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Comment by 0xWTF

There's a term I saw all over someone's Google calendar schedule, pre-pandemic "DNS without asking". Now I realize it means "Do not schedule without asking" but my mind thought "Domain Name Service without asking" ... how in the hell would you do that?

I guess this is similar: how do you make trustworthy decisions that seem to inherently depend on the network, in the absence of a network? Before the internet, we had phonebooks instead of DNS, and we had cash instead of cards. Did the phonebook have every number? No. Was every piece of cash not counterfeit? No. But it's "good enough". Portable reference sources and tokens. The references are issued periodically and the tokens have evidence of exhaustion, their decay over time. A dog-eared dollar with a bunch of phone numbers on it, half-torn ... the merchant doesn't have to accept it.

How do you do these things digitally? Periodic issue seems pretty straightforward ... if you have a network. Token issuance, similarly, needs at least occasional communication with other nodes in the network.

So there's a local dwell capability.

Is this part of the same reaction we saw with Denmark starting to have emergency stores within 50 km of every Dane? Is this motivated by a need to prepare for war?

parent 0xWTF 1 year ago

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