One of the great aspects of the course E-learning 3.0 (#el30) is the interaction between the participants. A network of blogs is discussing various elements of e-learning and the decentralized web. In my previous post I expressed a concern about using the blockchain in the context of managing your identity in a decentralized way. The blockchain is


There are at least serious tensions between the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the idea of storing personal data on the blockchain. Just one issue is the right to be forgotten, which implies that people can demand to erase data, which is very problematic in a blockchain-context. There are workarounds, but these have their own disadvantages, as Andries Van Humbeeck explains on Medium.

Thanks to the #el30-network, an interesting discussion about the tension between blockchain and the right to be forgotten started in the comments on my previous post. One participant, Dorian, had this to say:

Roland’s concern is indeed a theme that The Circle discusses at length.

[For those who haven’t read it: in the novel, “The Circle” is a massive software corporation which builds its power and political influence on its totalitarian ownership over people’s personal data — but also enforces absolute “transparency” as people’s “source of trust”, by making privacy criminal, and publicity (or publicness) compulsory.]

Most existing blockchain solutions are certainly not appropriate to carry people’s private data, since they are basically gigantic public ledgers shared and copied integrally among the computers of all users…

However, some new solutions are popping up that attempt to preserve the main benefits of decentralised information (and thus, power) sharing, while giving individuals much more control over *what* they share with the rest of the world, and being less wasteful in terms of energy and information redundancy.

One of the most inspiring projects I know of is called Holochain ( Contrary to Bitcoin or Ethereum for example, it doesn’t rely on one huge ledger, but on a fractal concatenation of micro-ledgers connected into one common network. It looks extremely promising, not just for financial or IT purposes, but as a tool for fairer economic and socio-political systems… and, yes, as a better way to inscribe one’s identity into the world wide web!
(not to mention that it’s being built by good people, who are not interested in becoming billionnaires)
To learn more, I’d recommend the following articles, and their links:

The articles and sites mentioned by Dorian are very interesting. The Holochain-story is slowly getting into the mainstream media.Some words of caution though: Holochain is a big idea and a very deep project. It’s also complicated to understand and only known about by a niche audience. There are other projects aiming at the decentralizing the web, like Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid. Looking for a definition avoiding terms such as ‘hash tables’ and ‘git’ I came back empty-handed.


Some basic notions make people shiver, like the idea of sharing the spare capacity of your computers. Sharing a room for Airbnb became a success, but sharing your computer in times of fear for hackings seems a serious marketing challenge (I don’t think the “sandbox”-notion is something the average computer-user fully understands). Some ideas are great but never gain traction, as I experienced in virtual worlds and virtual reality. The actual development of Holochain seems to have started in 2016, yet, two years later the Holochain-site seems unable to explain what it is so that non-geeks would understand it. The homepage of starts with a video where a developer starts mentioning Ruby on Rails. A journalist like me working for an interested but general audience finds not a single usable text snippet explaining what it’s all about.

Holo-host saves marketing

However, the holochain-community is being saved as far as marketing is concerned by a related project, the holo host. It’s literally a box (in various versions) which is pre-configured to act as part of a hosting-network in order to make it possible to host holochain-apps in a decentralized way. The video is less technical and actually does a good job explaining what it’s about:

A graphic explainer (click to enlarge):

Graphical scheme of the holo host box.

Finally some textual explanation:


Holochain is a platform infrastructure technology for distributed peer-to-peer applications, and Holo is the first application to be built on top of it. The purpose of Holo is to act as a bridge between the budding community of distributed Holochain apps, and the current centralized web. By creating an ecosystem and currency that enable distributed hosting services provided by peers, Holo brings access to distributed applications to the familiar web browser. The long-term goal is for Holo to run itself out of business by expanding the community built on and around Holochain apps until the majority of people switch over to using Holochain directly. But adoption of a new technology as fundamental as Holochain won’t happen overnight, so Holo is here ease that transition.

Actually you don’t need to buy the box to participate: “While the HoloPort is optimized for hosting the network and is the easiest way to be a part of the community and earn Holo fuel, you will be able to run the Holo software on a variety of devices. We’re selling HoloPorts in order to jump-start the Holo ecosystem with many stable, dedicated hosting devices, but we encourage users to join our community through any means at their disposal. Initially the Holo software will only be available for download and installation on computers running Linux; later macOS and Windows will be supported.”

I think I’ll buy a holo box, even though I fear convincing “the internet” to embrace such a revolutionary project, against the interests of established giant cloud providers, will be very challenging indeed.

2 thoughts on “Holo and the Holochain as infrastructure for the decentralized web: a marketing challenge

  1. Hi Roland,
    I’m happy that you find the Holochain concept interesting.

    As you mention, there are definitely obstacles to overcome in terms of marketing. It’s true that sandboxing can be scary and tricky to understand. Hopefully Arthur Brock and his team will manage to convince more and more people to join them, and not just the bona fide nerds among us…

    Because I’ve also been delving into mutual credit systems for community currencies lately (see for ex., I’m also quite excited to see that Holo (and Holochain down the line) are promoting this kind of currency for people to acknowledge one another’s contributions to the healthiness of the entire network… Instead of all this credit flowing straight into the pockets of the guys who own massive mining server farms in China, in the case of Bitcoin!

    It seems to me that such financial systems have the potential to become the backbone of a truly “distributed web” in the future, as well as promoting a fairer *distribution of resources* in society (since in a mutual credit system, one typically cannot accumulate more than a certain amount of credit, nor owe the network more than a certain amount).


    PS. Is there a way for you to add a “get email notifications for new comments” checkbox somewhere in the comments section? I wasn’t notified of your last comment to your previous post 🙂

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