On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Amir Taaki <genjix@???> wrote:
> Wlad I had people coming to me before telling me to make libbitcoin
> closed... you can have some part open but we need to "own" something.

Right, it's how society sees things. After all if you don't own
patents or enforce copyright, you're just giving things away so how do
you want to survive at all?

> For me the crazy part is the amount of resources I see thrown around.
> It's the realities of misallocation and a skewed market directly in your
> face.

It's extremely skewed indeed. One of the problems is that there
appears to be no business model for P2P infrastructure that everyone
can use, where you have no special rights to insert ads or monitor
users and sell their information.

Crowd-funding and bounties seem to be only partially useful there.
They work initially for high profile projects, but not for maintenance
in the longer run.

Then how to fund decentralized solutions? If developers have to spend
all day convincing people to crowdfund every bugfix, troubleshooting,
and small change that would be a bureaucratic nightmare.

Much easier to get big bucks by catering to VCs and build a service
that people will use for (at most) a few years after which it fades
into obscurity. Or if you're very lucky, the next monopoly. I do think
humanity as a whole would be helped much more with lasting,
standardized and decentralized infrastructure.

> I've stopped labouring under the pretension of clamboring for my rights
> and equal opportunity before the system, because the corruption is
> endemic to the soul of its operation.
> Instead seeking the liberation of markets where the power of our ideas
> can prove or disprove themselves. I only seek fair competition.

On one level competition is good to keep everyone awake, but on
another level, we also need more cooperation. Individualistic
competition results in a lot of duplication of effort - and a very
short-term memory - which you can especially see in IT, where
everything gets reinvented with a different name every few years,
little learning from lessons of history, so much lost for example when
a company goes under.

Wladimir