The specific dynamic of a labor union coexisting with a quasi- or outright hostile employer is a distinct application space for decentralized cryptography and finance that is up till now relatively untapped in the cryptocurrency community. To capture this low-hanging fruit of blockchain application, let use pursue a framework by which Peercoin could assist and support a labor union in the face of adversarial negotiations.
There is a kind of chicken-and-the-egg problem here with regards to adoption. To promote adoption, we want a culture of donation and participation. However, the target audience does not even have a Peercoin address and cannot imagine a reason why they would have one. As such, we could seek out a kind of “killer app” to get people involved. However, once involved, a more decentralized approach that more broadly uses Peercoin transactions and features would be a more robust approach.
As such, we define 3 categories of application:
- On-chain finances
- Off-chain cryptography
- Second-layer solutions
A key issue facing unions these days comes in the form of attacks on their finances. Unions have found the need to set up alternative payment schemes to avoid disruption by those in increasing positions of power to perform such disruption. This often still remains in the form of domestic currency, but we can certainly imagine a world where laborers pay their union dues in Peercoin. In this world, a public address can easily also be used to source donations from the community. Minters and users could also signal support for various movements publicly and immutably. These concepts are clear, but they lack impetus for a union to generate a Peercoin address for themselves.
The applications for off-chain cryptography in verifiable signatures for trusted decentralized communication have barely been cracked in this context. While many of the traditional commercial spaces have extensive budgets for cybersecurity, unions tend to rely on word-of-mouth and less-secure communication to organize. Tools that fill this niche of decentralized encrypted communications could fulfill that starting need to prove useful Peercon’s approach. Message signing is built-in to the core client, and has been a staple since inception. Building out the tools to make use of this feature of cryptocurrency does not make sense when we percieve of crypto as a speculative asset. However, as a revolutionary tool to help laborers organize it fits in perfectly.
In extending these concepts beyond even the basic on-chain finances and off-chain secure communication, we can pursue wider applications in representing large-scale organizations directly in second-layer approaches that blur the lines between on- and off-chain. For example, all members of a union could participate collectively in a single address with a threshold activation. Such an address would be indistinguishable from traditional single-signature addresses but could contain the direct will of the collective bargaining unit.
With this new lens we can review all past, present, and future projects in Peercoin and analyze their impact on supporting the efforts of labor unions. The thought-experiment and framework of supporting a collective unit going through (un)cooperative bargaining provides a rich background to re-assess the global role that Peercoin will play in the coming decades.
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The open-source messaging app “Signal” has a concept of “Safety Numbers” e.g. here:
Signal-Android/app/src/main/java/org/thoughtcrime/securesms/contacts/paged/SafetyNumberRepository.kt
Not that Signal is the only option here, but it makes for a good contemporary and open-source example.
Alice and Bob want to organize. They share a signal chat and both have the Safety Number. They also each have a Peercoin address and private key. They are even willing to learn things about taproot scripts and what have you to try to act together on or off the block chain. What can we do to help them automate and otherwise validate their mutual interactions?
The first and most obvious statement involves signing messages to validate that each Peercoin address holder knows about the signal chat. This is easily done by signing a message containing the Safety Number in order to link it to an Address, a la Patchcoin. This is done if you aren’t sure if the person you are chatting with controls the Address. In the opposite case, where you trust the Signal chat but not the Peercoin address, the answer is as simple as someone posting the Address in the chat and vouching for its authenticity. Either way, we can easily couple Peercoin addresses and Signal chats.
A natural inclination would be to have the Safety Number itself be a Peercoin private key that is held mutually by either party. This would be akin to Pay-to-TagHash in which both parties could import the Safety Number as a private key in the Peercoin wallet and both be notified when something happens. In this way, we could have e.g. an extremely large Signal chat group all receive an OP_RETURN message even if the Signal app is shut down, and one that pushes up into their Peercoin Wallet or mobile app. For example, sending the signal to strike to everyone’s mobile app and easily verifying that the spent output used in the OP_RETURN matches their address book. These private keys could be used in turn in a multisig to form conglomerates of Signal chats that act collectively.
Using the Safety Number in an oracle to trigger a Tapscript could be an interesting way to couple everything together into a responsive network.
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Organization amongst peers is the foundation of Proof of Stake. The realization of Oracles as meaningful beacons of the real-world requires association with real-world concepts and priorities. Those that work a job, laborers, are key performers in the real-world and their organization amongst peers should be a priority for Peercoin. The influence of foreign currency is far less meaningful to Peercoin’s fundamental design than the ability for peers to organize in the face of adversity. Oracles of unions and other collections of laborers provide a pathway to a living chain, and serving their needs for an undisruptable ledger falls directly in-line with Peercoin’s foundational aspirations.
Following this line of thinking, let’s take a look at noosphere and see what we can make of it.
First off, we can follow the bread crumbs and go to this file:
noosphere
We can see on line 1138 during login it will grab the private key. Noosphere performs distributed key generation (DKG), which takes the key and combines it with others via a server to produce the resulting Schnorr signature.
The individual private key on line 1138 is taken from coinlib, another Peercoin project:
coinlib
We can simply replace that random byte generation with anything we want if we are looking to have deterministic private keys as mentioned in the previous post about using Signal chats as keys.
With these tools, what combinations can we imagine for inter-party dynamics in the context of organizing peers? First, we can consider our actors. We have individuals, who can generate their random bytes normally. Then we have collections of individuals sharing a private key, as mentioned. We can also have leadership representing collections of individuals that have a private key, which can be deterministic or random depending on how it is organized. As such, we can imagine several combinations of activity:
- Each individual, collection, and representative behaves independently. This is straightforward and the lowest technical bar of entry.
- Collections and individuals act together. Here, we can imagine several dynamics with corresponding requirements. For example, we could seek a solution where anyone in the collection can act as a dynamic representative, but it takes the individuals working together at some point in time to do something on-chain. This is a similar situation to the mint-pool concept.
- Representatives and individuals act together. This is similar to 2, but instead we might seek to provide the representative with direct execution power, with the individuals empowered as well. For example, a 1-of-2 multisig made up of another n-of-m multisig representing the individuals and a single sig for the representative.
- Representatives, collections, and individuals act together. This can be nuanced, but we could see how multiple unions with or without representatives can participate in large combinations that can be activated dynamically by large numbers of participants. Liberal use of weighted oracles and multisigs may be of extreme value here.
One last actor in this ecosystem is the person not involved in an organization. This person can interact with the oracles by generating tapscript based off their published signatures. In this way, decentralized activity with fundamental meaning can be realized.
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In conclusion, decentralized peer to peer organization through cryptographic protocols provides a framework for large networks rooted to real-world activity. The specific target of worker’s unions provides a powerful example for the long-term potential this technology holds, allowing for diverse arrays of inter- and intra-organizational structure. Providing ease-of-use off-chain cryptography tricks as standards for distributed communication enables on-roading to the chain and provides a nucleus of inter-agent coupling to build larger hybrid on/off-chain architectures. By mapping out potential use spaces and improving documentation/user experience, Peercoin can provide real value through immutability in adversarial environments. Tooling towards second layer decentralized organization is a clear pathway in the spirit of proof-of-stake consensus and embodies the intrinsic concepts Peercoin was built on.
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