Peer2Politics

  This post from the P2Pvalue blog by Florian Glatz is based on an article by Primavera de Filippi posted on Internet Policy Review – read the full article here Today we want to point you to one of the many studies we are conducting at P2PValue, regarding the different applications of peer-to-peer technology in today’s networked information …

Love of money can cause people to do unwise things—like stealing time on your university's resident supercomputer to mine crypto-coins. The Harvard Crimson is carrying the story of someonewho did exactly that: an unnamed individual who was discovered using Harvard's Odyssey supercomputing cluster to generate dogecoins.

Packed into a small conference room, this rag-tag band of software developers has an outsized digital pedigree, and they have a mission to match. They hope to jailbreak the internet. They call it the Indie Web movement, an effort to create a web that’s not so dependent on tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and, yes, Google — a web that belongs not to one individual or one company, but to everyone. “I don’t trust myself,” says Fitzpatrick. “And I don’t trust companies.” The movement grew out of an egalitarian online project launched by Fitzpatrick, before he made the move to Google. And over the past few years, it has roped in about 100 other coders from around the world. On any given day, you’ll find about 30 or 40 of them on an IRC chat channel, and each summer, they come together in the flesh for this two-day mini-conference, known as IndieWebCamp.

Shortly after, TechCrunch had a piece about it.  I also forwarded on my responses to Raphael Satter, a journalist for The Associated Press who also got in touch via twitter.  The story is now all over the place.  Overnight the story made it on to Forbes and The Guardian, and this morning Paul Vigna from The Wall Street Journal got in touch has just post this up.  A quick google news search also brought up articles in The Evening Standard, The International Business Times, PCWorld, Here is the City, The Domains, Finextra, The Drum and more.

Excerpted from ars technica, by Lee Hutchinson. A meme-based cryptocurrency that came and went almost unnoticed, seems pretty frivolous. But how much more insubstantial is it than making “regular” money out of thin air? Plus, this particular (and popular) meme lends itself well, graphically, to the “coin” icon.