Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jayd16 1687 days ago
In snowcrash, p2p network IO is cheap, compute is expensive. This sets up a metaverse where users render themselves and their content for others. The renders are streamed. No one controls the metaverse itself as it's more of a self hosted, federated affair.

I think there is some sort of main street with some reserved space but it's akin to a url.
1 comments
EvanAnderson 1687 days ago
There's a "real estate" model, similar to "ownership" of domain names and address space. Developing on the "Street" is licensed by the ACM, and the compute to run it comes from income from a trust fund.

There's also an IP licensing model going on too-- selling avatars, video games, amusement parks.

link
samizdis 1687 days ago
When I first read Snow Crash, I thought (perhaps wrongly) that there was also an advertising model to supplement the real estate business - and one that went hand-in-hand with it.

I love the passage that introduces "the Street", and it's the last sentence of it that gave me the impression of an advertising business model.

In the real world - planet Earth, Reality - there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway, by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their employer, and at any given time the Street is occupied by twice the population of New York City.

That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.

link