This type of consensus that the internet relies on and that is at the heart of the Stellar Consensus Protocol is purely relational in the sense that it is based on the transitive convergence of relationships throughout the network. This allows for reputation within the community to be the main influencing factor on consensus.
This is a non-trivial problem that has been solved by David Mazieres when he developed the Stellar Consensus Protocol using his “Internet Hypothesis”. Web 3.0 is the collision or union of the internet and blockchain and will kill Web 2.0 Technofeudalism. Taking the internet hypothesis all the way through to the individual user. This idea of nested ideations of the same idea, namely “The Internet Hypothesis” playing itself out: 1) at the ISP (Internet Service Provider) level; 2) at the Node level of the decentralised blockchain network i.e. global clearing houses are the top tier ISP’s of fiat banking; 3) at the user or agent level i.e. each participant has data sovereignty visa v the agency of flexible trust and those participants with the highest levels of trust within the community have the greatest influence on consensus. On Saturday I went for a walk amongst the giant ancient remnant river red gums in the Mt Riddell reserve. One could say that the reputation of the Red gum to provide shelter, sustenance and connection to the surrounding life system means that it has a significant influence on the consensus or convergent point of equilibrium within the whole ecosystem. They have the most trust lines with other species i.e. all the birds and marsupials living in the many hollows of the tree’s branches. The tree has been there maybe 300 years so the other species know they can rely on it to be there and shelter and nurture them.
Every level powered by this concept that the implicit agency of flexible trust allows counter party relationships to transitively converge in consensus (agreement across the network on the “shared truth” of the network). There is a formulae, using algebraic abstract mathematics that can calculate the average path length of a human network. With N = 7,200,000,000 nodes in the network and each node having 30 connections the average path length is 6.7 nodes between any 2 nodes on the network. Today individual people have significantly more than 30 connections especially when you add in the digital connections. So in today’s world with the current population I would speculate that the average path length between any 2 people would be significantly less than 6.7. This demonstrates the convergent nature of relationships within a network. I feel that in my understanding of how the Stellar Consensus Protocol works, this convergent nature of human relationships within a human computer network is what powers the algorithm as it follows the trust lines throughout the network. As the consensus algorithm processes the binary trust votes (yes or no) in reference to the connections between each node/agent and every other node/agent, to construct overlapping Quorum sets of trust between nodes, the process of consensus converges throughout the network.
The user interface level involves creating a social cooperation network with a sophisticated wallet that ports in the stellar / soroban laboratory functionality for creating and managing Digital Commitment Vouchers (aka digital assets). Each Digital Commitment Voucher then becomes each agent’s digital avatar (similar to a node) and other agents have to decide whether they trust or do not trust that digital avatar. With the default being not trusted therefore any new participant has to gain the trust of other agents in the network / community before they can participate in value exchanges. This is the interface between the real world and the blockchain and brings the internet together with the blockchain. The blockchain is like a security layer that allows each agent to control who can access their internet based data and under what conditions. Using the internet level consensus powered blockchain to facilitate a decentralised data sovereignty of the internet.
Also the internet data associated with the blockchain based digital avatar (aka digital asset) serves to allow other agents to get to know something about the avatar’s reputation and values etc.
This internet level consensus powered data sovereignty and a secure immutable ledger to exchange value on creates the foundation and then Soroban (smart contract platform) creates the surface area to innovate around the governance of securely shared data sets. The system itself is value agnostic in the sense that a group of people could use it to cooperate around any value. However it obviously lends itself particularly well to values that align with the principle of cooperation.
Data sovereignty and internet level consensus are intimately entwined. If there is an internet level consensus that is open and decentralised, then that forms the basis for the maintenance of secure data sovereignty. One could call it a new rules based order. If we replace the current dysfunctional Monopoly rules based order with the Economic Commons rules based order then we have lore for the reimagining of our First Nations’ ancestors lore today. A lore where every node or individual has equal open access to the same internet level consensus. Along with that comes a unique 56 bit encrypted key pair to securely manage your data and who has access to it for what fees.
I know it all sounds very easy and too good to be true, but an internet level Federated Byzantine Agreement protocol is non-trivial. The 2 things that make it non-trivial are firstly the fact that each of the agents is empowered with the agency of flexible trust that allows “how each agent engages with the social contract” to determine consensus. The second key feature is the Federated Voting system, which I still don’t fully understand. However it seems that it works by allowing agents to exchange vote messages in the effort to reach agreement about statements (consensus). The agent vote messages specify which other agents they trust and are therefore included in their quorum slices. This then in turn allows the algorithm to dynamically discover convergent quorums across the network while tallying votes. The Byzantine agreement is generalised so that participants determine quorums in a decentralised way based on their own trust. Majority-based voting doesn’t work against $ybil attacks, therefore the Federated voting system is used. In the Federated voting system counterparties’ relationships transitively converge to consensus among well behaved agents and agents like $ybil who are behaving badly by trying to subvert the reputation of the system get isolated.
A Quorum is a set of nodes / agents that encompasses one quorum slice of each of its members. Every 2 Quorums must share a correct node / agent. This is how the Federated Byzantine Agreement protocol guarantees safety and outputting the correct value. To facilitate the convergence of counterparties’ relationships even with relatively small agent sets a 2 step / phase voting system is used. This includes a Nomination phase and a Balloting phase. The phase 1 of nominating values allows the values to be propagated through the system and for the system to converge on a nominated set of values. Phase 2 the balloting phase allows for iterative rounds of binary voting on whether to commit or abort the nominated values, which when convergence takes place and any bad acting agents have been isolated, the whole system then commits to consensus on the nominated values. Whilst this isn’t as efficient as Majority voting it is much more secure being Byzantine Fault Tolerant and effectively preventing $ybil attacks and takes about 5 seconds to execute.
This type of consensus that the internet relies on and that is at the heart of the Stellar Consensus Protocol is purely relational in the sense that it is based on the transitive convergence of relationships throughout the network. This allows for reputation within the community to be the main influencing factor on consensus. An agent who has a very strong reputation within the community but very few digital assets will have way more influence over consensus than an agent who has a very poor reputation within the community but lots of digital assets. In this way the consensus mechanism mimics quite well the essentially relational and reputation based systems of First Nations’ lore (governance).
A Radical Shared Economy 
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