[hoggle]

Namecoin, Ethereum and Open Transactions come to mind.

Maybe the future is much more evenly distributed and we all make a living by offering energy and computing power to those services? Why did PGP never take off? I would love to set up my own "miner" for it to play its part in a truly decentralized and secure Email service. Open source as the "business model" is key in that scenario.

I don't have enough energy nor am I smart enough to actually create those kinds of services but I do feel stuff like that is the way out of this mess.

Interesting articles on topic:

"Enter The Blockchain: How Bitcoin Can Turn The Cloud Inside Out"

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/22/enter-the-blockchain-how-bi...

"Can Namecoin Obsolete ICANN (and More)?"

http://theumlaut.com/2014/02/05/namecoin-icann/

[jiggy2011]

The problem here is that the money is made by providing commodity services rather than engineering effort. So the person who designs the innovative decentralized system makes much less money than the person who can throw a lot of cheap servers into a rack.

[tlrobinson]

Bitcoin itself is possibly one of the first exceptions to that.

We could see more opportunities for distributed services to be monetized in similar ways. It needs to be done carefully, as there's a strong bias against "pre-mined" schemes.

Read up on DAO/DACs if you're interested ("Decentralized/Digital Autonomous Corporations/Organizations" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Autonomous_Corporation https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Distributed_Autonomous_Community_...). It's still mostly theoretical stuff, but Ethereum, ProtoShares, etc are working on these ideas.

[hoggle]

Maybe if there was some kind of token connected with paying the services the originator would be able to stash a lot of them very cheaply at the very beginning of the network's lifecycle - think Bitcoin/Namecoin again.