fucking shit, didn't the UK start to crackdown on internet freedom.. and this is the result? now that we will soon be handing over the internet to the big ISPs, we're totally fucked. the internet in the US might be censored one day.
The Internet might be censored (and the EU can mandate citizens' ability to censor others' speech), but internets will replace it, eventually. User-created assets bring meshed internets (or at least a shared mesh network for the Internet) very close to reality. Andreas gave a great speech @ Bitcoins in the Beltway partially on that. Relevant part:
Let's look at this consensus algorithm, because I think we need to realize the future of cryptocurrency is the future of consensus algorithms. It's the future of scalable consensus systems that align incentives with the outcomes we desire, and we can take this and run with it. We can actually create better solutions for a much broader set of problems than simply, “don't steal the money.” We've already shown it works for “don't steal the money,” and now we can show it works for a broad variety of other systems. I'm most excited by the startups we see in this space that're taking the consensus algorithm system of Bitcoin and applying it to novel problems, not the Federal Reserve minting of currency problem, but problems about allocation of resources in a social environment, and even social interactions themselves. Proof-of-work is just the first step. One of the more interesting developments we're seeing now is other forms of consensus algorithms like, for example, proof-of-resource. There're a few companies working in this space, and with proof-of-resource, what you do is take resource that is currently under-utilized or completely unused, like, for example, the disk space that's free on your laptop, the bandwidth available on your access point that's not being used, the CPU capability of your desktop computer or even your mobile phone. -And they're saying, “how can we take that resource and share it?”
I can share that today. We have the protocols, we have the software to take resources that're under-utilized on personal computers and share them with others to create scalable, peer-to-peer cloud computing systems. How many of you here share your excess computing, storage, and bandwidth? There's a lack of alignment of incentives with outcomes. You don't share them because an abundance of altruism is not a good-enough reason for human behavior. That's a simple fact. It doesn't work. It works in very narrow scenarios, it works in very small, local communities, it works at local scale. You can create mesh networks. You can create communes, co-ops, and collaboration environments, but it doesn't scale. Consensus algorithms actually give us an opportunity to take incentives that only work on the local level and scale them up so they work on the global level. If you were able to share your WiFi and, as you're sharing it, the very act of sharing mined coins in a proof-of-resource consensus algorithm and gives you a token that has value; a token you can then use while you're traveling, so at Marriot Renaissance, to pick a random example, asks you for $14.99 for 100kbps of WiFi, you can say, “**** off, I'll use the shared network instead,” and use some of your precious resources you've mined by being altruistic with incentives to now use the resource that is common. You mine coins by sharing your network at home, you go traveling, you use those coins to use somebody else's network, and suddenly, an incentive structure that'd only work if everyone was being absolutely altruistic, meaning it wouldn't work on a large scale, would work on a very large scale. Suddenly, in 2014, mesh networks that have been a glimmer of possibility, just on the edge of horizon for the last two decades, suddenly seem like they could be real, and they could be happening on a massive scale pretty soon. That is incredibly exciting, the idea you could take cloud computing resources from thousands and thousands of under-utilized PCs and set up cloud computing networks by proof-of-resource mining.
The reason this works, or I think it'll work, is because consensus algorithms take an incentive structure and, through the use of mathematics and game theory, they align it with the outcomes you want to achieve as a community. If what you want to do is increase the capacity of a shared resource like WiFi bandwidth, and you align the incentive of a currency with that, it happens. If it's on a transparent blockchain like Bitcoins, you don't need to regulate it. I don't need to worry about whether the FCC is going to destroy net neutrality yet again on a proof-of-resource sharing network because there is no FCC.
I would like to believe regulation works, because then the fact that seventy-five percent of the Internet is against destroying net neutrality would be perfectly enough for the FCC to do its damn job, but they're not going to because they have many, many paid lobbyists whispering into their ear, “this is about greedy Netflix trying to get more money.” Well, guess what? I already paid for that Comcast connection, and if I choose to download Netflix, that's my money. Netflix doesn't need to pay again – I paid. You advertised 50meg down. Where's my 50meg? It's already paid for. The FCC is destroying net neutrality because it's suffering from regulatory failure, and if I had a proof-of-resource sharing mesh network, I wouldn't need to worry about that because net neutrality would be ensured by the combination of a consensus algorithm and a transparent blockchain. I wouldn't need regulation because the system is self-regulating. I wouldn't need to ensure one player can't dominate the environment because one player can't amass the resource to dominate the environment, and if they did, the incentive would be for them to share that resource for reward rather than use it to destroy the environment.
