[Aurornis]

Blockchain people have been trying variations of this for a decade. Any time you create a system that pays people for data, it will be exploited to the extreme.

I don’t think you need to incentivize people to provide weather data. Just make it easy to set up a station and get a lot of people interested. There are already hobby stations out there and networks for them.

[noosphr]

Blockchains have clearance rates that are a few dozen orders of magnitude too slow for this. Bitcoin for example clears 7 transactions per second.

[ben_w]

While that detail is true, the real problem is much more general: you have goal x, you use some proxy y for that goal, you pay people for y, they give you lots of y that may end up being the exact opposite of x.

Famously, the British found x was "fewer cobras" and y was "cobra tails", the opposite of x being "the locals bred cobras to get money for cobra tails".

Make a citizen science weather station that's free, it's all fine. Make it paid, someone's going to grab satellite pics and generate from them plausible but not necessarily accurate simulated weather station data for everywhere to get that money.

[zaphirplane]

Incentives do work in general. Sometimes they are abused. Incentives with no checks and balances are always abused. I don’t think the generalized problem you discuss above is broadly general

[ben_w]

Incentives can work, but most governments and businesses are still only mediocre at them even with enough money to throw at the problem they get to do do-overs when they get it wrong.

Trying to do this with humans on a big scale combines the worst of software development in the days of punched cards, working without anyone having given you a formal language spec, and black-hat hackers on the modern internet.

It is very very easy to pick your incentives badly; you only get feedback on a very slow cycle (in the punched card days you might run the program overnight and only find it crashed on line 32 from a typo the next morning, but it's much slower than that in meatspace); and you also need constant fine-tuning as people interested in gaming the system share their methods for doing so.

[Aurornis]

Bitcoin wasn’t designed for high throughput. I’m referring to projects like the Helium network, which rewards people for running network nodes: https://www.helium.com/

It doesn’t work as well as they wanted and it has been subject to various exploits over the years from people figuring out how to fake the participation to extract rewards.

[noosphr]

>Bitcoin wasn’t designed for high throughput

>>Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions

From the bitcoin white paper.

>I’m referring to projects like the Helium network, which rewards people for running network nodes

OK, what's the clearance rate for helium?

Visa clears 35,000 a second.

[Self-Perfection]

TON blockchain showed throughput above 100k per second, about 3x more of visa. There are other blockchains with similar throughput claims. L2 networks can give even lower fees and higher throughput.

[noosphr]

Are there any good papers on it? I've found the majority of crypto literature to be between bullshit and terrible.

[Self-Perfection]

Original whitepaper seemed rather good to me, but I have not studied it completely.

https://ton.org/whitepaper.pdf

[squeaky-clean]

I don't think they were saying to use blockchain to do this. It's just an example that shows that if you offer financial incentives in exchange for data people will exploit it and gameify it. The reason blockchain clearance rates are so slow is because of all the effort to prevent this. You could remove PoW from bitcoin and the network would be significantly faster. It would also be dominated by people exploiting it.

It's the same thing with ad networks, most of the effort goes into verifying that an ad click was legitimate and not a bot. Or that classic story of when the British government tried to eliminate Cobras in India by paying a bounty for every dead cobra, which just led to people breeding more cobras.

[ge96]

Time series database comes in ding ding

Yeah I could see the hobby-drive there