3 ms·
If you get rid of "merkle tree" requirement, then you have just described database files hosted on github. It does plenty of advantages -- it scales good and i
by theamk 8y ago
If you get rid of "merkle tree" requirement, then you have just described database files hosted on github.
It does plenty of advantages -- it scales good and if done right, it is immune to hacking or site going down.
But it has some disadvantages as well -- the biggest is that client needs to do non-trivial, complex work, so you cannot just insert AJAX call onto your webpage. Also, you lose all control of data, so a competitor can trivially clone your service.
- EGreg 8y agoWell yeah, I am not talking about Capitalism in the traditional sense anymore (business builds a moat, provides a service to you and charges fees). I am talking about a collaboration economy (open source, science style). You may still be able to sell stuff, but not the stuff whose marginal cost to copy is zero. Information would be free. Asked who would generate it, the answer is increasingly “everyone”. News and Maps can be crowdsourced (see openstreetmap for example). The hard part is in the consensus model, ie data sets will be honeypots for people who want to alter the “truth as we know it” (like Stephen Colbert and Elephants on Wikipedia). I am not convinced that a for-profit top-down corporation is necessarily better for that than a flat, democratic crowd, provided we have interesting game mechanics built in (like high stakes challenges where you can lose a significant portion of your accumulated reputation if you don’t win by a large margin).