Thank you for that analogy, because it actually serves to illustrate my concern.
Here in NJ there's a station that reaches most of the state, and makes a big deal of its every-15-minute traffic reports. I used to listen to these while commuting, until I found from experience that their reports, at least for the roads I deal with, carried data that was either so stale as to be useless, or was just plain wrong. So now I don't listen to that station anymore. Instead, I use an app called Waze for my phone. This uses crowd-sourced data (i.e., decentralized), which also isn't wholly dependable (there's not always another user there ahead of me to make a report, and it's still susceptible to gaming), but on the whole it gives me a better picture of the traffic situation.
Thank you for that analogy, because it actually serves to illustrate my concern.
Here in NJ there's a station that reaches most of the state, and makes a big deal of its every-15-minute traffic reports. I used to listen to these while commuting, until I found from experience that their reports, at least for the roads I deal with, carried data that was either so stale as to be useless, or was just plain wrong. So now I don't listen to that station anymore. Instead, I use an app called Waze for my phone. This uses crowd-sourced data (i.e., decentralized), which also isn't wholly dependable (there's not always another user there ahead of me to make a report, and it's still susceptible to gaming), but on the whole it gives me a better picture of the traffic situation.