@russell and @luckybit I’m dipping into this thread and following as much as I have time for, which is less than I’d like :-), but want to add that I respect both perspectives - although personally more aligned with @luckybit’s attitudes towards the existing models and players.
I am listening to you @russell because I know you know a lot more than I do about your field, so I value your experience and see it as vital to us creating better solutions. I don’t fear messing with the status quo in ways that disrupt and cause hardship to those invested in it - its inevitable, and I wish society dealt better with that, but on its own that is not enough reason to maintain it because there are other factors.
So this comment is to support both of you in continuing this constructive dialogue, and to let @russell know that you and your input is valued, even if you feel like you are battling against the tide of others here including myself. I would really love something new and good for all to come out of this part of the SAFE project.
Sign of a strong community, well said @happybeing and I agree I have come to respect @russell for his ability to stay dispassionate and true, even when against the tide (which may not be correct). It is valuable knowledge.
The chat is very good for the whole awareness perspective and @luckybit and others is doing a great job at probing many areas of investigation. I hope this community can do this for years, our SAFE network will be uber powerful and true if this is the case.
I read every post while compiling code etc. so find it very educational and it is like being at school at times, I hope most feel the same way. I will contribute more when the whole thing is up and running, but a quick note to say thanks very much for the interesting and diverse commentary.
Oh, I didn’t mean you. I’m saying that people have a tendency to choose their media input. A buddy of mine consumes that website exclusively, then tells me that I need to “open my mind.” To say people involved in the old system are useless or “tainted” is going to hurt your evolution, and cause you to stumble over well worn territory. You evolve efficiently when you take it all in.
I work freelance, so I’ll do independent films, commercial work, etc. But I should make this clear, as there seems to be some confusion: I do not work in (or for) the recording industry. Not sure where you got that from. I work video/film editorial. I’ve worked on everything from studio films to crowdfunded indie films. I’m not in music. I’m in film/television/commercials.
I think being from outside the entertainment industry allows you to have some fresh perspective on how things could work. It allows you to have totally fresh eyes on the model and construct interesting new systems. I also think that you’re more than like ignorant to 90% of the goings-on. The trick is to not be so arrogant as to disregard what the people who work in entertainment every day. They know more about it than you. I could come up with a really cool, unusual, and original design for a bridge, but at the end of the day I don’t know anything about how bridges are built. But it’s that ignorance that allows molds to be broken.
Oh yeah, definitely. If I was ignoring them I wouldn’t be furiously responding!
There are sooo many profit models out there today. I’ve been on projects with them all. I don’t have a stake in any of them. As long as people keep making things, I’m useful.
Speaking of controlling the subconscious… We discussed weeks ago that the members of this forum do not agree with copyright and patent trolling. That this is a space to work on new ideas. In the context of this debate, it’s about getting artists and creators money without the need of fear mongering with laws. So please stop bringing it up, especially in relation to me. I agree. We all agree. It’s well covered. You’re making me sound like I support it, which I don’t.
Thanks. The reason I’m here is because the old models, specifically for the distribute of film and television, are on a decline. I’m not here to defend them or protect them. But I’d also like for movies and TV to not go away because I like watching them. The public seems to like film and television, and the people who provide that service have a really specialized skill set that requires years of sharpening (like any industry), so my hope is we can find a smart way to get content creators the money they deserve in a system that finds an accurate, realistic value for their work. And there are some smart things floating around here. Or at the very least, have a system built that doesn’t undermine them and doesn’t just perpetuate the same models of power.
Maybe it appears I’m fighting it because I’m forced on the devil’s advocate side. But I’m really not. Promise.
@Russell my bad. I was in error. You do not work for the recording industry but for the film industry.
I take notice to any idea no matter where it comes from. Anyone from any industry can contribute to the debate. Some people are going to defend copyright/patents and I mistakenly believed you were of that mindset.
Even if somehow you were it doesn’t really matter. The reasoning I have for being against copyright/patents isn’t because I don’t side with artists/innovatives and creatives but more that I’m against the corporate system which exploits their talent. I believe patents in specific along with copyright are technically unfeasible and socially undesirable in the long term. We have to find something better such as a way to patent using the blockchain or get rid of it entirely.
In the case of SAFE Network the first person to upload a particular song. piece of software, film, or invention (whitepaper), is the owner in my opinion. The patent office would be replaced by the timestamp either on a blockchain or on SAFE Network through time stamp/meta data without a blockchain. Only technical solutions in my opinion can save the patent or copyright idea but there is no clue whether or not the government would respect the sovereignty of the blockchain in the long term which means anything stored on SAFE Network will likely be stolen by corporations.
You made a good point that people can receive information from bad sources and it can shape their thinking. This is why I don’t fully trust any source of information which isn’t primary. If I experienced myself I would trust that and if someone else has direct experience which I can verify with evidence then I trust that.
I prefer primary evidence. Direct evidence. I prefer it to be observed by multiple people and the approach to be scientific. That means it wouldn’t be enough if I were the only person to observe it but I would need my own observations to be peer reviewed by the crowd.
The one thing I do know is that the trend data is pretty obvious. The statistics I see in many cases match what I’ve experienced in my life. I can then ask people if they have had similar experiences or have noticed similar patterns.
Of course any of us could be wrong but the only way for us to find out right and wrong is to take divergent paths and see where each one leads.
On this we are on the same page. The problem I’ve noticed though is that the user is being ignored. We will not have any payment culture if users aren’t somehow paid so we have to figure out ways to value the user so that the user can purchase the content.
Can I also just throw out there again that THIS idea is fantastic. The idea that more engaged consumers are rewarded more directly for their interest and help distro is amazing. The concept definitely has legs. I’ve explained it to people and it tracks in conversation, as where other systems I’ve thrown around with industry folks tend to fall flat.
By the way @russell and @luckybit - did you watch the YouTube video posted on MaidSafe’s twitter feed and featuring a long interview with @ioptio / Paige? Paige was great BTW, but I mention it because beforehand there is an interview with Tatiana of Tatianacoin, who I had unjustifiably pigeon-holed to ignore as jumping on a bandwagon, only to find she is right-on and very savvy about these very issues. She and @dirvine are plotting too
+1 USER (every user is also a farmer in a crucial sense) @luckybit “decentralized income culture” Yes(!) but of course no MLM flavor. The sticking point for the public interest is over what we contribute vice what we and society get in return. We know we don’t want enclosure and exploitation. We presumably want minimal regret and minimal guilt transactions that don’t feel transactual. Presumably we want constructive empowerment. It seems safe to assume that people are willing to pay for constructive empowerment and willing to get paid for providing it and possibly even more willing to do both where the mutual gain transfers without the need for a gross mechanism.
The end user brings the most important resource/component to the network. They bring mindshare and attention and behavior based defacto word of mouth. Their familiarity becomes sunk cost and cognitive dissonance as insurance which translates into solid good will. They invest when they use system. They invest time, energy and effort, but also tend to invest emotionally and begin to identify. They bring critical mass but they are also the core or weight in any network.
The hardware and software are glue. All content/programming reduces to communication in a imaginal/real, past-present-future space. The energy behind sublingualization whether focused into ligature or not emanates out and can apparently be sampled with recognition software. Augmented wireless earbuds may weave us all together in that space so tightly that we are less identified with thoughts and personality. The net is about breaking down our sense of enclosure or encapsulation but in a way that doesn’t alienate.
Safecoin:
network resource
joules
seed development
sustainable development
possible quick means for replacement internet build out
per luckybit: +1 users paid for attention instants to complete economy, ties joules and resource to attention or continued engagement- closed loop sans “enclosure” (sorry for the embellishment)
Unitas:
pays for attention (final currency,)
pays for learning (hedge against grand challenges)
model aims to replace work (almost all ‘work’ today is counter productive)
aims to channel more income to creative work directly
Future works crypto micro payment
convenient (if used with a self replenishing base like Safecoin)
crowd source flavor- recognizes the nature of contribution.
fair use sentiment, sustains a kind of open source perspective which is end user empowering
potential minimal friction/coercion (some will never use the feature)
this does create a vestment cycle, its like watering seeds, an adjunct to farming
not charity averse but not charity
FairShares (philosophy):
early product placement
end user buy in
end user loyalty
plank holder (realistic as early users are beta testers at the very least)
true cost approach to conflict of interest
addresses contribution and host killing parasitism
education (inoculates against pimping)
dynamic ownership based on public interest invites “legal persons,” rich immortal psychopathic entities into stake holder pool
vesting is complicated and once vested people may coast (a small cost in my opinion)
charge against Mondragon and coops is they aren’t as responsive to public (as opposed to what?)
Pay per view
percapita PPP GWP US$12,400 / seconds of life per annum: aprox .0393 cents per second would be like 2.3 …cents per minute long distance or $2.83 for a 2hr movie
…it could provide the universe of content and services but these aren’t Netflix rates
…its more like a $430 a month cable bill and services would be today’s sponsors
…compromised level of stuff. Around the Amazon SD rent rate.
sets up extractive nonsense:
agency
exclusivity
attachment of IP
placement
premium
limited time offering
supplier price control (absolute no no)
tracking regime overhead
privacy encroachment
attracts speculation and Wall St. style banking
a slippery slope into totally useless supply side and grotesquely entitled elites
ideal for sponsor choke point and loss of societal democratic voice/control
Reverse pay per view
useful mainly as line in the sand on exploitation- a focusing point.
I’d better get at least an indexed 2.3 cents per minute etc.
Weberian classics:
Bureaucratic- procedure- reliable- soul killing- Volgon
Entrepreneurial- memory, clarity, speed, passion, autocratic
Collegiate - democratic, middling results, slow
and to be fair: corporate is generally a post founder blend of the worst of the above.
I’m glad you appreciate it. It all starts with the right frame. We must speak of them as users/partners but never as consumers. This is because partners are part of the business and in the era of decentralized autonomous companies any user can work for this sort of business.
The customer paradigm was necessary because in the physical world there are these strict boundaries but in our space we don’t have the same rules.
“In the case of SAFE Network the first person to upload a particular song. piece of software, film, or invention (whitepaper), is the owner in my opinion. The patent office would be replaced by the timestamp either on a blockchain or on SAFE Network through time stamp/meta data without a blockchain. Only technical solutions in my opinion can save the patent or copyright idea but there is no clue whether or not the government would respect the sovereignty of the blockchain in the long term which means anything stored on SAFE Network will likely be stolen by corporations.”
This is where a micro payment for future works type approach might be useful especially if there were a self replenishing base of coins from farming or attention. Also, wouldn’t the majority of farming naturally come from users almost from the start i.e., a phone connected by wifi but plugged into the wall?
My sense is that people should slow down on the idea of selling privacy or attention. Think of selling your blood or liberty. Selling privacy is never going to be a good thing. Besides its finite. It doesn’t matter if business wants it or needs or feels it has a right to intrude. It doesn’t. Attention makes more sense when the provider gets safe coins without having to take them from an end user. Maybe its a farming of attention. The selling of attention and privacy can become another enclosure game.
We don’t want approaches that compromise plausible deniablity or anonymity for anyone. Also even a minority consenting to tracking would only be able to do so once. Those firms doing the tracking would sell it to everyone else. I don’t think it could even be time limited effectively. Also, the notion of ownership is nice but inaccurate. We can’t actually own anything and even it we could its limited in duration. Ownership always ends up being collective or temporary. Ownership seems to make sense in terms of an end user owned and controlled network, but in the context of goods providing entities on the net, it possibly loses coherence- too much accounting and overhead and opening up of the proof of end user concept.
Some of these ideas are nice but they are MLM like and any kind of advertising in any form is still coercive. The product discovery issues may be overblown if there is honest sponsor/ad/tracking free search and trending(opt in) We want to avoid conflict models, and those are conflict models for they are all forms of prostitution.
It does apply to them because partners would hold shares in the content they pay for and become distributors. They would get a percentage of the profit so they would have to be called partners.
Even if you view it as a form of prostitution it’s the right of the user. The user must generate income and if that means they must sell their attention (and if that means you view it as prostitution), then you shouldn’t Opt-In. I think if someone is homeless using a public computer/smart phone or if they just aren’t rich enough to get income from any other way then we should not restrict people from this because it would restrict their liberty.
I think not everyone wants anonymity, plausible deniability, in fact most people don’t even know what these concepts truly mean. The vast majority of users just want the content or to make income. My idea would empower the user directly.
@luckybit My bad, I’ll try to be less identified with prostitution. Also I’d be surprised if I was to come up with anything original here. Further I do understand the allure of the idea’s they are beautiful. None the less at present I have some reservations.
End user veto votes to stop coin receipts to sites or businesses.
It will be much better not to pay sites to mine attention because they will end up in the majority trying to attract attention for attention’s sake. Its a money for money’s sake approach. Better is a voluntary crypto micropayment for future works as a replacement for IP in a convenient instant crowdsourcing kind of way. That is minimum coercion and minimum friction with minimum conflict of interest. And it seems a lot of us agree that open code can be used to enforce fair principles better than sponsored human administrators and sponsored judges. We can use reputation code driven enforcement to get at great goods like total end user control over end user interfaces. More on that below.
Stakeholder models don’t go remotely far enough- is the RIAA a stake holder?
Stakeholder models won’t work, because they disempower end users as a group through overlap and redundancies. In the end everyone is an end user and that is the bottom up level to focus on and the level from which power must flow in democratic systems especially those that will be the main means of speech. The struggle is not to keep power from concentrating, that happens naturally but to keep it dispersed and decentralized.
Straight or indirect payment of end users to surf not a good idea
Payment of end users to surf doesn’t work- it converts end users into employees, the power flows in the wrong direction. It will imply users making sacrifices that are harmful to their choice and power base. I.e., erosion of total end user control over the interface- which by the way can be achieved by an end user veto/revocation system and education. Payment of end users to surf despite the virtual environment is a loss leader stunt. Remember Net Zero?
Auto micropayment isn’t a good idea
On on opt in basis a user may set up automatic micropayment as a convenience- not recommended because its encouraging hollow attention seeking. Auto micropayment does erode the users discrimination and reduces the exercise and reinforced demonstration of end user power. A take-for-granted situation will set up. Its a variant of throwing money at Wall St. and expecting a return and being upset when that money is not only not returned but used against us. Site recompense should be deliberate to create quality not accidental.
Disuading bad actors
An end user would of course be able to switch off auto micropayments globally and specifically but more importantly suggest cessation of associated farming, dev and auto/specific micropayments for a site which would commence when a site received enough negative suggestions from enough different people. Those revocations may result in a temporary cessation but they should be enough to dissuade profit for the sake of profit type behavior. Revoked payments can go to fund honest sponsor/ad/tracking free trending. Anything deemed or discovered to be coercive should be revoked. This would deal with all the stealth manipulations.
Increments on micropayments
For conversion sake the amount of automatic micropayment or alternatively micropayment increment going to a site may be a third of an indexed .034 cents per second per user. That is a third of PPP GWP divided by seconds in a year. Maybe .011 per second at max. Such a default suggested increment if left on all the time would amount to roughly a cable bill a month for someone who surfed as much as an American watches TV. But again paying for future works is better and makes more sense when a million people clicking the micropayment increment in a day would yield 11k.
The economic loop is already closed
Of course actual testing and a lot of math will be needed to answer this assertion and its unavoidable. But the economic loop looks closed on the farming/dev cycle alone. What if its adequate? People who leave their stuff on get coins to spend back to people who develop . People how develop who also leave their stuff on also get coin from both the development and farming to spend on other development. We don’t need to pay/not-pay to watch ads or pay/not-pay to surf or pay/not-pay with regard to mining our privacy. No ads and no mining privacy and no need for coercive measures. And yes, defacto total end user control over the interface can be achieved with end user feed back (code enforced reputation system with consequence) and the promotion of power aware culture.
End user empowerment vice ‘balance.’
Think of what balance means in some present ‘developed’ societies. In the US for instance there is a NLRB rule that prevents a secondary strike. So if employees are striking they are not supposed to be able to go to a grape producers retail outlet and also strike. They might claim the public interest is in not having the public lose a grape vendor but that’s not balance. Balance is the owner being useful because he/she knows the employees can always pull the trigger on the business.
Here is another example. Say I am the proprietor of a local store specializing in organic goods. While I am quite successful, to the point of no local competition, I feel I should be paid more for my services and I raise prices. Fine. Say my costs increase and I raise prices. Fine. Say I raises prices on everyone who will not had over their personal information to my plus card scheme? Not fine- for me that should be a crime, because its an abuse of power, position and money. You do something coercive for no value added that harms the public- as in no ready alternative- then a strident example could be made of such behavior to dissuade it. Much better is just make it impractical- which is what proper progressive taxation with proper loop holes attempts to do. Sorry I know how nasty that sounds but people have forgotten what a slippery slope enclosure is and they keep trying to glorify the hell it brings.
These are interesting times. We have a technology that can disintermediate speculators, banks and governments from currency. The early US almost died more than once over this very issue. In the demo of the Watson tech where it beat the Jeopardy champs the voice and speech rec weren’t used presumably because in combination it would have produced the same victory but literally scared the living daylights out of the public as they would have more tangibly connected the possibility to their denial around work. I am not trying to say the results of the speech/voice would have been better than say Google’s 800 search- but I witnessed Google’s 800 search handled a jumbled ELS sentence in a noisy car through a phone without missing a beat with more speed and accuracy than a human would have managed and that was several years ago. And of course fast forward a few years from the Watson demo/trial and we have a machine and crew passing the Turing test at Cambridge- last week. Think also of the separate but equal paid extra to discriminate and censor drivel coming out of the US ISPs and their massive entitlement for already dead last performance. Lets not reproduce status quo and enclosure- its not a survival strategy.
End user veto votes to stop coin receipts to sites or businesses.
It will be much better not to pay sites to mine attention because they will end up in the majority trying to attract attention for attention’s sake.
If sites don’t want attention then no one will want to go to the sites. You’re not getting it. If you put a site on the web no one is going to go to your site when there are billions of sites which are better at attracting and keeping attention. In reality it’s all about attention and if you don’t fight to get attention then no one will ever know you exist. No one will know your work, they will not know about the app you wrote, they will not know you exist at all.
By the way I never said pay websites for attention. SAFE sites should rely on micropayments and I suppose you could say it’s mining in a way if it’s automatic micropayments but once again the money for these micropayments has to come from somewhere else. Users must have income to pay for micropayments.
Its a money for money’s sake approach. Better is a voluntary crypto micropayment for future works as a replacement for IP in a convenient instant crowdsourcing kind of way. That is minimum coercion and minimum friction with minimum conflict of interest. And it seems a lot of us agree that open code can be used to enforce fair principles better than sponsored human administrators and sponsored judges. We can use reputation code driven enforcement to get at great goods like total end user control over end user interfaces. More on that below.
It’s not money for money sake. If you don’t have attention then on one will participate in anything. If no one participates in anything then no one will be active. If there is no activity there is no economic activity and no economy. So even the act of paying attention is activity which creates an economy and without that you’ll have no ability to generate income for the vast majority of users.
I don’t mind if you have crowd sales and other mechanisms as well but those mechanisms assume money is going to pour in from outside. What about creating wealth inside so you don’t have to rely on Wall Street and speculators to shove fiat value into SAFE Network? Sure VCs might benefit but most people aren’t going to be VCs.
So how do you make everyone into a stakeholder and not just VCs?
“Stakeholder models don’t go remotely far enough- is the RIAA a stake holder?Stakeholder models won’t work, because they disempower end users as a group through overlap and redundancies. In the end everyone is an end user and that is the bottom up level to focus on and the level from which power must flow in democratic systems especially those that will be the main means of speech. The struggle is not to keep power from concentrating, that happens naturally but to keep it dispersed and decentralized.”
Stakeholder models do work. I’ll show you an example
The John Lewis Partnership is working pretty well and has worked for many years. It’s not perfect and can greatly be improved upon in decentralized fashion but if you don’t do something like this you cannot have an economy. You have to achieve participation from the users, the users have to be excited about products, they must earn an income, just as citizens typically do in the real world. If you don’t have any income then you don’t have any money to buy anything.
"Straight or indirect payment of end users to surf not a good idea "
So how will users earn income? And why would they switch from the regular web to the SAFE Net web if they have no incentive? Do you think Bitcoin would have been a success if there weren’t any incentive to participate in the Bitcoin economy? That was the key to everything.
"Payment of end users to surf doesn’t work- it converts end users into employees, the power flows in the wrong direction. "
In my opinion if we empower users the power flows in the right direction. The end users should be empowered. And they would have a sort of independent contractor position just as Bitcoin miners, Farmers, Builders. They would not have any special treatment but would be valued as every other participant is. If we don’t value the users then the users won’t value SAFE Network. We have to remember all content comes from the users, and that the users will be purchasing most tokens.
It will imply users making sacrifices that are harmful to their choice and power base. I.e., erosion of total end user control over the interface- which by the way can be achieved by an end user veto/revocation system and education. Payment of end users to surf despite the virtual environment is a loss leader stunt. Remember Net Zero?
I’m not sure what you’re talking about here. Net Zero is something you’re saying is bad? So if a person had to choose between no Internet or Net Zero you would rather they not be able to access the Internet at all? Don’t you realize for billions of people they will not have a choice.
NetZero went to 1 million users in a period of 6 months. We don’t want that for SAFE Network?
Auto micropayment isn’t a good idea
On on opt in basis a user may set up automatic micropayment as a convenience- not recommended because its encouraging hollow attention seeking. Auto micropayment does erode the users discrimination and reduces the exercise and reinforced demonstration of end user power. A take-for-granted situation will set up. Its a variant of throwing money at Wall St. and expecting a return and being upset when that money is not only not returned but used against us. Site recompense should be deliberate to create quality not accidental.
You’re saying everything is a bad idea but not offering alternatives. The attention seeking is going to exist no matter what because it exists in human nature (in the real world). Whatever exists in the real world is going to exist online. Some people make a living off the attention of others and while you might not like how they make a living if they don’t have an income they cannot buy anything from you or anyone else.
The problem is that if users cannot earn an income from their attention then they will not be able to buy shares, buy Safecoins, buy access to apps, it will be a situation where only rich people can afford privacy and access. I view that situation as unacceptable because I believe we are dealing with individual rights in the long term where if you don’t protect it for everyone then it’s not going to work.
So if a person only has their attention to offer then it must be monitzed. Anything a human being can contribute and monetize should be up to the individual human to decide whether or not to do it. If that means viewing ads, sharing computation, sharing storage, it’s really all just resources. Users have attention as a resource and all humans have it.
Disuading bad actors
An end user would of course be able to switch off auto micropayments globally and specifically but more importantly suggest cessation of associated farming, dev and auto/specific micropayments for a site which would commence when a site received enough negative suggestions from enough different people. Those revocations may result in a temporary cessation but they should be enough to dissuade profit for the sake of profit type behavior.
Profit is what powers SAFE Network. The users don’t need a reason to contribute to the economy of SAFE Network. It could be for any reason and it would not matter. What would happen is those users would create more content, more value, more demand for resources, which would attract farmers to provide more resources, which would attract builders to create apps to attract more users. It’s a circle, a loop, and the feedback loop between the users, the farmers, and the builders, is what makes an economy possible. That economy will drive the cost of computing resources down which will benefit all of humanity.
I’m not sure I understand your argument. It’s almost like you’re concerned that SAFE Network could become too big or be used too much by the masses. Those masses are the people who will power SAFE Network if it ever becomes successful. If you’re genuinely concerned about bad actors then I can actually understand that but the only solution is to empower good actors by directing your attention and money toward the good actors.
Revoked payments can go to fund honest sponsor/ad/tracking free trending. Anything deemed or discovered to be coercive should be revoked. This would deal with all the stealth manipulations.
Who determines honest and dishonest? I believe that should be up to the individual users. If you Opt-In then the control is in your hands. If you don’t want ads because you don’t need the money then don’t Opt-In. I actually think by Opting In then at least you won’t have to deal with spam anymore because it would cost too much money to spam. rather than earn money. There would not need to be a middle man because the person with the product would directly buy your attention.
Increments on micropayments
For conversion sake the amount of automatic micropayment or alternatively micropayment increment going to a site may be a third of an indexed .034 cents per second per user. That is a third of PPP GWP divided by seconds in a year. Maybe .011 per second at max. Such a default suggested increment if left on all the time would amount to roughly a cable bill a month for someone who surfed as much as an American watches TV. But again paying for future works is better and makes more sense when a million people clicking the micropayment increment in a day would yield 11k.
You accurately explain why micropayments are so necessary. Users must receive income in micropayments for their attention. If they watch ads they should get paid. If they then earn enough they can go and pay for other people’s content. Everybody wins this way.
What do you propose? If you get rid of micropayments and say users should not get paid for their attention and participation then where will users get the money to pay for anyone’s content. I Just Don’t See how you can have a “decentralized payment culture” without a “decentralized income culture”. You need a closed loop where people in SAFE Network are getting paid making a living while also paying others, and not everyone in the world will be a computer programmer/builder.
The economic loop is already closed
Of course actual testing and a lot of math will be needed to answer this assertion and its unavoidable. But the economic loop looks closed on the farming/dev cycle alone. What if its adequate? People who leave their stuff on get coins to spend back to people who develop . People how develop who also leave their stuff on also get coin from both the development and farming to spend on other development. We don’t need to pay/not-pay to watch ads or pay/not-pay to surf or pay/not-pay with regard to mining our privacy. No ads and no mining privacy and no need for coercive measures. And yes, defacto total end user control over the interface can be achieved with end user feed back (code enforced reputation system with consequence) and the promotion of power aware culture."
The problem with Bitcoin is that while mining started out as something anyone can do…how about trying to mine today?
If it were closed it would be inclusive of all human beings.
Suppose you don’t have the ability to farm because you don’t have a computer? Suppose you don’t have the ability to write C++? How do you get Safecoins now? How do you join the SAFE economy? I don’t see how you’re going to have an economy if you’re saying there are only farmers and builders when 99% of the world will not be able to do that.
Television and radio did not require people “farm” or “host” to access programming. Yet you want to replace it with a Pay-Per-View type model which doesn’t include a method within the economic model to allow people to earn so they can pay?
Anyone can sell their attention. Anyone should be able to sell their attention to earn an income so they can buy music, movies, and entertainment.
If you’re saying people cannot do that then you’re saying they cannot access music, movies, and entertainment while also compensating the artists. And if artists don’t get compensated then you’re indirectly hurting artists because you don’t want users to profit from viewing ads. I just don’t see how you’re going to get any kind of economy without users having plenty of income.
End user empowerment vice ‘balance.’
Think of what balance means in some present ‘developed’ societies. In the US for instance there is a NLRB rule that prevents a secondary strike. So if employees are striking they are not supposed to be able to go to a grape producers retail outlet and also strike. They might claim the public interest is in not having the public lose a grape vendor but that’s not balance. Balance is the owner being useful because he/she knows the employees can always pull the trigger on the business.
We aren’t talking about employees, strikes, or anything like that. We are talking about owners, partners, stakeholders, without anyone left out. Everyone should become an owner and everyone should be able to make an income on SAFE Network. The user owns themselves as a unique individual and every user with consciousness has limited attention.
I don’t understand your case for balance either.
30% farmers
30% builders
30% users
10% founders
That would be balanced. But if the users have no stake in the company then how is that balanced? Why would the users care about SAFE Network? The users would go to Storj or whichever network makes them a stakeholder. So if you don’t make them a stakeholder they’ll go elsewhere. Their attention is necessary to make everything work and attention will go where the incentives and opportunities are. Builders, artists, and merchants in the “decentralized payment culture” want users.
Here is another example. Say I am the proprietor of a local store specializing in organic goods. While I am quite successful, to the point of no local competition, I feel I should be paid more for my services and I raise prices. Fine. Say my costs increase and I raise prices. Fine. Say I raises prices on everyone who will not had over their personal information to my plus card scheme? Not fine- for me that should be a crime, because its an abuse of power, position and money. You do something coercive for no value added that harms the public- as in no ready alternative- then a strident example could be made of such behavior to dissuade it. Much better is just make it impractical- which is what proper progressive taxation with proper loop holes attempts to do. Sorry I know how nasty that sounds but people have forgotten what a slippery slope enclosure is and they keep trying to glorify the hell it brings.
How does this argument have anything to do with empowering users? If you empower the users then it’s a lot harder to exploit them later. So I don’t see how you’re making an argument which goes against anything I said. For example do you want a world where Facebook and all these big companies can exploit users like they are trash? User attention is a finite resource but in many cases users respected as human beings, have no rights, all their data is sold back and forth and they don’t even get a cut. Facebook gets rich off user contributed information and I’m saying a decentralized Facebook should be owned by users so the users can gain from the growth of the decentralized app.
Think also of the separate but equal paid extra to discriminate and censor drivel coming out of the US ISPs and their massive entitlement for already dead last performance. Lets not reproduce status quo and enclosure- its not a survival strategy.
You’re saying there should be no ads at all because you assume the advertisements would come from these big powerful entities. You’re assuming that people wouldn’t actually want the ads or that being paid will directly by advertisers will not benefit users. I suggest you give this more thought and take a deeper investigation of the new sorts of business models which become possible. Most of the arguments you’ve presented against this were using old business models that current corporations use and did not mention DACs, future business models which are possible, or problems/solutions which would be created in the future.
You did mention that people might adopt attention seeking behavior? Isn’t that how apps like MaidSafe were discovered by us? We saw some article with David Irvine speaking and something got our attention? Advertising when it works right would give us more of relevant information like that and less spam. An added bonus is we would be paid to view the ads so we could watch ads for breakthrough projects like MaidSafe, decentralized apps, new altcoins, opportunities and other stuff we might actually be interested in.
@luckybit I’ll try to respond soon. But I’d like to comment on enclosure.
All I have are appearances but it seems T-Mobile has just given us an example of enclosure. First the phony bandwidth caps which were presumably done all along with an eye to making businesses pay more for prioritized access, literally suspending cap usage for those who could afford to pay up. Its profiting from restricting access or penning in, an attempt to literally channelize the mobile internet with the hope that others will follow suit. This is similar to cable when it promised freedom from ads and once it had people switched it added the ads back in so that people literally pay to watch ads. Its pure enclosure and obvious fraud.
In our current system, enclosure is the goal even if its denied. I’d like to comment on my understanding of what “enclosure” is. It seems like there is a sentiment lingering which assumes that anything that hinders the free market is a kind of censorship and the real priority is still always to aid the market in generating profit. I think implicit in this is also a notion that society is a game that some people won a long time ago and what is lawful is defined by finding the best means to serve these people. With enclosure I am thinking of Mercantile Britain and the raw historical experience with the pure unfettered free market. Apparently the experience of Mercantile Britain wasn’t the worst, Mercantilism in the Scandinavian countries was reportedly even worse. At the same time this isn’t theory or an experiment, this is history- even if the past is a fiction and I am apt to get much of it wrong.
People were treated as crops or chattel. The principles of animal husbandry were applied to human beings. Ordinary people were removed from the commons and moved into inner cities and the cities converted into prisons. People were of course born into prison. One could not own anything, not even tools and of course had no rights. Even being able to stay clad was a struggle. Obviously being owned, one could never leave the prison city. People were tools, other people’s property and simply a means to other people’s ends.
Work started at age 3 or 4 and ended when people dropped dead of exhaustion by their mid 20s. People worked from sun up to sun down 7 days a week without exception. If one were caught outside the work place during day light without a chit from a thug noble or merchant the first offense resulted in the on the spot loss of a finger. The next, the loss of an eye or gouging out of an ear. The third was death on sight.
There were half nude pregnant women in coal mines with babies strapped to their chest and bottles of opium in the babies mouths to keep them quiet. It was 100 thousand heads on pins a day or else on the spot raping or beating. The hatred of the nobility was such that even though freedom could be found in the Navy (still far from a desirable life) people had to be be drafted by kidnapped waking out of sleep with a knife to their throat. People slept in unheated flats where there might be 18 people of both sexes strewn about the floor. Human sewage would pile at the back side of the flat to the 2nd story.
Any ‘free’ person caught trying to teach one of these people to read would lose their freedom.
There was talk of people outstripping their food supply by reproducing too fast. The theorists weren’t necessarily to blame for what followed, but the response was to introduce pestilence and vermin into the inner city. It resulted in the plague. The plague backfired on the oppressors and the poor walked into their mansions and took over where their former oppressors left off. Even as this started to dissolve there were new poor laws and if one could support oneself on a nickel an hour then back one would go into a private work prison.
In the American South the war captured were sold, and the skin color difference meant not having to build physical enclosure because one couldn’t blend in. Slavery was for most of its history a more honorable institution than in Mercantile England or American South. Cesar was a slave. If you met someone on the battle field and you were victorious you could spare their life. They’d be you nanny and after a period of indentured servitude where they proved they were no physical harm to you they could be come a Cesar. And there was necessity in it. How else could you have “the kitchen of tomorrow yesterday?”
This is where Lassie fare capitalism leads. Markets are not self regulating nor are they necessarily good or fair distributors of wealth. They don’t function without heavy regulation but they still tend to produce heavy externalities. The Mercantile mindset never left us. Its what Behaviorism was in psychology and if we returned to Mercantilism or unfettered capitalism today people would find themselves in the same kind of situations that life stock in concentrated animal feeding operations exist in today.
Its the kind of situation that makes for instance cow milk about the most processed food there is. Start with a GM cow. RBST it. Grow it in the dark up to its ankles in own feces. Pen it so it doesn’t get out. Saturate its blood with tetracycline to deal with the e coli in its blood from standing in feces. Heavily vaccinate it. Feed it inedible Round up BT corn (corn is already toxic to cows) and supplement with dead cats and dogs from the pound (for a herbivore.) Its a sick tumor ridden animal that dies at a 3rd of its life span that we take the milk from. We then cook it and homogenize it and ship it by the gallon in dirty toxin leaching #2 recycled plastic where the plastic stock and formula is toxic and formerly was made worse by toxins picked up by indiscriminate successive recycling rounds. We massively subsidize this.
I just skimmed Capital in the 21st Century, and will go back over it. If I understood correctly it seems someone with a couple billion dollars can now get a %10 return on capital with little effort or risk and this rate has been the historical norm for capitalism excepting the 30 years after WWII. Which will mean in short order all wealth and power will be in the hands of the very few, much more so than it already is. Again, enclosure. It will mean marriage may be the only access to an acceptable life. But statistically excellence is correlated with the base and the more the power distance under these circumstances the more instability to the point of collapse.
If sites don’t want attention then no one will want to go to the sites. You’re not getting it. If you put a site on the web no one is going to go to your site when there are billions of sites which are better at attracting and keeping attention. In reality it’s all about attention and if you don’t fight to get attention then no one will ever know you exist. No one will know your work, they will not know about the app you wrote, they will not know you exist at all.
By the way I never said pay websites for attention. SAFE sites should rely on micropayments and I suppose you could say it’s mining in a way if it’s automatic micropayments but once again the money for these micropayments has to come from somewhere else. Users must have income to pay for micropayments.
I think the problem of sites being found is overblown and its a problem of businesses who have revenue projections to meet who won’t meet it if a system like Maidsafe works correctly. This is why honest search and trending that is completely free of ads/sponsorship/tracking. Call it word of mount, or Brownian motion or assume idea spring from the ethers and minds are connected the same ideas occur to people and the same search strings pop up and ideas catch fire especially with honest opt in trending.
IBM’s original Watson project (or at least at some critical point) was the realization that search need not require a huge data center and power bill just a better front end. Some of the end user spam clean up (enforcing absolute end user control over the end user interface and using vetoing to redirect an offending sites farming and dev safe coin receipts at least temporarily) can go to fuel honest search and trending. We don’t want (as you point out) to recreate the system that we have within an indelible crypto framework.
It’s not money for money sake. If you don’t have attention then on one will participate in anything. If no one participates in anything then no one will be active. If there is no activity there is no economic activity and no economy. So even the act of paying attention is activity which creates an economy and without that you’ll have no ability to generate income for the vast majority of users.
I don’t mind if you have crowd sales and other mechanisms as well but those mechanisms assume money is going to pour in from outside. What about creating wealth inside so you don’t have to rely on Wall Street and speculators to shove fiat value into SAFE Network? Sure VCs might benefit but most people aren’t going to be VCs.
That is wonderful, and I will need to consider it. And it would seem quite consistent with the very reason for creating cryptocurrency in the first place. Last thing that would be useful is an encumbent VC take over or any VC base as a controller. What is happening looks to be possibly not just a replacement for the nation state and corporation but also the economic system and its rules. One of the reasons why I wish we all had hardened open phones. Let the phones be the mesh boxes. Let them be dirt cheap. With continuing process shrink they can become solar powered, and support line of site optical. Pack them in aluminum and they are hardened- to an extent. Make “G-shock” tough.
John Lewis Partnership
Although most economic activity may be set to occur in virtual space it seems sure that inside or outside we need these type of fair distribution systems. We also need a safety net that recognizes freedom from toil as everyone’s collective inheritance. I think these are coming just as a response to Capitalism. The economist Richard D. Wolf has suggested full employee ownership or variations on the theme as possibly the answer to stability and quality of life issues. Certainly we need to do better than saying well the system is tough and let your paranoia be your insurance.
“Straight or indirect payment of end users to surf not a good idea”
So how will users earn income? And why would they switch from the regular web to the SAFE Net web if they have no incentive? Do you think Bitcoin would have been a success if there weren’t any incentive to participate in the Bitcoin economy? That was the key to everything.
I see the point but I think making a new internet is actually a bigger more important task than the new currency and the needs and growth path of the two seem different. Not that reformatting or replacing currency isn’t necessary just that relative to a new net its not sufficient or at least is secondary. I think there is a lot of concern about timing understandably. Industry sees the window too and is responding desperately in trying to carve up the internet and reinforce its enclosure (divide conquer and profit) failing.
But with regard to attention, if the ads and the sponsorship and the puffing come with it, I am not interested in MaidSafe and I think those elements are not only not necessary but will doom a system even if it manages to provide some modicum of privacy. Under the developing EU rules a system might provide some modicum of privacy. To me the net grew not just because of an academia inspired somewhat hardened network but because of the open PC interface and end user control. End user control and empowerment is always going to be the top draw. The net grew not because people were making income from their participation, conversely they were paying into it. I think the tragedy of the commons is overblown. The dot com bubble on the other hand was the wrong people thinking they could easily turn the net into TV to shovel ads. Where we are at now is with a portion of industry thinking it can force the issue by taking matters into its own hands aided by sponsored government and with public doing the same with interest in Maidsafe.
“Payment of end users to surf doesn’t work- it converts end users into employees, the power flows in the wrong direction.”
In my opinion if we empower users the power flows in the right direction. The end users should be empowered. And they would have a sort of independent contractor position just as Bitcoin miners, Farmers, Builders. They would not have any special treatment but would be valued as every other participant is. If we don’t value the users then the users won’t value SAFE Network. We have to remember all content comes from the users, and that the users will be purchasing most tokens.
Maybe I am being too simplistic but I’ve heard it said that in law more than half of law is dedicated to addressing conflict of interest. To me the systems I can trust with empowerment, especially over the longer term, are those that only take money and influence from me. At first this is a laughable notion because there are no such systems. Such systems wouldn’t even be practical right? Is someone going to ignore the tax man? But such systems can be coded and such an ethic can be enshrined in charter and its something we have always expected even if we’ve ended up with the opposite in sponsorship. After working with Maidsafe for a while I wouldn’t want to discover that GE had come around and was bothering Maidsafe for customer information and 5 years ago an arrangement was worked out where GE quietly took ownership of Maidsafe with GE saying it took ownership but never looked at or made use of the data. Bad example as there would be no way to hide this but I don’t even want GE whispering to Maidsafe.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about here. Net Zero is something you’re saying is bad? So if a person had to choose between no Internet or Net Zero you would rather they not be able to access the Internet at all? Don’t you realize for billions of people they will not have a choice.
NetZero
United States Europe India NetZero is an Internet service provider based in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California. It is a subsidiary of United Online, owner of Juno Online Services and BlueLight Internet Services.
NetZero went to 1 million users in a period of 6 months. We don’t want that for SAFE Network?
I remember net zero it was an absolute disaster. I don’t watch TV and its free. Netzero was modal ads per minute. I think its a false dichotomy. The choice isn’t between that garbage and no net. I realize a pure enclosure model is going on with mobile in the developing world with the zero rate stuff. And some people say that’s the only way. Do a Raspberry pie mesh. Its not the only way.
Let me make clear how I feel about this and not mince words. Facebook was founded and perpetuated on crime and its crime I’d still like to see heavily prosecuted. To be sure I am using political speech here and the law may have been corrupt enough not to have the technical rule on the books to stop it but I wish the tyrany of a UCMJ article 92 catch all and EU style jury was on the books to stop it. The subscribers of Time wanted Assange on the cover as man of the year but the sponsored editorship put Zuckerberg on the cover- RockStar’s famed “life invader.” Netzero is the same. I feel people should be able to pay or vote to have charters revoked. I am glad there is a consumer protection agency. I feel it should have the power to suspend and revoke charters. I’d bring back quo warranto. Very tired of hearing crime described as innovation.
If our attention is as the early part of the dhammapada describes what defines and sets our plight or liberation then we don’t want systems built on its exploitation. We don’t want speech and attentional enclosure. This new internet must be for the end user not for business. It can’t take on a useless supply side flavor. If the internet isn’t breaking down firms like Time Warner or Comcast its ceased working.
Auto micropayment isn’t a good idea
On on opt in basis a user may set up automatic micropayment as a convenience- not recommended because its encouraging hollow attention seeking. Auto micropayment does erode the users discrimination and reduces the exercise and reinforced demonstration of end user power. A take-for-granted situation will set up. Its a variant of throwing money at Wall St. and expecting a return and being upset when that money is not only not returned but used against us. Site recompense should be deliberate to create quality not accidental.
You’re saying everything is a bad idea but not offering alternatives. The attention seeking is going to exist no matter what because it exists in human nature (in the real world). Whatever exists in the real world is going to exist online. Some people make a living off the attention of others and while you might not like how they make a living if they don’t have an income they cannot buy anything from you or anyone else.
The problem is that if users cannot earn an income from their attention then they will not be able to buy shares, buy Safecoins, buy access to apps, it will be a situation where only rich people can afford privacy and access. I view that situation as unacceptable because I believe we are dealing with individual rights in the long term where if you don’t protect it for everyone then it’s not going to work.
So if a person only has their attention to offer then it must be monitzed. Anything a human being can contribute and monetize should be up to the individual human to decide whether or not to do it. If that means viewing ads, sharing computation, sharing storage, it’s really all just resources. Users have attention as a resource and all humans have it.
Let me offer the notion that means and ends are one. There is no question that attention has immense value. Its probably the real basis for value. But it can’t be coerced. If its coerced its just coerced attention.
In the long run I am fine with attention as all that a lot of us will have left contribute but that won’t have to be nailed down attention or stuff that requires positive human ID or invasive tracking. Who wants an Angry birds economy?@russell and luckybit- this is where Russell, proffered if I am not mistaken the donation economy or tragedy of the commons economy that will be too weak for lift off. Not having the novelty of the original internet and competing against the current broken internet what will be the draw?
Well there was 6 million tossed in on the original coin offer and 500 apps developers before launch.
Look at open source and Linux, what was the draw there? Torvalds was once ashed why he did have the idiot cash in mentality with regard to Linux. He basically said where I come from people aren’t pimped out over money and no being so deprived of humanity and character do not lust after it. Now I put words in his mouth but the words aren’t far off. For society to work we don’t want Bush’s elevation of the value of capital so that people facing starvation will shine our shoes. It said under such circumstances artifice increases and humanity decreases. I’ll take humanity. At the very least we’d want models with results more like those of the Nordic states in the 70’s than Regan revolution type results
Disuading bad actors
An end user would of course be able to switch off auto micropayments globally and specifically but more importantly suggest cessation of associated farming, dev and auto/specific micropayments for a site which would commence when a site received enough negative suggestions from enough different people. Those revocations may result in a temporary cessation but they should be enough to dissuade profit for the sake of profit type behavior.
Profit is what powers SAFE Network. The users don’t need a reason to contribute to the economy of SAFE Network. It could be for any reason and it would not matter. What would happen is those users would create more content, more value, more demand for resources, which would attract farmers to provide more resources, which would attract builders to create apps to attract more users. It’s a circle, a loop, and the feedback loop between the users, the farmers, and the builders, is what makes an economy possible. That economy will drive the cost of computing resources down which will benefit all of humanity.
I’m not sure I understand your argument. It’s almost like you’re concerned that SAFE Network could become too big or be used too much by the masses. Those masses are the people who will power SAFE Network if it ever becomes successful. If you’re genuinely concerned about bad actors then I can actually understand that but the only solution is to empower good actors by directing your attention and money toward the good actors.
It seems like there is agreement here. But as for economic profit, I think it might be a worn idea that’s outlived its usefulness. The communists used to call it the “crime of profit.” If its gain for what makes us all better off to continue that behavior in a loop of ever increasing virtue that’s fine. But presently its a broken mechanism i.e., the stupidity of a fixated Detroit saying building an automobile is an inefficient use of capital. These people are forever distracted by vacuous profit and not focusing on useful activity like building cars. We goal seek in a line and are better off not distracted by intermediaries (profit.) We created a class of people who think the gods decreed that their enrichment through profit seeking makes everyone else better off.
I’d offer that an economy that works will break itself. It will end scarcity and it will not longer be possible to coerce anything to do anything. I’d also offer that a working economy is one that limits coercion to the extent possible from the very beginning. But hopefully there is none of that Randian stuff about love being selfish and greed being virtue. Without scarcity no need for economy but still a huge need for political philosophy.
“Revoked payments can go to fund honest sponsor/ad/tracking free trending. Anything deemed or discovered to be coercive should be revoked. This would deal with all the stealth manipulations.”
Who determines honest and dishonest? I believe that should be up to the individual users. If you Opt-In then the control is in your hands. If you don’t want ads because you don’t need the money then don’t Opt-In. I actually think by Opting In then at least you won’t have to deal with spam anymore because it would cost too much money to spam. rather than earn money. There would not need to be a middle man because the person with the product would directly buy your attention.
There is no daylight between us on this. In the current system this would be a miracle and revolutionary but relative to what could be achieved its last in line, but a good control point. I would just hope that relative to other options its not that competitive. But its much better than our current system because in theory if automated in the right way it could cut out sponsorship.
If at the end of a privacy protected sponsor and ad free search for a specific product one were paid to look at product info- I am ok with that as the least desirable of acceptable options. But I suspect that makes more sense in the context of a global subscription for all content and services (ad/sponsor free of course) where when looks at high quality product info, the poster of the high quality content (manufacturer) actually gets paid the generic per second fraction of the subscription less overhead.
Even under the current system if one is at Amazon shopping (note I am already shopping) and one sees an ad in a side bar one should get all the monies associated with the transaction- Amazon is lucky to have us at its site and we not it should profit from the concentration that is being used against our attention but it should of course be voluntary in the first place. It will cost industry money- but its not industries money it first place. Hatred of entitled business is an growing sentiment.
Increments on micropayments
" For conversion sake the amount of automatic micropayment or alternatively micropayment increment going to a site may be a third of an indexed .034 cents per second per user. That is a third of PPP GWP divided by seconds in a year. Maybe .011 per second at max. Such a default suggested increment if left on all the time would amount to roughly a cable bill a month for someone who surfed as much as an American watches TV. But again paying for future works is better and makes more sense when a million people clicking the micropayment increment in a day would yield 11k."
You accurately explain why micropayments are so necessary. Users must receive income in micropayments for their attention. If they watch ads they should get paid. If they then earn enough they can go and pay for other people’s content. Everybody wins this way.
What do you propose? If you get rid of micropayments and say users should not get paid for their attention and participation then where will users get the money to pay for anyone’s content. I Just Don’t See how you can have a “decentralized payment culture” without a “decentralized income culture”. You need a closed loop where people in SAFE Network are getting paid making a living while also paying others, and not everyone in the world will be a computer programmer/builder.
I share this concern. Let consider some use cases.
Lets say I am a typical user and cruising issuing micro payments as I see fit on the 1/3 ppp gwp/year seconds increment per click. I might click once in a minute if I am hyper about it. But that would be like 1/180th of reproducing the existing economy within the virtual economy. That might be fine if there is a lot of initial interest and its just one stream of income. It might also be a crucial differientiator on innovation- it is cutting out Wall St. overhead. And some of us while we naturally don’t want negative trickle down want non constructive capital to take a huge hit, it is by definition a ineffective inefficient use of capital… but 1/180 of reproducing GWP? That might be fine if the MaidSafe net suddenly accounted for 1/180 of PPP GWP or 400 billion. But its not instantaneous.
Now lest say I just leave the continuous per second increment on. Do I now am I able to reproduce 60x or more of the present economy. Not really. On the one hand we would hope the virtual economy is more useful in a fundamental way and also in shotgunning like this I am losing the discriminatory power to be very pin point about my needs. And I am also possibly losing the ability to right click and flick down to ratchet the micropayment increment way up. Not completely because under either scenario I can still get into amounts that look like donation or payment. If I am really aggressive nothing precludes subsidy with additional steps. Point is the save up (by staying non auto) might enable a 60x or increment size on the micro payment that I do make when I am inspired to do so. Maybe there could be an increment averager that helps me pace the increment. I am concerned that constant autopayment would just have people in running round in circles as sites tried to milk it, but of course it would fuel consolidation of services and channelization.
We might say the open source GPL type economy is amazing and it provides things the proprietary economy can’t and sometimes even at higher economy but it doesn’t replace it in scope or scale. But if an economy is every truly successful it will be all that is left. There is a huge difference in what we choose to do out of pure unadulterated inspiration and what we do when distracted by survival and lust and when that first approach is backed up by solid cooperation we wouldn’t want to underestimate it. Micropayments might be like butterfly nudges.
The economic loop is already closed
Of course actual testing and a lot of math will be needed to answer this assertion and its unavoidable. But the economic loop looks closed on the farming/dev cycle alone. What if its adequate? People who leave their stuff on get coins to spend back to people who develop . People how develop who also leave their stuff on also get coin from both the development and farming to spend on other development. We don’t need to pay/not-pay to watch ads or pay/not-pay to surf or pay/not-pay with regard to mining our privacy. No ads and no mining privacy and no need for coercive measures. And yes, defacto total end user control over the interface can be achieved with end user feed back (code enforced reputation system with consequence) and the promotion of power aware culture."
The problem with Bitcoin is that while mining started out as something anyone can do…how about trying to mine today?
If it were closed it would be inclusive of all human beings.
Suppose you don’t have the ability to farm because you don’t have a computer? Suppose you don’t have the ability to write C++? How do you get Safecoins now? How do you join the SAFE economy? I don’t see how you’re going to have an economy if you’re saying there are only farmers and builders when 99% of the world will not be able to do that.
Television and radio did not require people “farm” or “host” to access programming. Yet you want to replace it with a Pay-Per-View type model which doesn’t include a method within the economic model to allow people to earn so they can pay?
Anyone can sell their attention. Anyone should be able to sell their attention to earn an income so they can buy music, movies, and entertainment.
If you’re saying people cannot do that then you’re saying they cannot access music, movies, and entertainment while also compensating the artists. And if artists don’t get compensated then you’re indirectly hurting artists because you don’t want users to profit from viewing ads. I just don’t see how you’re going to get any kind of economy without users having plenty of income.
“Inclusive,” ! If that word gets sprinkled around then I get a warm feeling. We don’t want digital divide by any means. But we don’t slippery slope that reproduces the enslavement of sponsored media. In my opinion sponsored media inevitably leads to sponsored government which is totalitarian. Under such a system with each transaction we are reverse mortgaging our rights and quality of life.
This can be a primerose path. We were willing to pay to be free of ads to have cable. Then were were suddenly paying to watch ads. Cable made useless claims about the ads being value added relative to programming but netflix showed it was quite the opposite. Hulu even with rich subsidies form huge parents and ads went under I think multiple times. We will start of being paid to see ads (even if just a minority of users opt in to open it for everyone else) and we will still have crap products with huge externalities like Coca Cola (that probably wouldn’t exist otherwise) and in a short time the payments to us will be next to nothing. And soon enough there will be no payment to us and we will be paying to to
watch ads. We will be fighting against industry sponsors who are whining to their their sponsored representatives about making payroll and needing to trigger bonuses.
End user empowerment vice ‘balance.’
Think of what balance means in some present ‘developed’ societies. In the US for instance there is a NLRB rule that prevents a secondary strike. So if employees are striking they are not supposed to be able to go to a grape producers retail outlet and also strike. They might claim the public interest is in not having the public lose a grape vendor but that’s not balance. Balance is the owner being useful because he/she knows the employees can always pull the trigger on the business.
We aren’t talking about employees, strikes, or anything like that. We are talking about owners, partners, stakeholders, without anyone left out. Everyone should become an owner and everyone should be able to make an income on SAFE Network. The user owns themselves as a unique individual and every user with consciousness has limited attention.
I don’t understand your case for balance either.
30% farmers
30% builders
30% users
10% founders
That would be balanced. But if the users have no stake in the company then how is that balanced? Why would the users care about SAFE Network? The users would go to Storj or whichever network makes them a stakeholder. So if you don’t make them a stakeholder they’ll go elsewhere. Their attention is necessary to make everything work and attention will go where the incentives and opportunities are. Builders, artists, and merchants in the “decentralized payment culture” want users.
Its hard to argue those points (save for the necessity of ads- which I don’t buy- basic tech behind search can and should make ads or any push obsolete- traditional demand creation needs to end) but there is an interesting irony here or possibly precedence of value. On the one hand we want to be able to change things as our needs change but we want a concrete level playing field set in stone that either can’t be changed (we’ll find a new system or start from scratch) or is very difficult and unlikely to be changed. This is where we want open code to administer vice having for instance sponsored human admins. We above all don’t want money ruining our level playing field. Can own that? No we invoke it in code, point it out and reinforce it in culture as law. My ownership shouldn’t serve my unjust enrichment and if we can rule that out even in practical terms we have something. This is where I was suggesting that just like profit the notion of ownership is a bit overblown. I can’t own even what I came in with in real terms. In the deepest sense you can’t take anything or add anything to us. But I still want that level playing field and I don’t want lip service about equal opportunity.
How does this argument have anything to do with empowering users? If you empower the users then it’s a lot harder to exploit them later. So I don’t see how you’re making an argument which goes against anything I said. For example do you want a world where Facebook and all these big companies can exploit users like they are trash? User attention is a finite resource but in many cases users respected as human beings, have no rights, all their data is sold back and forth and they don’t even get a cut. Facebook gets rich off user contributed information and I’m saying a decentralized Facebook should be owned by users so the users can gain from the growth of the decentralized app.
We agree then that the end user has a right to control their information or how info is used about them (within reason,) To me an economically more successful system is not necessarily the better system. A quick growing Maidsafe may have a better shot at survival but its got to be a worthwhile future it provides.
I don’t think ads, the push side of it in particular are needed or should be allowed to stay. I’d criminalize the modal ad more stringently than the government presently does the jamming of commercial air waves because I think the modal ad necessarily leads to loss of democracy and tyrannical government. I think its a matter of privacy and completely possible and necessary for the end user to have total control over the end user interface. It think that open PC interface while it lasted (prior to stuff like Win 8RT) really drove the development of the useful net of the 90s through 2010 or so. It stems from but goes beyond privacy which most rights notions are based on. Between open transparent tech and hardware, in conjunction with education, end user veto and reparation feed back and culture that goal is attainable.
You’re saying there should be no ads at all because you assume the advertisements would come from these big powerful entities. You’re assuming that people wouldn’t actually want the ads or that being paid will directly by advertisers will not benefit users. I suggest you give this more thought and take a deeper investigation of the new sorts of business models which become possible. Most of the arguments you’ve presented against this were using old business models that current corporations use and did not mention DACs, future business models which are possible, or problems/solutions which would be created in the future.
You did mention that people might adopt attention seeking behavior? Isn’t that how apps like MaidSafe were discovered by us? We saw some article with David Irvine speaking and something got our attention? Advertising when it works right would give us more of relevant information like that and less spam. An added bonus is we would be paid to view the ads so we could watch ads for breakthrough projects like MaidSafe, decentralized apps, new altcoins, opportunities and other stuff we might actually be interested in.
Now my point isn’t to censor commercial speech, its vital but its still last in line in my estimate. Earlier US courts recognized this even in the commercial speech doctrine, but they didn’t want commercial speech leading to speech dilution. I am all for cutting out the middle and supporting people with the gain.
If Amazon has customers willing to opt in to answering a series of targeted regular questions and willing to allow some black boxed tracking to enable automated shopping so that novelties and staples are just show up and are paid automatically if taken in- I am fine with that.
But I still suspect with regard to ads we can align the interests of buyers and sellers in a true cost way that leads to a revolution in product quality and value and much better good will and even commercial esteem if we can do true honest ad free search and trending. High quality product information would be found at the end of an end user inspired ad/sponsor/tracking free search for an actual product. That search might well be informed by honest trending and word of mouth. If the manufacturer wants to pay for the attention at that point fine but they might as well just discount the price of the product. The alignment of buyer and seller already has a huge transfer of value just from being on the same side in trust.
It something Drucker said about Unions. He said, but he wasn’t being charitable or wholly accurate, that they exist to create the divide between white and blue collar staff, to profit from sustaining it. That is I feel about the Madison Ave sponsor union and its client mainstream media. It profits from perpetuating negative outcomes as much as its news profits from a negative focus. Its business is information divide and enclosure. Its screws up our products (its not about making them more appealing) and our economy and our society. I still like the ads more than the content. Possibly because the content is just a part of an ad. Its a system that pays to exploit us.
DAC- yes I have a lot to learn. Just looked it up. Very exciting. But is that what we’d want the Maidsafe net work to be? Maybe there is no talk of that. What if Unix itself or linux were a DAC, I know there are foundations and legendary squabbles. Well a lot to learn about this.
Then how exactly will it grow or will users pay their Internet/electric bill? SAFE Network cannot provide electricity or Internet right now so talk of a mesh net and electricity from some unknown source is just talk. These are bills people must pay.
SAFE Network is intended to be a “black box” DAC platform. DACs and decentralized applications are to run on top of that platform.
Noted about not offering solutions and just throwing up objections. Hopefully this post gets more constructive as its goes relative to paying to watch ads. I am still on the fence about that but I think it can be one approach on an opt in basis that can’t be ruled out. Being paid to do Khan Academy or learn coding seem more promising to me. Why not stoke attention in a way that will lead to more end users building out the network? I think that’s the Unitas proposal to literally replace work with fun human development activity.
Expand the definition of Spam
Let me propose expanding the definition of spam to include anything that violates total end user control over end user interfaces. On the ad/sponsor/tracking free clean search and trending delist sites that break this rule. Use user feedback kind of like “Call Control” uses to block spam calls could trigger a DAC threshold for delisting. I’d say anything modal should result in a delisting but also a veto of further receipt of safe coin from dev and farming at least temporarily. The search engine should be the choke point against spam. By its very nature it is supposed to filter noise not run on it. I’ve thought about it for a while and my sense is that if the modal ad is allowed to be technically practical it will occur and sponsorship will set in and democratic society will be lost. It could take a second, it might not, but worthwhile society will be lost. Money is coercive speech and so is the modal ad a form of coercive speech (ads in general) its attentional abuse. When people in a country like the US are subjected to 20-30 billion (guess) modal TV style ads daily the result is deterministic. Imagine if the ad feed were switched to educational feed. Sponsorship is censorship, that’s its purpose or reason for being. Filtering out the filter makes sense.
People pay for empowerment
Coins to watch ads? No coins to watch coding videos and take Khan Academy style tests, this is like the “Unitas” model. Its interesting that Craig’s List, Netflix and Wikipaedia likely owe their success to being ad free. But that also goes for Google which kept the ads of the front interface and kept it uncluttered. It also applied to Amazon for a while, but both firms seem to be hiring the wrong kind of people and are slipping as they become more cluttered with junk and ads. Of course Google is spam or noise powered and Amazon is an actual retailer- Amazon crosses a line with its “sponsored” stuff though. Its nice that its labeled but it shouldn’t be there at all. Amazon is confused about who its customers are and its got a loyalty issue and at least a few deep conflict of interest issues. Google’s model inevitably spreads spam especially with the notion that Google is expected to somehow cash in on the spam. Its founders originally refused the search business a couple of times because they didn’t want to be involved with it. Craig’s list is possibly the closest (although it will allow employers to pay to post help wanted ads.) Wikileaks doesn’t strike me as completely honest and the others firms are sponsored by Wall St. style social uselessness.
Some pros of the pay to watch ads model:
The outer limit of end user income with a pay-to-watch-ads model might amount to reversing a monthly cable payment. If the approach took off it could also reduce sponsorship or censorship. It would portends some disintermediation and on some level raise awareness of the value of attention as an ultimate resource. But these are developed world implications. In the developing world
it would down scale accordingly in actual pay, but less goes further in that context. It could generate some important revenue for people who need it, but naturally it would compete with other models and be opt in. The zero phone services are trading minutes for ads. Still, in the developing world the ad to end user revenue would greatly benefit from being enough to purchase the products the ads displayed, otherwise its just an appetite stoker. The assumption be would that it would bring about the ability to make those purchases.
Opportunity Cost of being paid to watch ads may be too high:
Where there is a perfect matching in any moment opportunity cost is minimized as there would be nothing someone would rather do than make that particular purchase at that place and time. In that case there is no room for payment to watch the ad because the whole transaction stands on its own. Voluntariness is likely the key here and then why have ads to begin with? Better just to have great search without the overhead. If someone is already seeking the product, push is noise relative to accurate search.
If paying end users the full amount of the ad transaction vice paying it to some pushy middle man could catch on and replace the current useless model of forced ads it would be a radical improvement but its just one tool in the box relative to what could be done. My sense is the impulse buy demand creation part of the economy is incredibly parasitic. Even if people like products like Coca Cola those products should really die and its using drug pusher type tactics and making the products themselves addictive that keeps them going. Money is “coercive speech” and that coercion can be used to address apparently necessary situations or reduce freedom by creating wanton necessity.
The potential danger to decentralized systems
Apparently one way to counter a decentralized is to subvert its ideology via a cooptation. So anything that would implement elements of current models in the new model has to be scrutinized very carefully. At the same time the concern about showing up with knife at a gun fight needs careful consideration. But honestly let people be paid to do Khan Academy and paid to learn coding, pay them to be better builders and farmers. Give them the skills to build out not just the software but also the hardware.
