> I had looked at holochain earlier, but to be honest I found their literature a bit difficult to grasp (with a quick read). But I was aware though that they're trying to solve the same problem.

I posted your feedback into the Holochain forum, and used it as an entryway into asking some questions I am grappling with:

https://forum.holochain.org/t/technical-holochain-101-for-se...

Do I have your permission to link it to our comments here?

> My view is that once you are able to reduce the amount of data an app has to deal with, you might even be able to rely on plain text files, yaml collections etc. for data storage/exchange; and fed into a db engine for faster querying.

If I understand you correctly then I think this is something Holochain's developers are tackling too. I think for the purpose you describe, they put a big focus on relationships and p2p actions that are 'gossip-ed' (spread) through a content addressable distributed hash table (if me mentioning this strategy seems unrelated, it shows the limitations of my technical competences).

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If you're interested to engage, I'd love to know what things you found difficult to grasp in your quick read? This is a big subject with a lot of entry points, so my question is a broad question, on purpose. I'm interested in which functional use cases you are seeking/developing, and whether your critique of the current centralized architectures is similar to Arthur and Eric's critiques (the two Holochain originators), versus whether we have reached - and agree on - the same conclusions. The first one (critique) being more important to me: do we see the same challenges/shortcomings? I hope that make sense.

From my understanding Holochain's main thesis is that centralized software obscures 1) an app's inner logic/workings, and 2) the relationships between peers and the data they create (as well as the shape and size of the data they generate).

Through my own my research the overarching patterns I found is that corporations monopolize blueprints. Through the use of centralized black box software, they can also act as middlemen, extracting parasitic rents. They can control and manipulate us by tracking our behavior and steering us into the direction it's algorithms (and often the profit motive, e.g. advertising) have decided for us.

Society's innermost services (like money, law, identity, intellectual property databases, healthcare, land registry) are often invisible or semi-invisible architectures (they require a high clearance level, or the information is stuck in old proprietary formats that make them expensive and difficult to maintain). Because these services are still centralized, they evolve very slowly, meaning that their use remains limited.

A big part of my interest in Holochain comes from the work of the Mikorizal.org team (Bob and Lynn, and Pospi) being done on Open Value Network economic protocols. Using Holochain they are building a Resource Event Agent (REA) acounting model that is completely P2P. Their projects aims to provide an alternative to the closed corporate Enterprise Resouce Planning (ERP) software that is the norm today. I think this new paradigm can help us to see more clearly the actual scarcity of natural resources, as well as use it as a tool to cooperatively fund and develop open source hardware (and software) in the open.

Edit: updated for clarity.