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This story is nonsense. "Now that we've established unstoppability as a net new feature, I’ll make my most speculative and contentious proposition: Hyperstruct

This story is nonsense. "Now that we've established unstoppability as a net new feature, I’ll make my most speculative and contentious proposition: Hyperstructures can be simultaneously free forever to utilize and extremely valuable to own. This is possible because of their unstoppability. There is no cost to maintain and keep the protocol operational forever." You heard it here first folks. The code maintains itself, forever. This is obviously naively optimistic at best. Further "free forever to utilize": Servers are free now? Switches, networking, power? There are costs, even if they aren't high. At best those costs are externalized to stakeholders beyond the majority of the user-base. Every time I read about one of these "unstoppable systems" which avoid the existing financial system, I find myself wondering if the theoretical freedom that grants is worth the risks it imposes.

webmaven 5y ago
> Every time I read about one of these "unstoppable systems" which avoid the existing financial system, I find myself wondering if the theoretical freedom that grants is worth the risks it imposes. While some of the examples cited were financial, I don't think the author would be particularly surprised if the next few successful exemplars of their thesis didn't have much to do with financial transactions. You could, for example, recast BitTorrent as such a "hyperstructure" such that a global chain comprised an immutable append-only index of all torrents, with side chains containing the torrent chunks. The next layer would add permissionless forking/versioning with optional attestation and provenance metadata, and you've got something that would be very interesting and useful infrastructure. Variations on that theme can be devised for use cases shaped like Usenet, land registries, IP registries such as patents and trademarks, Xanadu-style content annotations citations and transclusions, binding arbitration resolution, cryptographic content signing and verification (to combat Photoshopping and deepfakes), and so on. Basically, for digital infrastructure that has some sort of network effect that results in a natural monopoly, there is now a new option besides having the monopoly be centralized, owned, and operated by a for-profit entity, a nonprofit entity, or the state. Personally, I think that it is going to take quite a while (multiple decades) for the impact to be broadly felt in terms of actually displacing existing infrastructure and institutions (like banks). The first broad adoption of DAO-like "hyperstructures" will be new, like BitTorrent or hashtags were new. But I don't know what those will be.

webmaven 5y ago

> Every time I read about one of these "unstoppable systems" which avoid the existing financial system, I find myself wondering if the theoretical freedom that grants is worth the risks it imposes. While some of the examples cited were financial, I don't think the author would be particularly surprised if the next few successful exemplars of their thesis didn't have much to do with financial transactions. You could, for example, recast BitTorrent as such a "hyperstructure" such that a global chain comprised an immutable append-only index of all torrents, with side chains containing the torrent chunks. The next layer would add permissionless forking/versioning with optional attestation and provenance metadata, and you've got something that would be very interesting and useful infrastructure. Variations on that theme can be devised for use cases shaped like Usenet, land registries, IP registries such as patents and trademarks, Xanadu-style content annotations citations and transclusions, binding arbitration resolution, cryptographic content signing and verification (to combat Photoshopping and deepfakes), and so on. Basically, for digital infrastructure that has some sort of network effect that results in a natural monopoly, there is now a new option besides having the monopoly be centralized, owned, and operated by a for-profit entity, a nonprofit entity, or the state. Personally, I think that it is going to take quite a while (multiple decades) for the impact to be broadly felt in terms of actually displacing existing infrastructure and institutions (like banks). The first broad adoption of DAO-like "hyperstructures" will be new, like BitTorrent or hashtags were new. But I don't know what those will be.