On Apr 5, 2015, at 10:52 PM, Philip Browning <
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> wrote:
Kaliya,
Sorry while what you say might be true in your last para.
It is also your sore point and being fair not the issue I was directly speaking to.
“my sore point” is quite insulting.
I am a woman. I have worked in this industry for over 10 years. I have been very fortunate and luckly have had almost no major personal incidents to report. I also have because of my gender heard about the REAL incidents that happen regularly to women. A woman who I am friends with and is working to start a startup and met with someone who is known to many on this list to see if he would be an advisor was sexually propositioned by him multiple times. You don’t see or hear it happening but this kinda thing happens all the time. She wants to quit…this stuff is why women leave the industry (among many others). She has no safe place to report what happened there is no HR department for startup advisor conversations.
My partner Willliam and our good friend Eno Jackson (who died last summer) are African American along with our other staff person Amanda who is chicana (her family was in/from mexico when California was Mexican the boarder moved not her framily) they are all more then qualified have had their own issues and stories that I won’t into here… until you actually HEAR what they have experienced you should NOT dismiss what I am raising as fundamental issues with the culture of mainstream tech that are both particular to the US but also end up being global too (with different shapes and manifestations).
UNTIL you and the mainstream tech industry GET that these are not “personal sore points" but REAL issues that need proactive addressing and major shifts in culture and default practices I will continue to speak up for cultural and gender diversity and name the issues.
Furthermore, the point Phil was making earlier about single and centralisation is also relevant regarding your confusing language and use of Bitcoin's Blockchain and ethereum.
I spoke DIRECTLY with the young men building it. It is as they said in their own words ONE BIG COMPUTER. One ledger where everything IS public.
Do your own inquiry. I spent over 5 hours this week just talking to young men building these systems who were so “into” them they could almost not explain them - because they had created so much of their own language to talk to themselves.
Much of what I understand ethereum to be proposing is based on their own critique of the current Bitcoin Blockchain. And hence I would find it useful to know further your concerns on this. AS I am seeking to learn further.
Regarding my support for and of women who are minorities and underrepresented and of the poor/disadvantaged - we have not met and we know very little of each other.
It’s not really about "me" or "you". Its is cultural.
On a personal level, I live in Australia, many wouldn’t know of the significance of the The Ellen Pao case here-
you have bing/google - look it up.
Currency Systems we have now must be challenged.
However further abstracting them into “crypto” land is not the direction we need to go.
We need to GROUND money in real people, real land, real wealth AND address commons issues that are not currently being addressed by our current socio-techno-political systems. I point you to Zizek to understand some of those.
Please READ The End of Money and the Future of Civilization by Tom Greco to understand more about the point about how to understand the types of money systems that will help the planet not kill it further.
Debt Based Fiat Money is one of the biggest issues - we need to get out of that system of value creation. Bitcoin and its exchange into and out of these currency systems is NOT helping address the fundamental issues.
The last exchange is the most profound and important - and it's about not letting the incumbent status quo powers right the rules for the regulation of the new technology that disrupts these incumbents.
Then lets make sure that we have REAL diversity and diversity of culture at the table.
Also why not actually LISTEN to what I am saying and BELIEVE that I might actually have knowledge and am sharing it here…instead of just questioning it because Adrian had a good time at some fair.
Philip.
-----Original Message-----
From: Kaliya Identity Woman [
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]
Sent: Monday, 6 April 2015 3:03 PM
To: ProjectVRM list
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Re: Blockchain /decentralisation ecosystem and movements.
On Apr 5, 2015, at 9:51 PM, Philip Browning <
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> wrote:
Kaliya,
I am not endorsing anyone or anything.
Good so do your own inquiry and ask hard questions don’t just get excited by the so called "diversity and vibrancy” of the exhibition Adrian went to.
When you show me that the how me the women, Latino/as, African American’s and first Nations People actively leading and THEN you can say “diversity” do describe it.
Like many I am seeking to understand what will work and what is not going to (and from whose perspective it might be said to work - is an interesting question).
Sure there are elements of being able to see a repeating of past mistakes in some ways.
Great I look forward to seeing you proactively supporting communities of women and other people who have not traditionally had access to capital and leading the technology industry.
This means actually unpacking and understanding the default culture that is driving much of tech.
The Ellen Pao case is the tip of the ice-burg. The deep dysfunction of the industry will continue to be revealed.
- Kaliya
Regards, Philip.
-----Original Message-----
From: Kaliya Identity Woman [
" class="">mailto:
]
Sent: Monday, 6 April 2015 2:29 PM
To: Philip Browning
Cc: Phillip Windley; ProjectVRM list
Subject: [projectvrm] Re: Blockchain /decentralisation ecosystem and movements.
Hi Phil,
On Apr 5, 2015, at 7:18 PM, Philip Browning <
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> wrote:
Thank you Phil, this articulates my disconnect with what Kaliya is describing.
I have spent some considerable time reading and viewing much of the materials around Blockchain in recent months. I am no technical expert,
I am technically competent. I have learned all I know asking technical people to explain their technology. I spent a good deal of time this week in conversations with two different blockchain technology folks - Swarm.Fund and Ethereum.
The swarm conversation was about 3 hours with 20 people and by the end there was a bunch of ahha’s relative to what they were actually doing. With the Ethereum I got out a piece of paper and started asking questions getting explanations and getting more clarity based on going deeper into parts I didn’t understand.
It was very clear at the end of this discussion that they young men who work on Ethereum said out loud that bitcoin block chain technology is building one centralized computer distributed across many servers - where all transactions are visible . It was also clear there was no privacy in this system.
So you can “believe” all the bamboozling you want from the young men who obfuscate the technology with words like crypto.
The stuff that actually emerges and survives will have to pass the collective bullshit detectors of many that are increasingly distrustful of the institutions of the status quo.
So if we don’t want the status quo then why trust people who are deeply embedded within the status quo of the existing tech world.
When women are leading the development technology then we can talk about “outside the status quo” until then … its the same old same old default culture and assumptions about libertarian individualism.
Hence those that profess decentralisation and transparency and who don’t live it out BOTH in code/architecture AND their actual personal integrity as a human being will ultimately be their own worst enemies (And fail).
I think we need to as a culture talk about how the systems that underly things actually run and make choices about how to balance the needed trade offs. To work to balance the polarities. Hence my work and efforts to engage with and learn from the dialogue and deliberation world including my long time association with the Co-intelligence Institute. We have to be smart about this …and not just “believe” some alpha geeks who say things without actually understanding HOW it actually works.
If there are wise owls on this list, well time to step up and guide/mentor /critique so as to ensure there is not the repeat of past mistakes.
BitCOIN/blockchain is repeating a bunch of old patterns for how technology is developed.
I suggest you actually get those young men you admire to explain how it actually WORKS like I did this last week before you readily endorse it.
Warm Regards,
- Kaliya
-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Windley [
" class="">mailto:
] On Behalf Of Phillip Windley
Sent: Monday, 6 April 2015 11:44 AM
To: Kaliya Identity Woman; ProjectVRM list
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Moral Proxies as Intent, Autonomous Tech and VRM
I think there’s a terminology problem here.
You keep saying
"There is blockchain technology - sure can be used for all kinds of different uses - it fundamentally is creating a centralized ledger across a lot of different computers.”
It’s not centralized. It does create a *single* ledger. But it is not centralized. There is no single point of failure. There is no single entity in charge of it.
If you say “single” then I agree (and believe that’s a feature). If you say “centralized” then I think you’re not understanding what centralized means.
On 4/5/15, 7:18 PM, "Kaliya Identity Woman" <
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> wrote:
On Apr 4, 2015, at 5:30 PM, Brian Behlendorf <
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> wrote:
This is no more centralized than other fiat currencies, or many other power structures. It just feels less transparent and accountable, ironically enough.
Exactly it is not some new decentralized “nirvana”.
I look at it as exchange mechanism basically between fiat currency.
I suggest reading The end of Money and the Future of Civilizaiton by Tom Grecco if we want to have a good basis of conversation about fiat currency (the money he suggest should end) and the difference between it and mutual credit clearing systems. These could possibly built building blockchain technology - in part because of their ultra transparent ledger.
TCP/IP is a protocol that supports a fine balance between centralization (addresses are findable in a tree) and then a connection protocol that once to addresses are connected they send information to one another . It is not recorded anywhere. I suggest a great book to understand this and other protocols - Protocol: how Control exists after decentralization.
There is blockchain technology - sure can be used for all kinds of different uses - it fundamentally is creating a centralized ledger across a lot of different computers.
Then there is BitCoin and it’s ideological adherents are not explaining it well, the power structures and systems that surround it that Brian alluded to AND the fact it makes all the transactions that flow through IT public.
On Sat, 4 Apr 2015, Kaliya Identity Woman wrote:
Ok and this does what?
Makes every transaction seeable and therefore makes us all very vulnerable to entities with more power and money then us.
There are some applications that are more progressive. There are many developing countries, for example, with very poorly maintained (or non-existing) property title databases of the kind our local governments keep, tracking who owns what parcels of land and what the boundaries are and encroachments and the like. The lack of these is a serious impediment to economic development and fighting corruption. In a distributed ledger that is mathematically guaranteed to be consistant, you could track this efficiently and incorruptibly without depending on any single entity to maintain perfect and honest records. Property could change hands, or be divided, or have a lein recorded against it, etc, in a completely public and verifiable way.
Others are thinking of using blockchains to track greenhouse gas emissions (CFCs in particular, where you can more easily certify who's making them and who's destroying them than, say, CO2). Another is looking at it as a way to publicly audit supply chains and sourcing, so you could have much greater confidence in the source of the cotton and ink and rubber in those tennis shoes. I'm sure there are other applications.
Bitcoin builds one super-uber CENTRALIZED computer. it happens to be distributed around many machines but it is super concentrated power in one thing.
One thing that BTC proponents may not even realize the sensitiviy of is the outsized power held by the core development team. They are the ones who, for instance, set the rates for payouts (how much compute power to generate a new BTC), but they also control the evolution of the protocol. I've had one Bitcoin company pitch us "we have hired many of the core dev team, and so if we need enhancements made to suit our application, we know we can get them made." That's offensive enough when we're talking about open source projects; there, at least, there's a right to fork. While the Bitcoin software and protocol are open source licensed, truly forking would be much more difficult, as there's a momentum built up in the global hash engine that would thus need to spin off and join whatever rogue effort is undertaken. We do see them - look at all the other alt-currencies with different ideas, good for them - but there's still a huge perception of a gap between the interests of those who control BTC and the rest of us. And that perception is at least as bad as any reality of it may be.
This is no more centralized than other fiat currencies, or many other power structures. It just feels less transparent and accountable, ironically enough. It would be helped quite a bit if the BTC community organizations were competent:
https://bitcoinfoundation.org/forum/index.php?/topic/1284-the-truth-about-the-bitcoin-foundation/
Brian
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