Talk:Distributed Consumerium

Distributed Consumerium is Transparent Consumerium but requiring no Central Services of any kind for working Consumerium maintenance even in developing nations.

Well this is a hot potato or actually quite a few of them. If consumerium is wholly distributed there is the upside that there is no Consumerium Governance Organization left to ruin it's own reputation simply by not reacting to real problems and reacting to fake problems. On the other hand there is actually no integrity unless it is self emergent somehow as perhaps described in w:Dynamical systems and chaos theory.

Or just as described in Consumerium:Itself. An aspect of Transparent Consumerium would be that everything you need to know or do to maintain it, down to hardware selection and fixes, would be accessible from Consumerium Services by bootstrapping.

You are right that the tradeoff is having humans make decisions via a Consumerium Governance Organization and maybe be corrupted or fooled or just lazily screw things up, versus having a protocol for this which is strict but 'out of control' of everyone/anyone, thus leading to politics as usual and standards war. And, it's good that we are talking about this tradeoff now not later. Certainly many worst cases arise from making this tradeoff wrong at different times, and, it's likely that the correct tradoff changes over time.

They can do everything themselves, without help at all. They can set different standards and run their own content wiki etc., but of course governments and corporations cannot interfere with them doing so either.

Another hot potato.

Yup. Thus best identified early. If one puts people in charge they will make their own changes that reflect their own values. Control over them will be minimal. They may be influenced by corporations or governments we dislike or they may resist cooperating with some or apply criteria we don't like - again a tradeoff.

At this point we would rely entirely on Consumerium License and there would be no active intervention or control or governance that worked at all.

A licence without compliance enforcement of any kind is no potatoes for anyone exept for thieves.

That's true. So probably this implies a back door for a lockout if they are really and truly being used for fraudulent marketing of bad products, out of touch with the consensus on the global content wiki, or whatever... this would imply also using some form of encryption and authentication from day one, so that it simply wasn't possible to forge a Consumerium buying signal. We need that anyway to keep social capital high and participants enthusiastic.

This is exactly how shareware and demoware works - they cripple it so it only works for a while until you pay. Only difference is that our criteria for payment will vary based on what you're using it for - like, we might even *ALLOW* people to run variant Consumeria (plural! discuss the idea there) with the same healthy buying infrastructure but use criteria we founders or Consumerium Governance Organization hate... but would charge for that like other uses of the healthy signal infrastructure, the better to pay for the highly credible network of signals we don't hate. This is yet another tradeoff.

In some ways this is the state that free software is already in, but, of course, free software can't pay for its own hardware and data integrity and deployment, and that's one of the things that Consumerium Services should be able to do - become self-funding even in countries which are quite poor.

It is a long term goal and probably can't happen until there is healthy signal infrastructure with many people protecting it and paying for it in many countries, and some history of using it as a healthy buying infrastructure so that people won't settle for cheap substitutions.

Going distributed too soon is a risk, and leads to some worst cases and indeed some of the threats that are probably not possible as long as Central Services and the Consumerium Governance Organization exist.

I've heard that the bits of a potato plant that are above the ground are poisonous. Never tried so can't really tell but it's safest to presume it is true?

Trolls just compost 'em, and try to stay below-ground = anonymous thus not so poisonous.

The above is very good. We are now identifying some responsibilities that the Consumerium Governance Organization might take, or might have to load in the Consumerium License, and some software requirements like this 'shut down if they are doing things we dislike and not paying us enough to make up for it' lockout. Which means we must look at shareware license examples that 1. rely only on code-based enforcement 2. are popular anyway 3. are self-funding. Some Consortium license are also of this nature but without code enforcement or lockout since usually it's source that is being distributed and the lockout is easy to remove.

Of course there can be hacked versions of each bit of software without the lockout, but, it's quite hard if there is authentication of each part of the network in the protocol requirements, so that, you can't actually get a hacked module to cooperate with anything else. I can see this is a hot potato too, but, can't be avoided: there's no way that Gus Kouwenhoven is going to just sit back and watch his "business" get trashed if he can pay a hacker a few hundred bucks and insert greenwash directly into the Consumerium buying signals about his vile products.