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RE: The trouble with view counters
But without the view counter, how can we determine whether someone deserves the amount of money they get through upvotes??
😉
Anyway, while a view counter sounds easy, it's astonishing how many problems come with a proper implementation. Reminds me of an xkcd comic:
It's so true, really. I'm not even going to bother with saying that's one of my favourite xkcds, because I think more of them are my favourite than not. But that one definitely triggered a "get out of my head" response from me.
I love the bird example, because it highlights one of the biggest cognitive disconnects in Average Joe's understanding of computer systems. Humans are awesome at pattern recognition, but they're also terrible at empathising with computers. To an untrained human, computers are fast and powerful and all-knowing. They can do trillions of calculations per second and perform tasks their human could not complete in a lifetime, all in the background while said human is watching a cute cat video... and if they need any extra information to complete those tasks, they can just pull it from the Internet, right? No big deal.
But you try telling a computer what a picture of a bird looks like. It can be done, sort of. Almost. No matter how well you tune the algorithm, you'll still be able to generate false positives and/or negatives that even a child could discern correctly. So, sadly, that new "Proof of Bird Picture (PoBP)" cryptocurrency our stick-figure friends are scheming up won't be happening any time soon.... not without designating a human to recognise whether the pictures are real.
That's a legitimate strategy, by the way. Steem and Bitshares both actually do this for price feeds; the users of the platform elect human representatives to make observations that humans need to make, or at least verify, and they are economically incentivised to act honestly. That's exactly what Dan Larimer created when he invented DPoS; he called the representatives "witnesses."
So I guess we could launch Birdcoin after all... but we'd have to somehow convince at least 20 people to sit around all day verifying bird pictures in exchange for stake in the platform. Actually, after all the shitcoins I've seen launched to the moon on the wings of hopelessly impossible promises... I may be ready to bet on something as technically sound as Birdcoin. I can't wait for the ICO.
I'll sell you 500 BCS (birdcoins) for 1k steem. It's the next big thing!
Oh boy! I'm so excited for this extremely rare ground-floor opportunity. The world is not any more the way that it used to be... mmm, no no no! BirdconnEEEEEEEEECT!
😂