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Internet Bandwidth to Become a Global Currency?
ClimateCrisis writes to tell us that internet bandwidth could become a global currency under a new model of e-commerce developed by researchers from Delft University of Technology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "The application, available for free download at http://TV.seas.harvard.edu, is an enhanced version of a program called Tribler, originally created by the Dutch collaborators to study video file sharing. 'Successful peer-to-peer systems rely on designing rules that promote fair sharing of resources amongst users. Thus, they are both efficient and powerful computational and economic systems,' David Parkes, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard said. 'Peer-to-peer has received a bad rap, however, because of its frequent association with illegal music or software downloads.' The researchers were inspired to use a version of the Tribler video sharing software as a model for an e-commerce system because of such flexibility, speed, and reliability."
How can a peer to peer system running in your house provide bandwidth to anyone else? You are a bandwidth sink... you're not part of a route to anywhere (for good reason). Any files sent to or "through" your house have to travel down your internet connection and then go right out the same line. Thus, this becomes the stupidest thing I heard of today.
One of the requirements of money is that it is standardised across the economy. Internet bandwidth fails at so many points here, and that isn't the only problem.c teristics
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Economic_chara
1. Write an article and give it a sensational headline.
2. Post on slashdot
3. Link to a program with the option to download.
4. ?????
5. Profit!!!
Indeed. Bandwidth may be a commodity, for instance, but in no way can it be a 'currency'.
Mark Twain: "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."
The advantage of currency is that it allows getting past the inefficient mechanism of barter. Bandwidth can be bartered, but it can't be stored, for instance. Unused bandwidth is forever wasted. The only way to prevent it being wasted is for someone to use it.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
We spent all that effort mining the gold, and then we put 95% of it back underground intentionally!
Yes, this is one of the reasons economists don't like a gold standard: you have to hold a lot of gold out of production, just to use as money. (The other major reasons are that it imposes gold's price volatility on the entire economy, and that it restricts liquidity.)
Now, if there is a genuine, catastrophic financial collapose, you are correct that gold will not immediately have value. People will be most concerned with necessitities, so canned food, pure water, farming/hunting equipment, and guns will probably be more likely currencies in the immediate wake. Then, cigarettes. Then, people will start accepting gold. But remember: if you *really* think there's going to be such a collapse, you absolutely must physically possess the gold on your person or in your home. Gold in a faraway bank's vault ain't gonna cut it, since they'll just take your stuff and run.
Oh, and: dada21's spiel about the gold standard in 3...2...1...
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I just want to know how I spend my meager 768kbps on food, clothing, and shelter....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And trade with money is just barter by another name. I agree that bandwidth doesn't make a particularly good currency.
Deleted
Yeah, clearly it was their bandwidth commoditization scheme that ruined them. Not the massive corruption, embezzling and outright theft that went on.