Interesting history and analysis of SMTP’s history. How can we prevent fedi and other open protocols from suffering the same fates?
Interesting history and analysis of SMTP’s history. How can we prevent fedi and other open protocols from suffering the same fates?
I know there are problems with big email providers subverting decentralisation to benefit their business models, and throttling mail from independent or self-hosted domains. But I couldn’t take the analysis seriously past this statement:
Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.
Bitcoin is hypercapitalist? A decentralized value store not controlled by any one country and immune to money printing inflation? What are you smoking?
Bitcoin is more widely seen as a vehicle for speculation rather than a decentralized currency. Unlucky.
just like email.
I mean, it’s been shown that it’s relatively easy for a big company to control the price of Bitcoin, and there’s nothing more capitalist than wanting to get away from the control of countries and states that might get in the way of making as much profit as possible so, yeah no I’d say hypercapitalist is a valid accusation. Bitcoin was designed to beat the big banks and capitalist status-quo, but I don’t think that we can pretend it succeeded anymore.
No tech is perfect. And the current bitcoin is not the same as the original client. It has been modified to allow for abuse and control. The fact that we allow this to take place is more a reflection of our governments aiming to control it than any inherent property of the currency.
Big banks would have far less control if you couldn’t print sanctioned currency to buy as much bitcoin as they want to play with the value set by sanctioned exchanges.
I agree that bitcoin is capitalist like most monetary bills in a free market. I disagree it’s more capitalist than what we have now. It’s just being propagandized and veiled from the underlying technology to make it seem so.
This guy is a protocol engineer, talking about protocols. You may not like like Bitcoin, but it’s pretty hard to argue it’s not one of the most successful, widely-used, and forked open source protocols developed in the last several decades. Bitcoin core is in the top 100 starred repos on Github. It has a unicode character.
Bitcoin’s market cap (> 1 trillion USD) is bigger than Sweden’s GDP and it moves billions of dollars around the world every year. You can use it to send money to anybody with a phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees, and it settles instantly. And it’s been working for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack despite pandemics, wars, financial crises, and attempted bans by global powers.
Like, be mad if you want, but it’s a pretty successful and robust protocol. And if you don’t like it, you can fork it and change it, because it’s open source.
http, https, ssh, ntp, ftp. These are all algorithms some of us use every day. Bitcoin is a protocol, true, but it’s not a good one. And it’s one that most people have not used, and don’t intend to
It has a lot of forks? that is neither here nor there. it’s a tech buzzword. of course there are going to be a lot of forks. Do any of them actually go anywhere though? not really
No, see — if I dont like it I don’t need to fork it. I can just leave it and all its forks the hell alone. I’d do the same for national currencies if I could, cryptocurrencies are just the same bullshit without the regulatory checks and balances.
TL;DR — I see what you’re selling and I’m not buying it.
well to be fair bitcoin is on point as a decentralized currency.