Scientific foundations & theoretical references
UPlanet and Astroport.ONE are not an ad-hoc pile of tools: they bring together research on commons governance, money, cryptography and the thermodynamics of distributed computing.
1. Ostrom: beyond the “tragedy of the commons”
In Governing the Commons (1990), Elinor Ostrom (Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, 2009) refutes Garrett Hardin's claim that every shared resource is doomed unless subjected to private property or state control. Studying Alpine pastures, Spanish irrigation systems (acequias) and fisheries, she shows a third order exists: self-governance by the users themselves.
Digital life went the opposite way: an enclosure. Centralised platforms turned non-rival goods (knowledge, code, social interaction) into artificially scarce access, bringing surveillance, unilateral censorship and data centres that strain local power grids. Rebuilding the digital realm as a commons takes self-governance mechanisms, not just a free licence.
Ostrom's 8 principles in Astroport.ONE / UPlanet
Mappings as documented by the project; to be checked against the source code.
| Ostrom principle | Implementation |
|---|---|
| 1. Clearly defined boundaries | W3C DID (Nostr kind 30800), Nostr/Ğ1 keys (MULTIPASS); geographic keys UMAP (1 km), SECTOR (10 km), REGION (100 km). |
| 2. Rules fitted to local conditions | Execution at 20:12 local solar time; Power-Score tiers: Light (Raspberry Pi), Standard (PC), Brain (GPU). |
| 3. Collective-choice arrangements | Share-holding members (ZenCard); the Captain alone decides on changes proposed by the ARBOR agent (supervised self-improvement). |
| 4. Monitoring | DRAGON: captains admitted through Hop 0/1/2 (2-voucher quorum, ≥ 50% reciprocity); measured consumption (PowerJoular, Victron MPPT). |
| 5. Graduated sanctions | 7-day grace period, J-30 and J-7 reminders, encrypted ZIP backup (PASS code); captains exempt from purge. |
| 6. Low-cost conflict resolution | Love Ledger (bankruptcy → active volunteering); weekly ceremonies between peers sharing a skill (kind 30503, WoTx²). |
| 7. Recognition of the right to organise | De facto association / SCIC; strict copyleft AGPL-3.0. |
| 8. Nested enterprises | Fractal structure: Station → UMAP → Swarm → UPlanet constellation. |
References
- Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press.
- Ostrom, E. (2010). “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems”. American Economic Review, 100(3), 641-672.
- Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks. Yale University Press.
- Mauss, M. (1925). Essai sur le don.
- Bollier, D., & Helfrich, S. (2019). Free, Fair, and Alive. New Society Publishers.
- Hess, C., & Ostrom, E. (Eds.) (2007). Understanding Knowledge as a Commons. MIT Press.
2. IPFS & Nostr: disintermediation
IPFS: the space of immutable goods
IPFS addresses a resource by what it is (its hash in a Merkle DAG, the CID) rather than where it is hosted. A file cannot be altered in secret, and once any peer replicates a block the resource survives without a central server.
Nostr: coordination without accounts
Identity is a key pair (secp256k1). Relays (for example strfry) only propagate signed events: they hold no keys and cannot forge signatures. If a relay blocks a user or goes down, the user publishes to another one without losing identity, followers or history.
3. Social science: cooperation and gift
The relational model draws on Marcel Mauss's sociology of the gift and Yochai Benkler's “commons-based peer production”. If a member can no longer pay, the hardware the Captain keeps providing does not lead to expulsion: it is recorded in the Love Ledger, a public gratitude register.
4. Economics: Libre Currency & relative money
The Relative Theory of Money (Stéphane Laborde, 2010) holds that a currency fair to all living people and across generations must be co-created by every human being through a Universal Dividend (UD), rather than issued as bank debt.
c: growth rate (≈ 10%/year, so c² ≈ 1%); M: money supply; N: number of members. Simplified formula: in Ğ1 the UD is re-evaluated every period. Astroport.ONE interfaces with the Duniter protocol.
N² network extension
To value local off-chain services, the N2_Economics.py module weights usage-credit creation by reciprocal-link density:
N₁ holds reciprocal contacts (A follows B and B follows A, Nostr kind 3) and M(N₁) the Ğ1-N² mass they hold; N₂ (second-degree contacts) dampens dilution through a square root. The computation is global, never a per-member scan.
The 3×1/3 rule
Surplus is split into treasury, R&D and common assets (see Funding).
References
- Laborde, S. (2010). Théorie Relative de la Monnaie (TRM). Version en ligne sur trm.creationmonetaire.info.
- Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.
5. Mathematics & cryptography
- Merkle DAG (IPFS): content addressing, strict deduplication, self-certification without a central authority.
- BIP-340 Schnorr signatures (secp256k1): non-malleability and batch verification.
- NIP-44 v2: ECDH conversation key, HKDF-SHA256, ChaCha20, HMAC-SHA256 and padding that hides message length.
- AES-256-GCM (UENC): confidentiality and authenticity for heavy containers stored on IPFS.
- Shamir's secret sharing (
ssss): a MULTIPASS's DISCO secret is split into 3 shares, any 2 of which rebuild it. - Web of trust (DRAGON): Hop 0 = founding captains; Hop 1 = followed by a Hop 0; Hop 2 = followed by at least 2 admitted captains who follow back at ≥ 50%. In the spirit of Advogato (Levien) and small-world networks (Watts & Strogatz).
References
- Benet, J. (2014). “IPFS - Content Addressed, Versioned, P2P File System”. arXiv:1407.3561.
- Shamir, A. (1979). “How to share a secret”. Communications of the ACM, 22(11), 612-613.
- Wuille, P., Nick, J., & Ruffing, T. (2020). BIP 340: Schnorr Signatures for secp256k1.
- Watts, D. J., & Strogatz, S. H. (1998). “Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks”. Nature, 393, 440-442.
- Levien, R., & Aiken, A. (1998). “Attack-Resistant Trust Metrics for Public Key Certification”. 7th USENIX Security Symposium.
- Koblitz, N. (1987). “Elliptic curve cryptosystems”. Mathematics of Computation, 48(177), 203-209.
6. Thermodynamics, ecology & computing chronobiology
Landauer: erasing one bit dissipates at least
Astroport.ONE therefore favours proximity computing (light LLM inference on living-room hardware) and real physical measurement (PowerJoular, Victron photovoltaic regulation) over abstract simulation.
True solar time: the 20h12.process.sh script computes its run time in true solar time from the antenna's coordinates:
The equation of time EoT(τ) follows Spencer (1971) (tools/solar_time.sh); the cron is recalibrated daily because it swings about ±15 min over the year. As a result the swarm's maintenance loads never hit at the same instant: they form a wave following the sun.
AWAKE / DREAM cycle: the BRO agent's memory (memory_manager.py) is consolidated by analogy with sleep (Stickgold & Walker, 2005): when a slot reaches REVE_THRESHOLD entries, the older ones are summarised, the summary is re-embedded in Qdrant and the REVE_KEEP most recent ones are kept verbatim.
References
- Landauer, R. (1961). “Irreversibility and heat generation in the computing process”. IBM J. Res. Dev., 5(3), 183-191.
- Spencer, J. W. (1971). “Fourier series representation of the position of the sun”. Search, 2(5), 172.
- Stickgold, R., & Walker, M. P. (2005). “Memory consolidation and reconsolidation: what is the role of sleep?”. Trends in Neurosciences, 28(8), 408-415.
7. Law: GNU AGPL-3.0
The GNU Affero GPL v3 closes the GPL's “network service loophole”: anyone deploying a modified version to provide a service over a network must publish the source of their changes under the same terms. It shields the shared infrastructure from privatisation.
References
- Moglen, E. (2003). “Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture”. Conférence, University of Maine Law School, 29 juin 2003 (talk, University of Maine Law School).
- Stallman, R. (2002). Free Software, Free Society. GNU Press.