Topic: Technology vs. Marketing. Which is more important? - page 2. (Read 6463 times)

My first few posts in this thread clearly addressed this exact question:

Why did you change the name of the thread to make it another Monero vs. Dash thread? It was started as a thread on the general topic. It seems quite unfair of you to change the entire target of discussion to that narrow focus after several of us have invested significant effort in generalized Marketing vs. Technology discussion.

Does this entire Altcoin Discussion forum have to be about fucking Monero? (Monero needs to STFU and get busy on fixing their fundamentally broken paradigm for anonymity, if your point is about technology).

I have no issue with the post you made comparing the two, but I do have an issue with you changing the name of the thread as stated.

I asked a question in the DASH thread relating to future development and below was the best answer I received:


It sounds like DASH really is trying to improve its technology (based on the response above). How close they can come to closing the technology gap remains to be seen. When will the Dash Evolution whitepapers be released?

It is disappointing that besides TanteStefana2 other community members essentially deflected my question or provided non answers. DASH seems to be great in attracting newcomers and selling them on the idea of financial privacy. I wish they were better at answering technical questions.

Continuing my analysis, the other advantage of decentralized storage is durability and availability. This is a facet of permissionless in the sense that no one entity has a monopoly on the storage. It is not permissionless in the sense of allowing illegal activity as explained upthread (because the storage will hosted on servers, even those are owned/managed by different entities, they all are regulated by the law reflected in the hosts' Terms of Service).

So I am envisioning the possibility to design a system for decentralized file storage where the users pay the storage providers, but the storage providers are decentralized entities (even though they are all high performance hosted providers and not ISP user clients).

In this case, I think microtransactions is the only way it can be done decentralized. If we instead attempt to aggregate a monthly use plan (or similarly analogous aggregations), then some centralized party will be in charge of paying the decentralized entities, so then it is not decentralized.

So therefor I have just identified a potential market for microtransactions that can't be offered by centrally owned cloud services.

Alternatively, Storj and Maidsafe are paying storage providers coins for proving they are storing data, then data is exchanged in a tit-for-tat[1]. If used with ISP user clients as storage providers, this will have performance weaknesses as well as being economically a theft paradigm in support of Net Neutrality oligarchy and taxation (for the reasons I explained upthread). But a user can't do a tit-for-tax exchange if user is not also a storage provider, thus afaics Storj and Maidsafe are forcing every user to be a storage provider. Otherwise they need to use some form of upload bandwidth theft model such akin to Bittorrent's optimistic unchoking. The only way to fix Storj and Maidsafe is for them to adopt a microtransaction payment model so users can pay for the upload and storage costs to decentralized providers.

So therefor I have explained why Storj and Maidsafe are fundamentally flawed. And I have explained why decentralized file storage can ONLY be done with microtransactions.

Next we need to reason about the viability of the markets for decentralized file storage and also the technical viability/tradeoffs. We need to not only think about ability to prove the data has been retained by some provider, but also about how to enforce against the storage of illegal content (otherwise I have argued upthread that the entire plan is flawed since hosts' Terms of Service will likely block protocols/systems which can allow copyrighted material to be stored without recourse by injured parties).

[1] Note Storj also alludes to microtransactions, so perhaps the tit-for-tat exchange only applies to Maidsafe. I will study this more.

Because I viewed the linked archived content (and saw the existence of the Bittorrent forum archive going back many years even before 2008) when I made the post in the Monero Speculation thread, and now as you can see the entire archive is gone. And that was only a few days ago. So the probability that the sudden removal of that archive did not result from me pointing out that Bittorrent is in bed together with the corruption of the Net Neutrality movement is approximately Nil.

I am not saying necessarily that any particular Monero community member was responsible for the removal of the archive. I am saying that someone who reads the Monero thread and/or who reads all my posts was responsible. And it is very likely that TPTB are watching very closely all my posts, because they understand (as do many astute readers) that I am one of the brighter minds on the forum who is very truly anarcho-Libertarian oriented and that I have the marketing skills to actually make something happen on a large scale.

However, TPTB shouldn't fear me, because I am not going to do anything illegal.

The most important point to take from the post I made is that Bittorrent is a political gimick used to fool the masses into submitting to taxation of the internet bandwidth via Net Neutrality. Bittorrent was never economic. It is a fraud and those who are stealing content deserve their fate by buying into an uneconomic lie.

And this pertains to the Technology vs. Marketing thread in the context of we are discussing whether potential markets and technology are viable. It makes no sense to state marketing or technology are important, if we don't understand how delusions about each can be foisted upon us. Also I was responding to an upthread post claiming that we can replace centralized social media with decentralized variants. And to address that possibility, I must talk about the foundational issue of decentralized file storage. That should have been obvious from the post (and its context) that you are reacting to.

Also for those who don't fully grasp my economics point, the point is that if we try to force ISPs to give away bandwidth for free, then we in effect socialize ISPs. And then the government can step in with Net Neutrality taxation to make it "fair" by compensating some ISPs for others or what (but in essence what we have done is attempted to steal and thus the government is called upon to take over and steal from all of us). We are fucking idiots!

For those can't deduce the implications, without stealing bandwidth by doing file transfers P2P (taking the expensive upload bandwidth that ISPs have statistically allocated for client-server model paradigms) then we can't have file storage that is resistant to regulation and thus we can't steal copyrighted content (as I explained in my prior post that hosting content on servers will be regulated by the hosting provider's Terms of Service). Afaik, the reason upload bandwidth is expensive for ISPs, is because telcom "last mile" technology is focused on maximizing download bandwidth for the client-server model of HTTP. It is a natural law of physics that you would not run a main line water/gas pipe from the substation to each home, instead use multifurcation from the main to progressively smaller diameter pipes.

P2P can not be a bandwidth driven paradigm! Fuhgeddaboudit.

The problem for humanity is that ISPs are playing along with this Net Neutrality takeover (even while pretending not to), because of course it is a plan by which the internet can be monopolized and controlled by an oligarchy. So our problem is that paradigms such as Bittorrent which foster this theft, are less expensive to host content with. And thus this is why the new Bittorrent browser is receiving funding because TPTB have decided this a good direction to go and further their control of the internet. How can we can compete with the download costs of stealing it from the collective. We probably can't. So fucking clever how TPTB fooled us into thinking we had won (after they closed Napster and we thought we fought back), and yet we dug our own grave. Because stealing is evil. But the problem is that this lower bandwidth cost (by stealing it) paradigm can also be used for distributing legal content.  However Bittorrent does have the weaknesses that files are slower to start loading (i.e. higher latency), it isn't interactive, and it only applies to files that many users are simultaneously downloading. So thus we still have a means to fight back if we are clever.

When will fools learn that anything pumped up in the MSM is always a fraud to fool us. Kim Dotcom is being made into a martyr to fool us into believing that we must fight for Bittorrent every where and to give a boost to the launch of a Bittorrent web paradigm. We will be totally fucked with Net Neutrality.

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What possible basis could do you have for such an accusation and how does the allegation relate to the topic of technology vs marketing?

Both technology and marketing are important. But continuous development of the coin is most important.

One of the foundational technical challenges is decentralized, permissionless file storage (and databases); otherwise if a corporation is providing centralized file storage then they control the content and can monopolize.

Afaik, the current attempts such as Storj and Maidsafe have a fundamental economic flaw. That is they are selling for free that which is not free— the bandwidth (and most saliently the asymmetrically more expensive upload bandwidth) of the ISPs. I had warned Bittorrent about this flaw in their economic algorithm and had suggested a fix in 2008:

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Now what is really fucking amazing is that the link quoted above worked correctly a few days ago when I issued it. Apparently someone in the Monero thread communicated to Bittorrent folks and had the entire archive of the Bittorrent forum removed from the archive.org. I am not joking and I am not hallucinating.

What I had written there in 2008 (which luckily I reread a few days ago so my memory is refreshed) was I explained to the Bittorrent developers that their tit-for-tat algorithm was orthogonal to their optimistic unchoking algorithm, and that they could improve the tit-for-tat algorithm by have the two peers that exchange a shard of data to encrypt those shards. Then after the shards had been received by both peers, the decryption keys could be exchanged. The economic benefit is that the bandwidth has already been exchanged before each peer can use the data. Thus neither peer has any bandwidth cost reason to cheat. The reason this was important is because typically download bandwidth is much greater than upload bandwidth, so by forcing all peers to trade equally, it would mean that peers could only download as much as they could upload. Bittorrent didn't like this suggestion because they preferred to leech the upload bandwidth of those who have higher allocations with their ISPs thus forcing those ISPs to pay for the upload bandwidth that the other peers at the ISPs with lower upload bandwidth allocations do not incur.

I warned Bittorrent that without my suggested fix, then the ISPs would end up blocking and rate limiting Bittorrent, which is exactly what has happened as I predicted:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/145786/isp.html
http://guides.wmlcloud.com/windows/how-to-bypass-torrent-connection-blocking-by-your-isp.aspx
https://www.quora.com/My-ISP-has-blocked-all-the-P2P-downloads-Is-there-any-way-I-can-bypass-them

Note that any solutions to the problem of ISPs blocking P2P apps that involve a TURN (when STUN tunneling fails or is blocked), VPN, or other server in the middle, defeat the entire point of extracting the value of the bandwidth allocation of users provided by their ISPs, because then one is paying for the bandwidth of the server to relay the shards.

If Storj and MaidSafe max out the consumption of each user's upload bandwidth (thus leeching off users with higher allocations charging the costs to those users' ISPs), they will also be blocked by ISPs. Additionally STUN tunnelling often fails and thus a TURN relay server has to be employed (or using the other peers as relays thus leeching the upload bandwidth of those ISPs who don't block tunneling).

In short, P2P for bandwidth consumption between ISP hosted user accounts is not going to be reliable. Many users will have frustrations when trying to be a storage provider. It will not be the case that every user in the system can also be a storage provider. And it will probably end up being the case that the most efficient storage providers will be hosted on dedicated servers.

In other words, it is a fantasy to think we can get decentralized file storage without paying for it.

We can try to design decentralized, permissionless file systems that correctly incentivize the storage and bandwidth providers, and the users of the system need to pay for it somehow. Whether or not these can remain permissionless given the need to host these on servers is open to further contemplation and study. Most all hosting providers include in their Terms of Sevice a restriction on hosting illegal copyrighted content, so unless one can provide a mechanism for which illegal content is removed from the system, it seems to me that hosts will be forced to ban the protocol (system).

So where I am headed with this line of thinking is that we ought to just give up on illegal content and illegal uses of anonymity. It isn't going to work. It is a fantasy.

I think VPNcoin already has that feature (I have not used it) and is much better known in a very important market (China). I agree that technology is most important. That is why I support the project with the best CryptoNote implementation and ongoing development to improve it further.

Technology is more important!

Check out Warpcoin - They will have a built in VPN client within the wallet as well as a cloudsync (direct P2P communication).

They are currently in a cloudfunding stage at the moment and available on slack!

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13566927

technology is important long term, good marketing can make you a quick buck..... if you have both then its to the moon

The main thing to understand about money is that it's all about people, neither marketing nor technology. David Jerry puts it best!

“Money is a collective delusion. (Or in case of fiat, a Ponzi scheme) You need believers everywhere otherwise its value is zero.” ~ David Jerry

Once you digest and comprehend that, everything else becomes easy. Value your community as you value yourself, believe in your community and believe in yourself, extend your hands to help one another, and everything else will fall perfectly into place.

What's giving you the impression of malevolent intent by Synereo?

Thanks, that's interesting, it's been done already then, this one from your link uses a fragment/vertex shader for Sha256: https://github.com/derjanb/hamiyoca/blob/master/glminer.js

It's kind of a gaping hole in WebGL that full GPU-compute access is given without permission from a cryptocurrency perspective because someone could embed an alt miner in a HTML5 page and make a web-based botnet if they could get the traffic.  On the other hand I guess someone could monetize a site by running a background WebGL miner with the user's permission instead of e.g. advertising.  Neither have the barrier of needing the user to install additional software.

Regarding your requirement, I see what you mean, I don't think there's a way to get at a specific instruction set because browsers are CPU-agnostic in terms of the code you can run.  You just have GPU access via WebGL and multi-threaded Javascript via HTML5 WebWorkers which is pretty quick but nothing that would limit to a CPU I think (unless you can create a memory hard algo with those 2 features).  

I will respond to the rest of your informative post later (as I need to go outside on this Sunday).

I think Synereo may be conceptually on the right track, in that ads should preferrably be content that users want to see. I can envision content providers being creative in how they advertise products within enjoyable content. The bottom line is the economics per my prior post in reply to TechorMarketing. There were one or two ads on Google that were so interesting to me, I wanted to save a copy of the video ad. Meaning the way to beat Google is by making the advertising more efficient, thus superior ROI for all participants (advertiser, content creator, and viewer). If the superior algorithms require decentralization and cutting out the middle man, then Google with all its technical prowess can do nothing to compete.

I only scanned a portion of their white paper. I believe they may have Sybil attack problems in their attention model (thus being gamed and not having the result intended), but I can't yet judge that with any certainty as I need to study it more carefully.

You've given me something very intellectually deep to chomp on, so thank you. I love conceptual paradigm shifts and I like to analyze models. I will need more time on this.

Looks to me as though they are serious. The devil is in the details on their technical model. They have a brainy looking CSO mathematician, so perhaps some of the model theory is originating from him.

You might not be aware that I also proposed this idea in my vaporcoin thread.

Please read again the links I provided upthread on why the cognitive/effort load of paying in small morsels is hated by humans.

I am believing in the concept that content producers want to earn an income. I am not believing in the concept that users want a pay-per-view model for enjoying videos. It appears to me that Google is experimenting with just how frequently they can push ads on viewers without causing attrition. I agree the ads are annoying, but I don't think that per-per-view is going to work for an activity that people simply want to enjoy. Even if you asked people to knowingly pay $5 a month a month to avoid ads, I think they would not bother to switch from Youtube. Google would moderate the ads sufficiently so that the incentive to switch would be diminished.

I think rather the incentive is on the content provider side as you said, Google is taking the lions share of the revenue, but also bear in mind they have the lions share of the web traffic.

Again a chicken-and-egg dilemma and additionally the problem that users won't pay-per-view. I think I may know how to solve the latter issue, but the former issue is very challenging to conquer. Even if you assume users will agree to have their microtransaction balance automatically deducted some microcents for each video viewed, you still have the initial problem of how to distribute the currency into their hands in the first place. If they have to go buy it on an exchange, that kills adoption right there. Even if you could sell the coin for credit card or Paypal, it still would cause a huge attrition rate.

A third problem is that the value users are willing to transfer for watching a video may be much less than the advertising revenue that could be generated. Typically afaik ~$10 CPM, that is 1 cents per video viewed for each ad on the page.

Are you going to pay $1 for each 10 - 100 videos you view so there will be no ads on the page?

The video ads are the most disruptive (unlike banner ads) but they also probably pay a much higher CPM. I haven't researched that though.

Edit: also ideally you would feel better if you only have to pay once and can own viewing rights to that video forever. And you would feel better to pay for what you know in advance will be quality content. A potential difference between YouTube and music, is if you could trial music for negligible cost then you may pay more when you are sure you want to own the song for unlimited future listening. Whereas, for video we typically watch most videos only once. Music doesn't require our total attention, so it can coexist with doing other activities and thus can be replayed in more circumstances. Video demands our complete attention which is perhaps why advertising is more lucrative for videos (I am assuming, not sure  about that).

There are many people who create content for YouTube with the primary goal of income generation (through advertising revenue share) and countless other examples. In many cases the platform owner (in this case Google/YouTube) captures the lions share of the profits. Micro transactions (tipping income instead of ads) could help provide more income for the content generators in such situations assuming the infrastructure was built to easier facilitate it. Users would benefit (from voluntary tipping) by not being forced to watch as many advertisements.

Of course people pay for music... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_on-demand_streaming_music_services
This is a good article: http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-rockstars-cryptocurrency-music-industry/
The Bitshares ecosystem has been working on an interesting solution which allows listeners to invest in the success of an artist or band, and profit off of finding good talent early in their career: http://peertracks.com/

I think social media can possibly be taken over by cryptocurrency/decentralized/blockchain technology. Think about it... Facebook has a market capitalization of 266.3 billion. What if a portion of their net profit was distributed to its users instead? Which service would you use... one that makes money off of you providing you nothing in return, or one that pays you to use its service? There are likely a few projects attempting to capitalize on this space. The only one off the top of my head I can name is Synereo and I am on the fence as to whether it is is a legit project or a P&D... I am waiting on the sidelines for now. http://www.synereo.com/

Cutting out the middlemen in "live nude chat, typing job, creative job such as graphic arts or writing" could prove to be a lucrative decentralized business plan as well. Any business that is ran by middlemen can be eliminated by decentralized technology. People call all these random features "gimmicks", but they fail to understand that we are cutting out middlemen with each feature added. Coins like Nxt and Bitshares are attempting to become the Google/Apple of blockchains, and this is a successful model in my opinion. That is why I support them so. All of these "cryptocurrencies are only supposed to be used as currencies" types really annoy me, because I think decentralized technology is going to be very disruptive in a lot of industries.

Carrying on from the questions I presented in my reply to CoinHoarder, if we take a broad prespective, we can conclude the obvious which is the youth (all age groups in fact) are consuming more and more online media and that includes interactive scenarios:

http://kff.org/disparities-policy/press-release/daily-media-use-among-children-and-teens-up-dramatically-from-five-years-ago/

We can see that jump to using the computer more spurted at the turn of the century (as expected because that is when the internet went mainstream):

http://ns.umich.edu/Releases/2004/Nov04/teen_time_report.pdf#page=8

Much of that activity is being done not for direct economic income, rather for derivative motivations (which may be economic for participants in some holistic life calculation even though event locality may be uneconomic, e.g. clicking a Like) such as fun, learning, collaborating, politics, and socializing (just as we are doing here in this forum).

In what way can crypto technology (block chains, decentralized currency, etc) participate in the aforementioned trend?

Yeah people want to have fun, but that doesn't seem to have any direct relationship to crypto currency that we can yet identify, other than some promotional confluence mania that flamed out. (Unless someone can explain any other reason for Doge's continued existence, I will assume it is because some people still believe it has a future and that can be self-sustaining at some small level).

So I have stated above that most of the youth are consumers of interactive (social) media, and their economic motivation is holistic (fun, learning, collaborating, politics, and socializing) and not for an immediate income. Whereas the media providers (not always the content creators as the content may be produced by the participants for free) are motivated by direct economic gain, either in the form of income (usually ad driven) and/or company market cap appreciation.

Thus I have concluded that in most scenarios the consumers of interactive media have no use for crypto currency.

Is it possible to create interactive media where some of the participants (maybe providers of content or interaction) are motivated primarily by economic income (or a combination of the holistic benefits and income)? What are the examples out there already in cyberspace? The examples that come to my mind seem very limited in participation, e.g. live nude chat, typing job, creative job such as graphic arts or writing. Are there any music distribution sites where the providers of content are being paid by the consumers of content? Isn't it so competitive to get your music heard, that you must not charge for it?

Can anyone comment?