In Holochain, the agency is the power of an agent to act in their environment.
An agent is :
- Anyone or anything acting with agency, such as a human or bot.
- An agent (see definition 1) who participates in a Holochain network through their cell.
Agent activity¶
Records of all the sources chains actions that an agent has published, along with any warrants against them for malicious activity. An agent’s neighbors, as peers whose agent addresses are near to theirs, are the validation authorities for their agent activity data.
Agent activity operation¶
A DHT operation produced by the author of a source chain record, notifying the validation authorities for the author’s agent ID entry that they’ve published something.
Agent-centric¶
Describes any distributed system that puts agents at the center of the design, giving them agency over their online identity and the data they create. Agent-centric systems are usually decentralized and use public-key cryptography to identify agents. Git, Holochain, Dat, and Secure Scuttlebutt are highly agent-centric, while client/server and blockchain systems are less so.
Agent address¶
The address of an agent ID entry on the Distributed Hash Table, calculated from the agent’s public key. It is used in locating an agent’s transport address for gossiping and making remote calls, and in calculating the proper validation authority to send a DHT operation to or receive a piece of DHT data from.
Agent ID¶
The public key of an agent. It serves as their unique ID in any DHT they join (although an agent can create multiple IDs to use in different spaces if they like).
Agent ID entry¶
The entry associated with the third of the four genesis records at the the beginning of an agent‘s source chain, which contains their agent ID. The address of this entry is also the agent’s address on the DHT.
- Defined by a private-public key pair
- For cryptographically signing
- Others can cryptographically verify these signatures
- Action Ledger
- Sequence of all the actions that an agent has taken in a social container
- Signed by the agent
- Merkle trees can create unfalsifiable ledgers