It’s easy to see popular service, such as Google Maps as a neutral, free public utility.

A map service makes our phone a futuristic tricorders that changes our lives and make it trivial to get around and discover new things.

But these services are not neutral public utilities.

I care about Redecentralizing the web. But how do we do it?

Here is a crazy idea inspired by bitcoin… plus I wanted to get a post out on “fight mass surveillance day“.

A hard part of something like Diaspora which aimed at being a decentralized social network, is the problem of getting enough nodes up and running. A very small % of the population will step and run a server.

When email was born, a very large % of the internet using population could also run a server. Because if you used the internet back then, there were like a hundred of you. You knew that there were servers and clients, etc.

People setup SMTP servers, email flowed and all was good.

Over time as the internet and the web became popular, this % of the population because insignificant. Our current web architecture rewards centralized players.

If email was invented today, schools, businesses… everyone would be on one of a handful of email services!

So I started thinking about “who are the people running their own services” today?

Bitcoin miners operate the bitcoin transaction network. Think about the VISA network for credit card transactions. These are un-coordinated citizens running the bitcoin network, because they earn bitcoins over time. The network has a secure protocol that balances risks and rewards from many angles.

What if we de-centralized and rewarded service administrators with this same mechanic?

Think about:

• mapcoin
• wikipediacoin
• searchcoin
• babelfishcoin
• instantmessagecoin
• photosharingcoin
• dictionarycoin
• recipiecoin

Running a mapcoin node provides several facilities:

• access to map tiles

• access to compute for analyzing traffic data
• access to compute for processing map updates and settlement

By running a mapcoin node, you pay for electricty, a network connection and a fast computer with big disks. Every now and then, you “win the lotto” and earn a mapcoin. Sysadmins rewarded.

Also, we web developers can build great UIs that consume mapcoin data.
We can compete on great user experiences. Users aren’t locked into
a single vendor. The map data is a collective commons.

Once someone did the hard work of balancing risk, reward and baking it into a mapcoin protocol, OpenStreet Maps could endorse it and find a new sustainability model which would radically reduce their hosting costs.

Currency markets would take care of translating mapcoin into bitcoin or
“real money”.

Existance Proofs:

• Bitcoin is a currency, but also the payment network coin

• Dogecoin is Whoofie or social coin, there is a currency market for it
• SolarCoin is based on Bitcoin technology, but in addition to the usual way of generating coins through mining, crunching numbers to try and solve a cryptographic puzzle, people can earn them as a reward for generating solar energy.
• DNSChain (thanks Eric Mill)

*Coin all things to solve the de-centralization problem… what do you think?

https://ozten.com/psto/2014/02/11/coin-all-things/