or (3), the non-obvious, or non-advertised effects of the service may be valuable enough for powerful people to make the service "profitable" through artificial money flows (e.g. by paying for ads, endless investing, stock price manipulation, etc).

thinking of stuff like facebook here...

Paying for ads like that is still a subset of fork (1). Even as propaganda, it has to somehow be "worth it" to spend the money.

Endless investing is, depending how you look at it, either not (just) ad supported and preceeds the premise, or it still is ad supported (and hence (1)) just with extra steps to badly hide who is doing it.

Hmm… I suppose the purchase of a vote in a democracy is something that a poor person might not otherwise be able to sell, and where "we advertised and convinced you" is (depending on campaign finance etc. rules) one of the legitimate ways to do it… but even then, for reasons too long to type on my phone, I'd say in this case it would still make the poor poorer.

you two should also be aware of

https://www.ethswarm.org/

(censorship resistant distributed storage with the same API)

The same API part isn't surprising, content addressed stores are the most natural way to accept encrypted data.

The public storage networks are targeting a different use case than Blobcache though, which I think of as a private or web-of-trust storage network. To use a cryptocurrency backed storage solution, one must manage accounts, or a wallet of transaction outputs, connect to unknown parties on the internet, and pay for the increased redundancy. There's also legal risk, depending on the jurisdiction, when allowing untrusted parties to store arbitrary information on one's devices.

I don't want to consult the global economy in order to make use of my extra hard drives, which would otherwise be idle.

re legal risks: no one knows what their machines are storing in swarm without also holding a key and a hash. the pieces are distributed based on the hash of the encrypted value.

and https://www.ethswarm.org/

let alone this that drives me nuts: they are playing the ringing sound for the caller without the callee's phone actually ringing.

and it's a deliberate choice that they are defending for seceral years now, ever since they removed the submarine sound.

I did not know this but now that you mentioned it, it will forever bug me. I did notice that it plays very early when you make a call.

if you look at the screen, it first prints "connecting", and then "ringing".

being a de facto monopoly has a lot of value that is hard to quantify...

e.g. censorship, metadata, real time society-wide trends, etc...

google is way-way more than just a company.

you forgot the excessive censorship, of course to "fight disinformation"...

it even became an interesting signal which "disinformation" they deem censorship-worthy.

there's no zero downside (risk) of anything that makes a permanent state change in your immune system.

...and even a Nobel was given to its inventor (for its benefits for humans).

we're joking here... but GAVI is bill gates, who is saying very similar things in his "there are too many of us" talks... makes one wonder...