Synereo: The First True Social Computer?

Introduction

By now most people on Steemit have heard about Synereo. Some people think of Syenreo as the decentralized Facebook killer. Some people think Synreo will be a competitor for Steemit In some ways both of these are true but what is more is that Synereo is by the truest definition going to be a social computer. Because social computers are a new concept, and most people are only used to centralized "Social Media Platforms", I will take the opportunity to explore the concept of the Social Computer by taking a look at the potential of Synereo.

My conversation with Stellabelle

The trigger for this series of posts is my discussion with Stellabelle. She showed interest in understanding more about this way of looking at these platforms so now I'll outline some of our discourse below in the quotes:

Stellabelle:

love this post because it opens up an entirely new way of thinking about Steemit. I feel that the more opportunity streams that exist, the more fun it will become. Does Steemit have any new paths in sight, or is it to remain with the single focus of blogging? Your posts are valuable to me and without your unique perspective, Steemit would be suffering, for sure. What would such a human computation system look like? What sort of computation activity would it be?

Dana-Edwards:

I intend to describe my vision for how Steemit could evolve in future posts. This post is about introducing and popularizing the concept of:
Steemit as a Social Computer

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Which runs:
Social Computation Games

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Which compute outputs of value in the form of content, or voting results, or other more specific forms. The idea here that the crypto-community can immediately understand is summed up as "Blogging is the New Mining". In mining, and Proof of Work for a blogger is more based on reputation and proof they add value to the Steemit Community. And this is fine but I also recognize, not everyone is going to be persistent enough, hungry enough, dedicated enough, to be good at blogging, and blogging really isn't the only way people produce content.

But Steemit with it's current design might be limited to that. For example Synereo is more complex, the participants on that Social Computer are able to really treat it like a computer because they'll be rewarded for selling storage space to it, for selling computation to it, their attention of course is rewarded, but because it's a composable architecture, they can do more stuff with it over it's evolving states. What I mean to say is, human computation is just one way people can provide value, but attention (curation) provides value too, and finally providing hardware or AI also provides value.

Human computation would break up a complex task into many microtasks similar to what you may see with Amazon Turk. These tasks would be tasks only human beings can do, but which pay money, for example using something like CrowdLang and auto-translating content into all languages as a human computation app running on Steemit.

The translation game would be made fun by gamification. It would of course have rewards associated with it. The main issue with the rewards is I don't think Steem Power currently provides enough social privilege or prestige to make a person truly want to buy it with fiat. People will want to earn it with time but in order for Steemit (Social Computer) to be able to keep giving these liberating payouts, it must be a profit machine, and to be profitable in this context would mean Steem Power has to be in extremely high demand.

Right now it's not in much demand which is why the market cap is so abysmally low. In fact, if the users keep growing the market cap will become s o low that the payouts might not be enough to make much difference in people's lives. Steemit would still get content but in order to compute properly, we have to think of the currency more like fuel for the machine.

What I mean is, money is fuel for the Social Computer. People put fiat in, and it fuels the human computation engine, which outputs computations of value. If there is not enough fuel there will be content, but the kinds of computations will be less diverse, less rigorous. So for example if you want content which requires a lot of sophisticated human computation then you have to be able to fuel the human beings who produce that computation, which means the market cap is going to have to be high enough that bloggers or "human computers" can sustain their activities indefinitely.

Right now we don't know the true cost of a lot of different kinds of human computations. We only find it out by running it through the Social Computer and seeing what the market tels us is the true cost. For example what is the value of a mathematician working on some obscure logic or new mathematics? We don't really know the true value of this because most mathemeticians are locked away in academia or funded by governments. What about the true value of application vulnerability research? Again, we don't know because most people doing this do it as a hobby or they get a salary but we don't know the true value of certain aspects. In some cases rewards will be obscenely more high than we expect and in other cases extremely low, but that is an indication of a real market result and a real computation of value. When we start seeing prices or values which resemble what people expect politically and not based on any kind of computation or market forces then it's politically created prices, such as price floors, or price caps, or similar, and these can help people to survive which is good but it's not good for the signaling because there are also a lot of "bullshit jobs" which people do, which pay some standard amount, but which people don't really value or like doing.

Blogging is something young people typically do a lot. It's something people clearly value in certain demographics. But it's something which doesn't pay anything because it's based on an outdated ad model. It's almost like how musicians don't get paid or how art doesn't pay the artist, but we have to remember these people are some of the most valued people in society in terms of how much happiness they generate or how people enjoy consuming the content, so if you know some content gets a lot of views but gets very little money, or gets a lot of likes or upvotes but little money, then you know the value exists but isn't flowing to the people creating it.

Blockchain computers

In order to understand what a social computer is, that first involves understanding what a blockchain computer is. Many people might remember the Ethereum Computer and what it mave have intended to be before "The DAO" was hacked, where they announced an Ethereum Computer which would allow anyone to rent any computing resource, which would mean storage space, computation, bandwidth, and like legos, to put together a sort of decentralized computer. This couldn't have worked because Ethereum with Turing completeness wasn't really well designed for secure smart contracts. As a result, this might have worked on a limited level but when serious amounts of money flow into this kind of computer there would be problems. The concept of a blockchain computer is sound, and Ethereum isn't the only community thinking about this.

The Bitcoin Computer is also a concept and product. This is basically where the idea for the Ethereum Computer originated, and of course Bitcoin would be the first blockchain computer. Bitcoin has a project called Enigma which is said to be in development although no sourcecode can be found, which intends to allow people to do secure-multipary computation over Bitcoin with privacy guaranteed. This technology would have been interesting but considering the fact that Bitcoin relies on Proof of Work, and that the Bitcoin Core developers don't seem thrilled about making the changes necessary for Bitcoin to be a blockchain computer, it is in my opinion safe to say that Bitcoin will ne**ver function well as a blockchain computer without losing it's essence. On top of this, it is unlikely Bitcoin would be chosen for this now that there are competitors which don't have the "bad boy reputation" of Bitcoin.

Tauchain is also capable of running a blockchain computer or multiple blockchain computers. The main mechanism for Tauchain would be what Ohad used to call Zennet but which is now going by the project name Agoras. Agoras is an intelligent market place, but not an ordinary market place, as "smart markets" aren't like ordinary markets. This market place will allow any participants to rent any form of computation they like, whether it be human computation or machine computation, using the secure smart contract logic of MSOL over graphs. In my opinion it is safe to say that Agoras at this time is the most focused and sophisticated attempt at building a blockchain "super computing" network, but because of it's design it's not a blockchain as we currently think of it and is unfinished.

Synereo is a computer?

Synereo is interesting because it's composable. Composability is what allows Synereo to function as a computer and is how Synereo achieves high evolvability while managing complexity. This is made possible by the power of rho-calculus which is similar to pi calculus. Most people probably do not know what composability means or why it is such an important design pattern I will offer an explanation.

Function composition

Most programmers know what a function is but for people who aren't programmers, a function takes an input (BEEP) INPUT--> Function --> OUTPUT --> (BOOP) and produces an output. The output it produces is based on some computation, but it could be that the function is simply the recipe for addition, or perhaps for the Bitcoin price. In the case it's for the Bitcoin price then the function would contain the recipe which would look up the price for a certain date, and the input would have to necessarily be a date, and date would be a "type" of input while price would be a type of output.

Function composition allows for the benefit of code-reuse and helps the programmer to manage complexity. An example of code C programmers would be familiar with:

float x, y, z;
// ...
y = g(x);
z = f(y);

Because composability is a deep and technical concept, think of it as an ability to store a finite collection of recipe patterns in box or a "soup", in such a way that they can be combined in any way you like, and reused again and again. The power of it comes from the many different combinations you can use, and the fact that you can reuse old combinations or old patterns. This video provides a far better explanation than I can give:

Most programmers know the importance of modularity. Modularity allows for components to be swapped out as necessary. Composability goes a step beyond mere modularity.

Recombinant components is a core feature of composability. Composability is a design principle which requires:

1. self-containment (modular): it can be deployed independently – note that it may cooperate with other components, but dependent components are replaceable.

1. stateless: it treats each request as an independent transaction, unrelated to any previous request. Stateless is just one technique; managed state and transactional systems can also be composable, but with greater difficulty.

Synereo the Social Computer that rewards creativity?

A quote from the whitepaper gives an indication of what Synereo is being built for. This quote is from 2015 which is before Steem was even a thought. The quote:

If all value associated with cryptocurrency must ultimately trace back to value originating in fiat currency the transition to cryptocurrency will be a slow process,indeed. If, however, we provide a mechanism whereby a key aspect of the creative process is reflected in the AMP’s relationship to value, that process can be dramatically accelerated. What everyone implicitly understands, yet very few explicitly acknowledge is that creativity has a distinctive mark: creative processes are ex nihilo; they generate something from nothing! Whether it’s anew algorithm, a new song,or a new way of looking at the world, we recognize creativity in the freshness and newness of the offering – something is there that wasn’t there before. Human life vitally depends on the font of creativity; without the renewal of creativity value slow receeds from our lives.

However, without a mechanism whereby that creativity results in the creation of currency, none of the value created by a genuinely creative offering is recognized. All of the existing currency traces value back to some other source. So, without such a mechanism the creative act is not recognized properly by the system. Note though, that if they find their audience, the consistently creative participant in the network will have high Reo. Their standing in the community will reflect the recognition of their creativity. If they had a means by which they could turn some of their accumulated Reo into AMPs, literally capitalizing on their reputation, then the system would actually have a means to recognize the creation of value in the creative act.

Reo is similar to the reputation Steemit has. Amps are similar to the psychic credits of "likes" that we see with Facebook, but the difference is these amps have value as a currency. This allows for the attention economy to develop. The difference between Steem and Synereo is Steem is only partially decentralized, it doesn't function as a full social computer because it still relies on aspects of the web. Synereo on the other hand will allow for decentralized storage, decentralized computation, and will be self contained in a way that anyone will be able to set up a node. It will be able to run on in a way which is much more resilient, and if privacy is your thing, it will likely be able to offer more privacy.

Another benefit is that Synereo uses a functional programming language with it's code formally verified. It's going to be possible for developers to write safe smart contracts on Synereo, with reputation, and with the attention economy in-tact. Synereo indeed could rival Facebook and even surpass Facebook.

Synereo has design advantages over Steemit

Synereo encompasses some of the features which favor it in terms of security, decentralization, and recominant ability (modularity/composability), all which make Synereo extremely adaptable plus very hard to shut down. It may not need to run on the ordinary web, which could mean more censorship resistance. Synereo is one of the first composable decentralized social computing platforms available. Synereo has pi-calculus at it the foundation of it's "social contract" language, and in my opinion the future of synereo is very bright.

Conclusion

Synereo is going to provide very stiff competition for Steemit in 2017. Steemit has the "first mover advantage" if you believe in that, and if it can capture enough users early on, it might be able to be successful just on the size of it's user base. At the same time, if Steemit does not update to become capable of a greater variety human computation, to become capable of true social computation beyond just content creation and curation, Steemit is going to lose out in terms of market cap and demand for Steem Power. In my opinion, Steemit and Steem in general has an advantage in terms of performance, in that it's based on LMAX which is a great design for a high performance trading platform, and this performance advantage may allow it to do niche market functionalities which Synereo will not be able to do as efficiently.

So in a way it's similar to Bitshares vs Ethereum, where Ethereum could do more general purpose computations while Bitshares focused exclusively on the domain of trading, and in the case of Synereo there is a choice for Steemit to go more general purpose in which case side chains may enable this, or it can go specialized. And a final advantage for Steem is that it may in fact use more familiar programming paradigms and if the language Wren is chosen it will be both high performance and reasonably simple.

What I would hope to see is for Steemit to integrate into Synereo rather than compete against. In reality, Facebook and Reddit are more of a threat to Synereo and Steemit than they both are to each other.

References

1. https://github.com/synereo/rholang
2. https://www.synereo.com/whitepapers/synereo.pdf
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_computing
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composability
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_composition_(computer_science)

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If you appreciated this article and would like to learn more about social computers, and related topics, check out what else I wrote below:

• Social Computers: Human-Based Computation Games
• [CONCEPT] Living Computation - Social Computation - Steemit