I was mulling the mechanisms of a possible ICO for the IETF overnight.
So, here's the thing. The IETF is, as always, complaining about shortage
of funds, while having trouble attracting unfunded volunteers to do the work.
The IETF manifestly failed to cash in on the dot-com boom pre-Y2K.
Instead of making squillions like everyone else did, it sold itself
to ISOC for a pittance and the safety of some legal insurance and
governance and did not float when the market was hot for IPOs.
(Even Wired Ventures tried to IPO. Twice.) A sure-fire revenue
stream was foregone.
What about other revenue streams? Well, the IETF isn't even really in
the selling-T-shirt business, which is about as low as you can go on
the making-money-on-the-Internet totem pole. (IETF Companions on
Cafepress? Not a big earner, I'm guessing.)
Compare this with academic publishing, where there is no shortage of funds,
and the academic volunteers are funded by someone else to do all the work:
write the papers, review them, edit the journals... just for the assumed
prestige of getting to post something in someone else's printed blog.
What a glorious con with 40%+ margins! (For example, Robert Maxwell made
his fortune in that arena with Pergamon, and later came unstuck with ambition.)
So, if the IETF charged for RFCs, and more for standards track documents,
there would be a revenue stream. There could be a proper Internet Journal
of New RFCs which libraries and corporations should be forced to subscribe to.
The RFCs could be securely locked down using all the security standards that the
IETF has developed. Heck, you could do a bundle of secure subscriptions with
T-shirts to really attract the librarian crowd you're marketing to. They
earn less than you do, and so they value free clothing more. Plus, an even
weaker sense of what might be considered fashionable.
But even that subscriber model is slowly dying; it's not new. And that doesn't
address the reputational attraction problem that must be solved to make people
want to volunteer long hours for little pay and illusory kudos to create the
things that keep the organisation afloat.
Charging to attend conferences barely covers the cost of the conferences, even
when they're in Minneapolis. Charging for the right to post to mailing lists
might work - if on an organisational basis, which could filter out all of the
random annoying crazies using free email addresses.
Really, the IETF should cash in on the ICO craze by leveraging the IETF brand
and launching its own fully distributed networked coin based on IETF RFCs.
Secured with RFC1321 for lightweight scalability, distributed by RFC5050 for
robust resilience.
The fact that the infrastructure isn't yet in place doesn't matter; the IETF
has consistently shown itself to play a very long game for benefits
deferred suspiciously long, and it's taken over twenty years for
e.g. IPv6 to go from nowhere to reach the point where you can
finally have it but really want to turn it off because the supporting
infrastructure sucks, and all the bad ideas that IPv6 was supposed to
get rid of (such as fragmentation) are now being rediscovered and
introduced by the next generation as good new ideas ('truncation'),
while all the bad ideas that IPv6 introduced have flowered with
multiple incompatible variants (so many ways to allocate an address
to a client, but the client won't support the subset your servers use!)
IPv6 clearly has benefits, and we are all absolutely clear on that
party line. But actually benefitting from IPv6 is just that little
bit further into the future, rather like the heat death of the universe.
IETF protocol development is delay tolerant; it has to be. But if you want us
to work with a bunch of random workgroups or IPv6, you're going to have to incentivise us.
So this is the promise of a coin technology; a virtual coin, if you will.
Like so many IETF RFCs, it doesn't have to actually work. Like many ICOs and the IETF
as a whole, it doesn't have to make money immediately; it just has to hold out the promise
of making money, as stock options do. They're virtual too. It just has to provide
a fashionable tasty carrot to IETF goers, because we're fresh out of sticks.
L.
this IETF contribution is brought to you for virtual VintCoin!
Join the Internet revolution and invest in your and our future!
Help us make the Internet better, because it's really sick!
Lloyd Wood lloyd.wood@xxxxxxxxxxx http://about.me/lloydwood
________________________________
From: Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx>
To: valdis.kletnieks@xxxxxx
Cc: "lloyd.wood@xxxxxxxxxxx" <lloyd.wood=40yahoo.co.uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; ietf <ietf@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, 31 July 2018, 1:14
Subject: Re: AD Time
On Mon, Jul 30, 2018 at 12:47:17AM -0400, valdis.kletnieks@xxxxxx wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 03:49:57 -0000, "lloyd.wood@xxxxxxxxxxx" said:
>
> > The IETF should incorporate, and issue shares, which could be issued to ADs
> > and WG chairs to incentivise them appropriately.
>
> I'm hoping there was a /sarcasm flag in there that my MUA didn't render. The
> current US tendency to do things to maximize current shareholder value no
> matter what the long-term consequences, is totally opposite what we need
> for stewardship positions for the Internet.....
I think Lloyd forgot to include a proposal for issuing an Initial Coin
Offering (ICO) to raise even more money! :-)
(And in case it wasn't obvious, </sarcasm>)
- Ted
