The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

The obvious benefit of something like Filecoin is that you don't have to trust people to host your data. However vile it may seem to some, if they want to get paid they have to provably host it. And it's fragmented enough that you can't go after everyone who has only part of a series of forbidden bits.

I think there's a market for impossible to take down information. The competitors aren't the Amazons of the world, more like whomever is hosting Scihub.

>To wit, there are massive redwood forests that occur in nature that are just one cloned genome. These are reproductively successful on timespans many times a human life.

That there is a massive monoculture in an area that was an extreme desert until as little as 5000 years ago makes my point that a monoculture is more efficient in the short term. A human life is a terrible stick to measure geological time, one might as well measure success in the stock market using an atomic clock.

I have not defined what a monoculture is because it should be obvious by the name. Likewise for ecology.

>Is Amazon itself a monoculture? Is that relevant?

Yes. And because monocultures are prone to sudden collapses.

>Is enforcement of law by the state a monoculture?

Depends on the number of states. Depends on the diversity of laws between the states.

>There's a lot of evidence to suggest that centralized information management entities are actually much more robust in the long term than a loose confederation of peers.

The fact that we don't observe this in nature, or that the few times we do observe it is either before or after a mass extinction event should tell you that evidence has too narrow a time horizon.

Yeah, I think we can agree that there will probably be lots of interesting innovation in the distribution of illicit material. However, for an information technology to truly shape our culture, it needs a plausible path to go mainstream. None of the champions of current P2P crypto storage systems are claiming their focus will be on the distribution of said illicit materials. They all claim it will revolutionize transmission and storage of totally ordinary data, too.

My vote goes on "Hold my beer"

The points made in this article remind me of how CD-ROM was adopted in the early nineties.

Once upon a time CD-ROM was new and with Windows for Workgroups you could share a given CD-ROM across a network. If you needed to install $SOFTWARE on machine B you could theoretically put the CD-ROM in machine A's drive and install from there. The person on machine A might even put the right disk in for you.

Given that CD-ROM drives cost a reasonable amount of money at the time and probably went at 3x speed, you would have a financial incentive to specify machine B without the CD-ROM, same with machine C and machine D. In so doing you could save enough money to buy machine E (or at least the monitor for it).

Nobody went down this route, in offices or in education. In education settings there were financial incentives to save money plus tech savvy staff on hand to make it work smoothly. There was no 'status' value in having the CD-ROM attached.

Everyone was okay about sharing the same printer but not the same CD-ROM drive.

You would not even need the CD-ROM as often as a printer in those days. The publishing industry was in its infancy and you only really had install media. Writeable media was a long way off. Surely it would have made sense to have your MS-Office install media or 'Encarta' available to all, on the network which was faster than the CD-ROM drives of the era?

Yet this never happened.

Instead every machine was specified with the CD-ROM. Disks were passed around much like floppies were. Nobody network-shared their CD-ROM drives. Yet all that was needed was a 'right click' and 'share'. The financial aspect in doing so was not a micro-payment in some alt-coin it was proper $$$ saved from not having to purchase another CD-ROM drive.

In time the $999 CD-ROM drives went to 4x and cost nearer $200, then they became 52x and cost nearer $100 to eventually become the $20 things bundled with every machine.

When writeable CD-ROMS and DVDs came along the storage space was vast compared to HDDs of the time yet still there was no network sharing of the things, everyone had their own disk in their own machine. Sure there were exceptions - network machines of the time - but these were the exceptions.

For the same reasons of capitalism and human nature I suspect that file-sharing-by-altcoin will fail. Moore's Law makes 'common sense' arguments for file sharing in a P2P way where you rent out your disk not make sense. Layer on top the fact that every alt-coin is a scam-coin and you know that P2P file-coins are only for the true believers.