On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 03:38:35PM +0200, Wladimir wrote:
> Foremost I like their goal of making it easier for people to start
> working on bitcoin applications, but then they quote something like
>
> “I felt like I’d enter the weekend with a really great idea [for an
> application] but I’d spend three weekends just trying to get these
> [bitcoin] nodes running in a way that was useful for my application.”
>
> It's really too bad they're investing all that money in builiding yet
> another in-the-cloud service, instead of in making the P2P tools
> easier to use in the first place.
>
> All - I guess? - because they need to build toll gates and 'own'
> infrastructure to monetize on it. Which in turn creates structural
> risk because everyone will rely on their information and servers. I
> think people will eventually realize that the old way just doesn't
> work here anymore.

You know, ironically the even older old way - selling licenses for
proprietary software - is probably preferable to having all your funds
and service tied to servers in the "cloud". At least with proprietary
software you control the uptime and reliability, and nothing stops the
vendor from selling licenses to proprietary software whose sourcecode is
publicly available either - businesses tend to follow licensing
practices honestly due to the high cost of getting caught.

Heck, that could be a hilarious business model for libbitcoin: AGPL with
no linking exemptions, but if you don't want to make your services
sourcecode public you can buy a license from unsystem.

--
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org