@Jon- The difference is that I'm keeping some of this hidden, because I'm being a selfish dick and want to pay for my kids' college and so on. Fuck me, right?

@sloth- I'll take that bet. if it's less than that, I give you $5 cash. If it's more, I'll give you $5 through this fucking thing, because I'll have won another prize. Or we could skip this and bet on whether or not you'll be using this instead of or in addition to other options you've got now (eg- Hulu, Steam, the App store, iTunes music store, etc) before the end of the year.

@WolfCoder- Awesome. You'd be a model user, it seems.

Now, I'm going back to fucking off so I can make this thing and give sloth $5. Cheers.

Right, except the coercive element normally a part of an economic system is... well, ok, there's some, but it's small, the nature of it makes almost any consequence be very low-impact, the coercion-normally present in the form of things like legal punishment for committing crimes, in real life- is a consequence of the network's structure and the decisions made individually by the rest of the network on the basis of information that gets shared.

It's not so much that it has no laws as it is that it never writes them down, so any time the system wants to 'punish' some member of the network, it has to make up new laws to create a description of what the crime is- including objective data about why it's a crime, and why a given member should be considered guilty of it- and then each member of the network is free to take any action it sees fit. It's part of a security system I'm trying to get working, of all things, that allows the network to respond to damaging behavior of its own members- and it relies on a lack of structure, both for the computers and the humans that are occasionally directing them.

edit: the fact that I'm so bad at explaining this shit is part of why I'm just building the fucking thing. reading through that again, it looks- from the outside- like there's some category error in my description of why this is sort of anarchy, but that superficial error is partially the result of some of the mind-fuck logic that's gone into this (example: categorizing humans and computers together, on the basis that both take actions and make decisions on the network) and partially the result of me being bad at explaining things.

So, on that note, off I fuck again to continue ending piracy. Cheerio!

supersloth, on 29 January 2013 - 09:59 AM, said:

More specific, then, but I'm still keeping some of this shit under wraps. For reference, the 'kill piracy' shit is a peer network that has some different assumptions about network behavior, incentives, and consequences (and their enforcement)- but you could get a pretty close idea of what it's turning out like if you pictured publishing (any kind of content) the way you do with youtube, on a system roughly comparable to maybe amazon.com or the iTunes store, and had that all referenced- but not hosted- like it is on the pirate bay's torrent and magnet files.

There's lots of other stuff, there's a couple (big!) parts I'm not mentioning, but that's kind of the environment I'm building, or at least trying to, the way you'd see it from your browser.

So I'll bet you $5 that people will (deliberately) pay for content- either their own, a friend's, or that of a stranger- when they don't have to: and/or they will give away content they own to people that need or want it but can't pay for it, and none of this will have to be prompted, initiated, or even suggested by anybody but the people giving or receiving the content or money. The capability will be there: I bet people will find it and use it without needing to, or having any incentive to.

Also, this isn't the only thing I'm doing- part of the reason it's taking so long- so my wife and kids are fine, and thanks for asking.

Anarchy!

Anarchy is very underrated, when you think about it. Well, OK, maybe not when people HERE think about it, but the remaining functional areas of my brain can't help but draw a comparison between the selfish disinterest for its fellows piranha have when they strip all digestible matter from any unfortunate cows they happen to encounter- by cooperating out of selfish self interest. It doesn't take a lot of brains, fortunately for me, to point out the same parallels in wolves pack-hunting, or thresher sharks corralling schools of fish cooperatively. Even pigeons will cooperate and mob a predator that gets too close. All of these examples of selfish "accidental altruism" are by relatively simple species- even wolves are only fractionally as socially complex as the dogs we might compare them to.

In other words, anarchy works pretty well sometimes. So couldn't we concentrate on getting the information to make good decisions to each other, and the capability to act on these, instead of making decisions as groups- at least some of the time- especially since we tend to enforce the letter but not the spirit of those decisions?

Also, @sloth, betcha $5 I can use anarchy as a tool to get people to do the right thing when they don't have to before June this year.

• How did the year go for you?
  
  Lots of bad. Some good. Apparently I am crazy, but was satisfied to discover that 'crazy' did not mean 'wrong', because the stuff I've said that sounds crazy isn't, even if the kool kids say I'm just spouting buzzwords between rants about religion.
  
  
• Did you make any goals you set?
  
  I'm close to the big one. Missed a few others and accomplished a few less then I missed.
  
  
• What did you learn that was new or exciting in the programming world?
  
  virtual machines, machine learning, random bits and pieces.
  
  
• How about in the personal life?
  
  New Baby, disowned by (terrible bitch of a) mother-in-law, became a reclusive nocturnal socially caustic caffeine-powered workaholic.
  
  
• How have you grown as a person?
  
  Shrunk, possibly, although unfortunately not my waist line. I think it will have been worth it, but it's shitty going for now.
  
  
• What did you think was the most overrated game of the year? Under rated?
  
  (laughed) I haven't been able to play new games since 2005. I have no idea what games have even come out since then, except for the mildly depressing fuck-up remixes of original games I liked before they were the franchises that I've seen advertised on youtube.
  
  That said, I'm impressed by what I've seen of the game "Wach Dogs" and will probably try to pick it up if circumstances permit.
  
  
• Would you rank this a good year or bad?
  
  Overall negative, but not by a wide margin. Had to deal with a lot of shit, dealt with most of it successfully, but the unsuccessful dealings hit hard.