I want to give a small, muted shout out to the designers of the Steem architecture, because it provided a critical ingredient that has enabled me to finally find the solution to problems which the more I studied, the more I realised that this was the answer to every problem there is in the business of creating content (artists) for consumers (customers), that is cheaply replicated over global digital packet switched networks.
However, the muting is because the way in which it was finally done, and the simple fact that it misses out so many critical elements, means that it is not a sustainable system architecture (not durable long term), whereas I wanted to see a system that is not just durable, but has a good chance of becoming universally adopted instead of staying small, which just serves to further accentuate the flaws in the execution of the delivery of Steem to the users (this includes witnesses, curators/consumers and creators of content, who all get short changed because of Steem's flaws).
Agora Routing
Abstract
At the very centre of the Dawn Network system architecture is what I call Agora Routing. Agora Routing is the distribution of hosting of relay/routing, filesystem and application hosting that can be completely fluid and elastic and adapt to demand for services faster than any existing clustering system thus far built, because it works on a flat network map topology rather than in a centralised topology, and allows anyone with connectivity, storage and compute resources to become a Carrier and Intermediary.
The key to distributing services in this way has to do with having a protocol to verify that providers of service are not misbehaving, and to reward them for their contribution to delivering services based on the demand of the consumer of these services.
Up to now, this has largely been impossible because of being unable to pay the deliverers of the service, and one of the most revolutionary things about Steem is the way that it shows the way to design the system - by using the issuance of new currency to compensate creators of content. Bittorrent seeds are not paid, and neither are Tor routers, both are in the position of delivering service to the consumer and creating the link between Creators and Consumers of content and services.
By following this model, and extending it to it's logical conclusion, this method of compensating the labors of all parties providing infrastructure to not just the creators, and the validators of the network, as is the structure in Steem, it goes further to divide the pool of currency issuance into 5 parts, Creators, Deliverers, Consumers, Intermediaries and Validators.
About anonymity and eligibility for rewards
Note that this scheme requires total transparency. If any node in the chain does not sign the Proof of Service, Validators will not issue tokens to the parties who are signatories. Anonymous consumers can easily be Sybil attackers, Creators or Carriers under another guise, and the network reduces the value of these receipts in accordance with the network distance between Intermediaries, Consumers and Creators, as discovered by their frequency and quantity of tokens of relations in the Ledger (Follow the Money). Opacity is a necessary prerequisite for fraud, so it is outlawed by the network from having the right to claim rewards.
Some may consider this a deficiency, but it is impossible to enforce a separation between the chain that links Creator, Carrier and Consumer without identifying all three parties. Note that this does not preclude pseudonymity, which in fact all authentication systems are, but the earnings of any party in the process, if they are transferred to a Creator or Carrier they appear on in a Proof of Service, they steadily degrade the potential rewards for their participation.
Agora Routing does not require users to actively 'like' content, it simply measures who certifiably consumed it. The Dawn Network rewards the generation of new connections, so the older, and more established connections are between sequential links in the chain, the less valuable they are.
The 5 Elements of Agoric Routing
Key to the models used in Dawn, is the network diagram below:
This is a scheme that was first invented by Chinese Taoists possibly as far as 4,000 years ago. It represents what is called a completely connected graph in network and number theory, and topology. This is the first completely connected graph that can be both anisotropic and bidirectional, that is, you can trace a path from any point to any other without the edges being isotropic (bidirectional), without needing to cross any path twice. There is probably a special name in graph theory for this but I don't know it.
It may not be precisely the map that we follow, but it is a guide to the type of structure we want to create. Anisotropy is very important in control systems, reversibility does not exist in the real world within the central elements of systems, 'internally', only between them. Causality goes in one direction, each arrow is like the arrow of time, it only has one direction.
The 5 elements of Agoric Routing, and the proportion of their reward share is as follows:
- Creator 16/31
- Carrier 8/31
- Consumer 4/31
- Intermediary 2/31
- Validator 1/31
This scheme is formed out of the principle that the primary value creator is the Creator. The Content requires a Carrier, who delivers it to the Consumer, who demands the content, the Intermediary acts as a go-between who authenticates the relationships between Carrier and Consumer (enforcing that there be a lack of financial and network proximity relationships between (if the consumer is also the Carrier, the cost of delivery is zero), as this is how Sybils will attempt to exploit the system), and finally, the Validator, who judges whether the rules have been followed, and issues the rewards in proportion to the way in which the network is being utilised.
The proportions of rewards allocated to each part of the system is based on where the value comes from, as well as the amount of interaction that is required in that part of the system.
I am also including a brief description of how the elements and their relationships are cognate to the 5 element graph, one could go into much greater detail than I will, as it is accessory and to some extent mere marketing to point out the correspondence, though for myself it is a tool to bind together a universal causality map to the map of the network system. But the anisotropic quality of the graph shown above is critical to the function of Dawn as a promoter of new connections between Content and Consumers.
Creators
The Creator is number one, and gets basically just over half of the pool. This has to be big, also, because producing content is the most capital intensive and speculative activity in the system.
One cannot know while incubating a product, whether anyone will want to consume it at all. Thus the reward must be commensurately larger.
Element: Earth
This is the substance from which everything is made, the incubator of all life. Creativity comes from joy, which corresponds to Earth, and it corresponds to carbohydrates as it is the energy source, though it depends on the consumer, who consumes (overcomes) the product and causes it to become depleted.
Carriers
Delivering the content to the Consumer is the role of the Carriers. They provide the network connectivity, data storage and compute power required to deliver the content to the Consumer.
Their share is large because though it is far less of a gamble whether people want content, but providing the infrastructure is quite capital intensive, especially in the process of scaling up to a peak in demand.
Because this system is completely borderless, there is no barrier of entry of scale, everything from a little smartphone all the way up to a globally connected network of data centres can participate.
The smaller Carriers at the outer edge of the network before the Consumers help distribute load and allow the network to identify where the Carriers need to replicate which content.
Element: Fire
Carrier corresponds to Fire, because the energy from Wood (consumer demand) must be burned (a repeated request is not counted) in order to apply it to work. Fire is also highly adaptable, the most changeable element, representing the way in which Carriers adapt as quickly as possible to bring The Product to the Consumer.
Consumers
The consumers of content are the whole reason for building the structure, and the reason for creating content. However, they still get a sizeable share of the pool of rewards available in the network because they inform the Creators what content is demanded, and the Carriers know by their demand what and where to deliver it.
In the Steem architecture design, the Consumer is the Curator. Thus, for consuming the content, there is a reward that is calculated as a proportion that is 1/4 the Creator and 1/2 the Carrier share.
Element: Wood
Wood penetrates (destroys and consumes) earth in order to grow, and it's nature is very fickle, like the wind. Likewise, with the passing of time since the creation of new content, the value of what is created diminishes rapidly, because of competition to feed the consumer content they value most highly, it is always a moving target, and the Consumer provides the Carrier the fuel that allows it to rapidly adapt and keep the cycle moving.
Validators
Validators are given many names in Distributed networks - in Bitcoin and most similar and derivative cryptocurrency (ad hoc financial ledger database) systems, they are called Miners. In Steem, they are called Witnesses. In the upcoming Cosmos network, they are called Validators, a label that we are grandfathering in as the original work by Jacob Gadikian is derivative of Tendermint, the Cosmos consensus/replication engine (Dawn will not use this engine, but rather the Rock Paper Scissors Consensus Protocol).
Validators task is as the gatekeepers to writing to the various blockchain databases that link together that create Dawn, as well as deciding whether the rules of the system have been obeyed, and reducing the reward based on the financial links between most specifically the Consumer and Carrier, who if they are within the same network, owned by the same party, are near zero cost.
They assign Intermediaries based on graph analysis of the Ledger to ensure that there is no automatically discoverable financial interests in common between Creators, Carriers and Consumers. A Consumer can optionally choose an Intermediary, but the closer the Intermediary is to their activity in the Ledger, the more the Validator will reduce the reward to every party who signs the receipt. So by default, Consumers (the client that renders the content) will request a maximally distant Intermediary.
To repeat again what was stated in the Abstract, this is because the more closely related the three C's are, the less valuable it is to the network, because it is not creating new connections. Dawn rewards generation of connections. Anything that is old is less valuable, this is a principle of free market capitalism and cognition.
They certify all of the signatures on Proof of Service receipts created by the chain starting with Creators, through the Carrier, to the Consumer, and then finally the Intermediary, whose position is chosen to enforce the network isolation between Consumer and Carrier, and then with this data, they compute the distributions of new tokens to pay to each of the parties according to the apportioning of pools described in the foregoing.
Element: Metal
Validators are this element because they are rigid (enforcing rules), and create the opportunity for Intermediaries who certify that Consumer and Carrier are not in fact the one and the same party. They are also the mortal enemies of Carriers, who would otherwise try to collude with Creators and Consumers to defraud the network. It is also relevant that Metal is what money has been for the larger part of human history, the Validators mint tokens to distribute to the system to provide compensation for the labor involved.
Intermediaries
Because of the possibility of collusion between Carriers and Consumers, in particular, who can set up their own distribution within the same private network as the Consumer nodes, in an attempt to syphon resources in a total conspiracy between Creator, Carrier and Consumer, the Intermediary acts as a check on this collusive behaviour.
Thus they also receive a reward for their work that is half what the Curators get, because their position is necessary in every transaction involving content delivery, to certify that there is no mischief, and their position is assigned by Validators according to data derived from the Ledger, which provides the information of financial relationships between accounts in the Dawn Network.
Element: Water
Like water, intermediaries do not care what is between them and the way down the hill towards the ocean. They are a critical part of how the network finds paths, as well as ensuring that the Validators are sure that the three C's are not Colluding. The Creators are the enemies of Intermediaries, because the more demand for The Product, the more work the Intermediary must do, which is essentially simply a single hop proxy between the Carrier and the Consumer.
Process Flow
Creators produce content which is replicated by Carriers, who deliver The Product to Consumers, via Intermediaries, who are assigned by Validators to enforce separation between Carriers and Consumers, who can be pretend to be both parties, potentially operated by Creators, who are seeking to exploit the flow of data to win unearned tokens from Validators.
Thus, in the process of production there is a record created, of the movement of data from Creators to Consumers, that looks like this:
- Content Fingerprint - The hash of content, which can be the hash of a database log/blockchain plus the hash of the query that produced the data, which also bears a hash, in the case of applications (databases)
- Creator Signature - The creator signs the content, or by delegation through the chain of Carriers who perform the delivery. This signature certifies the identity of the Creator.
- Carrier Signature - The carrier signs the foregoing, and these can be a chain of signatures as usually the delivery process will involve multiple Carriers delivering (logistics) between the Creator and the Consumer.
- Intermediary signature - The Carrier may not directly deliver content to Consumers, because they can be very easily the one and same party behind the two identities. The intermediary should be physically proximate between the Carrier and Consumer in order to optimise the flow of data along the shortest paths.
- Consumer signature - The consumers of content sign next, certifying that the content delivered was as specified and signed by the Carriers, and that it came through the Intermediary.
With this data, the Validator then judges whether the procedure has been properly followed, and if all the signatures and relationships are correct according to the rules, that then the Proof of Service receipt leads to the issuance of tokens to each role in a transaction, listed on the Proof of Service receipt.
This data is compiled by the Validator (in all cases, all these names are placeholders for a plurality in each category), and the total pool of pending Proof of Service Receipts are compiled, the various coefficients that lead to producing a scalar value that is then summed, and the ratio of the sum to the value, assigns the proportion of tokens out of the pool that are paid out to each account whose signature appears on the Proof of Service.