Not only is an individual's private data nearly worthless, but they can protect it for free simply by using the Brave browser or other adblocking/tracking solutions.
People often claim that they would pay for web content if it were somehow easier or if micropayments worked better or something. I'm not sure that I believe them.
I'm not sure what scientific bar of proof you would need to see passed, but Google stalks users and targets them because it makes them more money. The ads perform better. Their systems fall back on context, when they can't do the more lucrative stalking.
They broke my YouTube account a number of years ago in an attempt to force Google+ across their systems and artificially inflate user numbers.
Yesterday I got an email from them saying that they are nuking my Google+.
I will always remember that series of events as one of the most hostile acts of aggression against users that I have ever experienced.
That changed my perspective of Google as a company and I'm not sure that they can ever regain the positive perception that they lost due to those hostile actions.
Now their dominance with Chrome is leading them to make similarly hostile actions: breaking webaudio, attempting to "do away with URLs," forcing unwanted shit on our Internet.
Thanks for expressing these problems clearly and succinctly.
Does the Fisherman approach involve validators randomly checking other validators for phony transactions?
Will validators be incentivized to do this?
Is that why they are called fisherman? Because honest validators are "fishing" around for opportunities to catch invalid transactions and increase their stakes?
How long is the challenge period currently being discussed?
The other attack vector that the fisherman opens, "grieving" attacks, whereby malicious nodes launch a series of false reports, knowingly sacrificing their stakes presumably to overwhelm the system and push through a double-spend or phony token mint or something.
Am I interpreting how this attack works correctly?
Has any thought been given to making the challenge period as long as it needs to be to process all challenges, and incentivizing goodwill from those affected by the slowdowns with a fractional return of the slashed stakes... Maybe like a reverse gas cost? Is that insane?
How does Uber burn so much money? Isn't it a fundamentally profitable enterprise? Aren't they just skimming off contractors' wear-and-tear?
Won't they eventually hit a point where they promote their product less aggressively and generate significant revenue off the massive ride-sharing network that they've established?
One issue that is not addressed by the subscription model is the subsidizing effect that the ad-based model has:
The finance professional who lives in New York has very valuable page views. The African school girl does not. Yet, through advertising their values are averaged. The affluent subsidize the poor without even knowing it.
Putting content behind a pay-wall reduces this effect and creates an informational disparity that will only broaden the gap of equality between the two.
The New York finance professional just has to decide that the subscription is "worth" paying. The African school girl cannot make this same decision.
"The focus right now, they say, is on identifying all the ways people use URLs to try to find an alternative that will enhance security and identity integrity on the web while also adding convenience for everyday tasks like sharing links on mobile devices."
My statement is clearly supported by the article. They paint a rosy picture of it, because this is a submarine piece, but they are definitely making moves against the url.