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RE: Proposal: Funding for anyx.io API Infrastructure Recurrent Costs

in #sps5 years ago (edited)

Your arguments are getting increasingly ridiculous. A garage is not a public good by any defintion, so the fact that one can exclude use of it by parking a truck in front of it (or with a door) does not mean anything at all.

The definition is non-excludable is that it isn't possible (or if you want to go with a sliding definition, less practical or feasible) to limit access.

That's just not the case for a server.

the point that something can be provided in a non-exclusionary way to be a quasi-public good.

No that's exactly backwards! Just about anything can be provided in a non-exclusionary way if someone willing to pay to make it freely available.

The reason the category of public goods is important is because these are goods where it isn't practical or feasible to control access, therefore they must be funded by some sort of collective or public funding or they will not be provided or will be under-provided. This is a market failure.

Again, that isn't the case for servers, and especially not for nodes on a p2p cryptocurrency where you can get all the access you want or need by running your own. There is no market failure. (Except, arguably in the case of smaller developers, experimental use, etc. where the cost and difficulty of running a node might be a significant barrier).

I also get that running a Steem API node is a pain in the ass, so the barrier is somewhat higher than it might be. Nevertheless the barrier is not so high that profitable businesses and larger projects can't do it or hire someone to do it for them. We should also continue work to make it less of a barrier (as MIRA has started to do, somewhat, in a two-steps-forward, one-step-back sort of way). That's also work I'm more interested in supporting via SPS.

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I'm obviously not arguing about access to ones own garage, I'm talking about access to the public road (which you were excluded from obtaining). Everything is excludable given some amount of effort, so a binary semantic don't make sense here.
Anyway, this is just getting extremely pedantic about semantics, and we're not making progress, so I suggest we stop here, and agree to disagree.

Oh, I guess I misunderstood. The idea was that parking a truck in front of my garage would control access to the road?

The problem is that you would have to do this to everyone's garage, and it simply isn't feasible. I mentioned above some of the ways that controlling access to roads is starting to become more feasible but for the most part, in general, it still isn't.

Agree to disagree, indeed.

Seemed to be mostly downvoted already but I added a little.