It seems to me that turning web-indexing into a rewards-based crypto network is a push towards an ideal ‘globally neutral’ internet.
Has this been discussed before? What were the conclusions?
Else, is anyone interested in discussing this?
Interesting idea.
I’m not a big fan of mining. The ever increasing power consumption requirements seem to indicate that that sort of thing is not sustainable in the long run.
There seems to be no actual purpose behind all that power consumption, other than as a means of introducing new fiat currency to the pool. Web-indexing, if it consumed power and cpu time at least serves a purpose.
I definitely agree. It serves a purpose and solves the issue of biased indexing, or the future version of censorship.
In general, every single “shared computing” project would in theory benefit from this kind of incentivized strategy, be it protein folding or web indexing or AI Training.
With regards to the energy consumption, I believe personal energy usage is only irresponsible if we do not become personally involved in either producing more energy or reducing our energy intake. In general, civilization consumes more energy with every year/generation, so collectively it is only irresponsible if we neglect to research new energy collection/transformation methods.
Years ago I was involved in what I think, probably one of the first “local currency” projects in the United States, just because I happened to move to Great Barrington Massachusetts, where Berkshares “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BerkShares” were used locally as well as “Barrington Bucks” even more locally.
The local Barrington Bucks were printed notes simply run off on a regular offset printing press. Authenticity was by a couple of signatures. This “Fiat money” was introduced to the community through local farmers as I understand it. So using Barrington Bucks supported local farmers. That really gave everyone who used the money a good feeling. The atmosphere in Birkshire county Mass was generally very high spirited. Creating and maintaining this currency cost almost nothing, but locally was virtually as good as US dollars.
Anyway, I’ve often thought that there should be a crypto-currency that was introduced through productive people like farmers. Farmers are hard working productive people who deserve to have the currency introduced through them to help support them. Why not do the same with crypto-currency? It could be introduced through (Given away to) free software creators, content creators and maintainers, like the Internet Archive, Wikipedia etc. etc. which would be a kind of reward and support of their work and do away with the nonsense going on now where currency is earned by useless number crunching to do what? Nothing constructive whatsoever! just a waste of energy and a waste of processing power.
I’ve used very many free programs and services on the internet over the years and appreciate what all these programmers and content creators have made available. Generally speaking, I’ve never really been able to personally contribute to or reward any anywhere near the level they deserve, if at all.
If cryptocurrency could be used to reward productive members of the internet community for the hard work they have done and continue to do, how much better that would be than rewarding people for using their computers for solving completely senseless mathematical problems,
From what I understand, the blockchain does not require all that much processing power. “Mining” serves no real purpose other than to restrict the rate that new currency is introduced, to make it seem more valuable.
It makes no more sense and has no more real value than collecting treasure in a video game.
Yes, “a rewards-based crypto network” that actually rewards real productive “work”, the way Barrington Bucks rewarded farmers, seems like a great idea to me.
I like to play around with the idea that crypto-currencies have an actual definition of value, whereas fiat currency has a definition that is loosely based on a number of ultimately subjective matters like country stability, GDP, taxation-of-it’s-citizens-ability, military capability, access to oil, etc. On the other hand, military capability, or more specifically, the ability of a group of people to defend their interests by through diplomacy or force, is legitimately important. Being that there does not exist a crypto-country, and we are not part of it’s crypto-citizenry, we cannot have a common policing arm to defend our interests and protect our assets. Sure, X country can step in and defend it’s citizen’s digital assets, but then it is justifying taxation of those assets. I am touching a list of different topics, all worth their own essays. I digress…
Back to the YacY coin motivation, i would say the most important way that the net can get decentralized is solving search. If search gets solved in a way that resists tampering and censorship, and provides a means for a global population to be invested in this decentralized search, then the rest of the problems of decentralization begin to become small by comparison.
if I understand your point correctly, I think this is why I’ve spent so much of my time working on a kind of international, language independent, web-indexing system.
As far as I know, all of the existing ontologies or “controlled languages” intended for organizing the internet categorically or semantically (conceptually) are “longhand” language dependent.
That is, take some JSON or XML metadata. It generally looks something like:
<metadata>
<location>
<address>
<street_name>Maple Street</street_name>
<country>France</country>
<city>Paris</city>
<house_number>3726<house_number>
<postal_code>75008</postal_code>
</address>
</location>
</metadata>
Internationally this has limited usefulness. Only about 20% of the worlds population could understand this, in theory. In practice, most English speaking webpage designers would never ever bother as it is just too much work and too complicated and probably a waste of time as who knows what proprietary search engines are actually using or looking for. There are too many variations on this same theme and it is anybody’s guess what the search engines will be looking for tomorrow or if they are even using this or that metadata system today.
Personally I more or less admire the simplicity and universality of Ranganathan’s Colon Classification system.
https://www.isko.org/cyclo/colon_classification
It especially has the advantage of being language agnostic. It is equally incomprehensible to everyone in any language. If Unicode were used as a base notation symbol set, the amount of metadata that could be encoded in a relatively short character string would be infinite for all practical purposes I would think. Though some degree of human readability, or at least translatabuility into the various human languages is an important consideration.
1 Like
It is equally incomprehensible to everyone in any language.
I laughed out loud. That is quite a read. I will place it on the “very interesting but long reads”. I sometimes stay awake at night scared at the probability that the amount of data that is created every day, the reactionary data, the analysis data, and so on, will always probably never be fully categorized and classified. Just looking at the amount of stuff that I have in my house and the fact that there is not a system that simply reminds me of stuff that I have bought… impossible tasks. I digress again.
Back to YaCy coin, I wonder if any of the developers have thought about a rewards based system. I am going to try and read up on either the ethereum or bitcoin repository to see if i can somehow assess what is necessary for that to happen. Maybe there are already other projects which combine web-crawling and crypto. I hate being so far behind the curve.
I don’t really see any good reason why material posted on the internet cannot be categorized and indexed at, or in actuality, even before publication.
Most websites are marked up with some basic form of metadata before going live on the internet with at least something like <meta name = “keywords” content = “YaCy, Search Engine, Peer to peer, Forum” />
<meta name = “description” content = “YaCy, the one and only free distributed peer to peer search engine! Discussion Forum” />
Though, I think, search engines make little use of this any more, but it illustrates at least that such indexing and categorization can (or could) be accomplished in advance rather than after the fact of publication
Unfortunately, there is really not any good system in place for doing that.
It was a joke, but I think it is also true.
Take the Dewey Decimal System. Randomly, what does 398.2 represent?
I doubt even a seasoned librarian could say, without looking it up, but the system works, for any library in the world, in any language or culture. I think web-indexing should have a similar universality.
Hello there! Why not use the Etherium system to solve this problem? After a while, it will work on POS. You can create tokens and smart-contracts in it.
I see a very good use case here for reward based indexing. And Etherium is perfectly fine idea for it. I am not trying to make a general case search engine. It is limited to a certain type of user. So trying to index the entire www isn’t needed. There’s other kinds of non-crypto rewards possible. Access to insiders club sites. Coupons for merchandise. Etc.etc… It’s motivation enough, to get users to use this search engine, and to become an indexer peer.
If anybody is still talking on this website. Seems it takes months for anybody to respond on here. Yacy seems to me to be an incredible search engine.
1 Like
Incentives for crawling is being planned by anyone?