From: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 6 Dec 1998 08:45:31 +0800
To: ravage@EINSTEIN.ssz.com
Subject: Re: (eternity) cost metrics
In-Reply-To: <199812052047.OAA31186@einstein.ssz.com>
Message-ID: <199812060026.AAA28211@server.eternity.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Jim Choate writes:
> Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> wrote:
> > I think a better deciding factor of which files remain and which don't
> > is hard, anonymous ecash.  [...]
> 
> There is some window for abuse in this method. It allows a well endowed
> entity to bias the information available. 

The alternatives, such as say one vote per person have problems too.
Perhaps one person cares greatly about the issue and spends the one
vote posting pro-X information (for some issue X), and the other
person hardly cares at all, but has some slight bias against issue X
so spends one vote posting anti-X information.  Now we have ignored
this difference in scale.

Cash allows you to measure the scale.

Perhaps an in-between voting metric might be percentage of individuals
wealth.  But then this also is unfair because a pennyless dole sponger
could dump 50% of his wealth on an issue on a whim, and the person who
has mega bucks may have worked hard to have the money to help
disseminate information about some issue Y he believes passionately
in.

So straight cash seems I think to be a good metric.

Note also my earlier comment that I view an important eternity
objective to be preventing negative votes on data availability.  You
can only disseminate more, say contradictory, information not remove
information.  You can attempt to disseminate more copies (make
available with higher redundancy, and fund faster download) perhaps,
but this does not drown out the other information.

Filtering and rating services should ensure that just because there
are a lot of copies of naff software my mega-corp M out there, it
won't in anyway reduce your access to quality open source software,
nor slow you down in finding it neatly cataloged by use by your
quality open source software rating service.

If you worry that mega-corp M will buy all available space at a
premium, there is an easy solution: if mega-corporation M decides to
flood eternity space with their inferior software, one can combat them
by getting into the eternity servers business, taking their money and
using the profits to disseminate quality open source software, or
simply to profit from their gullibility.

> There is also the question of data degredation, in the sense of
> worth, over time versus the archival/historical worth of the
> data.

As long as people are interested to keep the data around in low
priority low access speed storage they will pay for this to happen.

If they don't care -- well they don't care.  People who do care can
fund it, and evangelize to others on the merits of doing this.  No one
has any special right to force others to pay for keeping junk around
for the sheer historical sake of completeness of it.

Adam