In a very interesting essay, Hank Sohota, a Holochain enthusiast explains a philosophy differences between blockchain and holochain. Even though blockchain saw its popularity soar and fall quickly in the last 2 years, holochain is still fairly unknown in the broader tech community probably because of its radically different agent-centric approach to network design.
As Sohota puts it, Holochain “is the first technology, in human history, which genuinely addresses the mutual self-sovereignty challenge, completely and at any scale — in fact, it is inversely scalable, its efficiency and efficacy improve as network size increases — and as an integral component of the MetaCurrency and Ceptr projects, it also pre-dates both Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Holochain provides a bio-mimicry inspired, software-based, enabling social technology — a pattern, if you will — from which can emerge anarchy — life without mass intermediation as a necessity.
The author goes on by saying:
“Furthermore, Holochain’s data integrity model supports mutual self-sovereignty by having an agent-centric orientation, using sourcechains (think, agent owned hashchains), digital signatures, and validatingdistributed hash tables (think, BitTorrent and GitHub), rather than a data-centric orientation. Thus fully returning value realisation and ownership, as well as privacy and confidentiality, to those actually creating the value locallyrather than intermediaries, representatives, executives or organisation-owners, seeking to extract and monetise it. “
Blockchain plagued with a lot of issues is Holochain’s chance
Blockchain was hyped to the skies for the last two years. Nowadays, it seems companies are having a blockchain fatigue. A new report from Forrester Research states that some companies are stopping to use the term “blockchain” because they think it is overhyped, business magazine Fortune reported Nov. 6.
Here is our list of top coins to invest in 2019
Unfortunately for blockchain, that is not its only problem. There is a new player in the arena that promises even bigger disruption to the tech world than blockchain. Part of the name is the same, nothing else is – enter Holochain.
Holochain is a framework for building peer-to-peer applications, like Ruby on Rails but it runs your app directly on your device instead of on a server.
Below is a nice graphic showing the differences between blockchain and holochain.
A holochain application is run entirely by the people who use it. This enables direct communication, without the need for corporate web servers.
For any particular use case, developers can create fit-for-purpose solutions that strike the right balance between minimizing risks, reducing costs, and optimizing speed. Relative to other distributed application infrastructures such as Blockchain (Bitcoin, Ethereum), Holochain applications operate exponentially faster and cheaper. The lightweight architecture is perfect even for mobile phones and other low capacity devices.
