I’m glad some people on the reddit thread mentioned Freenet. That’s a project that sadly doesn’t get near the publicity it deserves.
Bold new opportunities for botnets to monetize your stolen electricity!
Bold new opportunities for your privacy to go out the window and your personal data to be sold to the highest bidder!
Having already become a William Gibson novel, the world is now about to become a Charlie Stross novel.At least it’s not the fucking Laundry universe…
their proposals are substantially weakened if you don’t accept the efficient market hypothesis.
…which is a really crappy predictor of actual economic results - but it keeps the math simple, so that’s good.
You’re Blaming The Money again. I can tell…
Their proposal is also substantially weakened by the fact that instead of some crypto to underpin the whole system, there is only a yawning gap.
The central concepts of “proof of bandwidth” and “bitcloud cryptography law” seem to be little more than the names.
The white-paper describes a lot of superficial things, like the syntax of messages and even a homebrew compression scheme (!), but the actual lynchpin to make the whole scheme work is missing.
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.
I’m pleased to see from these comments that Bitcloud is at the “ridicule” stage - looking forward to the fight with Big Corporate Web. 
It is a neat idea. If it isn’t feasible, it is for a technical reason rather than market blaming. Markets work. There is a reason why every nation in the world does the vast majority of its resource allocation through markets. It is by far the most efficient way to transfer value and resources around. This isn’t to suggest that we need to worship at the alter of markets. Markets might be the most efficient way to transferring around resources, but if trying to reach perfect efficiency isn’t your goal, markets are not going to work. Giving grandpa his social security check isn’t an exercise in efficient resource allocation, it is an exercise in basic humanity. Markets suck at maximizing happiness, health, equality, and all sorts of things.
…which is why when I see that they are shooting for some sort of market based cloud storage, I don’t balk. I don’t want my government to be an amoral machine allocating resources to maximize value, but I am pretty content with an utterly amoral cloud storage service. Personally, I think the idea is brilliant if it is technically feasible and secure. It reduces storage to a base resource bought in bulk that costs somewhere close to the physical cost of the storage and is mass distributed. I’ll take an amoral resource transfer system of Microsoft any day of the week. I am a bit skeptical about the technical feasibility, but in principle, it is awesome.
Just wait for the 3D printer’s dildo malware!
The android replica was already playing up…
Efficient for whoever holds those resources in the first place. For whoever has to obtain them, not so much.
I’m glad to see things like this pop up (and increasingly expect it). But, yeah, a “free market” Internet of sorts isn’t really in the spirit of a true meshnet P2P Internet system of routers that we really need. It’s almost like what Obamacare is to a true single payer system for health care.
But, as long as it sparks more discussions and get more people involved in better alternatives to our current, crappy Internet, I’m happy.
related:
http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/
Only if you promise to spend it on crack and glue.
Someone who can read code should blog and document the early stages of this. But not about the code itself, just about the people, the birth and the progress of this.
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