Interesting read. I'm all for decentralized systems but one important consideration which will likely be different for each scenario: is whether distributed consensus in x (ie. traffic lights, water, power) is more valuable to the participants than a statistical machine-learning based approach. The latter is optimized towards some predefined metrics (minimizing total average wait times in traffic), whereas a cryptocurrency approach is distributed to the whims/needs of independent actors ("I want to cross the street now").<p>The benefits of distributed independent actors is clear in some areas such as economics, where the system is so massive and chaotic attempts to control it via machine or human intervention often fail. Even when they continually adapt their models over time, they will never be a full replacement for the consensus of a market.<p>While markets are efficient they famously at times have a habit of acting irrational and counter-productive to participants needs. This is where in the present times human intervention (occasionally) out-performs pure markets. In the future, most of us expect machine-optimized models to out-perform both markets and centralized systems.<p>That may be the differentiation in the long term for which is better, which can provide the best value? Human consensus -> human consensus via machines -> machine consensus. We'll likely keep moving farther to the right of that flow as machine learning (AI) becomes better.
Economically, adding such a layer creates perverse incentives. My router becomes profitable when I make its bandwidth scarce. The same incentive applies to everyone else with a router.<p>My ISP's gateway agreements become structured around a new definition of efficiency. Extract the maximum possible toll for each bit.<p>This new definition means, the more spam received The more my email host can raise the tariff. It can hold my incoming mail hostage.<p>The logic which underpins the idea is the finite pie. It ignores the possibility that network effects offset the cost of infrastructure even though that's what has driven the internet and mobile cell networks to vast scale over the past twenty years.<p>But it's still a great thought provoking article
This reminds me of a very tangible shortcoming in the OSI model that <<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Identity_Protocol>" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Identity_Protocol></a> is trying to address and which is, in my opinion, far more important that exchanging value.<p>It is the fact that we always talk of machine addresses, and never of machine identities (except through DNS, but DNS is also about giving human-readable identifiers, so it cannot be decentralized <<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle>" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle></a>).<p>However, now that everyone is using public-key crypto, we should understand that a machine can be referenced by a public key, and that it can prove ownership of it to anyone who asks. (This can also be used to encrypt traffic, but this is not what I am thinking of.)<p>Hence, why do we connect to IP addresses, rather than connecting to public key hashes? Granted, public key hashes are not routable, but there could be a service to provide the mapping from hashes to addresses -- not DNS, because it doesn't have to give human-readable names (so doesn't have to be centralized), and because there is little penalty for receiving a wrong answer (as long as you always check the identity of who you are talking to.<p>I think that, had asymetric crypto been in widespread use before the OSI model came about, this would have been the natural way to do things. Now the problem is unsatisfactorily solved both in DNS (which is not the right solution, as I already explained), and in an ad-hoc way with TLS, in SSH, etc.; but this is still too high in the hierarchy, machines should be addressed with public key fingerprints unless we are concerned about actual routing.
From the comments section the author writes:<p>"You are correct in that it’s technically another set of application layer protocols – I was just being provocative with the title..."<p>sigh... so it is not a "fifth column"<p>yes, the bitcoin protocol did provide some interesting things but is not nearly approaching the level of hype and spilled pixels lauding it
Ethereum is planning to build a whole turing complete platform for new coins and other kind of P2P apps and services.<p><a href="https://www.ethereum.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ethereum.org/</a>
Yes.<p>I work in the area and have probably researched it more than most... and from quite some number of angles (social, technical, regulatory, etc.). My take is that <i>an asset-neutral, settlement-system neutral transaction layer will certainly emerge</i>.<p>This layer will provide (1) a suitably generic model of transaction state (2) hooks for cryptographic, reputation and logistics/provisioning systems (3) precise but extensible description of transactions including both traditional and digital goods and services<p>It will also facilitate a digital market for RFQs and quotes, and become as important to the JIT/decentralized manufacturing industry, spare parts supply business and the management of power on electrical grids as it will be to general purchasing.<p>Our children will find it inconceivable that archaic, limited, centralized, third party, centralized trust based platforms such as Alibaba, Amazon, eBay, SAP or Taobao and their rudimentary reputation systems ever existed.<p>I've put some thoughts and proposals online at <a href="http://ifex-project.org/" rel="nofollow">http://ifex-project.org/</a> .. some of these are in live use already .. but very interested in any feedback.
This is a very good summary of a future, but I don't think any sort of coin system will be particularly effective at mitigating either the spam nor DDoS problem for the wide variety of cases: if a botnet captures a computer, I expect it would equally capture whatever coin-wallet is being used for default mail transfer and network access.
Certainly not a new idea, this approach was discussed in the early 2000s but instead using pennies. I've always been a skeptic of this approach as anything that has value will inevitably be traded for money making it entirely possible for organized actors to create inequity in the system to their own ends.
If you need proof-of-work for value to not reject an interaction as automated / meaningless, just use a Hashcash header, which is where Bitcoin got started anyway.
Note that this already exists in the form of Bitcloud [0].<p>I'm skeptical about putting it in every conversation. If every peer has to pay to work on the internet, it will make bigger peers more important (because they have more resources) and it will force everyone to mine (instead of having only a minority of people mining today)<p>[0] <a href="http://bitcloudproject.org/" rel="nofollow">http://bitcloudproject.org/</a>