PromiseGrid is a decentralized computing, communications, and governance system. PromiseGrid is to computation what the Internet is to communication -- the Internet is a decentralized network; PromiseGrid is a decentralized computer. Owned and operated by its users rather than any single legal entity, the grid is scalable and resilient, growing as users join.
This document is a high-level overview of the project.
Tragedy of the commons is a fundamental problem in corporate, community, and national governance, and it is a problem that PromiseGrid is designed to address.
Tragedy of the commons (ToC) is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action. The resource in question may be the well-being of the organization or community as a whole, or it may be a shared physical, natural, or digital resource.
PromiseGrid addresses ToC by providing an equitable platform for collaboration and shared resource management. The grid's design is based on several principles from Promise Theory by Mark Burgess. These principles provide a foundation for a decentralized system that can not only govern itself but also provide governance as a service to its hosted organizations and communities.
- Users own their own nodes.
- The grid grows as nodes join.
- A node can be as small as a browser tab, a phone, or a Raspberry Pi.
- Organizations and communities join the grid without centralized hosting costs.
- Applications can be loaded from a URL and executed in a browser tab.
- Applications can be executed from a command line.
- Users control the choice and version of the software they run.
- Applications can be composed from multiple modules in mixed languages.
- The grid remains operational even if parts go offline.
- The grid uses capability-based security for fine-grained access control.
- The same consensus, conflict resolution, and governance mechanisms that manage the grid are available to hosted applications and users.
- WebAssembly (WASM)
- WebAssembly System Interface (WASI)
- Large language models (LLMs)
- Infrastructure as Code (IoC)
- Container Orchestration
- Capability-based security
- Promise Theory
- Content-addressable storage
- Content-addressable code
- Capability-as-Promise Model
- PromiseGrid Universal Protocol
- Merge-as-consensus Model
- Decentralized cache
- Enabling technologies
- Lessons learned from centralized computing
- Mainframe (1960s)
- Networked personal computers (1990s)
- Infrastructure as Code (1990s)
- Grid computing (2000s)
- DevOps (2000s)
- Strong open-source cryptography (1990s)
- Virtualization (2000s)
- Containerization (2010s)
- WebAssembly (WASM) (2020s)
- WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) (2020s)
- Large language models (2020s)
- Lessons learned from centralized computing
- Convene/contact
- Community Systems Working Group CSWG
- Internet of Production IoP
- Worknetting community
- Mark Burgess
- ...
- Write LLM-based bootstrap tooling
- Write WASI target
- Develop/port example applications to WASI target
- Development tools
- Grokker
- Multi-agent production
- Native LLM/ML
- Grid protocol analyzer
- WASI kernel debugger
- ...
- DevOps tools to manage underlying infrastructure
- Container orchestration
- Disk image management
- Configuration management
- Community systems
- Collaborative text editor
- Chat
- Video conferencing
- Event scheduling/management
- Virtual world
- Membership management
- Enterprise Resource Planning (MRP)
- Inventory management
- Project and task management
- Bill of materials
- Production scheduling
- Accounting
- Quoting
- Order entry
- Shipping
- Invoicing
- Payroll
- Time tracking
- Facilities management
- IoT device management
- ...
- Version control
- issue tracker
- wiki
- code review
- CI/CD
- code search
- execute from repo
- large blobs
- tool to import from
git fast-export
- ...
- Development tools
- Self-hosting
- Migrate remaining community systems to PromiseGrid
- Migrate remaining repositories from github to PromiseGrid
PromiseGrid takes advantage of the WebAssembly virtual machine that is now in all major browsers. The core PromiseGrid code operates as a decentralized kernel and presents syscall-like services to WASM modules, acting as a WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) target.
The kernel also runs natively on server nodes, also via WASI, and can be used to run applications from the command line or as daemons.
The grid can execute containerized applications, either within WASI as a machine emulater (e.g. container2wasm) or natively as a container orchestrator.
The grid uses content-addressable storage for code and data. Both code and data are addressed by their content, not by location or name. This allows the grid to store and execute code and access data from any node in the network, and to replicate code and data across the network as needed. This is a key feature of the grid's scalability and resilience.
Because a grid address is a cryptographic hash of the content, every piece of code, whether a large binary or a small library function, has a unique address that can be used to reference it unambiguously from other code.
Using a 256 or 512 bit hash creates an address space that is large enough to uniquely address every atom in the observable universe. This means that the code and data storage of the grid is effectively unlimited for practical purposes; every piece of code ever written could in theory be stored and addressed in the grid.
The PromiseGrid kernel uses capability-based security for access control. We also consider capabilities to be a form of promise, both in the sense of javascript-style async promises and in the sense of promises as described in Promise Theory by Mark Burgess.
In our model, a capability token represents a promise that the issuer will either break or fulfill at a later time. Revocation of a capability token is a form of breaking the promise. The holder can present the token to the issuer as a request to fulfill the promise -- the response will be a fulfillment, a revocation, or a further promise to fulfill at a later time.
This recognition that capabilities are like promises is key to the design integrity of a decentralized system. As in Promise Theory, these principles hold:
- A resource cannot issue capability tokens promising access to another resource.
- In a system composed of autonomous parts, a resource sending unsolicited directives to another, imposing obligations, should expect poor results.
These principles are consistent with behavior and dysfunction observed in human organizations and distributed systems.
While we expect some evolution of this model as we develop the grid, as of this writing it appears that:
- An issuer creates a capability token by creating a closure containing a function that will fulfill the promise, and then hashing the closure's code. The hash is both the capability token and the address of the closure.
- A holder calls the closure (sends a message to the closure's address). When called, the closure can elect to fulfill the promise, revoke the capability token, or issue a further promise.
- Closures can be nested; the choice of whether to revoke or fulfill
the promise could be handled by a security screening closure, for
instance, before forwarding the request to the original issuer. This
could help simplify issuer code.
- In order to avoid breaking principle (1) above, the issuer would send the original promise to the security screener, so the security screener could wrap it in a further promise. This avoids the case where an issuer would otherwise be making a promise for the security screener to fulfill.
- The kernel could maintain a graph of promises and their fulfillment, and could use this graph to manage access control and to facilitate consensus formation and conflict resolution among participants, or these functions could be delegated to hosted modules or to the original issuer.
- Likewise, reputation -- how well a participant fulfills promises -- could be tracked by the kernel or delegated.
Which of these models is in use at any given time is a matter of protocol, and could be determined in a given session by the counterparties.
The low-level protocol of the grid, both on the wire and within the kernel, is designed for extensibility.
A function call is a message.
A message consists of a capability token followed by a payload. Because a token is the hash of the function that will fulfill the promise, a message always starts with the hash of the function that will fulfill the promise.
In other words, a message is a function call. The message payload is the arguments to that function.
A response to a message is another message.
A message can contain one or more messages in its payload. This is roughly analogous to passing a function as an argument in a functional programming language.
There are no version number or other metadata fields in a message header before the token. The token is the address of the function, and doubles as a protocol version hash.
Because messages can be nested, kernels can be nested. This is what allows the grid itself to be extensible and to evolve -- a hyperkernel can route messages to other kernels, and so on.
The grid's consensus formation and conflict resolution mechanisms are based on a model semantically similar to the merge function of a version control system.
Merges are a form of consensus formation. A merge is a function that takes two or more versions of a document and produces a new version that incorporates the changes from all of the input versions. How this should be done is application-specific, and we expect that the grid will support multiple merge functions for different types of data, each as content-addressable code.
Merge conflicts occur when a merge function cannot fulfill its promise to produce a new version that incorporates the changes from all of the input versions. This is a form of consensus failure. We expect applications to use heuristics that include a cascade of merge functions, ultimately falling back to LLMs and finally to human intervention if necessary.
We expect this same model to be applicable at very low levels, e.g. resolving race conditions caused by concurrent writes to a single resource, and at very high levels, e.g. resolving disputes between participants in an organization or community.
The grid includes a decentralized cache that is used to store and replicate code and data across the network. The cache is a content-addressable store on each node.
Grid functions are pure functions -- they observe referential transparency, always producing the same output from the same inputs.
The cache is a directed graph database. Vertices are typically either hashes or arguments -- a message, when received, can be decomposed, with the leading hash (the capability token, function address) used as a vertex value, the first argument used as a destination vertex, and so on, eventually leading to the components of the response message.
This design allows the cache to store responses to function calls, even when the calling messages or responses are nested.
When a node's kernel receives a message, it first checks its cache for the token and arguments. If the call is in the cache, the kernel replies with the cached response. If the message is not in the cache, the kernel encapsulates and forwards the message to any other node it has capability tokens for. When the response is received, the kernel stores the response in the cache and forwards it to the original sender.
We welcome collaborators. It's still early days; the core team is currently meeting as a group weekly as well as 1:1 in between, and we'll soon be standing up community systems (email, chat, etc.). In the meantime, if you're interested in joining a mind-bending open source project that could change the world, watch this repo and contact Steve Traugott on github, twitter, or linkedin.
PromiseGrid development is supported by C D International Technology, Inc. and TerraLuna, LLC.
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