> What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on?
as for data availability, bittorrent works stupidly well today without any monetization. it turns out that upload/download ratio works as a pretty decent metric to combat tragedy of the commons for larger torrent communities that really want to protect against it. for websites, i've been surprised in the past when i let a domain expire, and then it pops up a month later because somebody who enjoyed it had archived it and brought it back online themselves. that's more satisfying to me than if it had been kept available because i paid some distant/dispassionate person $1 to do so.
point is, the future i want is largely one of reciprocity. decrease hierarchy and encourage participants to act as both consumer and producer. financialization doesn't do this: it encourages large, efficient producers to compete with each other to serve consumers. i don't want my 20,000-person retro-arcade community to be served by 5 people who've provisioned 4x10Gbps uplinks charging us for BW. then it's just some extractive thing (these producers are likely directing their proceeds to things unrelated to the community) and the magic's gone.
financialization helps when the capital cost of entry is otherwise too high. say, using loans that are repaid by usage-based micropayments as a way to get mesh power/data networks off the ground since these require costly physical equipment. such networks would be beneficial both from the redundancy/fault-tolerance perspective you care about and also from the social angle i care about of being able to participate in more of the things around me. but after deployment, continued monetization works against that latter aspect.
the one crypto project which financialized data networks (Helium) completely failed at the participatory aspect. its users (gateway operators) are merely providers for a different set of consumers (LoRa users). you may have good intentions, and you may build something better than FB/AWS, but if it's built around monetization it will only ever be a stopgap. stopgaps are fine and often good, but the places we need them are already shrinking. federated chat/social networks and peer-based media/streaming applications are developed and advancing rapidly enough for me to take them seriously today. another "big tech" alternative -- open SW/HW stacks for mobile phones as an alternative to Apple -- is in a similar state and crypto hasn't even started any parallel project that i know of. search alternatives are the furthest behind, but is anyone using crypto to build an alternative to Google? my understanding of search is that it's a tough problem to solve because of the money incentives (if a click results in profit via commerce or ads, then there's an incentive to pay for more clicks, either via backchannel payments or SEO), and that social ranking of search results is one of the only ways to overcome this.