Reading the Swarm whitepaper, and I know this has already been said to death, but i freaking hate how the blockchain mfs absconded with the popular conception of #p2p and got it all filthy with their libertarian ancap stuff. Bittorrent culture is like "it is good to seed way more than you download for no reason," and despite the trivial neoliberal objection that "if there is no reason then nobody will do it" it freaking WORKS.

then the blockchain people come along and are like "any imbalance in bandwidth between peers needs to be settled by MONEY and you have to RENT the ability to share anything." and it's just a preposterously bleak world. like, because they can't imagine organizing anything together with other people they have to imagine a storage infrastructure that needs an economy to keep it running.

I have no interest in permanent immutable storage of anything because that is impossible and undesirable. I want to make a digital space that exists for as long as it is needed, and sure some domains in that like research data and whatever might need to last longer than others, but the preservation of that is always a social phenomenon, and I would way rather have that come from a place of shared belief in something that is important rather than being yoked to yet another zero-sum system of wealth and debt.