Tim May wrote: >There are bidding protocols where N parties make a firm bid for some >service. I think the commercial instantiation of this is ubid.com, by >the way. Usually these bids are for real products, with delivery to >the N winning bidders. >Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources. Voluntary >payments usually dont do well, for the usual game-theoretic and >human psychology reasons: > "I was planning to send in my $5 contribution...maybe next week." Do you mean this objection to apply to ubid.com also ? ubid.com enforces payment. Actually so does loudvoices.com. Money is transfered to an escro like account upfront. If enought people sign up for a thing - it is disbursed otherwise it is returned to all users accounts. > "Why pay anything for something that is free?" The idea is that IF you know up front that 100,000 people want something to happen, there are no free-riders (digging up some economics). Everyone pays or it dosent happen. > "You expect me to bid $1 so that a band will deliver an MP3 in six >months? Get outta here." (Lack of robust dcash and escrow services, >unenforceability of contracts...) What if a band releases low quality stuff on radio / mp3. Then after some time says to fans - if 100,000 pay $1 then we will release it high quality. > amount of money put upfront is trivial (in the MP3 example cited >above, collecting $100K, even if unlikely, is also a trivial amount >for a major band to think about...barely pays for studio time, etc., >etc.). Yeah for now. What if napster / freenet do seriously change things. Metallica at least seems to think it is a possibility. What if they cant stop it. How will they get paid. This is better than nothing. > "I like buying my music anonymously...I heard that Metallica plans >to get the records of all those who offered money to Siliconica and >sue them." (Absent robust dcash many schemes fall apart.) I dont understand this - they are trying to stop another band from receiving funds this way? Or you mean trying to stop giving funds to a napster like entity? >(And certainly no one is going to fall for this logic: "A young >student in Finland is asking for donations for an alternate operating >system he plans to develop. If enough people send him $1 hell >deliver something he plans to call "Linux" in a few years.") How about with decss. Having a Decss defense fund for all those being attacked. People seem to at least be interested. If 100,000 people commit $10 would you be willing to be one of them? This way you dont feel like you are one of the few people who gave. >Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources. Resources may >be kept scarce by metering them suitably. Crypo allows some secrets >to be kept secret and/or metered properly. Crypto also makes some >secrets widely available, untraceably. Do you think watermarking can work ? Maybe if they had controlled hardware like that proposed crypto thing inside intel chips it could be done. ------------------------------------------------------------- Sent with AnonEmail at http://anonymouse.home.pages.de/
