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Comment by blurbleblurble | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the barbed wire metaphor. Couldn't crypto have the effect of putting content that would otherwise be freely available in the current internet behind monetary barriers? Couldn't cryptocurrencies enable further control by monopolizing media industries? The technology is powerful, whether or not it will be liberating is to be determined.

Edit: didn't realize this was from 1993! Amazing to read that perspective!

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It was very interesting! They nailed a number of points there in terms of the prominence of certain techs.

They missed a big one, though. Today it was announced in the New York Times that Goldman Sachs is backing a payment fintech startup that operates on a public blockchain. JP Morgan, BNY Mellon, Credit Suisse, ING, are all involved in the EEA. Big money is making its way into cryptocurrencies presently. Groups like GS are fairly responsible for a lot of those barbed wire fences, and usually for their own gain.

No crypto-currency back then and openly available strong cryptography was a new thing. It was a different time.

Oh no doubt. It was just a comment, not a criticism.

Yes, cryptocurrencies could be used by media distributors. But anything that's popular and too expensive will get pirated, and distributed via darknets.

Crypto would enable inbuilt content use payment system if the user wants to pay, and reap additional benefits - freemium model

Industries wont be monopolized cause forking and launching decentralised code would be free and instant.

Tell that to email.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge cryptonerd. But open source is not a panacea against monopolization.

Tell what to email? I'm deep into the process of telling it to shut up and forward the anonymous, encrypted data here: https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis. It's still an excellent transport for async messaging.

As the saying goes: information wants to be free. In a world where everyone can interact with each other completely anonymously that becomes even more true, since governments cannot effectively penalize people for distributing said information.

For example, imagine a version of The Pirate Bay hosted as a Tor hidden service, combined with a completely anonymous torrent-like P2P file sharing system.

The full quote is:

"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

- Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Review, May 1985

Ugh, I hate that "information wants to be free" nonsense. Information doesn't want anything, it isn't a thing that can want. People want information and very rarely do people actually want it to be free.

People generslly want information they don't currently have but want to be free for then to acquire. People often also want information they do currently have to be expensive to other people to acquire.

> People often also want information they do currently have to be expensive to other people to acquire.

I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, pirated copies of media are typically created when someone legally purchases a copy of the work and then publishes it for others to use entirely for free. I find it very hard to believe that the people posting these pirated works want those works to be expensive for others to acquire.

It's the original publishers of the information that want to set a high premium, in this case movie studios.

> > People often also want information they do currently have to be expensive to other people to acquire.

> I don't think that's necessarily true.

You seem to have mistaken “often” for “always”.

> Information doesn't want anything

It's obviously a metaphor.

> As the saying goes: information wants to be free.

Don't anthropomorphize abstractions; they hate that.

Sure. He should have said "tends to be" or "gets driven toward being" or whatever. But the key point is the tension, not his languaging.

whoosh...

Look, everyone knows that concepts have no intentionality. It was a figure of speech.

You're missing the joke. "Don't anthropomorphize abstractions; _they hate that_." He's saying not to anthropomorphize abstractions, then doing so himself in the same sentence. ;-)

Yes, I got the irony. But I was responding to the criticism of Brand for anthropomorphizing abstractions. And if it was just a joke, with no criticism of Brand, then it was arguably off-topic, no?

Ok, an xkcd fan. Apparently a bunch of these commenters don't get it.

The problem with both the original form and yours is it obscures the active agent and real interests driving the real effect, which is important because not obscuring that makes the generality limitations of the statement a lot easier to see.

I agree. It gets used in contradictory ways. But he was going for a soundbite. So two sentences was probably the maximum. And most of the time, only one gets quoted.

Free as in beer, not as in freedom. That already happened decades ago.

Well: http://uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion/

It's hard to get "completely anonymous" for large video files. It's the snake-eating-a-pig problem. Torrents anonymize much better than streaming, because users are sharing many small pieces. Torrenting is very popular on I2P. With Tor, it's best to use only onion services, because exit resources are limited.

There's potential to multipath transfers among onion services. MPTCP works, right out of the box. That would enable high-bandwidth torrenting. It'd also provide chaff for normal Tor users. And there's currently oversupply of entry guard and middle relay resources.

Information "wants" to be gratis only in the sense that water "wants" to flow downhill. It turns out that devices that impede that flow (like a cup) are useful.

The corollary then to your particular analogy is that since anonymity on the internet was the default, it turned out that much of the commercial value eventually accrued to companies that correlated online activities with each other (searches, clicks, posts, likes, etc.) and tied the bundle to an identity.

The Internet was never anonymous. Especially not at the start, when every computer had its own IP address.

First, IP address assignment for dial-up users was generally random from a pool, and ISPs usually only kept logs long enough to be useful for troubleshooting purposes.

But ignoring the IP address assignment issues, do you remember what website log analysis tools (eg. http://www.webalizer.org/) were like back then? Most encouraged dumping the raw logs and just keeping the summarizing reports.

As a result, for most intents and purposes the data on nearly all user information consumption and interaction was ephemeral.

These New Yorker cartoons sum up the situation then and now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_dog.jpg#/media/F...

http://68.media.tumblr.com/7a8daddf2030b685e5e776eb9af7a6ac/...

At the start, there were no ISPs. Assuming that logs are transient is dangerous. Remember how Kevin Mitnick got pwned?

Ah, you're talking about the start of the web. The person you responded to was talking about the start of the Internet -- ARPANet or one of its later incarnations. When the traffic started exploding, yes, it became possible to be pseudonymous on the internet, but before then IP addresses were pretty much known and assigned in large blocks to particular universities/agencies/companies.

It sounds like there may be some history you missed out on. I recommend reading 'The Cuckoo's Egg' by Cliff Stoll if you've not already done so.

Actually, it was 1988.

Bitcoin can enforce property rights, like barbed wire.

Exactly. They article compared crypto to the wire cutters, but it can just as easily be used to make barbed wire.

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