Quote from: Lynx! on January 11, 2014, 04:09:01 PM

I was thinking recently there is some sort of correlation between cryptocurrencies and 3d printing. If you think about this two, relatively new technologies, it seems like they are going in the same direction : Bitcoin is decentralizing money, 3d printers are decentralizing production. As a follower of both i would really like a world where you can buy everything (from a glass to a nuclear weapon Grin

) as a 3d printer project using BTC and then produce it with my own printer.

What do you think ? We are heading to a decentralization of the whole economy ? Is this good or dangerous ? /discuss

Very good correlation. This has been a trend in the making for a very long time that is often referred to as "distributed computing", particularly when you're talking about P2P. While 3D printers are not as interdependent as P2P, they do represent a form of "distributed computing based manufacturing".

This article in 2002, while on the topic of web services, which were new then, discusses the trend towards distributed computing:

Quote

Distributed computing is about getting components and systems to interoperate to create something bigger, independent of the physical machines the parts are hosted on. As each computer reaches out to connect to another to create something bigger, the individual machine becomes less noticeable. It becomes just one of thousands, then millions, then billions of machines in a world of massive information flows to create what we call the Internet.