Who pays volunteers on Wikipedia, Linux, BSD, Webkit, Chromium, PHP, Python and all those other technologies and languages who have taken over the world? Is TimBL rich through extracting rents from all users of HTTP?
Vitalik is mega-rich from selling his tokens once, and now he doesn’t control the network. That is the alternative I am talking about. The developers of a successful project make buck but then the project becomes bigger than them. There were was an article posted the other day from an open source author complaining that they are now being required to use two-factor authentication before they can continue releasing their product. They said “well, I guess I don’t pay for the distribution platform, so I will take what I can get.” But they are missing the point entirely — the distribution platform isn’t supposed to serve the one author/maintainer. It’s supposed to serve the public! Those are the actual customers, and even if the author pays $1,000,000 a month to such a service, the value to the public of NOT having a security backdoor on the next update can become far, far greater. At some point, what you built just becomes bigger than you.
That’s why science has peer review, wikipedia has talk pages and open source commits have reviewers before merging the code. No one wants something to be rolled out at 5am on the whim of one guy, EVEN IF he has two factor authentication.
There is a fundamental, fundamental difference in mindset between on the one hand the celebrity culture we have on Twitter, and various entertainment, and the peer review culture of science, wikipedia and open source. The latter is far more useful to society.
In fact, most of our divisions and strife in demicracies is a result of for-profit news media trying to write one-sided outrage articles with clickbait titles because the market selects for that, while our social network algorithms surface this and put us in angry echo chambers because that leads to the most “engagement” (and therefore, profit). Once you see it, the profit motive IS WHAT CORRUPTS these networks. Wikipedia and Linux may have their faults, but not these.
Who pays the volunteers? No one. They have enough financial stability to spend an hour here and there making a commit. There doesn’t need to be a billion dollar investment by any party to advance the thing forward. They’re like ants… and it beats closed profit-driven silos in the end.
