HACKER Q&A
📣 orthecreedence

Any anarchist/communist/socialist hackers here?


Hi, everyone. I'm working on a leftist-oriented blockchain project (https://basisproject.gitlab.io/public/) and wanted to gauge interest in the community. The project is geared towards being a set of tools to democratically operate a profitless economy (based on need/use instead of profit/exchange) with socialized assets (housing and means of production mainly).

The project is built in Rust on top of the Exonum framework. Currently, a rudimentary member system as well as cost-tracking mechanisms are built and working, but I'm at the point in the project where rather than continuing to build in a vacuum, I see if there's any interest in participation.

The project's paper is incomplete and probably less technical than it should be, but a good overview of the goals. There's also an up-to-date roadmap (https://gitlab.com/basisproject/tracker#roadmap) which shows current progress.

Would love feedback, thoughts, contributions!


  👤 paulrpotts Accepted Answer ✓
I am a leftist whose exact ideology is a work in progress, but I'd generally call myself an anarchist in favor of localized gift economies, food production, and devolved government, so distributism and worker-owned collectives are both things I'm very interested in.

I work mainly in embedded development and I'm not really sold on blockchain or IoT or, really, using TCP/IP for much of anything. My recent paid work involves control systems on small microcontrollers, either using FreeRTOS or that are so small they use no OS. I'm interested in building driver stacks on these chips for writing things like bootloaders and serial interfaces that support remote control commands.

I also have a little bit of PCB design experience, although I'm not trained as an EE. So, I have no idea if my skills might be of use, but I've been thinking of how to apply some of my work to future open-source hardware devices. I keep coming back to how some of this might be useful for fully open voting machines, and I know everyone jumps to thinking about blockchain for that, but I think it is overkill and too heavyweight for what I want to do. I'm thinking more of writing data to redundant EEPROMs and verifying it with something older and simpler like message digests or digital signatures.

I realize that maybe there's not a lot of overlap there but I guess if you need any low-level drivers I might be able to help...


👤 bediger4000
If you were such a non-standard hacker in the US, why would you reveal it? None of these particular -isms are considered reputable in the US. It would appear that the US is entering a period of persecuting holders of non-standard political ideologies, too.

👤 ieRei6ae
Excellent project! I hope it gains traction.

Can you please clarify on the docs why it uses a blockchain and how it is mined or otherwise generated?