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Appreciate the reply here! Your analogies are effective and point out an important difference. It comes down to this question: "Is wrapping everything in a fin

Appreciate the reply here! Your analogies are effective and point out an important difference. It comes down to this question: "Is wrapping everything in a financial model inevitable?" 1. If yes, then let's seize the moment to figure out how to make it the best we can. 2. If no, let's create an alternative, or figure out something else that's inevitable, or perhaps at least resist #1. I've landed on the side of #1. Therefore it becomes a matter of shaping it to be the best it can be. Same with solar power and electric cars. They are inevitable, let's make them the best they can be. For those that land on #2, I can see the point of resisting. However, the best way to support #2 would be an alternative hypothesis "Inevitably some things will be financial and other things will not" and then building tools to support that. Thanks for talking this through and creating this clarity about where the difference is.

ryan_lane 5y ago
Things are currently wrapped in a financial model of sorts. You pay for network resources, the provider does too. They pay for hosting costs and decide whether or not to pass those through. I, for instance, publish everything for free, with an open content license. Wikipedia does as well. We're happy to pay the hosting costs to make our content accessible. The web archive handles long-term archiving, in case we stop hosting. In this new "everything is wrapped in crypto" model, nothing is free. You still have to pay for the network and hosting costs, but now you also need to pay middlemen to access the content, even if the author wishes to provide their content for free. Also, everything becomes more brittle. Since content isn't centralized, it can (and will) disappear when folks stop hosting it. They can be incentivized to host content by being paid to do so, but that really means it makes the most sense to host the most popular content, and to ditch everything else. The whole concept, technically, is worse than the system we currently have. If you want to see numerous reasons why this is a bad idea, look through Wikimedia's various email lists to see this idea being shot down over and over again for nearly 20 years. It's simply an inferior approach to the problem.

ryan_lane 5y ago

Things are currently wrapped in a financial model of sorts. You pay for network resources, the provider does too. They pay for hosting costs and decide whether or not to pass those through. I, for instance, publish everything for free, with an open content license. Wikipedia does as well. We're happy to pay the hosting costs to make our content accessible. The web archive handles long-term archiving, in case we stop hosting. In this new "everything is wrapped in crypto" model, nothing is free. You still have to pay for the network and hosting costs, but now you also need to pay middlemen to access the content, even if the author wishes to provide their content for free. Also, everything becomes more brittle. Since content isn't centralized, it can (and will) disappear when folks stop hosting it. They can be incentivized to host content by being paid to do so, but that really means it makes the most sense to host the most popular content, and to ditch everything else. The whole concept, technically, is worse than the system we currently have. If you want to see numerous reasons why this is a bad idea, look through Wikimedia's various email lists to see this idea being shot down over and over again for nearly 20 years. It's simply an inferior approach to the problem.