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Presentation at fOSSa 2014

Listen to the presentation: First Principles - Presentation by Chris Ellis at fOSSa2014
View the presentation slides: First Principles
Also see Legal Release Notarisation on the Blockchain

Timestamps
Proof of Initial Publication 10th November 2014
2014-11-18—0750
2014-11-19—2311 Delayed due to poor internet connectivity

I have been invited to speak at fOSSa 2014 Stephane Ribas at INRA on the 19th November 2014.

This repo will be a learning process as I will be tracking my time and work using tools from Quantified Self movement such as Rescue Time, Toggle and of course the Blockchain.

Understanding technology as a sense, an objective witness without the capacity for care which opens up a theatre for history itself to be the final judge of our actions in the present.

Donate to this project

If you enjoyed my work please donate to make it sustainable:
Bitcoin: 1De3QE17d8rSwRWwoLvNV9zJ9JTsZiGhij
Feathercoin: 6hAcWCGDLRgr5Ggxsg3b5zcd8p9m3dG95Z

Special thanks

I am grateful to the following people for inspiring my thoughts. I do not make any claim to expertise but these are the real experts who have helped to inform my thinking: Chief Scientist Peter Todd, philosopher king Andreas Antonopoulos & prodigy Vitalik Buterin

Underlying Assumptions

First set - Assumptions

While forming this presentation and listening to my thoughts I formed a basis of premises and assumptions which which are as follows:

  1. All people across the globe are disposed to the same number of hours in a day
    • All people independent of place and culture have discretionary attention
    • Good decisions require information and judgement
  2. All people across the globe share a need for common resources
    • This common need once satisfied creates a basis on which our uniqueness can emerge
  3. Risk is a distributed phenomena
    • Therefore it requires a distributed response
      • “Profit: the reward for correctly grasping an element of reality ahead of your peers.” ~Alain de Botton
  4. Ideas can come from anywhere and anyone
    • Tribes today are not defined by geographic borders
      • Tribes are interconnected communities
  5. Uniqueness emerges at the intersections of our ideas & common interests
Second Set - Definitions
  1. Defining Entrepreneur
    • The ability to anticipate demand
    • The ability to de-risk an uncertain environment for another
  2. Defining Business
  3. Defining Profit
    • Profit is a way of quantifying progress
    • Profit is epiphenomenal, it is the result of getting things right
      • Therefore financial profit is not a goal in and of itself
  4. The internet is network of networks
    • Every network it touches it liberates
    • The internet’s various protocols raise the marginal cost of keeping information secret (slower moving information relative to its wider context)
    • The internet allows for existence to emerge without a stable spatial referent
    • It allows peers to communicate their intent without prejudice
  5. Bitcoin is a continuation of the Internet’s development
    • Bitcoin is the Internet
    • Bitcoin is a distributed database with a state transition rule
    • Bitcoin brings together the databases of the large networks on the internet together with the offline identities of individuals to create reducing information asymmetry across space, time and human cultures
Conclusions based on the premises

For now I reason that:

  1. As architects of this system of networks we will observe the behaviour we design for
    • Therefore it is in our interests to understand the whole system from first principles an up
  2. Bitcoin has introduced the incentive engineering in to a global information network which informs behaviours offline which cause corresponding online activity observable from anywhere on the network
    • It behoves us as the experts ‘sophos’ to educate the people ‘demos’ or we risk creating further division, hyper specialisation and catastrophe