Welcome Again

Why Hum Beep? This is the story.

Later, though, there was something I wanted to buy which was being sold with Ethereum, one of the Big Two cryptocurrencies, along with BitCoin or BTC. I bought some Ether, sent it if off to the address of the seller who was supposedly selling the deliverable I was wanting to buy, and the result was ... nothing.

I didn't get what I thought I was buying. I got nothing.

I couldn't interact with the seller -- it was just some program on the internet which noone was actually responding for. My money went down the tubes, and my trust with it. Never again.

Since then, I've heard a lot of air about cryptocurrencies going up and going down, there isn't any point to it at all except in watching the value of the currencies go up and down, which they do a lot.

Now blockchain, that's a cool (but different) idea; stick your information into the blockchain, and everything that comes after validates that your information was definitely there back then, and not something you made up later to manipulate the truth. Although the garbage-in garbage-out problem remains an open problem, the blockchain idea has the potential to establish a version of public reality that can't be manipulated. I like truth, so I like that.

And I think I found it; it's not a new idea, because the killer app for money is buying and selling. And I know all about it, because I've been screwed.

Now, as it turns out, your servant here has a specialized skill at a particular technical task, which is called Protocol Verification. You write up a protocol using a special protocol meta-language, called ProMeLa, very cute, and then you beat on it with every possible kind of event that could happen in the world of your protocol -- and I do mean Every Possible one -- and then you discover that if you didn't do A before B then some other problem C occurs, and you keep fixing it and debugging it until everything not only implements the idea you want to govern the joint interaction of two or more parties, but that it actually runs smoothly without exception, ever. Then you never get stuck in a spinning loop where you keep doing the same thing but there isn't any progress (called "livelock"). Also you don't get stuck in a blocked state where you're waiting for something to happen that doesn't ever happen (called "deadlock"). Protocols are like that, they can go wrong, in ways you could never guess, that's why Amazon needs a million staff to make sure it goes right all the time, but if instead you use theoretical computer science where you can make proofs of validity and correctness, then with Promela and Spin and the good tools out there for Protocol Verification, you can actually prove there are no spins or blocks in your protocol, or fix it to do so until indeed that is the case.

So I did that for a protocol which I first called the Buy protocol, but that seemed a bit too generic and untrademarkable, so now I call it the HumBeep[tm] Protocol.

And it works.

So voila, here is the Hum Beep website, it lets you identify yourself, generate public and private keys, create offerings as a seller, accept advertised offerings as a buyer, send the money, get the stuff, agree that it was good, and fix it if not, all within a logically infallible and also legally enforceable contractual system, which makes sure you get what you agreed to, or you won't be out all your money for nothing, like I was when I sent ether to that anonymous seller, whose name I never knew, but who was NOT governed by the rules of any reasonable game.

And that's my story.

Please, don't be like me, don't send your money to nowhere without a meaningful, that is, enforceable, contractual, step-by-step system that makes sure you get what you wanted before they take their money away.

Instead, use Hum Beep. Try it with something small, and ratchet up. Soon it'll be your normal way of doing purchases and sales.

And thanks for visiting.

Read about HumBeep's benefits, and if you're ready to buy or sell, then click around and let me know if anything is not working very well for you.

For questions or problems please contact me.