It Was Ten Years Ago Today

Ten years ago today I posted Economies of Scale in Peer-to-Peer Networks . My fundamental insight was:

• The income to a participant in a P2P network of this kind should be linear in their contribution of resources to the network.
• The costs a participant incurs by contributing resources to the network will be less than linear in their resource contribution, because of the economies of scale.
• Thus the proportional profit margin a participant obtains will increase with increasing resource contribution.
• Thus the effects described in Brian Arthur's Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy will apply, and the network will be dominated by a few, perhaps just one, large participant.

In the name of blatant self-promotion, below the fold I look at how this insight has held up since.

Warning: Slow Blogging Ahead

Vicky & I have recently acquired two major joint writing assignments with effective deadlines in the next couple of months. And I am still on the hook for a Wikipedia page about the late Dewayne Hendricks. This is all likely to reduce the flow of posts on this blog for a while, for which I apologize.

Dewayne Hendricks RIP

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Dewayne Hendricks, my friend of nearly four decades, passed away last Friday at age 74. His mentors were Buckminster Fuller and Paul Baran. He was a pioneer of wireless Internet connectivity, a serial entrepreneur, curator of an influential e-mail list, and for the last 30 years on the organizing committee of the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop.

For someone of his remarkable achievements he has left very little impression on the Web. An example is his Linkedin profile. Below the fold I collect the pieces of his story that I know or have been able to find from his other friends. If I can find more I will update this post. Please feel free to add information in the comments.

Lie Down WIth Dogs, Get Up WIth Fleas

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It is generally quite difficult to upset the denizens of a wretched hive of scum and villainy by further besmirching their reputation, but recently the Trump family has succeeded.

Below the fold I explain how they did it, and why the denizens of the wretched hive are not happy.

"Owning" e-books

The basic aspiration of the LOCKSS Program when we started a quarter century ago was to enable libraries to continue their historical mission of collecting, preserving, and providing readers with access to academic journals. In the paper world libraries which subscribed to a journal owned a copy; in the digital world they could only rent access to the publisher's copy. This allowed the oligoply academic publishers to increase their rent extraction from research and education budgets.

LOCKSS provided a cheap way for libraries to collect, preserve and provide access to their own copy of journals. The competing e-journal preservation systems accepted the idea of rental; they provided an alternate place from which access could be rented if it were denied by the publisher.

Similarly, libraries that purchased a paper book owned a copy that they could loan to readers. The transition to e-books meant that they were only able to rent access to the publisher's copy, and over time the terms of this rental grew more and more onerous.

Below the fold I look into a recent effort to mitigate this problem.

2024 Optical Media Durability Update

Six years ago I posted Optical Media Durability and discovered:

Surprisingly, I'm getting good data from CD-Rs more than 14 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 12 years old. Your mileage may vary.

Here are the subsequent annual updates:

• 2019
• 2020
• 2021
• 2022
• 2023

It is time once again for the mind-numbing process of feeding 45 disks through the readers to verify their checksums, and yet again this year every single MD5 was successfully verified. Below the fold, the details.

Astroturfing

I seem to be stuck on the theme of cryptocurrency gaslighting with two weeks ago More Cryptocurrency Gaslighting and one week ago Greenwashing. Now I look at cryptocurrency gaslighting in the political arena, where it is termed astroturfing:

it is defined as the process of seeking electoral victory or legislative relief for grievances by helping political actors find and mobilize a sympathetic public, and is designed to create the image of public consensus where there is none. Astroturfing is the use of fake grassroots efforts that primarily focus on influencing public opinion and typically are funded by corporations and political entities to form opinions.

Donald Trump, 2019

Currently, the crypto-bros have poured money into primaries, defeated several incumbents deemed to be insufficiently crypto-friendly, and have accumulated an immense war-chest for November's general election. This pot of gold was enough to turn Trump from crypto-skeptic to telling Maria Bartiromo:

Who knows, maybe we’ll pay off our $35 trillion dollar [national debt], hand them a little crypto check, right? We’ll hand them a little Bitcoin and wipe away our $35 trillion

Below the fold I discuss the gaslighting the cryptosphere is using in their massive attempt to purchase "regulatory clarity", and what the scale of this investment suggests about the profits they expect to garner if it succeeds.