On 25/12/13 07:33 AM, Peter Todd wrote:
On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 11:03:31PM -0500, Benjamin Kreuter wrote:
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Moderation and spam control - both involve trusting centralized humans.
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Equally we have very suductive solutions to such distastful brushes with humanity in the form of throwing proof-of-work, or better yet transferrable proof-of-work(1), at the problem. Previously known as hashcash of course, but much more usable this time around because there's actually a market for the stuff in the form of Bitcoins so attackers don't have an advantage. Of course, such pure solutions have real world drawbacks - like rich wankers flooding your forums with junk because they can afford too - but they've also never been tried in real-life so there's a lot of interest in doing just that. Who knows if it'll actually work in practice, but all the more reason to try.
Controlling groups of people and manipulating the trust and other factors by charging money is a time-honoured marketing technique. It may be that Bitcoin community hasn't tried it, but the marketing types know all about it. In the art it is called 'price discrimination' which I'm sure google knows allllll about. It works. You can even predict with some precision how it is going to work.
1) https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fidelity_bonds - Disclaimer: I invented them. Also "Just use fidelity bonds!" is a standard joke in the Bitcoin developer community, and for good reason.
There have even been studies done on how effective it is. The one I recall is selling two t-shirts, one red and one green, with one at twice the price...
Of course, this still leaves the question of how to control trust without money. Another day...
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