Granted, there is no incentive to forward transactions, but if nobody forwards transactions then the network won't work so ultimately it's in the self interest of all users to do so.
It doesn't work that way, this is a tragedy of the commons type situation.
while there is no incentive to forward the transaction (beyond stability of the network), there is also no obvious disincentive to do so as the cost is tiny (the cost of the bandwidth to forward it)
The disincentive to forward does not come from solving the current block, but from *not* solving the current block. If the current block is solved by someone else and you have withheld a transaction, you have a new opportunity to reap the transaction fee by solving the block after the current one.
To see this clearly we can take it to the extreme: suppose all transactions run through you, and you withhold all of them until you find a block yourself. Then no one else will gain any transaction fees from solving a block, and you will get all of the fees once you find a block. That's a definite advantage.
Tell me that 9/11 isn't just a cheap ripoff of a comic book from 1986.
No, as a matter of fact it was a rip-off of a novel by Tom Clancy (read the last paragraph of the plot summary).
Also there was an episode of 'The lone gunmen' (a short-lived spinoff from X-files) that aired in march 2001:
"The plot of the first episode, which aired March 4, 2001, involves a US government conspiracy to hijack an airliner, fly it into the World Trade Center and blame it on terrorists, thereby gaining support for a new profit-making war."
Qik does just that: stream your video to its site in real time as fast as your mobile connection allows you to. However, it uses a proprietary recording app to accomplish that. You can also set the movies to private/shared from within that interface, chat with your viewers, etc.
If all you got reimbursed for was the actual amount of damages, then people who commit the offences would, on average, profit, because they, on average, don't get caught all the time.
In a simple model, it seems to me that three variables factor in to the financial aspect of committing a crime: the profit from the crime, the chance of getting caught and the penalty to expect when caught. If those add up to a positive amount, you may on average expect to gain from this kind of crime. In a formula:
ProfitExpectation = Profit - ProbabilityOfBeingCaught x Penalty
ProfitExpectation > 0? Then the crime pays
Coming back to the issue of file sharing. The most conservative estimates about the number of people illegally sharing copyrighted material is in the millions at least. Only a handful of those people face penalties for it. Plugging that information into the formula above, we can argue that the penalty should be extraordinary high to counterbalance the expected profit from file sharing. ('profit' in a broad sense, not necessarily financial).
On the other hand, when the powers that be are able to increase the chance of being caught to let's say 50%, the punitive damages could be far far lower. Damages in the range of $3 per song for example, because the Profit expectation would still be negative and people would technically be deterred from file sharing just as much.
Of course this is likely a gross oversimplification of the decision-making process of a criminal mind, but i wonder if this kind of reasoning is used when establishing punitive damages for file sharing?
At least there should be someone actually listening to the bootleg before they're going to sell it by the hundreds to the audience, just to make sure that it doesn't have any faults...
If they could do this with a team of 15 guys, these could all take care of 5 minutes of the CD. But.. who will correct the errors if they find any?
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, there is no incentive to forward transactions, but if nobody forwards transactions then the network won't work so ultimately it's in the self interest of all users to do so.
It doesn't work that way, this is a tragedy of the commons type situation.
while there is no incentive to forward the transaction (beyond stability of the network), there is also no obvious disincentive to do so as the cost is tiny (the cost of the bandwidth to forward it)
The disincentive to forward does not come from solving the current block, but from *not* solving the current block. If the current block is solved by someone else and you have withheld a transaction, you have a new opportunity to reap the transaction fee by solving the block after the current one.
To see this clearly we can take it to the extreme: suppose all transactions run through you, and you withhold all of them until you find a block yourself. Then no one else will gain any transaction fees from solving a block, and you will get all of the fees once you find a block. That's a definite advantage.
Tell me that 9/11 isn't just a cheap ripoff of a comic book from 1986.
No, as a matter of fact it was a rip-off of a novel by Tom Clancy (read the last paragraph of the plot summary).
Also there was an episode of 'The lone gunmen' (a short-lived spinoff from X-files) that aired in march 2001:
"The plot of the first episode, which aired March 4, 2001, involves a US government conspiracy to hijack an airliner, fly it into the World Trade Center and blame it on terrorists, thereby gaining support for a new profit-making war."
Qik does just that: stream your video to its site in real time as fast as your mobile connection allows you to. However, it uses a proprietary recording app to accomplish that. You can also set the movies to private/shared from within that interface, chat with your viewers, etc.
If all you got reimbursed for was the actual amount of damages, then people who commit the offences would, on average, profit, because they, on average, don't get caught all the time.
In a simple model, it seems to me that three variables factor in to the financial aspect of committing a crime: the profit from the crime, the chance of getting caught and the penalty to expect when caught. If those add up to a positive amount, you may on average expect to gain from this kind of crime. In a formula:
ProfitExpectation = Profit - ProbabilityOfBeingCaught x Penalty ProfitExpectation > 0? Then the crime pays
Coming back to the issue of file sharing. The most conservative estimates about the number of people illegally sharing copyrighted material is in the millions at least. Only a handful of those people face penalties for it. Plugging that information into the formula above, we can argue that the penalty should be extraordinary high to counterbalance the expected profit from file sharing. ('profit' in a broad sense, not necessarily financial).
On the other hand, when the powers that be are able to increase the chance of being caught to let's say 50%, the punitive damages could be far far lower. Damages in the range of $3 per song for example, because the Profit expectation would still be negative and people would technically be deterred from file sharing just as much.
Of course this is likely a gross oversimplification of the decision-making process of a criminal mind, but i wonder if this kind of reasoning is used when establishing punitive damages for file sharing?
At least there should be someone actually listening to the bootleg before they're going to sell it by the hundreds to the audience, just to make sure that it doesn't have any faults... If they could do this with a team of 15 guys, these could all take care of 5 minutes of the CD. But.. who will correct the errors if they find any?
... and then use this streaming rice as a powerful debugging and monitoring tool!