He repeated it three or four times. Then both of them watched me as if waiting for my impending reaction.

I had not understood what he meant by “his double.” He had never mentioned that before. I asked for a clarification.

“There is another Genaro,” he explained.

All three of us looked at one another. I became very apprehensive. Don Juan urged me with a movement of his eyes to keep on talking.

“Do you have a twin brother?” I asked, turning to don Genaro.

“Of course,” he said. “I have a twin.”

I could not determine whether or not they were putting me on. They both giggled with the abandon of children that were pulling a prank.

“You may say,” don Juan went on, “that at this moment Genaro is his twin.”

That statement brought both of them to the ground with laughter. But I could not enjoy their mirth. My body shivered involuntarily.

Don Juan said in a severe tone that I was too heavy and self-important.

“Let go!” he commanded me dryly. “You know that Genaro is a sorcerer and an impeccable warrior. So he’s capable of performing deeds that would be unthinkable for the average man. His double, the other Genaro, is one of those deeds.”

I was speechless. I could not conceive that they were just teasing me.

“For a warrior like Genaro,” he went on, “to produce the other is not such a farfetched enterprise.”
After pondering for a long time what to say next, I asked, “Is the other like the self?”

“The other is the self,” don Juan replied.

His explanation had taken an incredible turn, and yet it was not really more incredible than anything else they did.
“What’s the other made of?” I asked don Juan after minutes of indecision.

“There is no way of knowing that,” he said.

“Is it real or just an illusion?”

“It’s real of course.”

“Would it be possible then to say that it is made of flesh and blood?” I asked.

“No. It would not be possible,” don Genaro answered.

“But if it is as real as I am . . .”

“As real as you?” don Juan and don Genaro interjected in unison.

They looked at each other and laughed until I thought they were going to get ill. Don Genaro threw his hat on the floor and danced around it. His dance was agile and graceful and, for some inexplicable reason, utterly funny. Perhaps the humor was in the exquisitely “professional” movements he executed. The incongruency was so subtle and at the same time so remarkable that I doubled up with laughter.

“The trouble with you, Carlitos,” he said as he sat down again, “is that you’re a genius.”

“I have to know about the double,” I said.

“There’s no way of knowing whether he’s flesh and blood,” don Juan said. “Because he is not as real as you. Genaro’s double is as real as Genaro. Do you see what I mean?”

“But you have to admit, don Juan, that there must be a way to know.”

“The double is the self; that explanation should suffice. If you would see, however, you’d know that there is a great difference between Genaro and his double. For a sorcerer who sees, the double is brighter.”

The main difference being you get the money back when it expires. The use case that came up most often was wanting to provide money for children at college.

I’ve been thinking about the different ways the wealth transfer could work. I’m particularly interested in how it would be accomplished with bitcoins. So far I’ve got four scenarios. The players are the giver, the recipient and the vendor.

• The giver gives to the receiver with the agreement that funds from that address will only be transferred to a specific list of addresses. The company would sign up online and register an address. This is a situation where the address verification through postcards might be useful. It isn’t possible to control how the receiver spends, but the giver will know and it can be marked as a violation.
• The giver gives to the company in an account that is designated as for the recipient. The recipient would need to identify themselves to get the money. One suggestion from the weekend was taking a picture of some distinctive object that they own. They then show the object to prove their identity.
• The giver transfers to a bank which holds the money then transfers it to the vendor when the recipient makes a purchase. It removes the responsibility from managing the accounts from the vendor. It also allows a gift to be used at multiple vendors.
• The receiver requests money from the giver who then transfers it to the vendor. This requires action by the giver as part of the payment process or an agent making payments on their behalf. This is the model bartab uses where a credit card is kept on file and charged when a purchase is made.

I like the direct giving because of the control it gives to the receiver, but I think #3 is likely the way to go. This means setting up a bank of some sort.

The 99.9% having 20% means that they would quintuple their wealth were it distributed evenly.

Something I think might be interesting to tackle the problem is to make a company mostly transparent. I’d like to use the ESON object to hold as much of the company data as possible. I’m primarily interested in the cost information.

It would pair especially well with bitcoins. Each transaction has a unique hash identifier and so you might have a subobject like:

{
  bitcoin: { transaction: {
    transaction hash: {
      for: product hash,
    }
  } }
}

The product object would contain whatever appropriate metadata for the thing purchased. For example:

{
  product: {
    type: 'corn':
    variety: Sundance
  },
  quantity: 24,
  units: tons
}

The transaction has a sender and a receiver address. So we know the store paid ฿0.2 for 24 tons of corn. Addresses would be owned by individuals or organizations:

{
  bitcoin: { wallet: {
    wallet address: {
      owner: xmpp id?,
    }
  } }
}

This way you know who paid and what they got. I’d really like to start with a grocery store. Collect data about the food supply chain and work out where the inefficiencies are. There would need to be shipping information as well to track how stuff moves.

I guess that would be associated with another transaction when the person paid for shipping. In the case of a grocery store stocked by local growers, they might bring it in themselves.

If we had this information though we could create visualizations of product flow to drive better efficiency. I like the idea of publishing it in the DHT and seeing what people create.

var combo = $.extend.apply( this, $.merge( [ true ], objects ) )

Later entries override earlier ones, so this means entries should be in order of reliability.

One of the things I would like is for people to be able to request royalties for use of their work. So, say for example that the artist who did the kitten head at the center of my logo would like a royalty for use of his image.

The first issue is how I know who the author of an image is. The sha1sum of the kitten head is 35813f6e. One approach would be to set:

 { royalty : {
  35813f6e: {
    holder: bitcoin address,
    price: float
  }
}

As a person surfs the program keeps track of how much the requests are and can optionally pay them.

The issue is what is to prevent Bob from publishing a royalty for Alice’s work. This is where a consensus system comes into play. People include either Bob or Alice’s version in their individual trees and the one that is referenced the most wins.

That or you have a curator who somehow determines the validity of competing claims. That seems more brittle though.

Because it doesn’t use javascript it will also animate when used as a background image.

One of the first things I’m changing is that instead of JSON the values returned from hash values are ESON. An ESON object is returned by the function:

return eval( "( function() { return " + eson + " } )()" )

JSON is a subset of ESON. One thing that ESON will allow us to do is give literals valid positions in the distributed object.

Imagine, there is a DHT in place such that an ESON object can be retrieved with a key.

Objects are stored by decomposing them into nodes in a hash tree. For example, starting with the object:

{
  foo : { bar : 'baz' },
  x : 'y',
  abc : [ 1, 2, 'f' ],
}

First insert the non-array / non-object values into the DHT:

{
  foo : { bar : 'baz' },
  x : 'y',
  abc : [ 1, 2, 'f' ],
}

• 'baz' → 7008a69f99f290ca687ddd752e016517b339c958
• 'y' → 4da61411af38bbbcc58d67e46682f890fc8c9ceb
• 1 → 356a192b7913b04c54574d18c28d46e6395428ab
• 2 → da4b9237bacccdf19c0760cab7aec4a8359010b0
• 'f' → 5e526cc14a935fc1a1b4179472a788b89dda5cb6

Next create objects where the values are replaced by their hashes (the values are shortened for readability):

{
  foo : { bar : '7008a69f' },
  x : '4da61411',
  abc : [ '356a192b', 'da4b9237', '5e526cc1' ],
}

An object/array is complete if it doesn’t have any objects as values:

• { bar : '7008a69f' }
• [ '356a192b', 'da4b9237', '5e526cc1' ]

Next insert the JSON representations of those objects into the DHT:

• { "bar" : "7008a69f" } → e74d732ade880c70eae4100a336c127974198572
• [ "356a192b", "da4b9237", "5e526cc1" ] → ca89648739400617740cb11cf369e602fc161191

Then replace those objects with their hash values in the original object:

{
  foo : 'e74d732a',
  x : '4da61411',
  abc : 'ca896487',
}

And one final round of hashing to get the root key:

{ "foo" : "e74d732a", "x" : "4da61411", "abc" : "ca896487" } → 0f5ccdb211adaba64c4a8ceb86c92475ec730ba5

The object can be represented as a graph:

When reconstructing an object, the values of arrays and objects are always looked up in the DHT.

The proof of residence is a utility bill or a voter registration. Say for instance you’re a student who rents. You could not be able to trade. I’ve been thinking of an alternative. A person creates an account online and requests a code to be sent to them via mail. Once that code is entered back into the system, it verifies a person’s address.

This same process could be combined with the voter registration process to provide an electronic component to civic interactions. Rather than everyone voting on every bill, people would still specify proxies for most of their decisions. The process could be more dynamic, however, and with more granularity in expertise. Rather than a single politician making decisions about a broad spectrum, votes on issues could be divided up and proxied to different people.

Another application could be in conjunction with a housing site. It could be used to verify that a particular account controls a particular address.

The example that I was first thinking of was for dating. Someone who is considering a liaison might be favorably inclined if their potential partner could show them a recent clean bill of sexual health. If doing so meant a simple exchange between smart phones.

The legally tricky part would be the laws surrounding release of medical records. Some cryptographic function would have to be considered equivalent to a signature.

I suppose though that would simply be in the contract the user signs when getting the procedure done.

It took some finagling, but the blog archives are back. The theme is apparently permanently lost.