Could you explain exactly how blockchains allow societies to create ideas? I'm not sure how append only lists allow idea sharing in ways a database does not.
For example, I want to release a tool that can mod old ROMs. I cannot legally sell this. This is a new idea, I'd like to make a living with it, but I can't. And why not? Because the concept of IP has turned us into servants.
Meanwhile you have youtube series like Freeman's Mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SQhfkpX9bc making a killing, and I'm preeeetty sure he didn't ask Valve for permission. Nintendo is possibly the most litigious game company in history, and will aggressively shut down anything remotely connected to any of their characters. The whole situation is completely fucked for artists, and decentralization can solve it.
Unfortunately it looks like I'm born a couple generations too early to benefit, but at least my kids might.
"And now you, dear filmmaker, want to come along and want to make your own version of Star Wars: A New Hope? For shame! That's like stealing food right out of George Lucas' mouth."
You can remix themes and ideas all you want. Just don't call it Darth Vader and profit off other people's investment in that specific expression of the space opera.
For instance, I love the harry potter universe. I just happen to think that JK Rowling is a terrible writer. I would pay hundreds of dollars for quality fan fiction, ideally licensed or legal. There’s really no mechanism for any human on the planet to tell a story in this universe and widely distribute it legally.
Arguably this is more of an issue with copyright and trademark, but I think there’s a lot of room for art to fluorish if there’s a market not beholden to IP law.
Always refer to copyright laws as "copyright laws", trademark laws as "trademark laws", and so on.
I have read and particularly recommend Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Many other works set in the HP universe exist.
Would you argue that Shakespeare was not creative? Or is it possible that stories are based on the culture of a society, and the culture of a society is based on the stories told -- meaning that any story can be argued to be a copy of another person's idea.
Of course modding is not the same as Shakespeare. My point was that stories like those of Shakespeare would not have been possible with our modern notions of copyright. I do agree that many (but not all) examples of such work are just simply rip-offs of other people's work. On the other hand, does it make sense for any work to be untouchable for an essentially unlimited period of time?
So while you might argue that mods are all shameless copies of another person's work, I direct you to 'The Stanley Parable'[1] which was a mod of Half-Life 2. I think most people would argue that it is a creative work that is unique despite the fact that it re-uses assets from a copyrighted work. There are many counter-examples to the idea that the only way to have creative value in a game is to "draw your own monsters". Jim Sterling ran a contest where people were to come up with original works based on an overused Unity asset, and the winning entry was a game made entirely out of textures based on that asset[2]. Is that not a creative work?
I think that ultimately it's a disservice to argue that all such works should not be allowed because many examples of people building on previous work is lazy or a transparent rip-off. That the requirement for a creative work be a strict sense of originality (not to mention that you need to decide how do you define sufficient originality -- is "Harry Potter Told Using Pokemon" an original work?).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stanley_Parable [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTL6NlPF0Lw
But should The Stanley Parable be able to profit and set up a free enterprise on the tireless work of Valve engineers? Well, I wasn't really arguing that either.
All I was saying is that, as an artist, if you consider yourself "fucked" because you can't profit off of releasing a commercial game "Harry Potter with Pokemon" that sits on the shelves of GameStop alongside the originals- even though you would be quite good and creative artist in my mind, hell I would play the shit out of that game- you are not realizing that respecting copyright law and abiding by those rules, as "unfair" as they may be, is the only thing that protects companies from being ruthlessly shared on uTorrent for free, and that if you were truly creative and trying to form a business, why not respect this law, and take additional effort to create something "new" and "original", which I understand is total hyperbole, but within our confines of law is simply a matter of "reskinning" so yes Shakespeare could be regarding on the level of reskinning someone else's Angry Birds, but clearly he put his creative spin on it enough to be different or else he wouldn't have made his mark.
In conclusion, nothing is completely "original", and fanfiction is still creative, but artists should strive to not self-identify with other creative entities, if they wish to form a business, out of respect for the law that protects from 100% bad actors which do not wish to creatively enhance, but to sell or distribute identical copies of original creative work.
I see we're very far apart and probably won't find some common ground, but the way I feel about the situation is that as automation removes the rest of manual labor jobs, people will need to specialize. And modding old ideas is one of the few ways people could specialize and make a living for themselves. You're free to disagree here, but the future is coming, and one day we'll both be gone. The best ideas, however, will be around. And it's hard to imagine that the best idea is not to let anyone else use anything you've thought of for your entire life plus ninety years.
Copyright law is not meant to protect companies. From a historical perspective, it has always meant to temporarily protect authors' rights to their inventions so that society can get more works from those authors. Citing the US constitution (other countries have different justifications, but I assume that you are in the US):
> [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
This matches the purpose of the copyright system defined in 1710 under Statute of Anne (which inspired this clause in the constitution). The copyright system that pre-dated the Statute of Anne was a system of censorship by the publishing houses (that were members of the Printers' Guild), and the public rebelled against their censorship and Queen Anne strove to come up with a system that was far more fair and was meant to inspire authors to produce more work (rather than restrict what they can write so publishers can make more money).
Having a copyright system that protects publishers (which is what we currently have) and lasts for 70 years after the death of the author does not "promote the Progress" of anything (in fact it actively stifles it). I would argue current copyright law is unconstitutional in the US, but I don't have enough money to fight that fight (and the only people that do benefit from copyright law's overreach).
Unfortunately, in our modern age, the true purpose of copyright has been forgotten. People (like yourself) think that the purpose is to protect companies profits -- this could not be further from the truth. Such companies benefit from this misinformation, and regularly lobby the US Congress to add laws which further expand copyright laws (both in breadth as well as length) that result in even more profits for large companies without any more works made as a result. The true hypocrisy is that many of these companies would not have been able to make their works at all without the public domain, and without liberal copyright laws. The first cartoon Mickey Mouse appeared in (Steamboat Willie) made use of things from previous movies (Steamboat Bill Jr -- which was released 50 years earlier).
> out of respect for the law that protects from 100% bad actors which do not wish to creatively enhance, but to sell or distribute identical copies of original creative work.
Even if we ignore that these copyright laws are written by these same corporations (that themselves used public domain, and even infringed on copyrighted works from smaller publishers, to make their products), as I said above this is missing the purpose of copyright law.
To be precise, the argument goes like this: Star Fox 64 is not currently generating any economic benefit for Nintendo. It doesn't harm Nintendo for someone to make a derivative work of it. In fact, I'd be more than happy to cut a deal with Nintendo and just give them most of the money. The problem is that no one tries to do this, and we all lose what could have been made.
Even in a complete wild west, some people are going to do the right thing. Maybe even most people. Probably is far more a cultural issue than a legal or technical one. Still, I'm not arguing that 100% deregulation is a good idea, just that I don't really think this is a convincing argument.
It doesn't matter if you would, it matters if the general public would. And all you have to do is look to China, where more cracked copies of windows are sold every day than legitimate copies. The only reason that doesn't exist here is because it's almost impossible for the average consumer to buy a cracked copy. If they were available at every corner store the average person would make that choice 9 times out of 10. And if they'll take that risk on the entire OS, they won't bat an eye at a rom.
Then it all goes to heck because innovation just grinds to a halt.
[1] https://bitcoinist.com/leonardo-da-vinci-mona-lisa-blockchai...
The best publications pay people to write for them, not the other way around.
I agree completely - why would paid posting do anything but create a chilling effect on anyone but the wealthy?
If the forumtokens fluctuate wildly in value it would probably kill the forum too, particularly if the only way to get them was through the market. I can't think of any way to algorithmically deal out tokens to posters that doesn't reward at least one of: multiple accounts, spamming, or writing outrage bait.
This isn't THAT different than a bunch of startups calling things web 2.0 five to ten years ago.
so just roll with it.
The Ethereum project's javascript library is literally called web3.js
So at the software developer level of the stack, what we get are new tools for managing reputation, identity, authentication, transparency, accountability, etc.
If you think of people as a graph of nodes, these tools enable novel patterns of trust and collaboration between individuals that aren't possible today. What this means is that every institution will ultimately have to reimagine itself so as to be cost competitive in the new paradigm, HT Carlota Perez.
To give a more concrete example, think of the 2008 real estate collapse. The reason the market failed isn't because people didn't have the data, it's because no one one going to read through a 3,000 page paper print out to figure out what was actually in whatever debt tranche they happened to buy. But when you can just run a simple Python script to analyze the contents of all that debt and get updates on payments in real time, suddenly those types of systematic market failures can no longer happen. And because a big portion of the lemon market problem is ameliorated, that creates new ways to finance big capital investments that would be completely impossible today.
Think about why we weren't able to have large corporations before double entry was invented/popularized in Florence in the late 1400s, because there was no way to really know if you were making or losing money once you got beyond a certain scale. Because blockchain reduces the costs of double entry accounting by 10,000x, we can (and will) restructure all aspects of society in ways that just aren't possible currently, everything from supply chains to social networks. I think it stands to reason that blockchain is going to be the most financially important technology of the last 500 years, since imho it's the biggest innovation since double entry accounting.
It makes sense as a store of value. But a realtime database that requires rapid, possibly millisecond-accurate entries? It just hasn't happened yet. Not on a scale that works in practice, anyway.
Example: I tried to use Namecoin a couple days ago. I got bored and quit after a few hours of "Synchronizing network". It seems to have consumed several GB. I just wanted to register a .bit domain. I didn't even get to "How do I acquire namecoin?" because (a) there is no clear "go here and pay this dude" service, and (b) you have to have GBs of free space just to try it. Such experiences are typical of blockchain, and this seems to murder consumer adoption.
The main reason for decentralization is to prevent collusion. But the risk of collusion decreases very quickly even with relatively limited amounts of decentralization. E.g. a consortium of even 10 independent banks would be much less likely to steal your money than Wells Fargo alone. So while there will always be some use cases where power users will want to validate the entire chain, in practice I think we can get 99% of the benefits of decentralization with even a handful of nodes. Bitcoin wouldn't be trustworthy under this model since anyone can jump in and mine, but it's possible to create networks that are trustworthy in this way.
In terms of scalability, the three main contenders right now to be the next generation general purpose blockchain are Hashgraph, DFINITY, and RChain, with a couple dozen other dark horse contenders as well (protocol labs, eos, tezos, etc.) We don't know if any of them actually work yet, in the same way we didn't know whether or not Bitcoin was actually secure in 2010. But there is a bunch of stuff that will be launching in the next couple years and then slowly battle tested over the next decade while we figure out what really works.
Most consumer apps are still going to be driven just by Postgres or whatever, with data only validated on the chain when it actually needs to be. E.g. if you're buying a house, it's probably fine to take Zillow's word on the transaction history if you're just casually browsing, but then if you're getting serious about buying you can always hit the button to go directly to the chain explorer or whatever.
The corollary is that I'm most interested in services that are focusing on decentralization, not merely trying to be a general purpose blockchain. One of the most important unsolved problems seems to be "I want to put this file up on the internet, but I don't want it to be taken down," plus "I want to request this file, but I don't want it to be traceable back to me," plus "I want to distribute this file, but I don't want it traceable back to me." Tor solves some of these concerns, but it remains a specialized niche. I can't just do it for any old file at any time; might as well use Dropbox for that. And why? There's no reason. It should all just be decentralized. After all, I'm online most of the time, and I'd happily upload the file to whoever wants it.
This all sounds quite shady, but the motives here are mostly pure: I'd like to distribute old ROMs and anime. Such things will get you kicked offline just as quickly as the more nefarious stuff. But this seems like a net negative for society. Society is at its healthiest when you're free to remix other people's ideas.
(More specifically, I want to write a service that lets you play whatever old ROM you want, whenever you want. There still is no Netflix of this area, and the game companies that could make it happen seem too inept. May as well force their hand with some decentralization. But that requires being able to write the equivalent of <img src="http://foo.com/img.jpg">, but for distributed binaries keyed by sha256. Blockchain could help here, but I look at this and go "Y'know, this is a perfect decentralization problem. Why aren't blockchains solving it already?")
Wanna collab? Shoot me an email and we can work it out. I'm really interested in getting this concept running. If only IPFS were low latency and easy for average gamers to upload files to, that seems a perfect fit.
I was hoping that as users play games, they would also upload the games to other people who want to play. That way there's no scarcity of server resources. You could fit ~40 n64 games into 1GB, so it's not a lot of bandwidth.
It's already been ported to the web. https://medium.com/webmr/n64-vr-with-javascript-e188de42ced5
The trouble is performance. N64 emulation is all software rasterization based, but it can be rewritten to use WebGL. It's just a lot of work that no one's done yet. RetroArch runs at 40fps because it can use SSE ops, which is beyond what browsers can do currently.
I think it would be possible to ship an Electron app with a local build of Retroarch, modified to export the rom's game data and selectively replace the draw calls with other ones. That way you can basically swap out starfox with mario, if you wanted. If any of this sounds interesting, shoot me an email (see profile).
Debt was fraudulently misrated, so you'd have junk bonds rated as AAA or whatever. But the primary data was all there, so you could actually go visit all of the properties and talk to the owners like they did in The Big Short, it's just that no one did. The people who approved the mortgages also weren't verifying people's incomes, and in some cases were even encouraging them to lie about their incomes. But the primary data was all there, the reason no one audited the primary data was that it was too expensive relative to the payoff. Blockchains can fix this. (The residential real estate market is pretty fragmented so it's unlikely to be one of the first industries to get transformed, it's just an easy to understand example.)
> Currently, blockchains have very high energy usage.
This is really only true for Bitcoin and things modeled after it, where the integrity of the chain is secured by wasting an amount of electricity that's directly proportional to the expected future price. This clearly isn't sustainable so BTC will have to change their POW if they want to be successful. But it's also not an inherent property of blockchains, there are many other blockchains that are already secured differently or are working on novel security mechanisms, but as I said they just need to be proven out over the next few years.
Wat.
There is no aspect of double entry bookkeeping that would lead to a cost reduction when combined with blockchains, even less a reduction of an order of magnitude (or four!).
That is a logical fallacy. Every new dna mutation is 'novel' and some mutations are even solutions to real problems, but not every novel solution is the most competitive. Just because blockchain gives you new tools that solve problems doesn't mean it is the best way to solve that problem. (EDIT: To defend your statement you have the burden of proof to show that your paradigm is significantly more competitive than current paradigms. I suspect time will prove me correct.)
> when you can just run a simple Python script to analyze the contents of all that debt and get updates on payments in real time, suddenly those types of systematic market failures can no longer happen
There are many, many factors that went into The Great Rescission. Repackaging subprime mortgages was bad for investors. Maybe python could have helped that by giving investors better insight into what they were buying. The housing market declined, fundamentally, because many families were unable to pay their mortgages. Python wouldn't have helped people be able to pay their mortgage.