For the benefit of anyone stumbling onto this thread...
2) But.... florincoin is a good long term coin. Data coins will probably do well and florin has a lot of positives.
I agree with this.
3) But... the 'block tech' thing looks dubious. It does not look like a project with real commercial possibilities. Rather it looks like part of a florin pump.
I disagree with this, although I can understand why you might think it without hands-on access to what Devon and BlockTech are working on. However, Alexandria is a real thing (I'm in the alpha) and it is extremely cool.
It's been in development for the better part of a year and has huge potential for content publishers and consumers alike. The beta starts pretty soon so you'll be able to check it out yourself; I'll also be recording video tutorials on using it once it's in a more finalized form. I'm only doing that because the project itself has value.
It's not about being "extremely cool".
The Pirate Bay Business Model worked for about 10 years (anon, ad supported, free torrents)...
And had about 50,000,000 unique visitors/month until Hollywood lawyers broke it up.
Alexandria uses almost the exact opposite Business Model (pay-as-you-go, minimal anon, your mom's Pirate Bay)...
As currently described, the most likely result = Hollywood will ruthlessly shut it down.
Hi there - thanks for sharing your concerns about the project - they're quite valid, so I'm happy to describe what we're thinking as far as how to go about addressing them
For one thing, as eXSn pointed out, there's no way for hollywood to ruthlessly shut this down. As a result of its decentralized nature (and very much by design, in order to truly embrace the idea of 'freedom of speech protected by code'), there is no central, controllable entity that could be shut down in order to destroy Alexandria. Media submissions themselves live in a DHT, hosted on multiple computers around the world, and the references/links that Alexandria uses to index them is a blockchain, again, hosted on multiple computers around the world.
Also, Alexandria is actually being designed so that it can be an attractive distribution mechanism for Hollywood itself (a bit down the road). You'll have to stay tuned at blocktech.com for a more detailed explanation of how we're doing so, but we have a process that ensures that certain content types (primarily feature films and music albums) require an extra step of authentication before they will actually show up in the Alexandria browser - basically a series of checks that allow a machine to verify, with reasonable accuracy, that someone who is attached to the credits of a piece of art has publicly demonstrated their approval for said piece of art to be distributed through Alexandria. Because its a check that is done at the time that a user browses across the piece of media, it is revokable at any time, so it makes temporarily delisting/hiding a piece of media extremely easy for its creator.
We aren't building Alexandria to be a competitor with PopcornTime - PCT does what it does quite well and has 10m happy daily users - we're building it to give artists of all kinds, from independent filmmakers to mainstream musicians, the ability to harness the highly efficient P2P technology that gives pirates completely free file distribution, but in a way that puts them directly in the drivers seat. Our first target artists are Youtubers/Soundcloud-podcasters - the content creators who are currently reliant entirely on ads. As more mainstream content creators see how well its working out for the short video/podcast crowd, we think filmmakers and musicians will start to dip their toes in the water.
