Exactly! We can do better, or at least different, instead. Bitcoin has good incentives built into the system that improve its trustworthiness. And, it doesn't need to ever completely replace other currencies to be disruptive and useful. I think the same kind of design principles could be applied to the general problem of communications.
We CAN build what we need, in fact most of what we need exists in software bits and bobs already.
Connectivity to this alternative network I envision would be free, but users would need to pay local trusted individuals/businesses to aggregate and cache subscriptions to wider-area feeds for them. Consider that these feeds would necessarily constitute large amounts of data since you'd need to bring huge swaths of data you're interested in close to your locality.
The volume and freshness of the data users would subscribe to would be proportionate to how much they'd collectively be willing to pay to fetch and store on an ongoing basis (sortof like how we have tiers for internet connection speeds today.)
The software for the network would build on existing tools and libraries on the client with proper sandboxing of sessions. The storage, cache, feed management, payments, chargebacks, and crypto are all solved problems for the most part.
Yes, this would be a huge effort and would probably work best if some new consumer hardware were developed and that would require investment. But, I don't think anything I have in mind is technically infeasible. I'd like to have some reasonable systems and protocols in place that prevent users being identified and tracked on the network for most classes of communications.
We CAN build what we need, in fact most of what we need exists in software bits and bobs already.
Connectivity to this alternative network I envision would be free, but users would need to pay local trusted individuals/businesses to aggregate and cache subscriptions to wider-area feeds for them. Consider that these feeds would necessarily constitute large amounts of data since you'd need to bring huge swaths of data you're interested in close to your locality.
The volume and freshness of the data users would subscribe to would be proportionate to how much they'd collectively be willing to pay to fetch and store on an ongoing basis (sortof like how we have tiers for internet connection speeds today.)
The software for the network would build on existing tools and libraries on the client with proper sandboxing of sessions. The storage, cache, feed management, payments, chargebacks, and crypto are all solved problems for the most part.
Yes, this would be a huge effort and would probably work best if some new consumer hardware were developed and that would require investment. But, I don't think anything I have in mind is technically infeasible. I'd like to have some reasonable systems and protocols in place that prevent users being identified and tracked on the network for most classes of communications.