How Holo and Holochain Prevent Runaway Concentration of Wealth & Power

How can a neutral Holochain avoid becoming infrastructure which drives the same patterns as mentioned above?

Holochain doesn’t have a built in monetary currency which powers it. As an agent-centric architecture, it doesn’t need data-centric consensus. It isn’t a monolithic space where bigger apps or communities can control smaller ones. Each hApp is autonomous as its own P2P encrypted network. Holochain is designed for mutual sovereignty between individual and group since each hApp forms a Strong Nash Equilibrium where rules are mutually enforced while maintaining individual autonomy, control, and ownership of your own data. This control never concentrates to another class of user.

How does Holo.host avoid that economy of scale which makes some actors become super hosts? Do you have some levers in place to maintain balance?

Holo is a hosting company providing hosting services for P2P apps. We do KYC and have contracts with our hosts. Quite simply, we can limit the number of Holo instances that a host can run. If you max out at 5 or 10 instances, you just can’t overturn the market.

However, I do expect to see a need emerge for commercial class hosting for some Holo apps (things like YouTube for example). We may have a need for different service classes like Holo Peer and Holo Pro. One lever is to require people who sign a commercial Holo Pro contract to provide 20% of their bandwidth for web relays to Holo Peer hosts. This ensures traffic can reach hosts behind NATs or Firewalls by using public IPs and Ports of the larger hosts, helping keep the system in balance.

How can the public audit the system? Not the code base but the usage patterns.

Holochain apps and their data are only available to users of those apps. We have no central way to collect data or even know all the apps that exist or are running.

However, Holo.host does collect usage pattern data from hosts which is used in the match-making process of connecting app users to hosts serving that app. That process of selecting/routing to a host results a triple-blind randomization with inputs from Holo, the app user, and the app provider. There is no way for any one of the parties to control which host the traffic gets routed to.