
A Typical Day in a Blockchain-Enabled World Circa 2030 - elemeno
https://blockchainfutureslab.wordpress.com/2016/02/27/a-typical-day-in-a-blockchain-enabled-world/
======
al2o3cr

        “The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” 
    
        He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,”
        he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight.
        “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t
        have to pay you.”
    
        “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed
        when you bought this conapt.”
    
        In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it
        necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his
        door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
    
        “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
    
        From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with
        it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s
        money-gulping door.
    
        “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
    
        Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.” 
    
        ― Philip K. Dick, Ubik
    

In addition to the above, I'd point out that there's already a massive
literature of ways to take supposedly anonymous metadata and derive a probable
identity from it - and the system described in the article would have vastly
more information at its disposal than any of the intelligence agencies could
DREAM of currently...

~~~
kristianp
That code-formatted excerpt is hard to read on mobile due to the narrower
page. Here it is without the spaces at the start of each line:

“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he
told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What
I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to
pay you.”

“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed
when you bought this conapt.”

In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it
necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his
door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.

From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it
he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-
gulping door.

“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.

Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through
it.”

― Philip K. Dick, Ubik

------
Animats
I used to hear this kind of thing from the fanatical free-market libertarians
behind Xanadu. (Xanadu, the pre-WWW web system envisioned by Ted Nelson.
Everything is pay per view in Xanadu.) Twenty years later, it hasn't changed
much, except it now uses Bitcoin as a buzzword.

Bitcoin is a terrible system for micropayments. The overhead is high, since
every node has to find out about every payment and you have to pay a fee to a
miner. Confirmation times are a big problem. (Accepting zero-confirmation
payments doesn't work, as Satoshi Dice found out the hard way.) Yeah, there
are all those fancy tree-based schemes to reduce the data being transferred
around, but none of them work yet.

Meanwhile, anyone knowing the whereabouts of "Big Vern", the CEO of Cryptsy,
the Bitcoin exchange, is requested to contact the Silver Law Firm. The CEO and
most of the assets are missing. "Big Vern" has blamed "hackers". Some people
believe him.

------
sirh4ppyp4nts
I could barely make it through reading this. Only someone who has never gone
to bed hungry would think that a world of constant commerce was a good thing.
This isn't what life is actually about. Not even close. Commerce is an
enabler. It isn't the ends its just a means, and a limited one at that.
Honestly, I found this future disgusting.

That doesn't mean I don't find block chain tech interesting...but this was
crazy.

~~~
legulere
Market based economy can be very good for development and efficiency. However
it also has many negative effects, that even can prevent the two advantages
from happening. Especially for normal consumers it leads to decision fatigue.
Sadly nobody wants to reduce the free market anymore even at the places where
we know that the negative effects outweigh the positive. As soon as you bring
that up some people will proclaim that you're wanting a dictatorship like
soviet russia.

~~~
patrickk
Decision fatigue is IMO the number 1 reason these ideas wouldn't work. Imagine
making 5 decisions about micro transactions worth fractions of a cent before
you even got to work, while shaking off sleep in the morning. You would go
insane.

Also, the reliability of the hardware and software. Sometimes my Macbook or
iPhone won't connect to a router as expected. Why would I need a bitcoin
enabled alarm clock when a low tech solution will also work?

They would've picked much better examples...blockchains are a solution in
search of a problem still I think. Voting is one area I think it could have a
big impact.

------
illumin8
The thing that's always bothered me about blockchain based reputation systems
is that it becomes a wild west.

Imagine if the credit rating system (FICO score in the US) allowed anyone
anonymously to put negative credit entries on anyone else's credit rating with
thousands of sock-puppet accounts...

I'm sure there's ways around it if some central governing authority issues
unique reputation blockchain wallets to each individual person on birth, and
they're not easily forged, but centralizing control of the blockchain is
against the philosophy of most blockchain early adopters, and it would leave
the reputation blockchain able to be tampered with, because now the central
authority could create sock-puppets to trash the reputation of anyone that it
doesn't get along with.

~~~
mjb
The only way to prevent these attacks is to force somebody to provide
something of value to vote in the reputation system. That something of value
could be energy (proof of work), time, money, their own reputation, tokens
from a fixed wallet (just kicking the can down the road), or many other
things.

The "Sybil attack" on reputation-based systems isn't the only one worth
worrying about. Another one is incentives - some people may be very strongly
driven to harm another person's reputation (see
[http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-benjamin-
wey/](http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-benjamin-wey/) for example).

~~~
nickpsecurity
You've just described the American electorate. People get elected largely on
the basis of who gets enough money and marketing. Big companies and wealthy
individuals outspend most of voting America combined. So, elected officials
work for them instead. Overtime, result was a one sided, rigged econkmy
benefiting the rich and elites almost exclusively that we call a plutonomy.

In other words, what you propose is very dangerous and needs more
review/revision to trust.

------
orik
Sounds aweful, I'll opt out. Just because some things can be Internet or block
chain connected doesn't mean they should be.

Reminds me of the second episode of Black Mirror.

~~~
jadell
I cam here to say exactly that. A world where I have to pay a usage fee for
each and every aspect of my life sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

------
Niksko
Cool little story. I really like speculative fiction like this.

The only part that is too far-fetched is "A lawnmower repair shop down the
street builds these mowers and provides them for free.". Why would they build
and provide them for free? Surely they would lease them to the local
governance body using automatic, demand based bidding and negotiation.

Other than that, very cool. Though I fully expect these comments to be filled
with people discussing how this future sounds terrible, entirely missing the
point of the story (which was to speculate and discuss novel models of
payment, ownership and reputation enabled by blockchains, not to provide an
exhaustive exploration of possible futures enabled by blockchain technology).

~~~
enraged_camel
>>Though I fully expect these comments to be filled with people discussing how
this future sounds terrible

I didn't find it terrible. I found it hilarious, because the story reads like
a satirical mockery of blockchain technology. That's what I gathered from the
part where Crowley opens his mouth and his TV says "FOOD ACQUISITION FACE
DETECTED".

------
narrator
In the old dystopia, everything you do is watched. In the new dystopia,
everything is watched and requires a micropayment.

------
macrael
Poe's law in full effect. I couldn't tell wether the author thought this was a
utopia or the other thing.

------
smitherfield
I read the story; I don't see any reason why automatically auctioning AI-based
or other services would require either blockchain or Bitcoin.

~~~
vidarh
The problem today is that taking payments electronically via the banking
system is a bureaucratic hassle in terms of getting a suitable business
account and getting set up as a merchant etc. It doesn't require a blockchain
or bitcoin, but it is _a_ way of lowering the barrier.

I found most of the examples entirely unconvincing, though.

------
placeybordeaux
If you have a hammer...

I love bitcoin and think that blockchains as a format have potential, but they
are not the end all be all and this story is basically a parody of bitcoin
enthusiasts.

------
matt_wulfeck
Looks like the future is a real-life version of a pay-to-win iPhone game.

~~~
plaguuuuuu
Pretty sure life is already pay-to-win :/

------
macawfish
Stuff like this makes me wanna reread Revelation.

------
vidarh
> Because Crowley likes to take long, hot showers in the morning, he used to
> run out of hot water.

In the UK, metering gas, and by extension hot water (since most hot water here
is supplied via gas boilers) is often used to illustrate poverty, as if you
regularly have problems with your gas bill you can get a coin operated metered
gas supply.

I immediately assumed that Crowley is poor.

And this is the problem with a lot of these: They are presented as solving a
problem, but many of them are solving problems that are only problems for
those less likely to be able to afford the solution.

The solution often involves outsourcing fixing problems to someone else. E.g.
the periods I've had a cleaner, we've always insisted on going through an
agency even though it's substantially more expensive, because it means never
having to think about holiday cover or illness cover or finding a replacement
if the current one proves to be unreliable or do a poor job.

Almost the entire thing to me read to me as written by someone lacking
understanding of what services they can buy right now, via service providers
that deliver substantial value by insulating you from hassle.

The house sale being perhaps the most prominent example. The colored coin bit
implies a total lack of understanding for the amount of legal hassles
involved. At the very least you would need a way to force a transfer to be
able to deal with situations where a transfer has been done improperly.

But secondly they seem to imply that the closing costs are primarily about
transferring title. When I last bought a house, the vast majority was rather
about drawing up a mutually agreeable contract covering exactly what
deficiencies were known and agreed on, and what should stay or not etc. None
of those goes away just because you have a way of doing a title transfer.

I believe there can be plenty of value to be had from Bitcoin. The ability to
start taking payments without having to wait to get bank accounts and merchant
accounts etc. sorted out is fantastic. And some of the things described may
have profound effects. But the examples in this story mostly seems poorly
thought out to me.

In fact, you _will_ find plenty of examples like this explicitly used in scifi
through the years as part of the designs of various dystopic settings, and
often to illustrate the downsides of poverty in a hyper-commercialised
environment - some of the first things people tend to spend money on when
their earnings power increases is buying themselves free of having everything
metered.

------
LAMike
It would have been nice to hear a story about an AI controlled Uber
competitor.

------
mesozoic
The future full of anthropomorphic crocodiles is what concerns me most.

------
plorg
This reads a lot like a Huxleyan ("soma") dystopia compounded or facilitated
by turning every passive human decision into another rent-seeking market.

I could not imagine a worse hell.

------
GunboatDiplomat
The real estate thing seems fairly sensible, if impractical to implement.

~~~
px1999
One of the (IMO many) problems with using coloured coins for property
ownership is that the real world is necessarily messy.

Disputes happen frequently, houses are seized, not bought outight, people die
and ownership needs to be switched, any other number of scenarios might
occur... on the flip side, what happens when a wallet containing the house is
compromised? When you start to go down this line of thought, delegation to
some authority begins to make sense...

To be honest, I found that every one of the interactions in the story has a
similar set of limitations or problems. The whole thing reads as though it's
been written by someone who's never actually been out in the world and
interacted with people. Every one of the points can be pretty much countered
with the same "OK, but what if something goes wrong with the transaction, or
if someone wants to act in bad faith?"

To me this is the biggest fundamental flaw with unregulated cryptocurrencies -
there are already a significant number of bad actors who are stealing coins
but no "fix" (indeed this is by design) - other than calling the victims
idiots and suggesting they act differently next time.

Unfortunately in the author's world, you're broke, homeless, and in every
other way possible, SOL.

~~~
ssharp
> The whole thing reads as though it's been written by someone who's never
> actually been out in the world and interacted with people

Have you ever been to /r/Bitcoin?

