<p><pre><code> “The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,”
he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight.
“What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t
have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed
when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it
necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his
door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with
it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s
money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik
</code></pre>
In addition to the above, I'd point out that there's already a massive literature of ways to take supposedly anonymous metadata and derive a probable identity from it - and the system described in the article would have vastly more information at its disposal than any of the intelligence agencies could DREAM of currently...
I used to hear this kind of thing from the fanatical free-market libertarians behind Xanadu. (Xanadu, the pre-WWW web system envisioned by Ted Nelson. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu.) Twenty years later, it hasn't changed much, except it now uses Bitcoin as a buzzword.<p>Bitcoin is a terrible system for micropayments. The overhead is high, since every node has to find out about every payment and you have to pay a fee to a miner. Confirmation times are a big problem. (Accepting zero-confirmation payments doesn't work, as Satoshi Dice found out the hard way.) Yeah, there are all those fancy tree-based schemes to reduce the data being transferred around, but none of them work yet.<p>Meanwhile, anyone knowing the whereabouts of "Big Vern", the CEO of Cryptsy, the Bitcoin exchange, is requested to contact the Silver Law Firm. The CEO and most of the assets are missing. "Big Vern" has blamed "hackers". Some people believe him.
I could barely make it through reading this. Only someone who has never gone to bed hungry would think that a world of constant commerce was a good thing. This isn't what life is actually about. Not even close. Commerce is an enabler. It isn't the ends its just a means, and a limited one at that. Honestly, I found this future disgusting.<p>That doesn't mean I don't find block chain tech interesting...but this was crazy.
The thing that's always bothered me about blockchain based reputation systems is that it becomes a wild west.<p>Imagine if the credit rating system (FICO score in the US) allowed anyone anonymously to put negative credit entries on anyone else's credit rating with thousands of sock-puppet accounts...<p>I'm sure there's ways around it if some central governing authority issues unique reputation blockchain wallets to each individual person on birth, and they're not easily forged, but centralizing control of the blockchain is against the philosophy of most blockchain early adopters, and it would leave the reputation blockchain able to be tampered with, because now the central authority could create sock-puppets to trash the reputation of anyone that it doesn't get along with.
Sounds aweful, I'll opt out. Just because some things can be Internet or block chain connected doesn't mean they should be.<p>Reminds me of the second episode of Black Mirror.
Cool little story. I really like speculative fiction like this.<p>The only part that is too far-fetched is "A lawnmower repair shop down the street builds these mowers and provides them for free.". Why would they build and provide them for free? Surely they would lease them to the local governance body using automatic, demand based bidding and negotiation.<p>Other than that, very cool. Though I fully expect these comments to be filled with people discussing how this future sounds terrible, entirely missing the point of the story (which was to speculate and discuss novel models of payment, ownership and reputation enabled by blockchains, not to provide an exhaustive exploration of possible futures enabled by blockchain technology).
If you have a hammer...<p>I love bitcoin and think that blockchains as a format have potential, but they are not the end all be all and this story is basically a parody of bitcoin enthusiasts.
> Because Crowley likes to take long, hot showers in the morning, he used to run out of hot water.<p>In the UK, metering gas, and by extension hot water (since most hot water here is supplied via gas boilers) is often used to illustrate poverty, as if you regularly have problems with your gas bill you can get a coin operated metered gas supply.<p>I immediately assumed that Crowley is poor.<p>And this is the problem with a lot of these: They are presented as solving a problem, but many of them are solving problems that are only problems for those less likely to be able to afford the solution.<p>The solution often involves outsourcing fixing problems to someone else. E.g. the periods I've had a cleaner, we've always insisted on going through an agency even though it's substantially more expensive, because it means never having to think about holiday cover or illness cover or finding a replacement if the current one proves to be unreliable or do a poor job.<p>Almost the entire thing to me read to me as written by someone lacking understanding of what services they can buy right now, via service providers that deliver substantial value by insulating you from hassle.<p>The house sale being perhaps the most prominent example. The colored coin bit implies a total lack of understanding for the amount of legal hassles involved. At the very least you would need a way to force a transfer to be able to deal with situations where a transfer has been done improperly.<p>But secondly they seem to imply that the closing costs are primarily about transferring title. When I last bought a house, the vast majority was rather about drawing up a mutually agreeable contract covering exactly what deficiencies were known and agreed on, and what should stay or not etc. None of those goes away just because you have a way of doing a title transfer.<p>I believe there can be plenty of value to be had from Bitcoin. The ability to start taking payments without having to wait to get bank accounts and merchant accounts etc. sorted out is fantastic. And some of the things described may have profound effects. But the examples in this story mostly seems poorly thought out to me.<p>In fact, you <i>will</i> find plenty of examples like this explicitly used in scifi through the years as part of the designs of various dystopic settings, and often to illustrate the downsides of poverty in a hyper-commercialised environment - some of the first things people tend to spend money on when their earnings power increases is buying themselves free of having everything metered.
This reads a lot like a Huxleyan ("soma") dystopia compounded or facilitated by turning every passive human decision into another rent-seeking market.<p>I could not imagine a worse hell.