Synereo - Earn Money Using Social Media

[TPTB_need_war]

[...]

Unfortunately I explained a dilemma:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1340057.msg13670558#msg13670558

If the users store their files on their own computer, then there is no way to enforce legal orders, thus the Synereo protocol will be banned by (centralized gateway) hosts. And if Synereo doesn't allow users to host content from their computers, then user's can't resist government regulation of their activities. Besides serving files from user computers over ISPs that have asymmetrically low upload (relative to download) bandwidth is a Tragedy of the Commons as some ISPs effectively pay for other ISPs' lower upload allowances (which is why Bittorrent is throttled/banned by many ISPs, which thus helps drive the Net Neutrality politics that will enslave us in internet taxation ... which btw I pointed out to Bittorrent in 2008, I offered a solution, and they apparently ignored me...click link above to read more).

So the point is that hosting illegal content is a non-starter. And thus hosting (at least high-bandwidth or copyrightable) content on user computers is a non-starter.

If we are going to find utility in Synereo, it has to come from gains in user's sense of value from the attention model, which is what I will be analyzing.

[...]

Furthering the above point:

[...]

Yes I am aware that the proposed legislation in the UK (also afaik similar legislation proposed in the USA, UK, Canada, and Australia) only applies to service providers who offer encrypted services, not to open source code which users independently obtain, compile, and run on their own initiative. I was vaguely aware of this pending legislation and then I became more focused on it during my private discussions last month with the GadgetCoin team who have a P2P streaming technology named Streemo. The governments are not stupid to try to ban activity they can't possibly enforce (thus making the government look impotent), i.e. the government can't monitor/enforce against what each private citizen does in their home.

But I argue effectively the direction is to ban end-to-end encryption in general that does not provide a back door to national security agencies. The government can regulate the ISPs (internet service providers) and ban end-to-end encryption protocols that do not include a decryption key for national security agencies. I have also explained that using home computers as servers over asymmetric upload bandwidth home ISPs is a Communist economic plan (as I warned Bittorrent back in 2008 and offered them an economic solution for their tit-for-tat algorithm but they ignored me). And that protocols which allow illegal activities from unregulated home servers will be banned by ISPs and hosting providers. If you know of any technology to hide a protocol's patterns such that ISPs can't identify it, please enlighten me. There is some discussion of "Censorship resistance" in section 2.4 of Synereo's white paper, but that still seems to be inadequate.

Simply put, it is impossible to fight the government when there are choke points in the system which the government can effectively regulate. This is just common sense.

[...]

Edit: I was explaining this post to my gf because she asked who are the guys in the above photo. I explained all of that above in terms she could understand, but I also made the point that the masses are blithely unfocused on the implications of ubiquitous government surveillance because they are not impacted by it now and they are focused on what they want and need. Thus I think a focus on DIY culture and decentralized social networking might be the most effective means for the long-term political-economic fight ahead because the end game is determined by the awareness of the people about what they are prevented from doing by top-down centralized structures. Once people taste freedom, they don't give up those freedoms that they use and need on a daily basis. Then they can demand encryption and anonymity, because they will see features they need and want that require it. We have to think wisely in terms of not putting the cart before the horse in our marketing strategies.

[TPTB_need_war]

Now that I have basically digested the Synereo white paper (not all the math formalisms are understood in minute detail which will require some more time for study, but I get the overall concept), I want to write down some of my thoughts about Synereo's design and in the context of how I am thinking about priorities for any major paradigmatic shift in social networks.

1. Per the post upthread where I elaborated, I do not think the attention model of a social network can be tied to Synereo's crypto currency AMPs, nor should it, nor will that be compatible with allowing each user to choose their own attention model. There may be a use for crypto currency in social networking but it is not to hard code an attention model for what is supposed to be an individual user choice paradigm for a social network. I suppose instead Synereo could offer their attention model as one of the variants users can choose, but I think it will be a failure for the reasons I stated upthread. I think we will need free market competition between attention models in order to find out what works well and what doesn't. Also I think this means we can't assume nodes obey some global process calculus.

2. Users will not run a social network hosted from their own decentralized home computers ephemerally connected by asymmetric bandwidth ISPs as is the initial planned focus on Synereo. Fugetaboutit. They will signup quickly (and/or download the mobile app) just like Facebook or any other mainstream social network. Thus they will have their data and nodes hosted and thus just fugetaboutit this nonsense about censorship resistance in the white paper, except perhaps in terms of encrypted sharing (but later the government will demand a global decryption key as they have for streaming encrypted voice and video communications in the USA, Uk and rest of the 5 Eyes countries). See my prior post upthread for where I think this political-economic battle over private rights is headed.

3. The advantages that matter most to users which can only be gained from a decentralized structure (i.e. not the way existing social networks are structured) are the ability to control their own data and to choose their GUIs, apps, configuations, and even attention models. In other words, each user should be able to independently choose their own social network design, store the user's data independently of other users' data, and these user nodes should interact to exchange data, which each user node filters and stores locally the relevant bits to that user. Ideally, the entire platform should be programmable on top of some maximally generalized decentralized protocol layer.

4. The details about how to implement a maximally generalized decentralized protocol layer and define the potential motivation (economics) for all participants (users, service providers, cloud storage providers, developers) such that there isn't chaos and lack of focus so as to insure the end product converges to easy-to-use and compelling for all participants, seems to be at least on first contemplation mindbogglingly complex to distill, because there are competing/conflicting priorities in such a design. For example, a streaming music download provider must invest development resources to develop all the stop/start/pause/forward/rewind interactive functionality between the server and the client player, but then needs to somehow monetize both the bandwidth costs and the development investment, as well as attain an ROI that compensates for opportunity cost (not just a return of investment). Typically the streaming provider (e.g. SoundCloud, Spotify, etc.) would want to create a walled garden around the musicians who are uploading, the app developers who are calling their API, and the fans who are listening (e.g. through the provider's player and even embedded into provider's mobile app), so that it can extract some revenues on this ecosystem such as through a combination of advertising and/or music sales. One might propose microtransaction payments to the service provider for each song played, but this requires standardized APIs for all integration with the rest of the social network so that service providers become fungible (i.e. substitutable with each other) and in which case the service providers are reduced to competing on costs and thus can't attain a ROI to compensate opportunity costs for investing in innovation. Even if we say that users can use different service providers with their proprietary players (all fungibility embeddable in the social network Timeline), this doesn't resolve the issue of needing a standardized API for these providers to communicate fungible attributes (between all service providers) that users need in order to make an attention model more fine grained, e.g. for the music the genre and sub-genre of each track played/shared.

Thus it seems that any decentralized protocol will need to be too general and that interoption standards will emerge initially adhoc and then probably go through standardization via organizations such as the W3C.org. Similar to the browser wars of yore, we would repeat another wild west of adhoc experimentation and competing corporate offerings with the community settling eventually on the defacto standards that work best for all.

In other words, we would be creating a new decentralized protocol for the internet which would foster competition and participation instead of the walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter, Apple, etc...

Sounds exciting! Where do I sign up to create this?

Note I was listed as a contributor on the W3C standard for CSS2.1. I contributed to the either the multi-column or table specification (I contributed on both but I was only recognized on one afaik), given my past history at the dawn of deskstop publishing in the 1980s.

[TPTB_need_war]

[...]

Diaspora (now defunct):

A simple look at dierent oerings in the space, aiming
to subvert some of the aforementioned premises, have been met with hope and
with praise before ever delivering anything substantial. Diaspora, in many ways
ushering the concept of a decentralized service, was quickly backed nancially
by hundreds of people.

[...]

Correction: Diaspora is an ongoing project which was funded with $200,000 via Kickstarter yet turned over to open source community development in 2012 (which some viewed as failure), but I don't like their protocol and message semantics:

https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Federation_message_semantics#Sharing_Notifications

Also it is written in Ruby on Rails and doesn't appear to be built on a clear separation-of-concerns design philosophy, i.e. the protocol should be formalized orthogonal to any particular implementation and language/platform of any implementation.

Note there was another white paper that had some similar ideas but without the formalization around process calculus:

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-730/paper2.pdf
https://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/papers/decentralization.pdf

I am trying to research process calculus so I can better understand what that might improve over an adhoc protocol design. Note afaics, Greg Meredith did not incorporate any economic game theory analysis in his process calculus models (or perhaps the models don't need to care about that). I do not understand which properties have been proven by the process calculus model in the Synereo paper. I don't think they were mentioned, but I'll have to scan it again.

http://www.pst.ifi.lmu.de/Lehre/sose-2013/formale-spezifikation-und-verifikation/intro-to-pa.pdf

[...]

Btw, if you follow the link in my prior reply to you, you will find a post where I summarized the things my 26 year old Asian gf (we live in Mindanao) doesn't like about Facebook, and sure sounds like she would prefer a decentralized social network with freedom to customize if she wouldn't lose the things she likes about Facebook (mainly all her contacts and slick UI/content). She is often installing new apps from Google Playstore to customize her photos and compose them into silly videos and others of her interests. So being able to customize her social network will fit right in with what her generation wants.

[TPTB_need_war]

Some suggestions to Synereo of how to ship polished product sooner and free up more degrees-of-freedom to focus first on marketing strategy:

Don't do this:

If you build a decentralized application, you actually need to ship software. You need to package, test, create installers, test on a variety of platforms, write defensive code to work around misconfigurations your customers are likely to create, etc. For a centralized website, you can often edit files in place on the production server.
Result: decentralized is 10x harder at least.

There is no need to create the above "turnkey" (a term Greg Meredith uses often) software yourself. You only need to create and publish the open protocols.

Again rely on protocol specifications, not on implementations (and remember I am not yet sure if Greg Meredith's process calculi proposal is a protocol that can withstand all game theory or if it is an app level implementation of a monadic state transfer):

Somebody somewhere will run every single version of your app that you ever shipped. It will be badly out of date, full of security holes (you fixed years ago), outmoded graphics etc. It will cost you additional support, and your brand will suffer. Almost nobody upgrades to the latest and greatest within a life time it seems.
Result: decentralized is less functional, less pretty, and less secure.

Which is what I had written in my prior post:

https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Federation_message_semantics#Sharing_Notifications

Also it is written in Ruby on Rails and doesn't appear to be built on a clear separation-of-concerns design philosophy, i.e. the protocol should be formalized orthogonal to any particular implementation and language/platform of any implementation.

As I said upthread, ads do not pay enough for users to want to watch them, and you can't force a decentralized peer to watch even if you offer a payment. Worse yet, you can't even confirm the peer did watch even if they took the payment! For many game theory reasons like this, Synereo's white paper seems half-baked to me thus far.

Decentralized software is much harder to monetize. You can’t run ads on somebody else’s installation. You can’t data mine your users (because most of them aren’t in a place that you have access to, it’s somebody else’s installation). You can’t do cross-promotions and referrals etc. You can charge those people who install your software, but there’s a reason most websites are free: much better business.
Result: decentralized produces less money for you, so you have less investment dollars at your disposal.

Again I urge that read access is the first priority and write transportability is the job of the free market:

Database migrations and the like for decentralized apps have to be fully productized, because they will be run by somebody else who does not know what to do when something fails 15 minutes into an ALTER TABLE command.
Result: decentralized is 10x harder at least.

The following is not so damn difficult. The main thorny issue is certificate authority on public key exchange. The solution is a block chain registry as the certificate authority, e.g. Namecoin.:

And if you build a social networking app, like Diaspora*, you have to build some kind of federation protocol that works across the internet. These protocols are hard, they are expensive, they are hard to secure, none of which you need to do in a centralized settings where you can simply update your (single) database.

Make sure your protocols are correct and fully specified before shipping implementation! Thus any errors are bugs deviating from protocol:

They are harder to use by the end user than a Facebook Like button. And the kicker: because you cannot guarantee that all installations of your app all over the internet run the same version of your app (you are lucky if it’s the majority), interoperability is hit-or-miss. I learned this the hard way when attempting to support users using OpenID. Often, as a developer, you don’t even have a way of finding out that 100% of your users in some place fail! Never mind fixing it (remember, most installations will be out of date)
Result: decentralized is so much harder once you need to seriously federate.

Which is what I had written in my prior post:

https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Federation_message_semantics#Sharing_Notifications

Also it is written in Ruby on Rails and doesn't appear to be built on a clear separation-of-concerns design philosophy, i.e. the protocol should be formalized orthogonal to any particular implementation and language/platform of any implementation.

He wrote this in 2012 and is it still in beta vaporware?

[Of course, I wouldn't be writing this if I didn't have some ideas on how to address many of the above challenges. Currently in beta. Stay tuned.]

[TPTB_need_war]

[...]

In short, only microtransactions would have the crucial End-to-End principle for streaming and downloading music.

They key insight I am making is a very profound one. It concerns the proper design of decentralized social networking. There can't be orthogonality of services without microtransactions, because otherwise services (e.g. streaming storage) have to bound together with other capabilities (e.g. streaming players) which then creates captured markets and the resultant effects (which was my criticism of the future of Ello):

[...]

Every attempt at a federated, decentralized social network has failed outright because either they committed the errors I mentioned in my prior post in this thread, or failed to scale and remain permissionless, trustless, decentralized because of what I wrote in the above quote. Refer to the following and note that App.net suffers the same economic problem as I described at the full post for the above, in that App.net is charging a subscription and thus it competes against the profit of the apps it includes.

Wikipedia has a gigantic list of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking

What's odd is that for so many, there's very few that are actually developed enough to use, and a good number of them have ceased to exist, or at least have frozen development (like crabgrass, it would seem).

Here's another one. It relies on subscription, which some believe make it a more likely solution to succeed in development: app.net (here's a review that talks about it: http://web.appstorm.net/tag/app-net/)

Additionally subscriptions for social networking are not very popular:

The bad news is that the renewal rate was not high enough for us to have sufficient budget for full-time employees. After carefully considering a few different options, we are making the difficult decision to no longer employ any salaried employees, including founders. Dalton and Bryan will continue to be responsible for the operation of App.net, but no longer as employees. Additionally, as part of our efforts to ensure App.net is generating positive cash flow, we are winding down the Developer Incentive Program. We will be reaching out to developers currently enrolled in the program with more information.

App.net will continue to employ contractors for help with support and operations. In addition to operational and support help, we will also be utilizing contract help for specific new development projects.

[Gleb Gamow]

Next month, Synereo is releasing their beta social media application.  If you don't know, Synereo is, at its core, a decentralized, monetized content delivery network.  By allowing users to directly own their data, thus cutting out the middleman (aka Mark Zuckerberg), Synereo passes on the profits to its userbase.  This is referred to as the "attention economy".  As users view and refer ("like") content coming into their personalized streams, they generate a reputation score and earn money.  The attention economy is powered by AMPs on a Casper blockchain.  All settlement is done in AMPs, but the user will have the option of earning any currency they wish.

My question to you is, "Would you change your social media network if you could actually earn money by simply using another network?"

Personally, I think this model has a great, widespread appeal to both the privacy oriented crypto crowd and the general market populace.  Who wouldn't want to earn money by doing something they already spend time doing?

http://blog.synereo.com/2015/03/27/how-amps-work/

1 Reply

Malthus_​​John

First comment: it's strange that there are no comments!  smile

This helps a lot, and I can't believe that I didn't see it before, or if I did, that I didn't remember about it.

If for no other reason, so that I cannot forget again... this.

One question I have is, is there anyone else using the term 'attention economy'? I haven't seen any. If not, then it's fair to say that this is an original idea to Synereo? (at least in this specific incarnation)

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22Attention+Economy%22

https://www.google.com/search?btnG=1&pws=0&q=%22Attention+Economy%22&gws_rd=ssl

About 132,000 results (0.48 seconds)

[DecentralizeEconomics]

Next month, Synereo is releasing their beta social media application.  If you don't know, Synereo is, at its core, a decentralized, monetized content delivery network.  By allowing users to directly own their data, thus cutting out the middleman (aka Mark Zuckerberg), Synereo passes on the profits to its userbase.  This is referred to as the "attention economy".  As users view and refer ("like") content coming into their personalized streams, they generate a reputation score and earn money.  The attention economy is powered by AMPs on a Casper blockchain.  All settlement is done in AMPs, but the user will have the option of earning any currency they wish.

My question to you is, "Would you change your social media network if you could actually earn money by simply using another network?"

Personally, I think this model has a great, widespread appeal to both the privacy oriented crypto crowd and the general market populace.  Who wouldn't want to earn money by doing something they already spend time doing?

http://blog.synereo.com/2015/03/27/how-amps-work/

1 Reply

Malthus_​​John

First comment: it's strange that there are no comments!  smile

This helps a lot, and I can't believe that I didn't see it before, or if I did, that I didn't remember about it.

If for no other reason, so that I cannot forget again... this.

One question I have is, is there anyone else using the term 'attention economy'? I haven't seen any. If not, then it's fair to say that this is an original idea to Synereo? (at least in this specific incarnation)

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22Attention+Economy%22

https://www.google.com/search?btnG=1&pws=0&q=%22Attention+Economy%22&gws_rd=ssl

About 132,000 results (0.48 seconds)

What's your point?

[target]

I'm confuse about the wallets i can't even find how to store Synereo in my hard drive.
Can you please explain a little further here, I saw a thread about Synereo. i understand its just platform but you have a total of about 1 Billion AMPs?  I'm just too newbie here. 

[DecentralizeEconomics]

I'm confuse about the wallets i can't even find how to store Synereo in my hard drive.
Can you please explain a little further here, I saw a thread about Synereo. i understand its just platform but you have a total of about 1 Billion AMPs?  I'm just too newbie here. 

AMPs are currently stored on the Bitcoin blockchain utilizing the Omni protocol layer.  Use Omniwallet or Omnicore to store your AMP tokens.  Once the Synereo network goes live in a couple weeks, AMPs will have their own blockchain.

[TPTB_need_war]

Synereo is up against someone who knows marketing and implementation of million user adopted software better than they do. And we didn't and won't ICO/premine/instamine, meaning that our network effects and adoption will blow theirs away. Synereo is a vaporware P&D so keep that in mind:

Designer's version and I asked her to lower the right pupil slightly more:

https://d3v9w2rcr4yc0o.cloudfront.net/uploads/stream/2016/04/668208/03201042/Revised%20design..png



Note this is the music and games social network, not the crypto-currency, yet the two will be integrated.

[bigs21024]

people could get rich off this if it works well social media is many peoples life mine is crypto lol

[DecentralizeEconomics]

Synereo is a vaporware P&D so keep that in mind

Synereo's beta will be released in a few weeks.

[TPTB_need_war]

Synereo is a vaporware P&D so keep that in mind

Synereo's beta will be released in a few weeks.

Just like Ethereum releases up to now, it will be software that doesn't work for anything real or meaningfully adoptable.

They are having fun inventing code that has no use case, because (as I had already explained) they don't even have the correct formulation of a use case economics and business model.

I will suggest you refer to my project's crowdfund to read the details on what I think a real business and ecosystem model is for this type of project.

I am less respectful than I would be, because they presold the AMP tokens. Thus for me it is scam just like Ethereum. That is my opinion. I don't hate them though. Afaik, they have not been egregiously deceptive, i.e. not like Dash.

[TPTB_need_war]

Reality check:

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/what-happened-to-the-facebook-killer-it-s-complicated

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking

[SynereoCommunity]

I think that trying to measure the potential for success, etc. based on part of a feature that values attention, is not very instructive.

Yes, some people might want to use the network for that reason, but very few.  It's the rest that need to be considered, and how they will come on board.

There are many "one-offs" that happen in reality that are not repeated, because the environment is never going to be the same again.  So how or why FB made it, and others didn't is subjective, and dependent on these other inputs.  Same thing with Tsu.

Neither of these, nor any other, can actually compare with what Synereo is, combined with the world that exists _today_.  The market is different, the level of tech saturation, etc.  FB was simply in the right place, at the right time, historically.

[TPTB_need_war]

I agree with that.

[TPTB_need_war]

I was thinking synereo was possibly meant

Same answer though. I don't even really know what that is, beyond some vague thing about social media. No idea how it was launched, what it does, etc. Never looked at it.

A competing social network for maskcoin or jambox or w/e hes calling it now. Hes trying to imply that you and Shelby intentionally gang on together on things maybe?

I dont know, but it seems like you broke the fella so i guess we probably wont know

I've read most of the 50+ page Synereo white paper, expended several hours viewing some of their YouTube Hangouts, done some limited discussion with their founding developer (username here Elokane), and posted in every recent Synereo thread in Altcoin Discussion.

Synereo was launched as a vaporware ICO and the math whiz on the project is Greg Meredith who is into process calculus research and was one of key persons apparently on Microsoft's BizTalk design. Greg is into using Scala and also is collaborating on the math modeling of Ethereum's upcoming, promised Casper design (which btw several of us, excluding smooth, have criticized in the Ethereum Paradox thread for its fundamental insoluble flaws).

I have pointed out that there are numerous P2P (aka distributed) social networking projects, so the idea of Synereo being the first and able to sweep the world, is very slim, especially they have no compelling features afaics. Thus I have criticized them for preselling tokens ("AMPS") with no adoption and on hype. Their major claim as an innovative feature is an "Attention Model" which is composed of reputation ("Reo") and a counter-vailing force of being able to pay to override reputation with the AMPS tokens. In other words, they aim to make the content that the users share more relevant. I had pointed out that the Reo needs to be fine-grained on for example #hashtags, and Elokane indicated that although that is not in the white paper they are implementing something like that, yet there is no holistic public specification afaik. They are claiming to be very close to beta, but I've pointed out that doesn't mean they are any where near adoption. I have also pointed out that Facebook users don't seem to have major complaints about the relevance of shared content on feeds, thus I doubt anyone will adopt Synereo (because their friends won't be there and much less content sharing and other chicken and egg dilemmas).

Also I have pointed out that the economics of advertising is the most someone could expect to earn by being paid to share (the AMPs model) is perhaps about $1 (in developing world) to $10 (first-world) per day and probably not that much. It simply isn't worth anyone's time. People don't join social networks to be paid some palty income. They join for other more important reasons. Thus I've argued the economic model for the AMPS is fundamentally flawed.

Thus I have argued they are preselling shit which no market.

Also I don't really understand the process calculus well enough to know if it is technobabble bullshit or not, but it sure looks like it to me. It looks like ivory tower shit that has no real implications in the real world. What did BizTalk do that was relevant? I did a Google search and it seems basically no one used it? Excuse me for being skeptical but the selling of ICOs is becoming too lucrative and attractive for every Joe who has some technobabble to make n00bs drool.

Smooth is not involved in my JAMBOX project at all. I occasionally trade ideas with him about technology. My JAMBOX project will when it is crowdsourced (not for tokens just for Tshirts!) will explain that it targets compelling features and economics. I have not yet announced that, because for one thing is that at the moment I am working on potentially creating a new programming language based on top of Rust, or perhaps contributing to Rust. Because JAMBOX is based on the concept of empowering mobile apps, and so I need to be sure the language we are using is the best in severals ways one of which is JIT compilation.

I don't hate Synereo's people. I just wish they hadn't done a vaporware ICO, both for the legal reasons of selling unregistered investment securities to non-accredited USA investors apparently in violation of securities law as provided for by the Supreme Court's Howey test and simply because it is the antithesis of the objective ethics (i.e. no zero-sum games) of meritocratic software development to sell vaporware.

[puremage111]

Imo yes and no.

Yes because if we can earn money by just using social media sites, why not?

But no is due to the fact that facebook twitter and some other popular SMedia sites have already captured and monopolize the entire social media field of interest, so it is still quite hard for people to transisting to other Social media sites unless, if i can earn like $10 / day while just browsing then yes, but if even its $1/day, i would rather stay on fbook

[Macno]

I don't hate Synereo's people. I just wish they hadn't done a vaporware ICO, both for the legal reasons of selling unregistered investment securities to non-accredited USA investors apparently in violation of securities law as provided for by the Supreme Court's Howey test and simply because it is the antithesis of the objective ethics (i.e. no zero-sum games) of meritocratic software development to sell vaporware.

That`s so nice of you not to hate them. What I like about the vaporware AMPs is that no one has to buy them and at the same time people like you have no possibility to hinder me to do so.
I can buy it as freely as I can ignore your T-Shirts. Freedom is awesome.

[TPTB_need_war]

I don't hate Synereo's people. I just wish they hadn't done a vaporware ICO, both for the legal reasons of selling unregistered investment securities to non-accredited USA investors apparently in violation of securities law as provided for by the Supreme Court's Howey test and simply because it is the antithesis of the objective ethics (i.e. no zero-sum games) of meritocratic software development to sell vaporware.

That`s so nice of you not to hate them. What I like about the vaporware AMPs is that no one has to buy them and at the same time people like you have no possibility to hinder me to do so.
I can buy it as freely as I can ignore your T-Shirts. Freedom is awesome.

Well originally that was my thought too given I am a minanarchist. I was very defiant of 2112's attempt to help me and ridiculed his attempt to teach me that I was incorrect. Today I was reminded to PM him a "mea culpa".

Because the reality is that USA society (at least and probably simiilarly in other jurisdictions) has decided that snakeoil salesmen (i.e. hypesters and pumpers) have too much leverage over "unsophisticated, non-accredited" USA investors, and thus has adjudicated that the selling (and ostensibly promoting) of ICOs to USA n00bs (residents or expat citizens) even when promulgated by foreign entities. I understand a prison sentence is a possibility.

Meaning it is not freedom to allow murders and rapists. It is also not freedom to allow hypesters to prey on the ignorance of n00bs, or at least that is what society has decided. If the law changes, then we can talk about the new reality. Until then, I can't help create/code/develop freedom from prison. I suggest you go read the appropriate thread from start to finish:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1218399.msg14546242#msg14546242