AIUI, Holochain and its mutual credit currency can’t be used for any economic activity, unlike Ethereum and Ether. Indeed, https://holochain.org lists apps that it helps. From https://developer.holochain.org/guide/latest/faq.html#what-kind-of-projects-is-holochain-good-for: “Fiat currencies where tokens are thought to exist independent of accountability by agents are more challenging to implement on holochains.”
Edited section May 14:
I’d edit the top post with this but I can’t:
Holochain pros:
- unlimited scalability
- doesn’t enforce universal consensus when every use case can do without it. Mutual and reputational credit can be used for transactions rather than fiat cryptocurrencies or tokens. You should be able to implement a blockchain as a Holochain happ, but again, this isn’t necessary. Fiat currencies (including cryptocurrencies) have inherent centralization with the stakeholders controlling the currency, e.g. developers, miners, stakers, validators; although this could be mitigated with a DAO, but then governance of the DAO can be complicated and there hasn’t been a secure demonstration yet.
- You can build a full (stack) happ on Holochain, rather than just a smart contract. This allows all of the code, state and data for the happ to be decentralized, rather than only hosting some code e.g. on GitHub servers, plus the developers, testers, and early-adopters who host it on their local machines. If there is a fork in a node in one line of code, that node gets rejected by validators and must fork to its own happ to continue operating independently, or sync with the existing happ.
Cons:
- rather than using consensus, mutual and reputational credit, if used to transact, hinges on KYC. But perhaps using KYC isn’t such a bad thing, and you could potentially have a web-of-trust like mechanism (a la KILT) to decentralise the KYC and trust, and also enable the ability to revoke trust from any entity at any time. Additionally, if you don’t need to transact currencies, and just transfer data, then Holochain, Secure Scuttlebutt, and Dat Protocol are more suitable than blockchains, with Holochain having the above advantages. Not enforcing universal consensus is what enables unlimited scalability.
As quoted above:
I’m not going to create another account and get involved with another conversation. I would like to point out that I see a criticism about the centralized aspect of Holo that appears to show lack of understanding of Holochain. Unless I don’t have the full context of the conversation.
Yes Holo is partially centralized. They admit that. That is the cost of creating mass adoption. Until people evolve to using pure Holochain. Don’t like KYC, they only run Holochain and require all your users to install it.
Blockchainers live in this future where everyone wants to do anonymous transactions because they don’t trust the “powers that be.”
Holochainers live in a future where they care about the people they transact with.
—lifesmyth
Me:
AIUI, to do mutual credit with Holo is one way, requiring KYC. But AFAIK there is no decentralized, sybil-resistant approach that does not involve consensus or a blockchain approach, in order to avoid invalid transactions such as double-spending.
pauldaoust:
re:
But AFAIK there is no decentralized, sybil-resistant approach that does not involve consensus or a blockchain approach
I’d further qualify your list of adjectives by adding ‘anonymous’ – because there is one very good decentralised, Sybil-resistant approach that doesn’t require PoW/PoS/etc, and that’s KYC – or at least some sort of human identification approach that all the participants in the system are comfortable with, which may in fact permit pseudonymity if you design it right. Connecting accounts with humans, whether those humans reveal their IRL identities or not, is by definition Sybil-resistant.
I’d further qualify your list of adjectives by adding ‘anonymous’ – because there is one very good decentralised, Sybil-resistant approach that doesn’t require PoW/PoS/etc, and that’s KYC – or at least some sort of human identification approach that all the participants in the system are comfortable with, which may in fact permit pseudonymity if you design it right. Connecting accounts with humans, whether those humans reveal their IRL identities or not, is by definition Sybil-resistant.
It’s also useful to talk about the consequences of Sybil attacks for a given distributed system. For a global ledger, the consequence is of course that the Sybils can control what goes into the ledger. (Hence the very clever but wasteful remedy, proof of work.)
For a Holochain network, the risks are different. You’ll never get enough Sybils in a given neighbourhood to completely push out the possibility of one honest neighbour who blows the whistle on them all. They can choose not to talk to that neighbour, but they can’t force the rest of the network to do the same. As far as I can tell, the only thing that Sybils can do in a Holochain network are:
- ‘ruin the party’ – that is, issue spurious warrants, fail to store or pass on data, etc, in order to make all the honest nodes work really hard to do the sort of data validation that should be done automatically.
- mount an ‘eclipse attack’ – this is when an honest node is completely surrounded by dishonest peers.
We’re thinking about both issues, of course.
—Holo
There’s more discussion on Sybil attack resistance at Holo (it goes over two days to Apr 16).