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Solving society’s problems

So part of my senior year at university involves a professional workforce development. The class spans two semesters, with small teams working on the development and prototype of a project that aims to provide a solution to a “societal problem”. I posted my initial response to the assignment a week ago, and the response from my professor was that he didn’t really see how it met the definition of the class requirements, which were to provide a non-trivial solution that could actually be implemented by six or seven undergrads in a school year. No world peace solutions, basically.

I’ve some time since then trying to narrow the field to something that could actually be implemented, and had some interesting notes that may or may not be relevant from a computer science perspective, but need sharing regardless.

Decentralized autonomous organizations

Smart contracts have really changed things in a way that I don’t think will be readily apparent to most people for another five to ten years. The ability to programmatically define business logic and have it deployed to a permissionless, decentralised network, is going to transform how organizations operate. I can’t find the quote, but I heard this idea about corporations as proto-artificial intelligence. They function according to their own rules, have inputs and outputs which follow from those rules, and ultimately take on a life of their own. The issues that we’ve had with corporations over the years, especially those of governance, growth mindset, and accountability, are ultimately ones that the AI field needs to deal with as intelligent agents become more capable.

DAOstack seems to be the most advanced toolkit that is available for bringing a DAO to the light of day. They have GitHub repos available for working at the various levels needed to either deploy custom smart contracts to Ethereum, use their existing framework, or interact with these contracts via a web front-end. These ‘web 3.0’ applications are called dapps or distributed apps. Most of the use cases that they have listed currently involve different voting rights or reputation management systems. These are usually used as a mechanism for submitting, voting on, and funding proposals through the DAO. Effectively, DAOs function as a type of digital constitution for an organization, and there could be use cases for the management of political or even sovereign organizations.

I’ve been thinking of ways to incorporate organizations into a DAO, although I don’t think think the tech is comprehensive enough to do so at the level that would be needed to replace Robert’s Rules of Order, or be robust enough to be deployed within the executive board of a traditional political organization. (Change management is hard enough as it is…I digress.)

Innovation and social change

I also spent a good deal of time trying to brainstorm on more generic ‘social good’ issues, and discovered The Workers Lab, which has two initiatives that I thought were worth noting. The first is what they call the Design Sprint for Social Change. Basically, the problem set is that most workers don’t have the financial stability to deal with a $400 problem. Their solution: provide up to a thousand dollars in direct assistance, no questions asked. They went straight into a design sprint:

Source: The Workers Lab website

The results of their pre-pilot was interesting, (spoiler: getting money to people is hard!) and I look forward to seeing the results of the full-scale pilot that is apparently ongoing, but what really caught my eye was their Innovation Fund.

The fund awards $150,000 in funding to projects which build power for workers, and has invested more than $2 million to over 20 projects. The application deadline for this fall was a few days ago, but we will watching to see who joins the past winners as this years’ finalists.

Now these aren’t software solutions that they’re funding, but more organizational and purpose driven organizations. I kept digging some more, and that’s when I came across societal benefit corporations, which I will cover next.

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Teach your children well

I’ve been trying to teach my daughters the things I love, hoping that some of it will rub off on her. My wife and I both have a healthy love of reading, and seem to have passed that on to the eldest. (The youngest is too young to read.) We’ve also been successful instilling a love of music in the both of them, as the girls both love making up songs and dancing. My wife was a singer when she was in school, and I’ve been a musician since I was 14. The girls love to ‘play’, but my attempts to teach them anything resembling anything other than open strumming on a ukelele have been unsuccessful.

I was exposed to computers when I was around four years old, so I’m trying to replicate that experience for them. I learned to touch-type via this Missile Command-style game on the PS2/e, so I found a game for her to play that would do the same. She managed to work her way through it, but I don’t think it stuck. At one phase I know she was bored and just started smashing keys to get through it. (There was no penalty for wrong letters.) I’ve also had her working through Code.org’s lesson plan. She advanced through it pretty well, but we seem to have abandoned it for now. Kahn’s academy was probably pushing it a bit too much. I wanted to see how far past her grade level she could progress, but I didn’t want to push her to hard.

She’s been targeted for the ‘gifted’ program at her school. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I think it’s important for her to be challenged and pushed hard, but at the same time I think about the effect that such a distinction had on me when I was younger. Not that I think there’s anything bad about being singled out for academic distinction, but I’m worried about the psychological effects of being told you’re ‘gifted’ or ‘special’. It’s a hard line to tread, cause I realise there’s might be some gender factors at play with how confidence levels are later in life.

When I’m watching my girls play, I’ve noticed that my eldest is very bossy, either with her younger sister or with other kids in the neighborhood. My wife tells me that she’s ‘exhibiting leadership skills’, and that calling her bossy is sexist or whatever, but she does bark orders a lot, and gets pissed off when people don’t do what she tells them. I fear that’s something I may have inadvertently modeled for her as well. But it is amazing watching them play.

I try to limit their television time. My wife is a lot more lax about it than I am, but I try to limit it to a couple of hours on the weekends. Today we had the TV off and the two of them were playing in the living room with their dolls and toys, making up stories and playing dress up. Their imaginations are at full gear. The youngest did something similar later this afternoon. I was meditating on the back deck, and she came out there with about four or five animal creatures and posted up on a cushion next to me and started making up this story. It was super cute.

So, hoping that I could actually teach them some music in a more formal way, sight-reading and some theory, I’ve been looking at getting a full sized, 88-key keyboard. They had a toy one that was too small for my large fingers, and I really want something that I can practice on as well, y’know? They’ve enjoyed messing with my 66-key USB MIDI controller that’s been stashed in the closet for a few years, but I wanted something that didn’t need to be hooked up to a computer. I found one online that was in stock at the local Guitar Center, so I took the oldest out there earlier today. She went straight for the drums, and wanted to spend most her time out there. Of course.

Of course, we don’t have room for a kit, much less the three grand for one of these fancy Roland hybrid-electronic rigs, but she didn’t seem super enthused about the keys. She couldn’t tell the difference between the two I was trying to choose from, so I guess we’ll hold off for now. Tomorrow, I’ll hook the MIDI controller back up, and start test driving some of these online piano learning app. I’m gonna see what her (or her sister) can do before I throw another three hundred dollars at it.

I know my wife will like that a lot better.

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The Nation Magazine: July 15/22

Reclaiming Stonewall, guest editor: Patrick McCarthy: This issue commemorates the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. I hate to use the word riot in the context of this event, a more appropriate term would be confrontation. Fed up with being targeted for by police for being, Stonewall marked a turning point in the LGBTQ community, one that would see a revolutionary change in status through the AIDS crisis and marriage equality. This special section of the magazine features short contributions by a number of LGBTQ activists, organizers and authors.

Warren Rising, by Joan Walsh: Continuing their coverage of the 2020 Democratic nominee hopefuls, The Nation turns their attention to Elizabeth Warren. Along with Bernie Sanders, Warren is one of the front-runners among the more radical and progressive factions on the left, and this gushing portrait of her is indicative of that. Joan Walsh follows Warren as she stumps through Iowa, covering her speech and reaction from the electorate while providing more of Warren’s background and some direct reporting.

I cant tell if this report is a glowing portrait of Warren because of her front-runner status in the primary, or if it’s because she’s the real deal. I’ve got great respect for Warren, and would welcome her as the nominee, but I would still prefer Sanders’s class-antagonism over Warren’s “I’m a capitalist” reformism. Still, there’s the issue of electability, and given Warren’s ability to bounce back from Trump’s attacks, and the Democratic establishment’s fear/hate of Sanders, I do hope that either one of them is able to beat out Biden for the nomination.

Resisting Trump’s Cruelty, by Sasha Abramsky: If there’s anything that seems to drive my outrage fatigue more than anything, it’s the Trump administrations’s wanton cruelty against immigrants. As I’m quick to remind, “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” of Trump’s policies, following a predictable proto-fascist campaign to stir up racial resentment and white nationalism. This article points out the rays of sunshine in the fight against this dehumanization of South American refugees, those risking jailtime to make border crossings through the desert less deadly, and the churches and community organizations that are stepping up to sponsor, clothe and shelter those waiting on their asylum hearings.

Inherently Unequal, by David Cole: Review of Separate, by Steve Luxenberg. This history of the Plessy v. Ferguson case, the Supreme Court case which enshrined separate but equal in the United States until it was over turned 58 years later, is interesting for a variety of reasons. The litigants in the case knew that it was deemed to fail, and it was even opposed by Frederick Douglass and other civil rights supporters. Without a mass movement on their side, they knew that the nation, still reeling from the Civil War, was not ready. What surprised me also was that the case was brought by the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Act, as well as the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which did so because of the expense of operating separate cars. While the justification of the Court’s majority decision that segregation was “in the nature of things” is not surprising, it is that the sole dissenter in the 7-1 decision was the Court’s only southerner, Justice John Marshall Harlan. Harlan, who was raised in a slave-owning family and was a long-time opponent of civil rights legislation and supporter of states-rights, was nonetheless a supporter of the 13th and 14th amendments.

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Scamming scammers: XCoinPlace.com

So this site has a long history with scammers. One of our most popular posts way back in 2005 was documenting a run in with a scammer on a Yahoo Personals. It got thousands of hits, and is probably the most popular thing I ever wrote here. Anyways, as one who is involved in crypto, and frequents many Discord servers, I get targeted from time to time. One happened earlier this week. I got the following DM on Discord. I ignored it for a few days, then finally decided to take a nibble. My altruism will get me one of these days.

The dark silhouette is a nice touch, BTW.

I knew it was a scam at first, but I was curious as to what the game would be, and interested to know if I could waste this asshole’s time and keep him from other marks.

Now I’ve seen this one before. It was about a year ago, maybe two. The play is to get you to sign up on this exchange, but of course it’s fake. There’s usually some sort of deposit required to verify your account or some other trap to remove funds from suckers. My curiosity peaked, so I checked the site out. I DO NOT RECOMMEND YOU DO THIS! I had a lapse in operational security when I did this earlier. My VPN proxy was not activated, and I may have inadvertently exposed my primary public IP to the operators of my house, potentially flagging my address as a high-value target. That said, what I saw on the site was quite impressive.

Front page of the scam site.
More of the site, highly sophisticated, including fake legalese, as well as a friendly chatbot operator to answer all your questions.

So, you may be asking, what makes me so sure that this is a scam and not an actual legit site? Well, flag number one: no Twitter. Neither by username, nor by search term. I I did find an ICO platform called CoinPlace, which means the scammers may be trying to count on some association confusion. Or their just lazy. Now this was enough for me, given the Discord message. I was already done. More important things to do. That and I felt I may have already exposed myself.

And this has been the last we’ve heard from lousib90

Of course I wanted to be a bit more sure before posting all this, so I did a bit more homework. Flag number two: the domain is less than 10 days old. This in spite of the assurance that the company has been around since 2013. And flag number three: the name Cryptual, mentioned on the front page. The only hit I could find for that is a LinkedIn page for Cryptual Limited, which was apparently founded in 2017 but links to a dead domain.

Something tells me that these people may be fake also.

So, apologies to the Cryptual team, if they actually exist, but I wanted to write up this dissection of the XCoinPlace scam and help get the word out, maybe save people some hassle. I’ll count success given how quickly this site goes down. And in the off chance that it is legit and not associated with my Discord friend, (not likely) they can reach out to me on Twitter to convince me otherwise.

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IDEX staking: lessons learned

In our last part on IDEX, we discussed how the decentralized exchange aims to incentivise their infrastructure roadmap with staking. In this part, we talk about our experiences implementing our node.

For the past 18 months or so we’d been running an XDNA masternode on an Amazon AWS instance. In July, following a 90% drop in price of XDNA during that time, we decided to try and rollout the IDEX node. Unfortunately, we ran into some compatibility issues between XDNA, which was written for the Ubuntu 16 Boost libraries, and IDEX, which was supported on 18. Rather than spend a lot of time trying to enable legacy Boost libraries for Ubuntu 18, we decided to dump the XDNA masternode and just focus on IDEX instead.

The deployment from Github to implementation was simple enough. The only issue that we encountered at first was that we were still holding legacy AURA tokens, which had to be swapped for the newer IDEX tokens. This delayed our staking by 7 days due to the staking requirement, but once we waited and signed our proof of stake we were good to go. All we had to do from there was make sure our server was up, and collect our rewards.

We immediately started having stability issues. The node wasn’t able to keep up with the data and stay in sync. Even though the hardware requirements suggested 2GB of memory, it appeared that others were having problems as well, so I bumped things up to a larger instance. The system was able to run better, but still experienced intermittent issues. While issues on the IDEX Github repo seemed to be going without response, there were several IDEX staff on the project Discord server that actually seemed to respond to people asking for help.

The issue with these small VPS nodes is that IDEX required a connection to a full-fledged Ethereum node, which is a bit much for a VPS with only 2GB of RAM to handle. I was actually referred to Infura, which provides Ethereum and IPFS APIs. Basically, they run the Ethereum node, and provide an API key that you can use for your web 3.0 applications. Ethereum as a service, basically. The free Core tier allows 100,000 requests a day, which is more than sufficient for the IDEX node, which averages about 82,000/day.

Once we implemented Infura, we were able to reduce our AWS instance down to a t2.micro instance. Bring our total monthly cost down to just over $9/month, about a third of what we had been running before.

IDEX payouts are based on two week periods. Nodes earn credits based on their uptime and stake size, and these tier 3 nodes split one quarter of the fees of the IDEX market amongst themselves. Our payout for the minimal stake amount was less than a hundredth of an Ethereum, and our shock at seeing this caused us to do some more research into how the staking model and payouts operated. I was able to find a earnings calculator, but the results weren’t promising.

IDEX staking earnings estimate, minimum 10,000 IDEX stake. Figures 9/4/2019

So it’s obvious that the doing the absolute minimum staking amount is not really worth the effort. And if I had done my due diligence from the start I may have realized this and maybe reconsidered my investment of time and money. I don’t consider this exercise to be a waste though. Beyond the the drawdown in value of the IDEX stake itself, I really haven’t lost much that I’m worried about in and of itself. With the hemorrhaging that altcoins have had over the last 18 months, daily volume on the exchange is down considerably from it’s all time highs. If this Redditor is to be believed, IDEX was doing ‘upward of 25 mil a day in volume’, which would considerably change the value of this calculation. There are lot of factors that need to be taken into consideration as to whether the market will come back and whether IDEX can maintain their lead, but one of my core beliefs is that during a gold rush, the sure money is on those selling the pickaxes. BNB token, IDEX and other tokens that allow taking profits from the trading volume of the exchange itself may be a better long term strategy than many of the various crypto projects that are born and die during the market cycle.

Ultimately, I considered IDEX’s long term roadmap when deciding to increase my stake. Although there has been no official word on when the tier 2 staking application will be available, those participating will earn 33% of the fees rewards, and 42% for the tier 1 when IDEX becomes fully decentralized. Ultimately, if IDEX is successful, ownership of a tier 1 masternode could be very lucrative. Plus I love these type of infrastructure projects, running mining pools and masternodes. I have decided to increase my holding of IDEX tokens to ensure break-even on the tier 3 node, which will hopefully put me into a position where I will be in a position to operate a tier 1 node.

With over two million dollars worth of IDEX tokens currently being staked, I may not be in the best position to participate, but if they do implement pooled staking then I should be in a pretty good position.

There are several concerns that we’re watching, mainly around auditability and the stability of the platform software, which we will leave for another update. For now, we’ll continue layering our limit orders to pick up more IDEX and figure out how we can manage our exposure to any further market downturns.

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IDEX staking: decentralized crypto exchange incentives

In the first part of this series, we discuss how decentralized exchanges work, and how IDEX operates their incentive plan.

It’s been a while since we talked about cryptoassets here, so today I want to talk about some of my experiences staking with the IDEX platform. IDEX is a decentralized exchange platform, which means that it is a non-custodial platform for crypto exchanges. This is in contrast to custodial exchanges where your money is kept on the platform itself. This is traditional method of asset exchange, where the exchange holds your assets and executes your trades. This is how the equities markets have worked since for ever, and how the first generation of bitcoin trading sites worked: Mt. Gox, Coinbase, Gemini, Poloniex, et cetera. With the advent of smart contracts on the Ethereum platform, these types of non-custodial brokerages have sprung up, with the first, EtherDelta, being the first.

Instead of the exchange holding custody of the assets, which can lead to theft, as was the case with Mt. Gox and other exchanges, the users retain custody of their tokens. Operations are performed via the smart contract, which, while it does have it’s risks — the DAO hack for example — the exchange operator does not have access to the tokens. Users deposit their funds with the smart contract, buy and sell orders are matched on the order book — more on that shortly — and the smart contract makes the trade, minus a small fee, of course. Users can cancel their open orders and withdrawal funds at any time. Minus the risk of a black swan event like a contract failure or other hack, users funds are completely under their control and are safe at all times.

Now with Etherdelta, the first generation DEX platform, the order book was contained on-chain, meaning that posting buy and sell orders, or cancelling them, cost gas. This was expensive, and was subject to delays when the Ethereum blockchain became congested. What IDEX has done with their exchange is to keep the orderbooks off chain, which removes these two limitations. Now critics will say that this type of centralized order book isn’t decentralized, which is why IDEX has a roadmap to offload this infrastructure in a fully decentralized manner.

Phase one of this three part plan is offloading the trade history, which they’re incentivising through a staking masternode model. Those participating in this process split twenty five percent of all fees on the IDEX platform, which is 0.3 percent of trade volume on the platform. Payouts are about every two weeks, based on node uptime and amount staked. There’s a seven day freeze period on funds as well, which is important to note.

Our initial entry into IDEX was around July of last year. The minimum required staking amount of ten thousand IDEX tokens, was around fifteen hundred dollars at the time, and we averaged into our position over several months for around sixty percent of that. This was several months before the staking software was actually released, and not only was the general altcoin market tanking, but IDEX took a further hit after implementing KYC protocols to stay ahead of regulatory issues. The staking nodes actually went live in January of this year, but by the time we actually started operating our node, the value of our IDEX tokens, (and our stake) had dropped to less than a third of what it had been a year earlier.

In our next part, we’ll talk about our experience setting up our node infrastructure, and our profit results.

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Solidarity, whatever

I’m sitting in the living room, looking out the window at the back yard, where my daughters are out playing with a couple of her neighborhood friends. I’d say it’s relaxing except for the sheer volume of high-pitched yelling that they’re doing as they play. My wife is asleep upstairs. I couldn’t ask for a more peaceful end to the summer.

Earlier today my wife and I attended the local Democratic Party’s Labor Day breakfast. I was in a mostly pissy mood, for political and personal reasons, and did my best to avoid people as much as possible. It’s quite a feat to attempt in a room with two hundred people, but I managed to take a seat at an empty table facing the wall until events started. I did see some close acquaintances on the way in, but managed to avoid any substantive conversation.

Again, I’m torn here between providing all the details and holding on to the finest pretense of anonymity, but what I can say is that during this last primary season for state legislature, a schism erupted between the Labor federation and the state’s Democratic Party. Certain business-friendly candidates were endorsed by the state’s Federal delegation, Senators and Congressional representatives, over pro-labor candidates. I can say that the pretense for the endorsements were personal relationships and fundraising ones, but the matter did not sit well with Labor leaders, and they have put state and local Democrats on notice.

One of the most important issues among labor are the so-called ‘right to work’ laws, which basically allow free-riders within labor’s collective bargaining structure. It’s one of the major contributing factors in labors’ decline over the last seventy years, not just in our state, but across the nation as well. Organized labor has traditionally stood behind the state’s Democrats, who haven’t held power in the state since the 90’s, and there is a very good chance that Dems could win back control of the state legislature in the next election cycle. Labor is rightfully concerned that their support within the Democratic party may not be as strong as they thought it was. And rightfully so.

All of this led to a convention earlier this summer where more than a third of of the Democratic legislature was not endorsed by the labor federation. And Labor leaders were not shy about this fact this morning, reminding those assembled that they were done supporting candidates and electeds just because they had a ‘D’ next to their name. The head of the state’s AFL-CIO went so far as to threaten that any Democrat that was not with them (presumably voting against right to work repeal,) would not survive re-election. Other speakers from within labor, including a sitting member of the state legislature, echoed these sentiments as well.

Now while these sentiments immediately improved my mood, there is part of me that questions whether Labor has the ability to back up these threats. Now I haven’t been organizing long enough to see whether Labor remains strong enough to overthrow a sitting incumbent. Most of the trades unions still seem to be operating as management organizations, with most of their activities centering around insurance policies. To be honest, and I hope I’m wrong, but I remain skeptical that labor has the power that they think they do. Their membership is too deflated, and their management too worried about their positions or retirement, to truly attempt something so radical as challenging the Democratic party establishment.

I hope I’m wrong.

There are a lot of changes needed. It seems that some new blood is needed in the movement to stir things up, to motivate people and rebuild labor. We need new types of unionism that fits better within the new types of tech sector firms that we have these days. The good news is that I think change is on the horizon.

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The Socialist Manifesto, by Bhaskar Sunkara

Sunkara is the founder of Jacobin magazine, which has been around since 2010, and his new book is an accessible history of socialism aimed at a general audience. It starts off with a vision of what democratic socialism in the United States would look like before going into a detail history of the movement from Marx up to the resurgence of the modern left through politicians like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. It ends with a chapter of action items that Sunkara believes are necessary for Democratic Socialists to win in the future.

My involvement in the movement is fairly recent, I’ve only been truly involved in it since the 2016 Democratic primary, where I was a Democratic party caucus chair for the Sanders campaign in my congressional district. I don’t have a strong history in Marxism or socialist history. I’ve been reading Dissent, Nation and Jacobin for about two years now, and have been reading and listening to leftist media on a regular basis during that time. Sunkara has done a service to people like me, to help fill some gaps in history and give me some much needed response to critics on issues surrounding socialism’s failures in the past.

There were several times during this book that I was having deja vu, when I realized that certain sections had pulled from Jacobin’s pages. Certain turns of phrase around Khruschev’s “secret speech”, for example, I’m pretty sure were lifted straight off of a recent issue (or reprinted.) Not that I’m complaining, mind you. Sunkara’s work with Jacobin has been instrumental to the movement, and my education, and the publication is probably one of the most coherent and influential sources of political thought for the latest generation of Democratic Socialists. At least that’s how I see it from here — it’s been months since I attended my local DSA chapter’s meetings.

Sunkara — and Jacobin — does not shy away from the failures of twentieth century socialism, and does not sugar coat the crimes that Stalin, Mao, and others have done in the name of communism and Marxism. He’s able to acknowledge it without excusing it or justifying it. At the same time, there is emphasis of the democratic part of democratic socialism, and the lesson to readers here is to find ways to increase democratic involvement in the movement.

The history is broad here, and it was easy for me to get lost amongst the party organizations, figures and coalitions that are part of the century and a half of the movement. There’s a lot to cover here, and the socialist movement spans the entire globe, and I’ll admit that another reading is warranted before I can even begin to understand all of the schisms in the various european movements contained within this short volume.

The history of socialism in the United States is one that obviously doesn’t get told these days, and reading the history of American unions and the left this right before Labor Day is good timing for the Party breakfast that I’ll be attending tomorrow. And this intersection of labor, Democratic party politics and Democratic Socialism is obviously one that I’m most interested in, and where I plan on focusing most closely in the future.

Beyond the history lesson and rationale behind democratic socialism’s resurgence, the part of the book that will likely get the most discussion amongst leftists will be the penultimate chapter, “How We Win”, with 15 points that Sunkara lists for success moving forward. Many of them boil down to the advice that socialists shouldn’t shy away from class struggle, and need to embed in working class issues to get our agenda pushed through. He worries that success may ultimately be the movement’s undoing as it has in the past, and urges readers to move forward, not backward, when the inevitable challenge rises. Two points that I’ll be studying: “It is not enought to work with unions for progressive change. We must wage democratic battles within them.” And: “We need to take into account American particularities.” This latter one has some broad outlines for possible avenues of attack within the Democratic party.

I’m not sure I share his optimism that our two party political system can be undone as swiftly as he believes, but I’ll take his idea of an actual mass-membership political party seriously for the time being. The idea of activating rank and file members, whether within a labor union or a political party, is probably the most important takeaway from this book. The main way to accomplish socialism in America will be through more Democracy. That is the biggest threat that we face from the populist right these days, and is also the main argument against authoritarian-style Communism. Focusing on democracy, within our organizations, workplace and political system should be the number one goal of progressive and leftist organizations moving forward.