Decentralised Model in Detail - Component Model & Summary

Next: Top down approach

Component model

We can represent the created model as one diagram showing its component and roughly how they would be positioned in a stack of key areas: enablers at the bottom, the operating model in the middle driving the system and higher-level application areas using underlying functionalities. This diagram is made to resembles traditional IT architectures.

All models are abstractions and intent of them is to visualize the resulting system from some single viewpoint.

At the bottom are things meeting physical needs: food, shelter, water, safety, energy, transportation etc. You could think these correspond to the lowest levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (roughly speaking).

Next is a set of core services needed to operate the system. Things like shared purse, decision making models, payment and governance tokens, participant identities, roles and responsibilities, reputation and integration interfaces to the “southbound” and “northbound” systems. This can be called society operations system (SOS for shorthand) or Community Operations System (COS) if you do not like the acronymic puns.

On top are various essential, value adding components like health, education, market places, financial services etc. I have called these “apps”. There will be a multitude of them for each domain. One could equally well place health and education to the infra part as well as any division is subjective to a great deal.

Finally, there are a few cross-cutting concerns such as defense and co-habitation/integration to other decentralized services and the national centralized actors.

To my surprise, we’ve covered all of those topics and no blockers rose up during my extended “checking and fact finding” period that’s covered in the past post. So, this is plausible future and all needed technology is - more or less - available today.

Looking at the series afterward it dawned to me that i’ve intuitively followed a pattern: first understanding the current environment - how the world and centralized organisations work today. Then move to think from a different worldview (decentralisation) looking is anything breaks in fatal ways. Nothing came up.

Just to round things up, lets take a different perspective on the same.

Any architectural image is just an abstraction taken from a particular viewpoint. Really a story disguised as an image. The same decentralised model can also be visualised quite differently, for example like this:

At bottom left we have Basics. Starting with human physiological needs like food, water, health, housing etc. Followed by basics of what society needs: energy, heat and raw materials.

The raw materials get worked on with production equipment. Physical goods are made locally with 3D printers, CNC machines, printer circuit board production kits and products of chemical industries are localised with flow chemistry and machine learning models and robots that can automatically organise the right production flow. I also added services there, like communications, logistics. Perhaps not the best place.

Once products(and services can be produced, people start transacting with them. Transportation infra is really just a transaction technology at the end, vehicles move people about to meet other people for all types of interactions. Same for goods with logistics companies. All of these need basic infra like roads, harbours, airports, rail tracks and a lot of different vehicles of all sorts.

Then there is the financial transactions part that’s covered quite well. Tokenomics for finding good economic models. And all the tools like property laws, banks, lending, insurance, exchanges etc.

Once the production machinery is rolling. it needs safety. That’s where defence comes in. Both in concepts like Schrödinger’s Army against active external and in concepts bugs bounty, fraud corps as preventive step. Safety investigation authority comes after failures to see what we can learn. The judicial system with police and courts also belongs here. In decentralised world some projects use the decentralised court system.

Once the basic system is up and protected, its possible to think about continuous learning and acceleration. This can be split to parts that grow the pie and parts that prevent it from destruction.

On grow part free and online education ensures everyone has best starting point for becoming productive members, property laws unlock financial services like loaning (as you have collateral protected by law), good infra lowers transaction costs, industry policy refers to any use of money from the Treasury to stimulate new developments. Note that both property laws and good infra appear twice, you might think this is not optimal but in reality its very common for any service offering multiple gains.

On the protect side we have things like health (get well and back to work), social security (allowing to take risk and bounce back after personal catastrophes), media and other information sources exposing wrongdoings, culture and religion giving meaning to life and being places to meet and network with others.

On top of everything is the steering of the whole thing. This is done in governance that in decentralised world is driven by the participants who make proposals, they are validated, sometimes field tested before going to vote and finally after implementation are followed how well they work.

In governance there are three levels of topics. Firstly fundamental rules of the project that are made intentionally difficult to change. They are like the constitution of the project documenting the initial intent of the activity. Secondly operational rules on how to operate and lastly small parameters that fine tune the operational aspects.

Lastly are the repositories of digital assets. Most products, production processes and tools can be digitalised and stored there. The intent more or less is to capture all human capital in digital form, open source it and make available to all as symbiotic good.

To motivate people there needs to be rewarding systems that seem fair both for contributors and users. Token engineering is the field that studies this and makes simulation tools for verification before implementation.

This is the plan.

It seems we’d be at end.

But wait, that’s not all, wrote the substack writer, like any self-respecting TV-shop host late at night.

We still have a couple of after-glow articles to publish, loose ends to tie and alternatives to discuss.

Stay tuned.