Holo Use Cases

Today: Jim has a small guest house that he’d like to rent to visitors. However, he is looking for an alternative to airbnb. Jim likes to talk to people before he agrees to have them stay with him, and Airbnb blocks attempts to share phone numbers until after a guest has finished booking.

Coming Soon: Jim could opt to join Ourbnb, a Peer-to-Peer home sharing platform run by the hosts themselves. Whenever someone visits the Ourbnb website, one of the community member’s computers serves their requests and deals with the booking. In return for making Ourbnb available to anyone with a web browser, that host gets compensated in Holo for the work their machine did.

Vision: The Sharing Economy on Holo expands through building numerous interoperable cooperatives. Reputation becomes portable across communities, so rave reviews in acclaim in Ourbnb may help Jim access opportunities in other contexts as well. Sharing smaller resources (not just homes and cars) also may become more common thanks to Holo’s efficient micro-transactions.

Today: Dana has medical records on file with 8 different doctors at 3 different hospitals. Yet, when she moves to a new town, it could be a bureaucratic nightmare to assemble the records from all of the different locations.

Coming Soon: With Holo, she would be able to securely share her own copies of her records with her new doctors and hospital. She would have that team working with a full medical history without any delays. Dana feels better knowing she holds, owns and controls her personal information.

Vision: Dana’s personal AI integrates health information from her fitbit and other ongoing health records, noticing trends worth watching for a heart condition she was diagnosed with a couple of years ago. Dana is also able to opt to share the insights gleaned by her AI with a service that will help her more effectively manage not just her physical health, but her emotional state as well through a custom blend of diet, activity and relaxation. In addition to choosing to share this “between checkups” data with her doctors, Dana can choose to share subsets of her data as anonymized information for medical research.

Today: Amena is a 15 year old Syrian refugee living in Eleonas, a refugee camp outside of Athens. She had no ID when she arrived. Though not uncommon, this has complicated her interactions with a variety of government agencies and aid organizations.

Coming Soon: With Holo, upon arrival in Eleonas, she could be given a Identity with Dignity (IDwD) smart card that she could use to begin using applications and controlling her own digital records. These could include credentials created as she moves through steps in a government immigration process, records from doctor visits, school achievements and more. For example, when Amena attends school, she can add copies of her classes and grades to her own online records. Each would be cryptographically signed by a teacher or administrator. Later, if she moves to a different camp, or is accepted into a host country, she will be able to share her school records directly with administrators, who will be able to confirm that the grades were signed by her school in Eleonas through any web browser. The hosts that support web access to refugee controlled records may choose to donate processing power, or could be compensated by the government overseeing the camp for helping support IDwD.

Vision: Our ability to control what we share and who we share it with is critical for privacy and agency. By making it not only possible, but easy for each of us to carry claims from our past into new interactions, we improve our ability to build relationships with our fellow community members without compromising our dignity – and this in turn may enable much more fluid and thriving forms of community.

Today: A handful of telecommunication companies have a monopoly over bandwidth. This is true in countries around the world and has enabled governments in places like Turkey and Egypt to “turn off the internet” whenever they feel like it. Furthermore, some internet providers want to charge different rates for different kinds of data, making the net less neutral. Before long access to the internet could look like your cable bill: selective channels of access. Today, the only organizations that can benefit from adding bandwidth to the internet (and thus the only ones incentivized to do so) are telecom companies. They lay cable and put up towers, and bill customers for internet access on a monthly basis.

Coming Soon: On the other hand, Holo’s microtransaction system could make it possible for anyone who puts up an antenna or shares a bit of their cell phone bandwidth to get rewarded for the increased internet access that they are creating. Similar to how holo leverages idle storage and processing power, it can also help us make better use of idle bandwidth — or incentivize the creation of additional bandwidth — as well. Jane could put up an antenna and choose to relay data for free for her friends or for a fee for strangers, thus extending network capacity.

Vision: With a growing ecosystem of peer-to-peer applications and an expanding peer-to-peer infrastructure, the centralized internet that has led all of us to grow accustomed to assuming we are being monitored and manipulated could soon become more of a memory than a menace. In addition, these more distributed models prove far more resilient as well – able to rebound from disruptions far more readily than is the case today. It may seem silly to require the residents of Hurricane impacted Puerto Rico to establish a connection to data centers in Silicon Valley in order to send messages to family members a few kilometers away, but for most social media and messaging applications today, that is what’s required. This centralization has resulted in brittle systems that have hampered rescue efforts too many times. In contrast, with distributed applications, just an antenna or two would re-establish the ability for residents and emergency responders to communicate, coordinate and save lives.