Vision Statement

⚠️ This project is still under development and is for reference purposes only. If you are interested in this project or have suggestions on how to improve it feel free to contact us at craterdog@gmail.com.

We hold these truths to be self-evident

1. Today's technology is really only understood by a small percentage of the population that uses it.
2. Most institutions run critical applications on laptops and servers that are running operating systems with dubious security.
3. It is infeasible to keep up with the software patching required to keep out the well funded hackers located around the world.
4. Identity theft is rampant because the personal information that we use to identify ourselves cannot be kept private in the Internet age.
5. Our financial industry is fraught with fraud, the cost of which is passed on directly to us.

Thinking outside the box

1. Simplify the model to include only a few familiar concepts.
2. Eliminate laptop computers and servers altogether.
3. Patch nothing.
4. Have each person wear an electronic device that can be used to digitally notarize any document in a unforgeable way.
5. Digitally notarize each business transaction between two parties such that neither party can later attempt to refute it.

The Rosetta Stone

The bottom line is that we need to humanize our digital lives in a way that does not require a PhD in AI and Computer Engineering to do our every day tasks.

Human Concept	Operating System	Geek Speak
trusted person	login account	security principal
document	file	inode
document citation	file link	Merkle (hash) pointer
document repository	filesystem	database
controlled access	file permissions	role based access control
notary key	private key	large prime number
notary certificate	public key certificate	X.509 cert
notarized document	digitally signed file	public key cryptography
notary seal	digital signature	secure hash

The average person should only need to think about the concepts in the first column.

Account Management

Each trusted person maintains a Bali Nebula™ account using the notary key stored in an electronic device that they wear. The account requires monetary tokens which can be purchased from a digital banker. The tokens are used to pay for processing time in the Bali Nebula™ and can be transferred to other trusted people as payment for products and services.

Document Management

All information is stored as notarized documents in a document repository residing in the Bali Nebula™. The notary seal on a document is validated using the corresponding notary certificate also residing as a notarized document in the repository. Once stored in the repository a notarized document cannot be modified or deleted. Instead, new versions of documents are created and notarized.

Message Processing

Notarized documents can be passed around as trusted messages in a way that assures the receiver of a message that it really came from the sender and has not been modified after it was sent. Or a notarized document may be published as an event of potential interest to multiple trusted people or other processes controlled by the Bali Nebula™. In either case, the notarized documents are placed into bags where they can be retrieved and processed accordingly.

The sender and receiver of a message or event can be a trusted person or a notarized document residing in the Bali Nebula™. In either case, the arrival of a message or event in a bag triggers a process running in the Bali Nebula™ to handle it.

For a detailed description of each of the use cases shown in the above diagrams click here.