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> Genuinely curious - why not? Is it just for ideological reasons or is there an actual use case preventing you? Ownership requires decentralization. In our c
by flaque 5y ago
> Genuinely curious - why not? Is it just for ideological reasons or is there an actual use case preventing you?
Ownership requires decentralization.
In our case, we can't make a "Steam that's owned by game developers" if the listing information (the screenshots, the titles, the descriptions, the game files, and so on) are hosted on AWS.
Ownership means that, if the original creators were to walk away, the asset would still exist without the need for the original creator.
This is (maybe) a new business model: take something that was previously a service, turn it into an asset instead.
In a "service", the original creator operates the product. In an "asset", the original creator does not typically operate or control the product. So to turn a service into an asset, you "decentralize" the operation of the product; typically via a commodity market which drives the price down and disconnects the creator from the original product.
As a real world example, take cars. Imagine if, when you purchased a car, you paid a subscription for your car service. Then someone came along and said "hey, you should just be able to buy a car and own it". Critics argue "but then who would fix it when it breaks? who will fuel it? There's no way anyone could provide you these services better than Ford. This 'car ownership' must be a scam." And sure enough, many people come along selling you a pink slip for a car, claim there's only so many to go around, and people speculate on the pink slips. The critic then argues "see, all this 'ownership' stuff is just a scam! Everyone's just buying the pink slip to sell to the next sucker." In fact, the pink slip sellers never made the car, and disappeared with the money. The speculators and scammers are indeed speculators and scammers; but they don't change the underlying point: it's not unreasonable to try and sell the car. In order to make the car an asset, you must "decentralize the car"; by ensuring anyone can become a mechanic and anyone can sell fuel to the car.
In Strangemood's case, we make a decentralized marketplace for software licenses, that's owned primarily by the sellers (ie: decentralized Steam). If Strangemood stored files on S3, then whoever owns the the AWS account is the only operator, and so the product is a traditional service, rather than an asset.
- bawolff 5y agoThank you for replying :) > In Strangemood's case, we make a decentralized marketplace for software licenses, that's owned primarily by the sellers (ie: decentralized Steam). If Strangemood stored files on S3, then whoever owns the the AWS account is the only operator, and so the product is a traditional service, rather than an asset. I'm a but confused here on the ownership - if its the purchaser or the seller who is in control. Filecoin isn't free so i assume one of these groups has to be footing the bill. Wouldn't this goal be equally served by just hosting it in the sellers s3 bucket (or webserver, or torrent, etc)? Someone still has to pay for and be in control of the filecoin "instance" (probably not the right word), what's the difference between that person doing that vs running their own server.
- flaque 5y ago> Thank you for replying :) Of course! Feel free to send me an email if you'd like to grab virtual coffee and talk more. I'm evan [at] strangemood [dot] org. > I'm a but confused here on the ownership - if its the purchaser or the seller who is in control. Filecoin isn't free so i assume one of these groups has to be footing the bill. Ah! This is what DAOs are for. A percentage of every sale goes to a community treasury (a wallet). That wallet is collectively controlled by a token. That token is minted to sellers upon purchase, so the sellers control the treasury. The treasury acts as a "payer of last resort". It pays for Filecoin deals basically. It also can pay maintainers of open source tooling through decentralized Quadratic funding grants (see https://wtfisqf.com/ https://wtfisqf.com/). Rebase (the company that makes Strangemood) peer's the store's small-file metadata (titles, descriptions, etc) as an additional backup. We don't have to do this, but it costs us about $0.15 per year to do so, and it makes the network faster and safer. Realistically, DAOs might be a janky solution. I'd love to see payment of file store be included within the protocol itself. But there's a few quirks of Solana that made this difficult. Specifically, you can't use more than 1024 bytes in a single instruction, which limits the scope of the program. This might be fixed in the future though.