Mike Brunt

Mike Brunt wrote:
Ever since I heard-read of Ethereum and Blockchain I have become convinced that as permaculture is worldwide and not under the influence of any one government, we could really use and benefir from a Blockchain based value exchange mechanism of some kind.  Back in 2014 there was a fairly big splash around "Permacredits" then it all seemed to fizzle out quite rapidly; so I have two questions.

Does anyone know what happened to Permacredits?

Secondly do you know of any Blockchain based mechanism that would be good for permaculture?  

I am just reflecting back on this, 5 years later; Bitcoin is still largely unchallenged, China basically tried to kick out the miners and many dispersed to different geographical locations, the USA got quite a few.  What we are now seeing is a coming together of power-producers and Bitcoin "miners".  More pointedly, our fiat monetary systems are crumbling and I still feel it could be very advantageous to have a decentralized value exchange and governance mechanism for our Permaculture-World, beyond fiat and corrupt governments.

We are just about to embark into the SDR world and wondered in anyone on permies has done anything in that world?

This is great to read as we have been involved in the open source software field for many years and in fact host a modified version of farmOS which is a open-source farm/garden ledger system.  We named our version Permaledger and would be delighted to add any information which might help the OSSI programme.  If interested you can check it out here https://perma-ledger.com/ uname guest pw 123456789

Loxley, we have been looking at farmOS for a couple of years and eventually launched our slightly modified version here, if you are interested uname guest pw 123456789 https://perma-ledger.com/

George we have been tinkering with farmOS for 2-3 years now and launched Permaledger in April this year.  The slight difference with our version is that we are tracking multiple locations whereas farmOS was designed on a per-farm format.

For the last couple of years we have been adapting a Drupal based web application called farmOS to help with permaculture based horticultural/agricultural day to day operations.  We just formally launched it the last step being to add QR codes to all seeds and areas, if anyone is interested it can be viewed here https://perma-ledger.com/ user guest pword 123456789

James Baca wrote:Anyone have any experience with this, or know where I can purchase some? The biomass production looks incredible and would increase the amount of fodder I can produce on my small homestead.

http://www.viaspace.com/animalfeed.php

Did you ever get any further with investigating this?

Michael Cox wrote:Or as a clearer specific example: Let say I'm a brick layer. I trade with other people in my close circle; the cement maker, the brick maker, maybe the site foreman. We like working together so we decide to agree our own special unit of currency. This works out fine for a while, right up until I decide to take a holiday and cash in my money. I suddenly discover that people outside my circle of trusted compatriots don't value our money. I can't buy tickets, book hotels, eat at restaurants. I may know - for example - that 1 unit will exchange for one hour of labour (or what ever metric you decide) but the outside world simply don't care. A hotel owner in some distant city doesn't care that my unit is worth an hour of Bob's time.

So for any permaculture currency to be viable it has to overcome the same basic rules that any currency does. It has to be widely accepted and easy to exchange for items of value. Until a permaculture currency does this I struggle to see how there will be a solution better than using a standard cryptocurrency (or normal currency!).

Thank you Michael, there are some scalability issues with Bitcoin and as many have pointed out it is quite energy intensive with "mining" etc, however I agree with your points "It has to be widely accepted and easy to exchange for items of value"

Josef Theisen wrote:You bring up some interesting points.  My understanding is that it is easier for law enforcement to do targeted surveillance, but more difficult to do ubiquitous surveillance.  Right now, in order to send money anywhere, we rely on a system of verification based on our identity.  This leads to situations where a store is now responsible for storing personal information; name, address, social security number, ect.  This is a burden to the store, and allows hackers or government to track us across multiple platforms fairly easily.  With this amazing new invention of digital trust, we can now do transactions using only anonymous account numbers.  

Now if law enforcement gets an account number during an investigation, they can follow that money through the blockchain (and so can we).  They can do it from any computer on the net and do so without a warrant.  This is a huge improvement from having to get warrants to search records at perhaps dozens of different institutions and study them.  This could save quite a bit of manpower on such an investigation.  However, since there is no easy way to associate an account number with a person, and no way to know if money is being sent to yourself or someone else, attempts to decode the entire blockchain get confused pretty quickly.  The blockchain is an ocean of data, unless you have a specific target, forget about it.  

The transactions are not encrypted at all, they are actually published publically.  The encryption protects the network form attack, in order to break it you would need more computing power than the entire network.  Right now bitcoin has a 10 petahash network working off over 100,000 computer systems all over the world.  That is more computing power than the worlds best 600 supercomputers combined, and is far more power than any government on earth currently possesses.  Since there is an economic incentive to mine, greed will keep it this way.  Even if someone managed to get enough juice to corrupt the network, they could profit from using it to secure the network instead.  It would be like killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

Not sure about the interest rates and all that, but I am convinced that QE 1, 2, & 3 are going to devalue the dollar massively as those trillions of dollars work their way out of the derivatives market and into the economy of real goods and services.

I realize this is some time back yet it interests me because there was a Permaculture targeted cryptocurrency called "Permacredits" which launched in 2014 and then fizzled out.  Personally I think it could benefit our community greatly if we had a value exchange mechanism in permaculture.

Ever since I heard-read of Ethereum and Blockchain I have become convinced that as permaculture is worldwide and not under the influence of any one government, we could really use and benefir from a Blockchain based value exchange mechanism of some kind.  Back in 2014 there was a fairly big splash around "Permacredits" then it all seemed to fizzle out quite rapidly; so I have two questions.

Does anyone know what happened to Permacredits?

Secondly do you know of any Blockchain based mechanism that would be good for permaculture?