“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,”
he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight.
“What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t
have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed
when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it
necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his
door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with
it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s
money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik
In addition to the above, I'd point out that there's already a massive literature of ways to take supposedly anonymous metadata and derive a probable identity from it - and the system described in the article would have vastly more information at its disposal than any of the intelligence agencies could DREAM of currently...
That code-formatted excerpt is hard to read on mobile due to the narrower page. Here it is without the spaces at the start of each line:
“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,”
he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight.
“What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t
have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed
when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it
necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his
door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with
it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s
money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
Then again, if there was a demand for that, I could imagine people using AI-driven "persona obfuscators" : )
Applications generating behavioral noise around you so as to confuse the tracking systems as much as possible, and protect some degree of privacy. If you can't keep your information private, get them to choke on an abundance of garbage information
The point is, it's always a permanent race between sword and shield
I used to hear this kind of thing from the fanatical free-market libertarians behind Xanadu. (Xanadu, the pre-WWW web system envisioned by Ted Nelson. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu.) Twenty years later, it hasn't changed much, except it now uses Bitcoin as a buzzword.
Bitcoin is a terrible system for micropayments. The overhead is high, since every node has to find out about every payment and you have to pay a fee to a miner. Confirmation times are a big problem. (Accepting zero-confirmation payments doesn't work, as Satoshi Dice found out the hard way.) Yeah, there are all those fancy tree-based schemes to reduce the data being transferred around, but none of them work yet.
Meanwhile, anyone knowing the whereabouts of "Big Vern", the CEO of Cryptsy, the Bitcoin exchange, is requested to contact the Silver Law Firm. The CEO and most of the assets are missing. "Big Vern" has blamed "hackers". Some people believe him.
I could barely make it through reading this. Only someone who has never gone to bed hungry would think that a world of constant commerce was a good thing. This isn't what life is actually about. Not even close. Commerce is an enabler. It isn't the ends its just a means, and a limited one at that. Honestly, I found this future disgusting.
That doesn't mean I don't find block chain tech interesting...but this was crazy.
Market based economy can be very good for development and efficiency. However it also has many negative effects, that even can prevent the two advantages from happening. Especially for normal consumers it leads to decision fatigue. Sadly nobody wants to reduce the free market anymore even at the places where we know that the negative effects outweigh the positive. As soon as you bring that up some people will proclaim that you're wanting a dictatorship like soviet russia.
Decision fatigue is IMO the number 1 reason these ideas wouldn't work. Imagine making 5 decisions about micro transactions worth fractions of a cent before you even got to work, while shaking off sleep in the morning. You would go insane.
Also, the reliability of the hardware and software. Sometimes my Macbook or iPhone won't connect to a router as expected. Why would I need a bitcoin enabled alarm clock when a low tech solution will also work?
They would've picked much better examples...blockchains are a solution in search of a problem still I think. Voting is one area I think it could have a big impact.
It's noteworthy that most of these things go directly against the grain of how we know people behave when we can afford it.
Metering is typically seen as inferior to un-metered services, to the point that people often happily overpay to avoid having to think about metering.
I pay for unlimited access to a bunch of movie channels. I pay for un-metered internet. I pay for travel cards so my public transport costs are un-metered, and so on.
Likewise, when I've had cleaners, having the hassle of thinking about paying the right amount each week and ensuring holiday cover etc. made us go with an agency with a fixed fee and set up a standing order.
To me, they've described a dystopia that I would pay to avoid: E.g. I'd rather pay that lawnmower repair shop a premium to be the intermediary and provide however much service necessary and give me a single point of contact, than having to deal with whether or not that lawnmower that claims to have cut my grass actually did it and whether it was necessary, and deal with conflicts (what if two of them both claim to have done the job because one of those developers who bid on contracts to do updates found a way of making it lie about the work it'd done?)
So to me, almost of these examples are telling me that Crowley is, if not poor, then at least earning little enough to be stuck in a consumer hell that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
The thing that's always bothered me about blockchain based reputation systems is that it becomes a wild west.
Imagine if the credit rating system (FICO score in the US) allowed anyone anonymously to put negative credit entries on anyone else's credit rating with thousands of sock-puppet accounts...
I'm sure there's ways around it if some central governing authority issues unique reputation blockchain wallets to each individual person on birth, and they're not easily forged, but centralizing control of the blockchain is against the philosophy of most blockchain early adopters, and it would leave the reputation blockchain able to be tampered with, because now the central authority could create sock-puppets to trash the reputation of anyone that it doesn't get along with.
The only way to prevent these attacks is to force somebody to provide something of value to vote in the reputation system. That something of value could be energy (proof of work), time, money, their own reputation, tokens from a fixed wallet (just kicking the can down the road), or many other things.
The "Sybil attack" on reputation-based systems isn't the only one worth worrying about. Another one is incentives - some people may be very strongly driven to harm another person's reputation (see http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-benjamin-wey/ for example).
You've just described the American electorate. People get elected largely on the basis of who gets enough money and marketing. Big companies and wealthy individuals outspend most of voting America combined. So, elected officials work for them instead. Overtime, result was a one sided, rigged econkmy benefiting the rich and elites almost exclusively that we call a plutonomy.
In other words, what you propose is very dangerous and needs more review/revision to trust.
Having it cost credits or tokens would just mean the wealthy or powerful can trash the reputation of others.
Yes, the incentives you talk about are really the reasons why someone would want to trash your reputation. Some people get angered by simply getting cut off in traffic, and imagine a crazy person being able to trash your reputation because they didn't like the way you looked at them...
Cool little story. I really like speculative fiction like this.
The only part that is too far-fetched is "A lawnmower repair shop down the street builds these mowers and provides them for free.". Why would they build and provide them for free? Surely they would lease them to the local governance body using automatic, demand based bidding and negotiation.
Other than that, very cool. Though I fully expect these comments to be filled with people discussing how this future sounds terrible, entirely missing the point of the story (which was to speculate and discuss novel models of payment, ownership and reputation enabled by blockchains, not to provide an exhaustive exploration of possible futures enabled by blockchain technology).
>>Though I fully expect these comments to be filled with people discussing how this future sounds terrible
I didn't find it terrible. I found it hilarious, because the story reads like a satirical mockery of blockchain technology. That's what I gathered from the part where Crowley opens his mouth and his TV says "FOOD ACQUISITION FACE DETECTED".
I liked the idea. Leasing them to some kind of intermediary partially defeats the purpose of what decentralized paying tech enables. The bidding and negotiation will happen naturally as any 14 year old hacker may put out their mowers to run around cutting grass for paying customers, prices will act accordingly.
The problem today is that taking payments electronically via the banking system is a bureaucratic hassle in terms of getting a suitable business account and getting set up as a merchant etc. It doesn't require a blockchain or bitcoin, but it is a way of lowering the barrier.
I found most of the examples entirely unconvincing, though.
I love bitcoin and think that blockchains as a format have potential, but they are not the end all be all and this story is basically a parody of bitcoin enthusiasts.
> Because Crowley likes to take long, hot showers in the morning, he used to run out of hot water.
In the UK, metering gas, and by extension hot water (since most hot water here is supplied via gas boilers) is often used to illustrate poverty, as if you regularly have problems with your gas bill you can get a coin operated metered gas supply.
I immediately assumed that Crowley is poor.
And this is the problem with a lot of these: They are presented as solving a problem, but many of them are solving problems that are only problems for those less likely to be able to afford the solution.
The solution often involves outsourcing fixing problems to someone else. E.g. the periods I've had a cleaner, we've always insisted on going through an agency even though it's substantially more expensive, because it means never having to think about holiday cover or illness cover or finding a replacement if the current one proves to be unreliable or do a poor job.
Almost the entire thing to me read to me as written by someone lacking understanding of what services they can buy right now, via service providers that deliver substantial value by insulating you from hassle.
The house sale being perhaps the most prominent example. The colored coin bit implies a total lack of understanding for the amount of legal hassles involved. At the very least you would need a way to force a transfer to be able to deal with situations where a transfer has been done improperly.
But secondly they seem to imply that the closing costs are primarily about transferring title. When I last bought a house, the vast majority was rather about drawing up a mutually agreeable contract covering exactly what deficiencies were known and agreed on, and what should stay or not etc. None of those goes away just because you have a way of doing a title transfer.
I believe there can be plenty of value to be had from Bitcoin. The ability to start taking payments without having to wait to get bank accounts and merchant accounts etc. sorted out is fantastic. And some of the things described may have profound effects. But the examples in this story mostly seems poorly thought out to me.
In fact, you will find plenty of examples like this explicitly used in scifi through the years as part of the designs of various dystopic settings, and often to illustrate the downsides of poverty in a hyper-commercialised environment - some of the first things people tend to spend money on when their earnings power increases is buying themselves free of having everything metered.
One of the (IMO many) problems with using coloured coins for property ownership is that the real world is necessarily messy.
Disputes happen frequently, houses are seized, not bought outight, people die and ownership needs to be switched, any other number of scenarios might occur... on the flip side, what happens when a wallet containing the house is compromised? When you start to go down this line of thought, delegation to some authority begins to make sense...
To be honest, I found that every one of the interactions in the story has a similar set of limitations or problems. The whole thing reads as though it's been written by someone who's never actually been out in the world and interacted with people. Every one of the points can be pretty much countered with the same "OK, but what if something goes wrong with the transaction, or if someone wants to act in bad faith?"
To me this is the biggest fundamental flaw with unregulated cryptocurrencies - there are already a significant number of bad actors who are stealing coins but no "fix" (indeed this is by design) - other than calling the victims idiots and suggesting they act differently next time.
Unfortunately in the author's world, you're broke, homeless, and in every other way possible, SOL.
