The Digital Assets Ecosystem Base Code (DAEBC)

by Dane Keller Rutledge

January 4, 2019

A decentralized community sustains a digital assets ecosystem (DAE) by embracing a base code of behavioral principles and digital applications promoting good conduct, social growth, and technical advancement.

Almost two and a half centuries ago, Founding Father Edward Rutledge reached consensus with his elder collaborators in the Second Continental Congress to declare independence from the British Monarch. Eleven years later, Edward’s brother John Rutledge and his compatriots convened the Constitutional Convention to form a more perfect union, leading with the words: “We The People….”

One central figure — Thomas Jefferson — drafted the Declaration of Independence. But the “Committee of Five” to whom the drafting was entrusted, and the entire Second Continental Congress, made extensive changes before the final version of the Declaration was first signed on July 4, 1776. That socio-political experiment, the most salutary and daring ambition in human history, was in practical terms the first manifestation of decentralized governance.

Like information ubiquitously perfused and preserved via blockchain technology in the present day, the Declaration of Independence was (and is) distributed and immutable. The Declaration was (and is) distributed because the text was placed in many hands and published extensively. It became universally known within the American population. The Declaration was (and is) immutable because, upon its adoption by the esteemed collection of wise men representing disparate (and decentralized) opinions and polities and seeking to secure to their families and communities “certain unalienable Rights,” the Declaration was figuratively set in stone like the Commandments of Old, thence to be joined by a Constitution, thence to be joined by the Bill of Rights and later Amendments adopted by referenda.

I now invoke the language of software programmers as I refer to the Declaration and the other core documents as the “base code” of American governance, the complete collection of source code by which the functionality of the organizational software known as the United States of America is maintained. I call it the “American Base Code” (ABC). For, in truth, those formulae — the founding documents and later revisions by popular referenda — are the ABCs, the first few letters of the proverbial alphabet of American philosophical infrastructure. In addition to those base code governance documents, the United States has engineered algorithms in the form of judicial decisions, legislation, executive orders, regulations, and other ongoing socio-legal guidance and imperatives.

Similar to a democratic nation, a discrete human community dedicated to a Digital Assets Ecosystem (DAE) (please read my article published on Medium on October 24, 2018) in a global digital economy requires a base code as a source of operating principles and functions. Let’s call this base code the Digital Assets Ecosystem Base Code (DAEBC) as a tip of the hat to digital asset pundits, who appear to adore mnemonic acronyms such as FUD, HODL, and DAO.

As the readers will recognize, the acronym I’ve just coined (DAEBC) contains the first five letters of the English alphabet: ABCDE. I’m going to use those five letters — twice — to express an innovative structure similar to a parallel electrical circuit. This figurative circuit shall be comprised of two components: a set of five programmed behavioral principles co-existing in parallel with a set of five digital applications by both of which simultaneous methodologies the DAE shall operate.

The two parallel components of the DAEBC must, of necessity, capture and serve the essence of both human understanding and human will. Who better to consult than the iconic Sir Francis Bacon to inspire an elegant comprehension? Thus, one component shall be logic; the other component, ethics. According to Bacon, these are the twin parts of human behavior.

The equally prescient Sir Isaac Newton might have imagined these fraternal twin concepts of logic and ethics to be like a double rainbow bridging across the sky, with each of the two curved paths containing the same five color bands of the visible spectrum. Newton might have observed the path of logic naturally to be the brighter more concrete rainbow located somewhat beneath the loftier yet subtler path of ethics.

In writing the Digital Assets Ecosystem Base Code, I envision the ethics component to contain five behavioral algorithms relevant to collective governance and social order and evolution. Each of the five shall begin with its own individual letter from the array of five letters ABCDE.

C stands for a Constitutional Code of Conduct. It is the law. It contains the rules and standards of behavior. C also stands for Compliance. The baseline behavior of any DAE community member ought to comply with the ethical principles promulgated by the DAE and with the applicable laws of relevant jurisdictions. (Please read my article published on Medium on November 29, 2018.) Failure to comply triggers the following four elements of the ethics branch of the DAEBC.

D means Detection. It is the policing function. Incompliant behaviors are identified and scrutinized. D also stands for Defense. As the DAE matures, and defends itself against internal (and external) aggressors, detection must be manually guided and refined as well as progressively automated. A growing decentralized community builds the collection of algorithms by which to direct those initiatives. Ultimately, the DAE will seek to be automatically self-monitoring, self-adjudicating, and self-enforcing, a natural extension and synergy of smart contracts, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

A is Administration. This is the decision-making algorithm, by which the law is applied to solve a problem. It is the Administration of justice.

E is Enforcement. It provides the mechanism for carrying out decisions by ensuring the consequences of those decisions are implemented and Enforced.

B stands for Betterment. It is an evolutionary process for social good. The DAE learns from its own experience, by virtue of the integrated efforts of humans and machines acting harmoniously. (Please read my article published on Medium on December 7, 2018.)

Taken together, this ABCDE of the DAEBC is the ethical infrastructure — the conscience — of the ecosystem. Certain tenets of good conduct between and among participants are presupposed and enforced. This conscience, an engineering solution in continuous development, has inherent traits of wisdom, foresight, and compassion embedded in the base code. It has the capacity to apply those traits and learn from its experience.

Summarizing, the DAEBC five ethical elements include a code of conduct, a means of detecting and defending against behaviors at variance with the code, the technology to administer and enforce the code, and the mandate and methodology for betterment.

There is a sixth letter F subsumed within the fifth letter B for Betterment. F is for Feedback. Like a rainbow expressing itself through the physics of light inside millions of water droplets, the DAE betters itself by the critical reflections contributed by a vast array of human users (as well as, ultimately, by intelligent machines capable of human notions of proportion). Feedback may come by way of cheers and jeers about DAE decisions and other actions. Users must be afforded opportunities to propose changes to the DAE for its Betterment, indeed even by potentially altering the constitution itself and, certainly, by refining the interpretation and imposition of its ethical standards of conduct.

Whether envisioned as a parallel electrical circuit or as a double rainbow, a complete system cannot be ethical without also being logical. Sir Francis Bacon thought logic to be defined as understanding and reason. I add that logic is also organized and disciplined. It is the underlying operational intelligence. If ethics is the impulse of human behavior, then logic is the pulse.

In the context of the Digital Assets Ecosystem Base Code (DAEBC), the logic component of the structure takes the form of five core digital applications. I initially addressed my design philosophy for these five applications in my article published on Medium on October 24, 2018.

My illustrators are again the first five letters ABCDE of the Phoenician-Greek-Roman-English alphabet.

A is for Attraction. This refers to an incentives-based recruitment program by which to attract and retain participants. Initially it may be wise to offer free gifts, especially units of a digital asset native to the DAE, to stoke the fires of educational ardor and to prime the promotional spirits of fledgling community members. (Please read my article published on Medium on November 16, 2018.) Thence to sustain and grow the DAE, It is essential to incentivize its human constituents not just to educate themselves but also to participate in and contribute substantively to the DAE. (Please read my article published on Medium on November 5, 2018.)

B means Bridge. It is also B for Blockchain. These two terms are in effect co-extensive as a connective matrix in which every device is a node and all nodes are connected to the same data, a peer-to-peer cross-blockchain functionality, like cars coming from all locations and then crossing two ways over a bridge while following signs and signals and communicating via on-board instrumentation logging tolls. All data are received, processed, verified, and preserved. This ambitious vision (yet inevitable reality) naturally subsumes the notion of a distributed, decentralized digital assets exchange to reduce or even eliminate the risk of losses sometimes experienced with central operators.

C is for Currency, particularly a digital asset unit (DAU) native to the DAE and enabling access to, participation in, and influence on the DAE. Transmutation from the native digital asset into other forms of digital assets (and vice versa) must be bridged with adequate ease, speed, security, authentication, scalability, liquidity, and stability. Of that array of characteristics, perhaps the most elusive is stability. High volatility has proven to be destructive to the very concept of digital currencies. For a digital asset to be considered a true store of value, a traditional measure of stability must be achieved.

D means Data, as in developing an interface with easy access to broad beams of information, particularly market ratings and sentiment analyses concerning the diverse marketplace of exchangeable and sometimes utilitarian digital assets, along with the methodologies to parse and analyze those data. The associated technology must be both intelligent and sensitive, to maximize the machine learning benefit emerging from interaction with human insights, mistakes, and struggles. The ambition for this application ought to be to assist in separating the treasure from the trash, thereby reinforcing relative stability in digital asset valuations.

E stands for Engagement. Here is where all of it must eventually tie together, in a downloadable master mobile digital application delivering a user-friendly UX/UI experience to promote mainstream adoption of the digital applications and behavioral principles underlying the Digital Assets Ecosystem Base Code (DAEBC).

In summary, the two components are:

Logic. Having been Attracted to the DAE, with access to a Bridge connecting throughout the global economy, with Currency securely in hand for purposes of accessing, participating in, and influencing the DAE, and with means to analyze and understand relevant Data, the DAE community member Engages one Facile instrument integrating all of it together and therefore solving comprehensively for user needs.

Ethics. Governance of the DAE is achieved ultimately in the form of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) reflecting the collective conscience of the community by way of a Constitutional Code of Conduct constructed on technology engineered to Defend, Administer, Enforce, and Better the DAE.

The readers will discern my alphabetical addition of F and G; thus, the parallel use of twin sets of letters ABCDE constructing the DAEBC (Digital Assets Ecosystem Base Code) is augmented from five letters to seven to be expressed as DAEBCFG or, alternatively and more generally, ABCDEFG (A Base Code Defining Ecosystem Facilitation and Governance).

Q.E.F. (quod erat faciendum, per Euclid, the father of geometry)

Dane Keller Rutledge

P.S. In identifying the visible spectrum by his observations of white light directed though a prism, Sir Isaac Newton added two colors to the base five we commonly see in a rainbow. Newton demarcated narrow bands for indigo and orange in addition to the wider bands for red, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Thus, five became seven, corresponding, in Newton’s view, to the notes of the musical scale: A, B, C, D, E, F, G.

CAUTION/DISCLAIMER: Please do not take any of what is written in this editorial as legal advice (or, for that matter, as advice of any kind). One should always seek advice of one’s own legal counsel and/or other relevant professionals.

Copyright 2019

Dane Keller Rutledge

All rights reserved

Recent articles by Dane Keller Rutledge:

“Creating a Comprehensive Digital Assets Ecosystem (DAE)” (October 24, 2018)

“Fundamental Human Constituents of a Comprehensive Digital Assets Ecosystem (DAE) (November 5, 2018)

“Giving Free Gifts to Stimulate Initial Interest in a Digital Assets Ecosystem (DAE)” (November 16, 2018)

“Cryptocurrency is in a Downward Spiral: Will a Phoenix Rise?” (November 29, 2018)

“Can You See The Future? The Rise of Machine Learning” (December 7, 2018)