I've been trying to find something in this message with which I
disagree. So far, no suck luck.
In article <1142535234.5792906.1533009513710@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> you write:
>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
