On 2012-11-01 7:18 PM, CodesInChaos wrote:
I believe there is a number of systems that can profit from monetary
incentives. I'm mainly interested in TOR like anonymization/relay
systems, but file sharing is another system where incentives would be
useful. But getting it right isn't trivial.
1) Plain bitcoin doesn't support micro-transactions
2) Plain bitcoin isn't untraceable (essential for use in an anonymous system.
Need fully automated fractional reserve banks, which use bitcoin as
gold. Accounts are, of course, public keys, banknotes are chaumian tokens.
3) You need to figure out an appropriate price. In the simplest case
the uploaders simply send to the offer with the highest payment
attached.
That just offloads the problem of price discovery somewhere else in the
system.
Price discovery is hard.
Price discovery in micro transactions needs to be substantially
automated - at both ends. People will not invest the effort needed for
manual price discovery.
Bad, incompetent, or buggy price discovery has killed every previous
effort to solve this group of problems.
Price information is probabilistic, thus a price discovery mechanism has
to support a full Bayesian model, recursive probabilities estimating the
probability that the true probability is p, performing maximum entropy
modeling. This is the sort of work that gets very smart engineers hired
at astronomical salaries by wall street.
4) You need to ensure cheating is unprofitable. In particular running
with debt incurs a loss greater than the debt.
5) If you give incentives for uploaders/relays that can lead to
perverse incentives for people who share metadata. For example if you
manage to give a client only collaborating uploaders, those might be
able to set a price far above market level.
This is a real life problem, for which there are real life solutions. A
friend tells me "As soon as they see your nose, the prices will go up by
ten times. Let me negotiate for you, and then you appear with the money."
He negotiates, then calls me in. Upon seeing my race, some of the
people he has negotiated with have fits at his lack of racial loyalty.
So, end users just have to get multiple independent sources of metadata.
And, to motivate them to get multiple independent sources of metadata,
those that don't have to get scammed.
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