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The customer for this L402 protocol is obviously a media network, especially ebooks, and plausibly an alternative to spotify, applemusic and closer to the bandc

The customer for this L402 protocol is obviously a media network, especially ebooks, and plausibly an alternative to spotify, applemusic and closer to the bandcamp model, content providers of all kinds who are currently subject to the chokepoint of payment processors. Emerging use cases would be domain specific LLMs trained on proprietary data sets in health, legal, accounting, and other professions. What it needs is a new there there on the other side of it. The objection to PoW is thinly veiled objection to tying it to physical value instead of policy. The objection would be the same for gold. What they object to is physical constraints on political authorities, and these sort of "bitcoin bad!" comments should not be admitted to spoil serious discourse. The economic case for PoW is that it converts any source of energy anywhere in the solar system to transferrable stored value. It would make a lot of space based energy harvesting projects economically viable, but also remote hydro projects that can't transmit electricity long distances, but can absolutely provide compute as an economic service from long distances and make the a local hydro system economically viable. PoW tokenizes electricity via compute. It's a very elegant idea, and the opposite of environmentally unsustainable because it actually rationalizes the price of electricity with endogenous demand. The same people objecting to bitcoin micropayments schemes also object to nuclear because it would actually solve the zero-sum problem narratives they want to sustain and manage. These views are not without controversy, and personally I reject them on principle.

hakfoo 2y ago
Frankly, when you describe PoW that way, it sounds like something you'd get by giving an investor a monkey's paw. If you had a source of power, you had to use it, either directly or indirectly, to make goods and services-- satisfy actual needs somewhere-- to exchange it for stored value. Your model cuts productive economic activity right out of the loop, Why would anyone bother using their hydro/solar/nuclear resources to run a factory when they can just use it to grind for Bitcoin directly? Well, at least until the economy becomes so wrapped around this delusion that we end up with real-world scarcities, and all the Bitcoin in San Francisco won't buy you one taco. I arch my back at trying to restore "physical value" to economic prominence. Fiat currencies are a socially progressive tool. It gives us the chance to decide as a civilization whether and how much to incentivize those who hoard, those who invest, and those who spend. Conversely, physical, undilutable wealth reassures only the existing wealthy, who can ossify their position with no fear of inflation undermining their treasuries.
- motohagiography 2y ago
  responding because your first argument is analogous to Sachs' "resource curse," where if you can make money in energy, why do anything else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse it's a good argument, but essentially presumes a nation run by public sector unions and their committees of planners is a desirable end state. 75 years ago dubai was a bunch of tents, and it is now diversifying its economy in a very short time. the reason they would run a factory is because they need something to spend the revenue from the money they're exporting on. also, why do they need factories, it's pretty sustainable to just import everything and then leave no trace afterwards. anywhere with hydropower is a potential PoW mini-dubai, if perhaps a bit more godless. the ossification critique reflects a scrooge mcduck understanding of wealth, where it assumes people sit atop a pile of it counting it or fill pools with it to swim and luxuriate in it, with no understaing of what capital is. the only scarcity in the world is freedom from fear and corruption to build, absolutely everything else is abundant.
  - hakfoo 2y ago
    >but essentially presumes a nation run by public sector unions and their committees of planners is a desirable end state. I get that this is an typical perspective for the HN crowd, but "where do I sign up?" An aspirational goal of civilization is that we should be able to cooperate and efficiently distribute labour, so we aren't all spending all our time trying to outhustle each other. Public sector unions and planning committees seem a bit more interested in that goal than VCs and and startup devs. Dubai is an interesting example. It's not just "we have to spend the money on something", it's "our entire economy has a best-by date, whether it's via the ooze running out, or just the march of renewables and EVs, so we'd better diversify while we can afford to." Even assuming that transport is free and 1000% green, local manufacturing capacity is important just to ensure you have some control over your needs-- look at the shipping fracas in the Middle East, and ask what products you want on the far end of a 10,000km container-ship journey? Perhaps Scrooge McDuck is an exaggerated model, but when I see "trillion dollar companies" next to "the middle class household is typically 2+ incomes these days", I'm not sure that taming 10% inflation is what really fixes the latter.
Dylan16807 2y ago
It's not stored value, it's burnt value. Burning large amounts of value will never be an elegant solution.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
These content aggregator types sound a lot like the kind of centralization that bitcoin designed to rid us of.

hakfoo 2y ago

Frankly, when you describe PoW that way, it sounds like something you'd get by giving an investor a monkey's paw. If you had a source of power, you had to use it, either directly or indirectly, to make goods and services-- satisfy actual needs somewhere-- to exchange it for stored value. Your model cuts productive economic activity right out of the loop, Why would anyone bother using their hydro/solar/nuclear resources to run a factory when they can just use it to grind for Bitcoin directly? Well, at least until the economy becomes so wrapped around this delusion that we end up with real-world scarcities, and all the Bitcoin in San Francisco won't buy you one taco. I arch my back at trying to restore "physical value" to economic prominence. Fiat currencies are a socially progressive tool. It gives us the chance to decide as a civilization whether and how much to incentivize those who hoard, those who invest, and those who spend. Conversely, physical, undilutable wealth reassures only the existing wealthy, who can ossify their position with no fear of inflation undermining their treasuries.

motohagiography 2y ago
responding because your first argument is analogous to Sachs' "resource curse," where if you can make money in energy, why do anything else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse it's a good argument, but essentially presumes a nation run by public sector unions and their committees of planners is a desirable end state. 75 years ago dubai was a bunch of tents, and it is now diversifying its economy in a very short time. the reason they would run a factory is because they need something to spend the revenue from the money they're exporting on. also, why do they need factories, it's pretty sustainable to just import everything and then leave no trace afterwards. anywhere with hydropower is a potential PoW mini-dubai, if perhaps a bit more godless. the ossification critique reflects a scrooge mcduck understanding of wealth, where it assumes people sit atop a pile of it counting it or fill pools with it to swim and luxuriate in it, with no understaing of what capital is. the only scarcity in the world is freedom from fear and corruption to build, absolutely everything else is abundant.
- hakfoo 2y ago
  >but essentially presumes a nation run by public sector unions and their committees of planners is a desirable end state. I get that this is an typical perspective for the HN crowd, but "where do I sign up?" An aspirational goal of civilization is that we should be able to cooperate and efficiently distribute labour, so we aren't all spending all our time trying to outhustle each other. Public sector unions and planning committees seem a bit more interested in that goal than VCs and and startup devs. Dubai is an interesting example. It's not just "we have to spend the money on something", it's "our entire economy has a best-by date, whether it's via the ooze running out, or just the march of renewables and EVs, so we'd better diversify while we can afford to." Even assuming that transport is free and 1000% green, local manufacturing capacity is important just to ensure you have some control over your needs-- look at the shipping fracas in the Middle East, and ask what products you want on the far end of a 10,000km container-ship journey? Perhaps Scrooge McDuck is an exaggerated model, but when I see "trillion dollar companies" next to "the middle class household is typically 2+ incomes these days", I'm not sure that taming 10% inflation is what really fixes the latter.

Dylan16807 2y ago

It's not stored value, it's burnt value. Burning large amounts of value will never be an elegant solution.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

These content aggregator types sound a lot like the kind of centralization that bitcoin designed to rid us of.