On of the biggest issues was how to entice people to download and run the client/node.
I half wondered afterwards if slapping some crypto on top of it which would be mined by running the node and providing resources would help. My gut says easy yes, but my mind grimace at the abomination.
Unless there can be a way to trivially verify what others tell you, crypto currencies are a dead end
You are paying either
- Block space: your transaction to be included in a block
- State: modifying the world state (EVM in Ethereum)
Trust problem is solved by various other means, usually on libp2p level, by banning node (IP addresses) that send you bad data, which you can verify by comparing it to data from other peers.
Spam is not a function of rate but of content. Spam can absolutely be sent in a blockchain, as you say, and making the price higher only makes both spam and non-spam more difficult. Spam for me might be actual legit information for you.
Hashcash is another beast, it only has the proof-of-work part, not the money part (contrary to its name) so it's not comparable.
You always need a way to hold nodes accountable in a system like this, or it'll be rife with manipulation — because there's already a strong, innate incentive to manipulate results. Today, we call that industry "SEO".
Building a societal system where you know you can rely on your peers, you build together, is a more joyful, more resilient, more ecological and also more realistic way of building a thriving society than distrust-by-default that cryptocurrencies live for.
Bad actors exist and there must be some process for identifying and dealing with them, but they are not the majority of people and so probably don't have to be the first, last, primary, and only consideration at all times.
IE living in a bomb shelter is not a life worth living, even though yes you will be safe from bombs and theives.
That sort of thing only gets handled very indirectly and much later and after a bad actor does their bad thing enough times for the surrounding greater population of good actors to notice a pattern.
I also don't understand your point. The current world is not what I want, so let's make it worse according to my values ?
The concept of a ZK VM is that it is able to prove arbitrary code. Risc0 and the more recent SP1[1] both compile arbitrary Rust programs into ZK circuits for generating and verifying execution proofs.
I highly dislike monetary incentives because they perpetuate inequalities by design, so here's another incentive: if you store a correct index, I will keep working with you and we can build an awesome system together. We can coordinate by talking to each other rather than trying to get money from each other.
YaCy has so many buttons I'm not even sure if it lacks it but playing around with it it is very cool to crawl large amounts of pages and serve requests until you want to do other things with the computer and the background process is to bloated. Something like a turtle mode like torrent clients have would be useful.
Long ago there was a Chinese p2p client with a rootkit that would seed at 1 kb. I haven't used it but was told it worked remarkably well.
Why would that be an abomination? It's a perfect use-case. Like you noticed people need incentives to volunteer their hardware. If you hate crypto because it's crypto you can just use fiat instead.
I wonder if this is because "volunteer your hardware" projects sometimes involve someone making else money, and if someone else is making money but not you, why should you donate your hardware?
For the truly libre "hardware donation" projects, they seem to be doing ok without financial incentivization. What immediately comes to mind is the petabytes of data flying around on peer to peer systems through torrenting. I know people that spend thousands of dollars a year on upkeep and upgrades for what are essentially super seedbox homelabs (I'm one of them too :P )
There's also communities like soulseek where people keep TBs of music up, often seeking out rare tracks to make available to the community for free.
There's folding@home and seti@home, and I'm sure other similar projects I haven't heard of, where people donate cycles just for the common good.
folding@home is a great example because we can directly compare the people that are "incentivized" to participate with bananocoin, a cryptocurrency rewarded based on work cycles in folding@home. You can see all bananocoin miners here under the banano.cc team: https://stats.foldingathome.org/ That team is in first place for work completed, however are only just surpassing the linus tech tips team, and not to mention compared to a bunch of other teams (and private "donors") they're a very small % of work completed for folding@home
So therefore I disagree that people "need" incentives, there just needs to be no, erm, disincentives, if that's a word.
And then you end with "there just needs to be no disincentives". If anything spending thousands of dollars a year on upkeep should be a disincentive for most people. You are not most people though, since you do it voluntarily.
Actually, before that, I used to run it off an old macbook.
Do we need it to be where everyone hosts a node? I just had this conversation with a friend yesterday actually. We were in disagreement about the accessibility of self hosting and federation. He was of the opinion that we should push LLMs to where anyone can type "I want to host a video hosting platform" and chatgpt.exe will find and install jellyfin on their computer and set up a cloudflare tunnel, or whatever.
I'm more of the opinion that we should increase the quality of documentation until the one person just weird and nerdy enough out of a group of 20 will be able to deploy things on leftover hardware, and share with their friends.
What do you think?
Something like pikapods.com certainly helps with accessibility, even if it isn't self-hosting per se.
But all of that doesn't have little to do with incentives or disincentives. Even with very high accessibility there are disincentives to self-host. It will cost time and money in some way. For some people the intrinsic motivation will override those disincentives. But I think for the majority of people there will still not be enough motivation to do it.
There are more important things to do for them.
Well yes, because right now society disincentivizes people from ever spending their time from anything that doesn't earn them at least a little bit of money. Kind of to my earlier point that "FOSS" projects with a monetization angle dicincentivizes people to contribute their time, to make someone else money. Well, except for the fact that it's almost a requirement for people in certain geographies to have FOSS commits on their portfolio, due to economic disparity. Yay free labor pool.
Should we actually leverage our technology to share the bounty of post-scarcity we could have today, don't you think people would spend more time on passion projects?
Not to mention, where is the value of this coin going to come from? Will people pay to use this search engine? That seems unlikely.
It doesn't sound like the perfect use case to me.
I'm not entirely confident that crypto-like reward mechanisms for distributed search is fundamentally flawed and unusable, but both the problem and solution needs to be refined a bit more.
I don't think we do. We just prefer to put our trust in algorithms and verifiable data sources. It's not like Google et al are the pinnacle of altruism, there have been cases where the promoted results are faked copies of the actual site you want to visit, fooling less computer savvy users to install malware.
The trust is put into the code, same principle as reproducible builds. It doesn't matter where you get the source, as long as the checksum matches. This way the censor side of the problem is solved.
That leaves the spam, which isn't really solved by the big corporations either. Last time I used google I got 2-3 pages of the same auto-generated bullshit on every technical search term I tried. This could be fixed by having the main index limited to trusted sites at the expense of discovering new content. The latter can be handled by opt-in indexes. If the goal is to index everything users could have their own filters for sites they don't want.
If you really want to spice it up allow me to maintain my own query function (dangerous and potential exploit yes) that I send to the nodes and I can handle my own ranking.
There's nothing that makes a distributed index more unsafe than one run by Google. If every query picks 2 random nodes and compares the results I would trust that query more than current Google execs opinions of what I'm allowed to see.
It's cool shit, you should really look into it.
The monetization is a nut to crack yes, but Kagi works as a paywalled search engine. Otherwise just serve ads like all the rest already do? Tried and proven model, and in this solution they could be very transparent as there's no corporation behind trying to dupe the users for clicks to maximize profits. I even see the possibility for a hybrid model, don't like ads? Pay for the compute with your own coins.
The value comes from the network, trust and use-case. It doesn't have to be a new coin.