Oh come on, neither a basket of commodities nor a basket of currencies are original ideas. During the security token craze of 2017/2018 many similar ideas were proposed and we don’t see those folks whining about Libra.
One example was a local currency based on a basket of goods such as real estate so that employers could pay a salary that adjusted as rents and other costs changed locally. Hundreds of these ideas were discussed freely in telegram groups.
Please. Even I had this idea in 2012 and I got it from being a user of Chaum’s digicash in the nineties and understanding parts of how the IMF works, etc. I even helped (not successfully) launch it in 2013. These ideas have been around for a good while by many people, it’s just that crypto is mainstream enough and facebook has enough clout now to take it seriously. If facebook ripped off anyone it was John Maynard Keynes. That’s not to say that it is even that good of an idea or that facebook will be successful with it.
I know people who were working on, what is now called, Libra at FB more than a year ago though. The paper was published a year ago. This just looks like a case of multiple people having the same idea.
"Adjacent possible" is the case of one of the weirdest possible definition for a very simple concept. I see people quoting this:
"The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself."
(Whatever the hell that means.)
Even though the concept is much simpler: "adjacent possible" is the set of things within reach. Or: all the things on the border between what we have, and what we could have.
This is just like when Google stole my idea to run fiber optic internet to people's houses. I totally had that idea a long time ago when I was trying to download a gif with a 28.8 modem. I'm not sure which of the neighborhood kids told Google about my idea but they sure screwed me over.
Yeah, I once had an idea for auto-scrolling based off tracking eye gaze through the webcam. I never told Microsoft or Samsung about it, but they totally stole my idea!!1eleventyone
Even worse: Google stole my idea for self driving cars. I was like " it would be cool if cars drove themselves" and sure enough, Google copies me. Do you think I have grounds for a lawsuit?
Compare these two papers (published in 2010 and 2011 in conferences that docker and everyone else in the space are regular participants at, for reference Docker was announced in March 2013)
This was also my "job talk" to IBM Research and it got me a post doc, but didn't get much traction in support of continuing to pursue / refine the ideas within IBM Research (which I find sort of ironic in retrospect with their recent strategic moves)
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."
The paper was published 18 July 2018. The public inital commit of libra was on 18 June 2019 and had 1,063 changed files. That could be a coincidence or not. Fact is, only one has realized the idea.
No sympathy for this guy at all. Think just because you’re an “MIT fellow” your claims to an idea carry more weight than people from other institutions or organizations? Get out of here with this entitlement, tons of people come up with exactly the same ideas all the time.
Plus, 9 times out of 10, it's the MIT types who lift ideas from others and promote them with MIT's increasingly well-polished hype machine. Within MIT, Media Lab is central to this problem.
Facebook's faithful copying is the large tech corp standard operating procedure. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple will start product lines based on accurate rumors about what the others are doing, and then cancel them as soon as their competitors do. This form of "copy thy neighbor" just happened with something like three major R&D products/features, one of which was cancelled and another leaked in the tech press.
Sandy Pentland cares a lot about these things and it's too bad Facebook just ripped this stuff off.
But he will have the last laugh: People already don't want to work at Facebook. It didn't matter so much that all those supposedly smart people aren't really capable of meaningful innovation. There will be a lot fewer of those smart people now.
>This form of "copy thy neighbor" just happened with something like three major R&D products/features, one of which was cancelled and another leaked in the tech press.
I don't keep up with tech press leaks. What products/features were they?
One example was a local currency based on a basket of goods such as real estate so that employers could pay a salary that adjusted as rents and other costs changed locally. Hundreds of these ideas were discussed freely in telegram groups.
The article is just outrage porn.