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Ask HN: Any anarchist/communist/socialist hackers here?

9 points by orthecreedence ↗ HN
Hi, everyone. I'm working on a leftist-oriented blockchain project (https://basisproject.gitlab.io/public/) and wanted to gauge interest in the community. The project is geared towards being a set of tools to democratically operate a profitless economy (based on need/use instead of profit/exchange) with socialized assets (housing and means of production mainly).

The project is built in Rust on top of the Exonum framework. Currently, a rudimentary member system as well as cost-tracking mechanisms are built and working, but I'm at the point in the project where rather than continuing to build in a vacuum, I see if there's any interest in participation.

The project's paper is incomplete and probably less technical than it should be, but a good overview of the goals. There's also an up-to-date roadmap (https://gitlab.com/basisproject/tracker#roadmap) which shows current progress.

Would love feedback, thoughts, contributions!

7 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 21.6 ms ] thread
paulrpotts
I am a leftist whose exact ideology is a work in progress, but I'd generally call myself an anarchist in favor of localized gift economies, food production, and devolved government, so distributism and worker-owned collectives are both things I'm very interested in.

I work mainly in embedded development and I'm not really sold on blockchain or IoT or, really, using TCP/IP for much of anything. My recent paid work involves control systems on small microcontrollers, either using FreeRTOS or that are so small they use no OS. I'm interested in building driver stacks on these chips for writing things like bootloaders and serial interfaces that support remote control commands.

I also have a little bit of PCB design experience, although I'm not trained as an EE. So, I have no idea if my skills might be of use, but I've been thinking of how to apply some of my work to future open-source hardware devices. I keep coming back to how some of this might be useful for fully open voting machines, and I know everyone jumps to thinking about blockchain for that, but I think it is overkill and too heavyweight for what I want to do. I'm thinking more of writing data to redundant EEPROMs and verifying it with something older and simpler like message digests or digital signatures.

I realize that maybe there's not a lot of overlap there but I guess if you need any low-level drivers I might be able to help...

orthecreedence
> I am a leftist whose exact ideology is a work in progress, but I'd generally call myself an anarchist in favor of localized gift economies, food production, and devolved government, so distributism and worker-owned collectives are both things I'm very interested in.

Sounds like we're fairly aligned here.

> I'm not really sold on blockchain or IoT or, really, using TCP/IP for much of anything.

I was reluctant of blockchain as well, however once I started planning out how this system might work, the use-case was particularly well suited for blockchain: transparent, verifiable, tamper-resistant. These are all qualities I'd like to see in a political/economic system. I think one of the problems with blockchain is it's associated with greedy people doing land-grab ICOs that provide no value but make big splashes, so when people see "blockchain" they think "ugh, another useless project by scammers." I don't blame them.

> I realize that maybe there's not a lot of overlap there but I guess if you need any low-level drivers I might be able to help...

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind! Things like voting machines might be really helpful.

bediger4000
If you were such a non-standard hacker in the US, why would you reveal it? None of these particular -isms are considered reputable in the US. It would appear that the US is entering a period of persecuting holders of non-standard political ideologies, too.
rayhendricks
We are headed twords the most common job [0] in each state being automated in 10-20 years. Then we [USA at least] will have a much larger unemployment problem till deal with, as the truckers are >=90% men[1].

So then we have a bunch of middle age men who formerly had decent jobs seeing those jobs go away. The economy in much of the country will have to adapt, and that is where UBI or some type of socialism will need to take over.

If you think the disenfranchisement that led to the election of Donald Trump was bad, imagine when the remainder of these jobs vanish..

[0] https://www.thejobnetwork.com/trucking-is-the-most-common-am... [1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/america-keeps...

ieRei6ae
> non-standard hacker in the US

non-standard hacker? Most hackerspaces and hackers communities are strongly aligned with Anarchism (and therefore socialism), at least outside of the US.

ieRei6ae
Excellent project! I hope it gains traction.

Can you please clarify on the docs why it uses a blockchain and how it is mined or otherwise generated?

orthecreedence
Hi, sorry for the late response, I thought this thread was dead so I stopped checking.

There is no mining. The blockchain is a permissioned system that uses byzantine fault tolerance. So the current working idea is different regions would have their own server that participates in the network and facilitates the transactions.

As for why it uses the blockchain, the idea here is less about currency, and more about making a system that enforces the smart contract layer network-wide. A lot of the costing is based on what would be smart contracts (in ETH for example) so making sure these trnasactions, given the same inputs, will always have the same output no matter who's running them is much more natural on a blockchain than any other system.

The project originally started as a postgres-backed app, but once I started thinking about federation between regions, how to do this transparently, etc...blockchain was just a really natural fit.