<story><title>Dole Food Had Too Many Shares</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-17/dole-food-had-too-many-shares</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>It reminds me of the last wave of distributed P2P filesharing, c. 2000-2005.  First we got Napster, which realized that by taking advantage of the bidirectional nature of TCP&amp;#x2F;IP, we could distribute copyright infringement so widely that it would become impossible to enforce.  Then some techies at NullSoft realized that you don&amp;#x27;t actually need a central server for discovery &lt;i&gt;at all&lt;/i&gt;, you can broadcast the existence of and metadata about files throughout the network for discovery, and put out Gnutella.  Lots of excitement followed, with many people of that era believing P2P would be the Next Big Thing (among people working on this were such folks as Travis Kalanick of Red Swoosh -&amp;gt; Uber, Mark Zuckerburg of WireHog -&amp;gt; Facebook, Friis &amp;amp; Zenstrom of Kazaa -&amp;gt; Skype -&amp;gt; Rdio, and Robert Tappan Morris of Chord -&amp;gt; YCombinator).&lt;p&gt;And then folks realized that Gnutella was slow.  Really slow, because folks on transient dialup connections in Estonia were critical nodes in file discovery.  So they created the idea of super-peers, where the protocol was adapted to realize that some nodes are more equal than others and route requests through nodes with known-good connections.  Then the next-generation P2P network (BitTorrent) decided that it was easier just to rely on HTTP for metadata exchange and went to centralized trackers, and the ecosystem that grew up around BitTorrent realized branding &amp;amp; centralized search engines were important for non-technical users and we got big torrent search engines like ThePirateBay and Mininova.&lt;p&gt;Eventually, the market seemed to settle on convenience &amp;amp; performance over distribution, and the real winners in the mass market were DropBox, Google, and Apple.  There&amp;#x27;s probably a lesson in there, but as someone who&amp;#x27;s been fascinated by P2P technologies since high school and wasted a lot of time thinking about the problem in college, the lesson is pretty depressing.  If hierarchy, market concentration, and single points of failure don&amp;#x27;t already exist, they will be reinvented.</text></item><item><author>maxander</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s fascinating that the financial system has evolved this kind of layered abstraction (humans owning stocks is a fiction maintained by brokers owning stocks, which is a fiction maintained by DTC owning stocks, which is a fiction maintained...) reminiscent of hallowed engineering kludges like TCP&amp;#x2F;IP.  Its especially interesting since, unlike data packets, stocks are &lt;i&gt;purely an abstraction to begin with&lt;/i&gt;, but the systems around them have become sufficiently complicated that it can&amp;#x27;t function without this kind of structure.&lt;p&gt;A blockchain likely wouldn&amp;#x27;t help this issue either- high-speed traders would inevitably be dissatisfied with blockchain latencies and re-invent brokers that abstracted over blockchain transactions at a faster pace.  These brokers would wind up causing bureaucratic meltdowns and become managed by some overarching structure similar to the DTC.  Etc.  If anything, a blockchain-based system would become &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; complicated, because it reduces the task of adding another financial sub-mechanism to an engineering problem.&lt;p&gt;Something about large distributed systems of non- or imperfectly-cooperative agents breed complexity.  (There&amp;#x27;s probably already formalized versions of that principle, but none are presently coming to mind.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>will_hughes</author><text>&amp;gt; Then the next-generation P2P network (BitTorrent) decided that it was easier just to rely on HTTP for metadata exchange and went to centralized trackers, and the ecosystem that grew up around BitTorrent realized branding &amp;amp; centralized search engines were important for non-technical users and we got big torrent search engines like ThePirateBay and Mininova.&lt;p&gt;Followed by those trackers getting taken down, we went from distributing .torrent files over HTTP, to distributing magnet links and getting the torrent metadata over DHT.</text></comment>
<story><title>Dole Food Had Too Many Shares</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-17/dole-food-had-too-many-shares</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>It reminds me of the last wave of distributed P2P filesharing, c. 2000-2005.  First we got Napster, which realized that by taking advantage of the bidirectional nature of TCP&amp;#x2F;IP, we could distribute copyright infringement so widely that it would become impossible to enforce.  Then some techies at NullSoft realized that you don&amp;#x27;t actually need a central server for discovery &lt;i&gt;at all&lt;/i&gt;, you can broadcast the existence of and metadata about files throughout the network for discovery, and put out Gnutella.  Lots of excitement followed, with many people of that era believing P2P would be the Next Big Thing (among people working on this were such folks as Travis Kalanick of Red Swoosh -&amp;gt; Uber, Mark Zuckerburg of WireHog -&amp;gt; Facebook, Friis &amp;amp; Zenstrom of Kazaa -&amp;gt; Skype -&amp;gt; Rdio, and Robert Tappan Morris of Chord -&amp;gt; YCombinator).&lt;p&gt;And then folks realized that Gnutella was slow.  Really slow, because folks on transient dialup connections in Estonia were critical nodes in file discovery.  So they created the idea of super-peers, where the protocol was adapted to realize that some nodes are more equal than others and route requests through nodes with known-good connections.  Then the next-generation P2P network (BitTorrent) decided that it was easier just to rely on HTTP for metadata exchange and went to centralized trackers, and the ecosystem that grew up around BitTorrent realized branding &amp;amp; centralized search engines were important for non-technical users and we got big torrent search engines like ThePirateBay and Mininova.&lt;p&gt;Eventually, the market seemed to settle on convenience &amp;amp; performance over distribution, and the real winners in the mass market were DropBox, Google, and Apple.  There&amp;#x27;s probably a lesson in there, but as someone who&amp;#x27;s been fascinated by P2P technologies since high school and wasted a lot of time thinking about the problem in college, the lesson is pretty depressing.  If hierarchy, market concentration, and single points of failure don&amp;#x27;t already exist, they will be reinvented.</text></item><item><author>maxander</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s fascinating that the financial system has evolved this kind of layered abstraction (humans owning stocks is a fiction maintained by brokers owning stocks, which is a fiction maintained by DTC owning stocks, which is a fiction maintained...) reminiscent of hallowed engineering kludges like TCP&amp;#x2F;IP.  Its especially interesting since, unlike data packets, stocks are &lt;i&gt;purely an abstraction to begin with&lt;/i&gt;, but the systems around them have become sufficiently complicated that it can&amp;#x27;t function without this kind of structure.&lt;p&gt;A blockchain likely wouldn&amp;#x27;t help this issue either- high-speed traders would inevitably be dissatisfied with blockchain latencies and re-invent brokers that abstracted over blockchain transactions at a faster pace.  These brokers would wind up causing bureaucratic meltdowns and become managed by some overarching structure similar to the DTC.  Etc.  If anything, a blockchain-based system would become &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; complicated, because it reduces the task of adding another financial sub-mechanism to an engineering problem.&lt;p&gt;Something about large distributed systems of non- or imperfectly-cooperative agents breed complexity.  (There&amp;#x27;s probably already formalized versions of that principle, but none are presently coming to mind.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>striking</author><text>This is probably the most enlightening comment I&amp;#x27;ve read all day. I&amp;#x27;ve been looking for a suitable explanation for this trend, and here it is.</text></comment>