Decentralization Vision
From CommerceNet Wiki
| Vision: | Software that works the way society works. |
|---|---|
| Mission: | CNLabs seeks to address fundamental challenges to, and opportunities for decentralization. |
| Strategy: | CNLabs is developing a platform for decentralized electronic markets: infrastructure, tools, and prototype applications. |
| Structure: | CNLabs invests in research Projects and demonstrations by funding People to develop prototypes and write Publications about them. |
CNLabs is exploring a new frontier of electronic commerce: decentralization. In its first decade, CommerceNet advocated using the Web to reduce friction in business, helping usher in the so-called "New Economy" of large, centralized, hyper-efficient firms. We think the next decade will be about agile networks of firms collaborating dynamically to form a "Now Economy."
In that sense, the original New Economy vision of Amazon.com is merely a very large, centralized, hyper-efficient bookstore (and now, toy store, clothing store, etc.) The new sense of a Now Economy is also being pioneered by Amazon, through its Amazon Services subsidiary: using open business services to turn Amazon "inside out" by letting affiliates tap into their product catalogs, reviews, sales, and fulfillment processes to create their own stores.
This fits into our larger vision of building software that works the way society works, following the principles of Decentralization: without unduly restricting the freedom of sovereign individuals and organizations to trade directly.
An overarching challenge problem that motivates us is developing a stable decentralized market. Consider it an "eBay without eBay" if you will, but it builds upon even more compelling precedents such as the trillion-dollar-a-day foreign exchange market. This requires a fundamental transformation of today's client/server command-and-control architectural style into a peer-to-peer sense-and-respond one: in a decentralized world there are few truths, only others' opinions.
To this end, CommerceNet is exploring the development of a decentralized infrastructure for commerce: a mechanism to enable trading without requiring dependency on one (or even a few) key individuals or organizations.
Our plan is to build several interlocking experimental systems (while minimizing risks of interdependent projects). We envision a foundation which includes (among other things) an event notification infrastructure that relies on decentralized governance to provide application-layer transfers with limited spam.
As an example of our planning at work, we are decomposing the zClassifieds ad network into several phases as well. The first step is merely simulating a decentralized market on top of a centralized infrastructure. But the next step really does require peer-to-peer connectivity, agents, derivative instruments, and collaborative filtering of appropriate ads for local communities... the sort of software that reflects society's mechanisms for managing freedom without descending into anarchy.
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We're located in Palo Alto, California. Please see CommerceNet's main contact information page for directions and other details.
