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« on: January 11, 2014, 08:33:27 pm »
I'm puzzled by the apparent implicit expectation that if something is not protected by copyfarleft than it can pave a way for patent trolls etc. A Public Domain Dedication of something which could potentially be patented, but which is not; this would preclude patent trolls from patenting any such thing as the Public Domain Dedication claims and proves as its original invention, and which is already so freely and widely either used or planned for use that nobody could reasonably claim exclusive right to it. There is substantial precident that shows this. The many attempted patents which you describe by e.g. Apple and J.P. morgan are laughed out of the U.S. patent office, because the patent office (surprisingly and wisely!) sees that they are shadows of ideas that nobody can patent because they are already in wide and free use. It's like trying to trademark a number (the way Intel tried to trademark the number 8088, and were laughted at for it). J.P. Morgan's pretentious digital currency patents have been rejected by the Patent office more than a hundred times. So also will Apple's (even if they apply a hundred times). Or, if not, the public has a hella case to bring against Apple, and Apple will not ultimately win, provided the public is willing and able to fight.
About value being made "out of thin air," of course I do not literally mean that the value is made out of thin air. What I do mean is that its a model which can create value with surprising ease--after the train gets going. Of course it takes a terrible lot of sweat, coal and steam to get the train going.
Also, I'm hearing two things at odds:
1) We must protect our investment from abuses e.g. patent trolls or large enterprises who would simply step in and poach our efforts, running off with so much value while giving nothing back.
2) Giving ten percent to the folks who back an enterprise from the get-go is "pittance," so nobody has any reason to do the wrong thing (to not give that ten percent).
Well, if nobody has any reason not to do the right thing, why should we contractually oblige them to?
I believe I am arguing for benevolent anarchism--yes, there are no rules other than that you hope others will do the right thing, because they obviously have no compelling reasons not to. It is an implied contract: I trust you not to mess with me, and I will freely exchange ideas and efforts with you for so long as it seems to me apparent that you will hold by this obligation which is so obvious that yes, of course I formally ask you to do what's right . . . but how do we always know what's right or best? What is right or best can change with circumstances; even drastically.
And what about drastic, unexpected changes? What necesittates benevolent anarchism is precisely the uncertainty which is underscored by the contradictions in your comments. One minute, your comments center on concern about people doing the wrong thing, and the next minute, you emphasize that they clearly have no reason to do the wrong thing--they only have reasons to do the right thing.
Well, which is it?
I think we don't know (and hence we vascillate on the question) because we don't yet know whether the Social Contract we propose to form is even the ideal contract. This technology and social engineering (and it really is social engineering) is so new and so novel that nobody could possibly predict what will come of it. It therefore needs to have a social setting which is so very flexible as to allow people to alter the rules for whatever benevolent purposes they may deem necessary (and which they may be able to persuade others are necessary). I challenge even your assertion that we know what will necessarily protect and best promote our investment, and that approach X will work while approach Y will not.
Now, maybe I've run into a self-contradiction here; in that I don't know whether benevolent anarchism will work; or whether there's any guarantee that it will work: can I really say it will work and a Social Contract won't?
No, I can't--but the difference is that benevolent anarchism admits this and, I'm concerned, a Social Contract . . . might try to hedge about that; to say "we are sure this set of rules will work."
No, we are not sure this will work.
But we do hope it will.
I do not like a proposed contract because I believe that in an absolutely free/frictionless commerce, if the majority happens to generally foster good will and make prudent decisions by the merits of their own instincts and conscience, the good majority will win, no matter what anyone with ill-will (or simply foolish will) may try to impose on them. Again, that's assuming or hoping that the majority generally favors what happens to be objectively good for everyone. If the majority picks otherwise, if the majority happens to be foolish or ill-willed, we're toast, and yes, that's chaotic/unruly anarchism. But if the majority makes poor choices, then there is not any system that can make it otherwise, period.
This is way too young and way too wild to say with any certainty what contracts will best predict a bright future and which contracts will not. I therefore propose the contract of maximal risk, because I want the potential maximal rewards of risking that others will do right by the community (really the world), which I hope and believe they will.
But I won't pretend that I could protect myself from people disappointing me, whatever set of rules I would impose in whatever circumstance--circmustances that can change so wildly that I may have a hard time recollecting next year why I wanted a certain set of now-discarded rules.
Consider this scenario (and this is one I've actually been ruminating on, and I would love to make this DAC); suppose somebody invents a DAC: "ID Squatter DAC," which somehow manages to be able to both generate and hide private keys from everyone, including itself, until some certain condition is met. And suppose that the private keys it hides happen to be for Keyhotee IDs which it automatically mined using GPUs, so that it mines ten thousand highly desirable IDs in a week, and then squats on those IDs, only dispensing the private keys for them, securely, to the highest bidders, such that the DAC itself can guarantee that it does not know the private keys and that only the highest bidder can know the keys (e.g. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, famous Hollywood director X, famous politician Y). Moreover, ID Squatter DAC also does all this from its own blockchain which is independent of Protoshares, let's call it HorkedIDShares, and this independent blockchains shares operates similarly to the BitShares/BitBTC exchange; HorkedIDShares can be used as collateral investment in a seperate exchange blockchain, ProtoSquatter, which somehow finds a way to deprecate the value of ProtoShares unless people pay seriously high "registration" fees to ID Squatter DAC. Now we've got a market that completely disrupts the foundational assumption that nobody would want to bid on Keyhotee IDs, in the same way that (supposedly) nobody wants to bid on an email addresses. (We've also got a DAC that it would be very tempting to sell for a few billion dollars when evil parties realize how much power they could abuse with this DAC.) We have something monetized which we never imagined could or should be monetized.
Are we sure about our assumption that unique and desirable Keyhotee IDs could have no further value than the face value we assign to them based on our assumptions about how they will be used or function? Are we sure they can't be used in some very unexpected ways that might make them more highly valuable--and therefore purchaseable--than we might have thought?
Now, what do we do with the promise that we'd give Keyhotee Founders precedence in profits--when some weird bloke with his insance DAC came along and smashed our expectations to smithereens, by suddenly making a "killing" on something--free Keyhotee IDs--which he found a way to seriously exploit in ways we couldn't have guessed?
What do we do with our entire technological and investment infrastructure if market innovations prove to turn our foundational assumptions on their head?
What we do is found the whole enterprise on an implied contract which can be as drastically flexible as drastic unpredicatability may warrant: A Public Domain Dedication, or benevolent anarchy.
(And let the Founders figure out how to increase the value of their Founder ID proceeds which have been seriously devalued by ID Squatter DAC.)