Adelphos, the fractal trust network

Level Zero

Adelphos is a federated system in which users exchange goods and services but they are not isolated, as in similar systems like eBay.

Types of users

In adelphos users are grouped in families and families can form bigger families, moreover families do not use external entities (like FedEx or DHL), but rely on special members (called carriers) who will route physically the object between families.

The family is able to gain credit using the exchange, either if it exports the object and also if it imports it.

This poses the need for adelphos to have different roles in adelphos; in this first version of adelphos we have three roles in a family

- User

- Boss

- Carrier

As we can have a family of one member, Boss and Carrier are inclusive, that is a user can be both a boss and a carrier for a certain family, but conceptually they are different roles.

We could say:

graph TB;
    A[Boss]
    B[Carrier]
    C[End User]
    B--can be-->A;
    A--can be-->B;
    A--is a-->C;
    B--is a-->C;

First step, create or join a family, the level zero

In adelphos the first step is to create a family; while in other social platform the maximum granularity is the user (users can form nets and groups, but they are not enforced), in adelphos the maximum split is the family.

Inside the family there can be different members, but from the point of view of adelphos they are ONE.

Putting this in monetary terms the family, the level zero, has only one account and has a trust of infinity.

In adelphos every user is part of a family, this family can be part of other families too, much like a folder in a file system can be inside of another folder until we reach the root folder ( ‘/’ in Linux/Unix systems, a drive letter such as C: or D: in Windows).

Why this emphasis on level zero? Well, because, as we will see, the number of the level determines also what happens when a person in that family gains or loses something.

Just to start the topic (we will later return into it in more detail) in level zero trust is infinity and the brotherhood constant (Beta) is one.

We have already touched the trust, this means that in adelphos, much like it happens in real life (or should happen!), the family members have completely trust in one another and, at the same time, they are completely responsible for the losses of the other (at least the adult members).

If the wife damages the family car, all the family is liable.

If the husband goes bankrupt in some cases all the family assets are withdrawn from the creditors (unless he has a limited liable company… but this is another story).

This is the meaning of the brotherhood constant: Beta = 1.0 means exactly that: all members of the family share completely losses and gains.

To put it all together you join adelphos by two ways

* you create your own family (level zero)

* you receive an invite to join a family (always in level zero)

In the following example we assume that two users Carlo Rossi and Maria Verdi, husband and wife, want to create a family in adelphos.

They have to decide who will start it: there is actually no difference, because the first will be automatically the boss and the carrier, but it can be changed later.

Suppose that the wife Maria wants to create the family. First of all she has to have an account in Mastodon. There are literally hundreds of Mastodon instances in the world, anyone is OK, for the sake of the example, and also because I am Italian, I have chosen mastodon.uno which is the largest Italian Mastodon instance)

Given that adelphos speaks the ActivityPub protocol you could sign also in another social in the fediverse (there are others); it must only implement the inbox feature (which usually any social does), but I have tested it only with Mastodon, so, unless you want to test and debug, please remain with Mastodon!

Maria creates a user in Mastodon which is in form @user@host (notice the double @ sign to distinguish from an email address), for example @maria_verdi@mastodon.uno

Now she wants to create another version of herself in adelphos which I have called an alias. This because I give the user the opportunity to create different alias of himself in adelphos (there is a reason for it, but it will be clear later) all of them from a single mastodon account.

To create an alias in adelphos you send a message to the adelphos instance; adelphos, in the fediverse, is just an ActivityPub user which has name adelphos and is hosted by the adelphos instance.

In technical terms adelphos is a daemon which listens to messages sent to its inbox, but for not technical people you can imagine adelphos as a call center clerk that listen to incoming calls using a particular address, a fediverse handle, the one with the double @ sign.

For example the adelphos user of www.adelphos.it is @adelphos@www.adelphos.it.

You can contact the adelphos user by using the “private mention” feature of Mastodon.

Login to Mastodon, you will see on the left a box in which you can type a message, there are at least three options to create a message: public, follower and private.

Choose private. Mastodon will warn that the message is not encrypted end-to-end. This is OK, because this is only a create message. The real communication will happen in a private chat, as we will see later.

The message will be like this:

@adelphos@www.adelphos.it alias.create alias maria.verdi password maria01

Let’s analyze it.

The first part: @adelphos@www.adelphos.it is the mention. It tells mastodon where to send the message.

alias.create is the command.

Then there are the parameters, in the form of

So the message could be translated in English like this: “Create an alias maria in the family verdi in the adelphos instance www.adelphos.it. This alias has a password maria01.

If all is OK you will receive shortly a notification from the adelphos daemon like this:

Alias created, you can login now.

At this point you can login. In the next lesson we will start to use the adelphos CLI interface.

Logging into adelphos, the CLI interface

Adelphos at the moment does have a simple chat/like CLI interface, much like a chat with a human.

Mastodon is used as a tool to get a MFA authentication, all the commands that you will send to adelphos are sent using this CLI interface which is located at the address $host/$api_root/daemon_cli

In the case of the current adelphos instance we have

$host = www.adelphos.it

$api_root = api

So the address to use is https://www.adelphos.it/api/daemon_cli

You will be presented with a chat like interface; you can login with this command:

alias.login alias maria.verdi password maria01

The command is nearly identical to the one used to create the alias, with the exception that we do not have the mention @adelphos@www.adelphos.it, this because the recipient of the message is already clear.

If you have entered correctly the password you will shortly receive a message from adelphos like this:


@maria.verdi Someone has entered your correct password in adelphos

If it was you, copy in the chat the last line to finalize login, otherwise

please change password immediately. DO NOT SHARE THE TOKEN with anyone.

alias.put_token tk avxswUcfp7NlgGhuj7IilZFNNJso2IfCdiIhFVeM_gs

The meaning of the message should be clear; Maria needs to copy and past the last line of the message in the chat to finalize login

So Maria copies the line

alias.put_token tk avxswUcfp7NlgGhuj7IilZFNNJso2IfCdiIhFVeM_gs

in the chat and adelphos should respond

Login OK, welcome to adelphos, maria.verdi.

At this point maria verdi is operative and she can use adelphos.

The two basic actions: join and associate

Adelphos is at its core a network of families which contain other families in a recursive tree, much like a filesystem.

In a file system the two main actions to create a tree are:

* create a directory inside another directory / delete a directory

* create a file in a directory / delete a file

These two actions are different because the first one creates a new level, while creating a file in a directory does not create a new level.

In adelphos the actions are similar, but there is a great difference from the file system: in a computer you start from the root and start creating leaves in it, so you have the level zero

/ or C:

Then there is the level one

C:/win or /home

Level two is

C:/win/system or /home/pferrentino

And so on, so in a file system the level zero is the greatest level because it contains all the children (this is less true in Windows as we can have different drive letters, so different roots, but the overall principle is the same)

In adelphos the direction of the tree is inverted: level zero is the smallest, the family, level zero is the family that contains families of level zero.

Level two is the family that has level-1 families as its members

In general

In adelphos a level-n family has members of level n-1

Each recursion must have a stopping condition otherwise we have an infinite regression. The end of recursion in adelphos is the level zero family.

The level zero family has user as members.

A simplified, informal BNF of the adelphos family tree could be written as this


    family_tree ::= '[' family* ']'
    family ::=  family_name ':' members 
    members ::= '[' (family* | alias*) '],'
    alias ::= identifier
    family_name ::= identifier
    identifier ::= [a-z]+[a-z0-9_]*

For example a very simple tree could be

    adelphos_tree = [
        family_one : [ 
            family_zero_1 : [ alice, bob ],
            family_zero_2 : [ mary, pat ],
        ],
    ]

This can be read in English like: we have a family called family_one that has two families as members, one called family_zero_1 which has members alice and bob and the other called family_zero_2 which has members mary and pat.

##

The basic actions that a user can do in adelphos are

* join / expel

* associate / revoke

The actions are paired because they come in pairs: detach is the opposite of associate, expel is the opposite of join.

And these actions are valid at every level, of course they can be done by the admin of the level.

The join/expel action.

The join action does not create a new level.

In this first version two main actions can be done at this point.

Invite a user in your family

When you create a user (alias) in adelphos you are automatically the boss and the carrier of your family.

The family is of level zero.

The first thing to do is to invite other users to join your family.

Remember that in adelphos the level zero is the level in which all the gains and the losses are shared 100% to the other members and trust is infinite.

So do not invite a friend in your family of level zero unless you trust him completely. Remember: you will be liable for all the expenses and he/she will have access to all of your gains.

Your new family member need to have an handle in the fediverse with Mastodon (even another social in the fediverse should work, but I have tested with Mastodon).