What is the idea here? Open a channel with each website that I visit. Lockup the BTC that I will ever send them but only send it to them slowly each time I visit it.
Yes. In reality, users would have a connection open with one or a small number of routing nodes.
The end result is very cheap and quick funds transfers to any node on the network. This lightning network infrastructure would make micropayments feasible.
Granted, there are still problems to solve. But this is the dream.
There is a contemporary books that explains this called The Impending Crisis of the South[1]. It was banned throughout the south and men were executed for distributing it in Arkansas.
I assume that any culture that is capable of developing interstellar flight will have a high degree of curiosity. We humans study even the most "mundane" life forms on our planet and try to study the rest of the universe outside of our planet. That is why I think extraterrestrials would want to make contact with us.
> We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path.
However, there are people who do study ants.
I think Roadside Picnic is a good novel but not indicative of how extraterrestrials who are capable of visiting Earth would actually behave.
Interstellar flight alone is not of interest. OTOH, it would allow earthlings to become visitors.
Commerce. If we use our experience as a basis here, this is the #1 interest that would lure alien explorers to this neck of the woods. Commerce is what got us to cross the Atlantic: looking for routes, buyers, suppliers, riches and land. All science-first approach ("they should come to study us") is so 20th century utopism.
But without really being sure what matters to aliens the most, commerce, tourism or science, makes it hard to lure them. We sent Voyager with curiosity in mind: songs, poems, language samples, pictures... But we could have sent instead a list/sample of our prime minerals, water supplies, preferred payment methods and our "1-800 number" for contact. Scientists can be so un-enterpreneurial sometimes!
Now, what then could get their attention and provoke a visit?
Become a menace.
Without really being sure what matters to aliens makes it tough to envision a way to get them really interested on the 3rd rock enough to launch a mission or send signals. So the most effective (and reckless...) is to become a menace, or at least a nuisance, to them. Fiction has played around with that idea, nuclear capability being the trigger that got them to notice or outraged enough to wipe us out...
Let's say we develop a gravitational wave cannon capable of making Sirius shoot over as a billiard ball into Procyon. Oh, now that would get their attention!
https://blog.cloudlinux.com/announcing-open-sourced-communit...