the supply of Webnotes will increase slowly with the annual bounty.
More users means more demand but also more tokens.
If the supply of Webnotes does start to get out of balance with demand this will be evident from the value of a Webnote token.
The value of a Webnote will rise or fall such that the value of 1 Webcoin will have less utility.
This might be because, for example, a Webcoin is too large to make desired micropayments.
The network is self-regulating, and its solution to this problem is token splitting.
Token splitting
If the off-network value of Webnotes becomes too large the protocol will react to rebalance.
A Webnote becomes too large when a Webcoin becomes too large.
A Webcoin becomes too large when a Webcoin needs to be divided down to meet the smallest expected transactions.
The smallest expected transaction SET will be set by the protocol.
This is necessary to maintain the micropayment function of the network.
We could have sub-divisions of Webcoins but that is counterintuitive, in the physical world we don't divide up our small coins.
We might expect this to be something like a small tip. Alice want to give Bob a micropayment, the exquivalent of 25c in her local currency.
A big Mac costs $4.50. If a Webnote is worth $1,000, the smallest denomination she has, a Webcoin, is worth $10, which is far to high for her proposed micropayment.
The network will recognise this imbalance dynamically and split tokens by n.
This would be analagous to the difficulty variable in the Bitcoin protocol.
Let's say the network splits tokens by 10. Alice has 200 Webnotes and 56 Webcoins. After the split she will have 2000 Webnotes and 56 Webcoins.
They will have the same value as before the split, because everyone recieves the same split.
Token consolidation
The opposite of splitting is consolidation. When the value of a webcoin becomes too small the network will consolidate
tokens. If Alice has 2000 webnotes and 67 webcoins and the network has calculated that there should be a 20% consolidation
she will have 1600 webnotes and 67 webcoins. It is unnecessary to consolidate webcoins.
Crypto exchanges
Webnotes will be listed on a DEX - a Distributed Exchange.
The first well known DEX was Uniswap, an Automated Market Maker (AMM).
It is an algorithmic agent created from smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.
It provides a mechanism for users to swap one token for another in a decentralised and automatic way.
It does this by allowing other users to contribute to a pool of liquidity in advance for two or more tokens, and sets the price of a swap with a formula at the time of a swap.
Uniswap is a constant function market maker (CFMM), in particular is uses a constant product.
a * b = k Where a is the supply of token A and b is the supply of token B
By this method Babblers can swap some of their tokens for tokens on other networks. This is called bridging.
The really cool thing is that Babblers can stake some of their webnotes to the DEX to provide liquidity to it.
In return they get an interest rate paid, a normal and useful interest rate, instead of the central bank nonsense we have lived with for 12 years.
Burning
There could be a burn policy, in order to create stability with other currencies.
Stable coins have burn and create policies. Burning tokens in usually involves sending tokens to an address for which there is no key.
The key is either not created with the public adress or it is destroyed. In the Babble network this is not necessary.
Values on the network are balances not the last transaction in a chain of transactions.
Is there a minimum balance?
Yes, nodes must retain a minium balance of Webnotes. This means that everyone has skin in the game.
If a node is greylisted its required minimum balance increases.
If a node is redlisted its Webnotes are distributed to its peers before it is shut out.
Keeping track of tokens
Who keeps track of the token supply?
The network allocates a node to keep track of the token supply. That node allocates a number of other nodes to act as a team.
When the network allocates new tokens the recordkeeper nodes update. Anyone on the network can ping the recordkeeper
node for the number.
What gives Webnotes their value?
the utility of the network
the people who own and use the network
the things of value owned by the DAO.
the expectation of future improvements, in the scale and scope of apps and services
the expectation of future network size
the expectation of future increase in network utility
How do we establish that value?
Webnotes will get their first taste of valuation when Kickstarter people make their bids for genesis nodes.
In general an exchange rate would be available thro parallel transactions, in other words exchanges in the network for things outside the network.
For instance is Alice sells 1 Bitcoin to Bob on the bitcoin network, and Bob accordingly transfers n Webnotes to Alice on the Babble network
then 1 bitcoin = n Webnotes
If Alice wants a pizza, she orders one from Bob
Bob delivers her a pizza, Alice transfers n Webcoins to Bob on the Babble network
Now 1 pizza = (say) £10 in London = n webcoins = n/100 Webnotes
When Bob offers to buy additional Webnotes from the DAO, and offers n tokens from another cryptocurrency, say USDT or MATIC,
there is an implied exchange rate.
We will have a price signal when Charlie offers her services in return for Webnotes, we know how much she charges fo her coding skills in Euros, so now we have a Webnotes equivalent.
Will it be volatile?
Volatility is a measure of how much a thing varies in exchange value against another thing.
We might think about the exchange rate of Euros, Pounds, Dollars or Yen against a Webnote.
But that misses the point. Webnotes are an embedded token in a network which anyone can join.
Once you are on the network you are given free tokens, and you earn more by contributing to the network.
You can buy or sell inside the network wihtout haveing to exhcnage your fiat for tokens. So you dont care about exhcnage rates.
Volitility be damned.!
why would anyone use Webnotes?
Webnotes are a share in a global network of millions of micro-servers.
Each micro-server has utility, as a household home network connected device.
The network also has utility, that utility has value, the tokens are are share in that value.
The network has built-in incentives to grow, it is self-growing. As it grows its utility increases, and the valuge of its tokens increases.
Tokens must be owned if a vendor is offering goods or serives in Webnotes, the only way to aquire Webnotes is to participate in the network and make it a little bit bigger.
As it gets bigger it gets faster, with more services, more apps, more users, more processing power, more storage. The network utility grows faster than its users.
Positive feedback loops are built into the network design, they are a feature.
Owning Webnotes is like holding currency in an economy which is growing at an exceptionally high rate.
Settlement system
Some history
Bitcoin showed in the last 10 years or more that value could be created by a network, and store value, and move control of value between people.
In the word of Andreas Antonopolous, Bitcoin turned money into a Content-Type.
In September 2017 Rustie purchased £200 of Bitcoin as an experiment, then paid half of it to a plumber for services rendered.
The experiment was a success, but in December 2019 Rustie took a closer look at Bitcoin and how it had developed since 2009, and formed a critique.
It was this critique that led her to formulate a different approach to network-based value storage and settlement.
She devised a working protocol which formed the basis for Babble today.
The problem with Bitcoin
Rustie noted that Bitcoin has many problems. It was not distributed, slow, data intensive, did not reward those contributing to the network by running a node,
it was technical, hard to understand, hard to use, attracted Government suspicion and therefore anti-network behaviour,
it is energy intensive, expensive for small payments, hard to acquire without using on-ramps via exchanges which are both regulated by government, and centralised.
On top of all that (and that is a lot already) it faces scaling limitations with a fixed and small blocksize.
We can add to all of this the problem that users lose their private keys. There are well known cases of people losing fortunes after losing their keys.
Users need more software in the form of wallets, they need one on each of their devices, they don't understand them,
they need hard wallets like Trezor, which means more passwords, and more hardware to lose or look after.
They need to worry about cold storage, paper print outs, pass phrases, seed phrases. It's exhausting!
Add to all this that some have got enough value on the chain to need to pay for a third party to take custody of it for them.
And I thought this was a "peer to peer payment system" [qotoe bitcoin paper].
It is these barriers that open the door to intermediation, and centralisation.
It is too complex for the average user, even a technical user, so experts and capital come together to abstract away the pain. The irony is that a purely peer to peer technology has been
overtaken by centralised interests.
Reading between the lines of the whitepaper the network was always intended to be run by technical smart-arses who would get paid to run and secure the network using a privileged circle of servers.
That is what we now have a network run by highly technical people funded by the rich.
Bitcoin has proved that a network can embody value, and how it could be secured.
It launched a thousand alternatives and improvements.
Thirteen years after the project began the average person cannot use Bitcoin. In 2018 and 2019 Rustie offered meadow hay for Bitcoin.
She had no takers, she was offered British pounds.
Bitcoin and other networks are being absorbed or assimilated by the very structures that they were created to oppose.
Bitcoin and the other networks have proved what doesn't work and why.
This gives us an opportunity to create something even better.
Balances not transactions
Each node has a data record which represents its balance in a network money unit.
The balance each node records is held by all its peers, which act as witnesses for that balance.
In fact the balance is not owned by the node itself but by its peers.
It is a model much like the social production of identity.
Node owners can adjust balances with another peer, this represents a payment and receipt.
There is a network protocol for this transaction, which cannot be faked, or gamed.
Protocol
[fold in protocol description set out in presentation]
Your internet bank account
This payment system runs alongside a secure communication channel, search engine, and e-commerce webhosting capability.
This means that users can search, browse, negotiate and pay for stuff over the internet on a single network.
The Webnotes airdropped to every node allow anyone to purchase over the internet with an unheard of ease.
We don't imagine that users will accumlate large quantities of Webnotes, but instead use their stash to make their usual internet purchases.
Fees
Transaction fees are zero. There are no gas fees, no validator fees, no miners fees.
Speed
The settlement time is likely to be a few seconds.
Zerocost payments and Micropayments
Micropayments are possible on Babble, because transaction fees are zero. I must have misheard you, I thought you said zero [laughter].
No, transactions are costless.
A payment of 1 webcoin between Alice and Bob- where 1 webcoin might purchase 1/10 of a cup of coffee -is possible.
The cost of a transaction on Bitcoin is currently about £8.
Consensus and separation
Consensus across the network is not necessary in the way it is for Bitcoin.
The issue for distributed networks is that the users are separated from the network.
They do not own the network, own a node, run it, make choices about it, or know much about it.
They do not have skin in the game. In order to use the service they
trust node owners
Trust the project devs
Trust the protocol
Communicate with a node they do not own or see
When a user IS the network, they do not need to trust a network they do not belong to,
they can trust their own hardware to be interwoven with a large number of other households with the same hardware
all running the same software, and all interconnected and interreliant.
No one node can operate outside of the rules of all the other nodes.
There is still a separation between the user (on their browser) and their node, but this is controlled and largely visible,
often inside the home and more tangible, and difficult to intervene.
It is the separation that causes blockchains and consensus validation to be necessary.
A user communicates with a network that they are not part of, about a transaction on a blockchain they do not own.
That is why they have to show that every UTXO transaction originated in a mining transaction, ie is real.
A balance sheet shows a snapshot, a bank account shows a summary of everything that happened.
Blockchains are bank accounts, babble is a bank balance.
Blockchain is all transactions, babble is last balance.
The storage overhead for Webnotes on Babble is effectively nil (32 bytes x number of peers + 1 ).
Security
Security on network relates to the things we wish to remain safe and secure. Financial, personal, family, keys.
I want to share my information, my data, with people I want to share it with. Not with anyone else.
I don't want to send security keys, personal feelings, beliefs, medical information out and have it intercepted, recorded,
and processed by others. I do not want it to be added to my profile and sold to a company I do not know so that they can profit from the most intimate private life of the people I love and myself.
I want to be able to do business with another person or company on the internet and have confidence
The honeypot
If the user has a Brainbox Personal Server there are a lot of attractive stuff on there for the attacker.
The user will have their personal data, household data, family data, photographs, videos, emails, SMSs, documents and more.
They will have their shopping, inventory, accounts, notes, journals, lists, passport and other official numbers, pet details,
car details, search queries, heating data, grocery data, health data, and much more.
Their Babble node will have Webnotes. They can prove to a merchant that they are good for the money, without having to show the merchant anything, using network zero-knowledge proofs.
They can lock sufficient of their funds with other nodes so that the merchant can be sure of payment, before delivering the item.
This is called escrow and there is more about it here.
Babble keeps your financial information secure. You do not need to give away your keys, because you don't have any.
You can't lose your wallet, or your private keys in a wallet, because you don't have any.
You do not need to give strangers access to your bank account, as you do with trad banking.
Your Webnotes are safer than in the bank.
In theory your balance could be discovered by one of your peers, if they were very clever,
but they don't know who you are in person, as peers are mostly not connected to your social network.
What kind of protection can we enjoy?
The best kind. Babble will use military grade cryptography.
If its good enough for the Pentagon and the CIA it's good enough for us.
Zero knowledge proofs (ZKP)
Zero knowledge proofs allow people who don't know each other, can't see each other, or don't trust each other to share over a network.
If Alice is a stranger to Bob, or Alice believes that Bob means her harm, or she believes that Bob would steal from her, she can still interact with him.
Bob can prove to Alice that he owns something, or that a message, or instruction came from him, or that he did something.
This means that Alice and Bob can trust the network, and its protocols, and the mathematics that underlies it.
There are many ways these can work, and how they work depends on what they are seeking to do.
They have the effect of producing trust and helpng strangers on a network work together, and all be safe.
Companies can prove they have solved a problem, individuals can prove they have solved a problem, without showing how they did it.
This keeps their solution a secret, but we can be sure they have solved it.
Progammable contracts
Escrow
Financial DApps may use escrow capabilities offered by the network.
This enables contracting parties to be sure that services or goods are delivered before payment,
and that payment cannot be withheld when the contract is met.
When negotiating a contract, say the purchase of widgets over the internet, the buyer can prove to the seller that they are good for the money
without disclosing how much they have in their wallet.
This process uses zero-knowledge proof ZOKNPOO.
Turing completeness
Turing completeness means any arbitrary code can be run, and assured of completing.
It achieves this with another utility token called "gas". Gas is related to Ether.
Contracts require gas to be executed, and this cost it expected to prevent infinite loops clogging up the network,
or DDoS attacks, in other words accidents or spam. Most smart contracts though do not require loops, and full code complexity.
It is often sufficent to merely make simple payments, or change a balance.
Some projects have adopted simpler, more limited, languages to do what is necessary for smart contracts.
Vyper for example. Babble takes the same approach. Babble will support smart contracts which are as smart as they need to be, and no more.
The upside to this approach is that there is no charge to execute a smart contract on Babble.
However spamming will be hard or impossible, because a repeated request from a single IP will cause it to be greylisted, then blocked.
Protocols such as Ethereum using ether tokens feature programmable transactions.
Future transactions for value represented by ether tokens may be set down in a program called a smart contract
and the network will execute the contract if its conditions are met.
Conditions may be met by time, by data obtained from Oracle sources, or other transactions being detected on the network.
Fees, called gas fees, are charged by the network to upload and exectute a smart contract.
The Babble network features the same functionality. However, no fees are necessary and no fees are payable.
Smart contracts are free.
Gas is not necessary because program loops are not possible, the network cannot be spammed with a rogue contract.
DDoS attacks should be impossible, but more work is needed to understand the threat here.
Secured lending
Network services
What are network services?
The network is able to harness network effects by combining the capacities of millions of micro-servers taken as a whole.
VPN, grid computing, cloud storage, artificial intelligence apps, expert systems, wisdom of crowd, and swarm optimisation algorithms..
VPN
The network can provide a VPN service. Any node owner can connect to a node offering VPN translation. The VPN node
accepts requests from the first node, the first node encrypts its request in the body of a message sent to the VPN node,
the VPN node unpacks the request from the body and make the required request on behalf of the first node, it then encryptes
the response and sends it to the first node, which unpacks and handles it in the client. In this way the ISP and other intermediate
relays cannot determine the ultimate request without having access to the VPN service internals. Which is rather hard to do unless
you are a dedicated government secret service. Even they would find this hard to manage because each request from the originating
node is made to a new VPN node. This approach is different to the Onion Router (TOR), but may be more effective.
Grid computing
Nodes may make CPU cycles available to the network, this is known as grid computing.
Nodes earn Webnotes for
Storage
Nodes automatically make 1Tb of hard drive storage available to the network.
Commercial enterprises may run nodes may offer further storage than the standard 1Tb and this would earn them Webnotes.
The protocol is IPFS and the file data is encrypted before storage.
Machine learning
[stuff]
Swarm intelligence
[stuff]
Expert systems
[stuff]
Net work
What is net work?
Net work is work done by carbon-based units for the network. This kind of work is distinct from work in the DAO or work on the code base.
Anyone with a running node can do paid work for network apps.
A network app is an application which requires human input, or physical world input.
Some applications require human emotions, reactions, activity, knowledge, experience, completing a task.
Estimating
For example estimating something, or giving an emotional response, confirming or checking something, labelling something, or delivering something,
Some applications use a phenomena called 'Wisdom of the crowd' Youtube. Wikipedia
Valuing something
Some apps use this collective intelligence to analyse sentiment, or create decision making applications, where small or large groups of people combine to reach a decision.
It has been shown that predictions made using this process are far more accurate than any individual, the probability of a prediction being correct
was very much higher than any individual, and much higher than chance.
Delivery optimisation
Applications that provide services such as delivery can harness the network to connect providers with drivers.
Expert system rule making
Some apps will develop expert systems. These require experts to add rules.
Labelling for AI models
Some apps required artificial intelligence training, which requires a human being.
Paperwork!
For instance, insurance claims can be processed on the network, but this requires human intervention.
Finding security exploits [not the right word]
Hackers can work for the network.
A security bounty will be available for whitehat hackers. They can propose proven security exploits to the DAO security team.
Obviously privately, when proven the exploit will be patched, the hacker paid, the exploit published, the hacker recognised.
The team
Founder
Rustie Newton spent time as a musician, composer, then accountant, investment banker, historian, then developer.
She is proud to be a colateral descendant of Isaac Newton, and proud of her Aspergers, and gender fluidity.
She is, like the main man Isaac, a restless and fearless thinker.
She is Amazonian in height, with soft grey hair and dreamy blue eyes.
In 2017 she started full time as a developer working on the Brainbox concept, which evolved into the wider Babble concept in 2021.
She wrote the first node instance the same year.
She wants the world to be a fair and inclusive place, where everyone is valued, heard, seen, recognised, appreciated and accepted.
She hopes that Babble will empower householders, especially women, and hopes that technology can be rebalanced toward the feminine.
She is driven to help create a world where technology businesses are unable to exploit their fellow human beings, one line of code and one soldered terminal at at time.
She believes the open source community can work together for positive change by harnessing the power and neutrality of computing devices for everyone.
Project sponsor [find one like these]
Ian Clarke (Freenet)
Andreas Antonopoulos/
Vitalik Buterin(ETH) /
Tim Berners Lee (HTML) /
Juan Benet (IPFS)
Larry Sanger (wiki)
Jimmy Wales (Wiki)
Shawn Fanning (Napster)
Project team
We have a team of tech leads from the English Universities of Durham, East Anglia, Cambridge, and London:
and more from around the world
people who are experts in games may be good at Babble
Networking & security
Name
[Name] is a PhD in [computer science]. CV.
Cryptography and game theory
Name
[Name] is a PhD in [computer science]. CV.
Tokenomics and games
Name
[Name] is a PhD in [computer science]. CV.
Story and language coordinator
Name
A brand leader, innovative, to communicate the network story as widely as possible, to inform
and broaden awareness, they manage the story across 9 principle languages
Spanish/Portugese
Mandarin/Cantonese
Hindi/Urdu/Bengali
English
French
Portugese
Russian
Japanese
Arabic
Indonesian
taking first AND second language these may cover 80-90% of speakers.
some content and data is univeral, not proscribed by language, for example photos, weather data, computation and storage, asset register, accountancy, payments, protocol services are universal
Network promoter
Name
A sales and marketing, or business development position.
Network services
This person be responsible for bringing expert systems, wisdom of the crowd, and other clever things.
Server apps (Brainbox)
Name
[Name] is a PhD in [computer science]. They are expert Linux administrator, C, Rust, C++
Node.js, MySQL, network specialist. A frontend and backend full stack developer.
Code technicals
The node implementation
Each node is a peer to peer service acting as server and client, and written in node.js.
This allows it to make asynchronous network calls with ease.
The host machine may be a Brainbox Personal Server, or an instance in the cloud.
The cloud instance must have its own unique IP, not already on the network.
The node owner communicates with their node from a standard web browser client, which is served a web app from a web server on their node.
The web app communicates with an endpoint on the node over a websocket, which in turn makes JSON RPC calls to the service on the same machine.
This is the same approach taken by Bitcoin nodes.
Data relating to the nodes peers, the network, and the node itself are class objects in the program.
All these objects are stored as data files [is this true?] on the server when the service is stopped.
Get your finger in the pie
Can I join the network before it's a network?
Yes. Go to the Kickstarter link and make a bid.
I have no idea what you just said, but I want to know more
You're like, “Holy crap, that's cool. It solves so many problems. I don't understand anything that you just said.
I never heard of it, but it's cool. And I don't know where to get started."
I heard it's already up and running, can I still join?
Heck yeah. There are lists of outlets on Twitter, Discord, Reddit, Instagram, Datakey.io.
Can I contribute to the network?
Yes. You can help with
developing server apps on Brainbox here
developing network apps here
testing security here
Datakey.io is always looking for talented engineers to create smart devices for the home, that work with Brainbox.
Contact them on Discord, Twitter, Signal, pigeon.
The roadmap
Milestones
DAO launch
Kickstarter open auction - invitations to bid in round 1
round 1 bidding and results
invitations to round 2
round 2 bidding and results
finalisation and award of nodes to bidders
collection of bid money
further development of Babble protocol with bid money
testnet launch
promotion to manufactuers, partnership agreements
mainnet launch
launch of developer community
completion of principal Brainbox server apps
Kickstarter open auction
How is it done?
There are Initial Coin Offerings galore. There is an established path to this.
Things we need:
a website
a listing on ICO website
a whitepaper
a high profile credible sponsor
a credible team
a legal entity for parent DAO registered in friendly jurisdiction
Common Collective Coin Public Offering
We will call this a Common Collective Coin Public Offering, or C3PO.
This is likely to have the structure and approach of a share tender offer on the UK stock market.
What are the auction options?
We are faced with a choice do we want the auction to maximise the number of nodes, number of Webnotes or value?
must limit the number to create the competition, and bec these nodes carry more
bid a range?
bid a val and num of Webnotes?
the bid values the node, its hardware, the airdrop tokens, the network, the personal server...
we could be offering 1m tokens, fixed offer supply,
cld offer much smaller number, then offer more in a second round, if oversubscribed, declare the average bid,
or the lowest successful bid last time, eff a floor,
we could have funding rounds and have a roadmap, ie round 1, - round 5
Is this the best auction option?
The question for bidders could be "how much will you pay for how many Webnotes"?
this is like a public offer for shares, fixed number of shares, bid price for a number
could have a 2 stage process of bidding, get a second chance to increase Webnotes for a
bidding table 1
Bidder
Value bid
Webnotes bid for
1
5,000
500
2
650
300
3
500
200
4
3,000
200
5
1,500
750
We can calculate the bid value per webnote wanted, and order them highest first, then calculate the cumulative total until we reach the required number.
The required number will be set out in the roadmap auction timetable, and announced on given social media channels.
bidding table 2
Bidder
Value
Webnotes
Value/webnote
Cum webnote
Cum value
4
3,000
200
15
200
3,000
1
5,000
500
10
700
8,000
3
500
200
2.5
900
8,500
2
650
300
2.2
1200
9,150
5
1,500
750
2.0
1950
10,650
At the end of the auction we have n bidders for n nodes, with w Webnotes, and v total monetary contributions.
The number of Webnotes will be fixed, the number of bidders and their offered contribution will be variable.
How much can we raise?
If 1 in 100,000 people would pay good folding money for a box, and there are around 4 billion internet-connected
adults in the world we could hope for 40,000 subscriptions.
if each bid was for $1000, we could raise $40m.
How much do we need?
If we assume 1.68 years of time, with 13 developers at $50,000 pa, the cost would be about $2m.
This means we have a lot of headroom in our assumptions.
