Is the incentive even necessary? It would be worth testing if there are enough scientists who are keen to promote information sharing in their field without some minimal reward
I also wonder if this will make the penalties for uploaders more severe since it becomes a commercial act
In the same manner you can turn time into money, but not money into time.
The most valuable thing in the world is actual time. Money is just a poor man's substitute.
Use bitcoin to pay your energy bill (e.g. gas, electricity, ...).
> In the same manner you can turn time into money, but not money into time.
Partially, you can:
- Hire a maid to do household chores instead of having to do them yourself
- Hire employees that do various aspects of your daily job
- Buy some expensive medical treatments that give you a few more years
- Buy healthy stuff, and have a healthy lifestyle; invest money in your wellness
- Less of a necessity to work lots of hours a day, i.e. have more free time
This is true, you can use bitcoin to buy someone else's energy. Energy is largely fungible. But the whole economic system you are describing has a net loss of (free) energy. What is that other guy going to use the bitcoin for? Buy energy from someone else?
The bitcoin network uses energy to provide security for transactions. It's a transfer of wealth from the owners and users of bitcoin to the miners in the form of inflation and fees, respectively. Somewhat analogous to fiat currencies in some sense. In order for bitcoin to be worthwhile, the economic activity it enables must outweigh its cost of security. The energy spent on bitcoin isn't valuable itself, it just enables the security of something that is potentially valuable.
Similarly, you can use money to buy someone else's time. Unlike energy, time is not fungible, however. It's true that you can outsource parts of your life, but how much can you outsource? I enjoy cooking for myself, I don't know if I would outsource that. Many parents pay a lot for childcare when they would rather spend more time with their children if the conditions allowed. I think it's a common trap to spend your life working at something you dislike so you can pay others to do other things you don't like. There's also an upper bound to the amount of free time we can gain through this exchange. In any case it's important to appreciate the mundane things.
Investments in your health at a young age can be incredibly profitable. But there comes a time when those investments produce greatly diminishing returns.
I don't consider it a bad thing, I think it's quite beautiful. Time is the great equalizer. We're all gifted with the greatest fortune at birth and it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.
What it can do is incentivize certain behavior by playing part in the distributed algorithm. But adding more tokens to the supply does not by itself make the economy produce more.