Absolutely! I never realized how powerful the media is until I read Chomsky in college.

It ALL hinges on making elections fair in the first place. Closed primaries and first past the post rules make banana republic democracies seem fair in comparison. Until those issues get solved, I only see the “adults in the room” deciding to boil the oceans for profit while codifying it into law more each year.

It’s hard not to be cynical.

“I” seem to require? No. I’m deferring to the cypherpunk manifesto which rings true over and over again.

IMO, anonymity should be able to be switched on and off at will by the user. Selective disclosure using homomorphic encryption coupled with digital identity can achieve both, IMO.

In particular, businesses require anonymity in much of their chain of custody…and I think that’s fair.

Perhaps. I tend to listen to Snowden when it comes to tech. But I haven’t used it yet because all of the implementations I could use involved a bitcoin wallet. I’m a fan of crypto but that felt weird.

Someone else reassured me that NOSTR is a very open platform and that requirement wasn’t true.

From my research, I have found it to be far more decentralized than Lemmy’s (and the pub/sub) federated model, which would also, obviously have the same drawbacks that we see in other truly decentralized tech like crypto, torrents, and tor where you are on your own in the world, forced to literally keep the ocean of shit from infecting you! 😉

So, I think of those things as necessary evils. For example, if I used NOSTR, I could have an address that follows me no matter what. That cryptographic hash is my NOSTR identity for better or worse. That’s pretty powerful and far more secure than a two step verification process in the long run.

I don’t know enough about it yet. But I’d say it is a raw technology that I wouldn’t allow the criminals and trolls of the world define for me.

Are the people who invented this aware of NOSTR?
If so, what makes this different? And if not, perhaps we could use NOSTR to bridge the gap in the fediverse at the moment between NOSTR users and Mastodon/Pixelfed/Lemmy/KBIN/MBIN users

I started forking Lemmy for an inventory system but then realized that NOSTR was far more suited to that and other applications that require security and encryption.

https://nostr.org

No problem.

Thanks for proving mine as well.

I even ended up writing you a stupid term paper but you just couldn’t hang I guess.

I mean, I don’t need to do anything. As you implied, it’s similar to any currency. If no one holds it or accepts it, it doesn’t have value. The only reason the US dollar has any value is the military force behind it.

Thankfully, crypto is able to offer something back in exchange for leveraging the greater fool fallacy as a system of security. It actually DOES something that will be valuable to society someday (and let’s be real that day is not today since not one DApp has really gone mainstream…but when they do, you might not even know it).

It serves as a world computer that cannot be censored, stopped, or bent to the will of any one nation or world power and all people need to do is buy into that greater fool fallacy to sustain that illusion. It’s strange and I get your point. But luckily I don’t need to convince you. There are already enough fools greater than I to sustain this thing ad infinitum.

For example, how long do you think people are going to keep paying Fanduel and Draftkings their undeserving cut when a crypto-based alternative that is equal or even superior in every way pops up? It’s only a matter of time. In that particular case: The only technology preventing it right now is an oracle that feeds the data from sports to a smart contract. This technology is in its infancy.

You have, perhaps, developed too strong an opinion too soon and will need time when it does pop up in mainstream use around you.

It’s slower

and virtually impossible to hack

It’s harder to use

and virtually impossible to hack

It’s full of scams

people are idiots. I have literally never been scammed. If it’s not open source and a small group of insiders have massive bags of it, don’t invest, dumbass. Invest in cryptocurrencies that are TRULY decentralized by actually using your brain and reading.

It’s backed by nothing

It has intrinsic value. Gold is only worth something because someone says it has value.

There is no consumer protection

It easily could if regulators weren’t intentionally wishy washy about whether it is legal or not. Regulation will come. Sounds like you’re REALLY chomping at the bit to have the inevitable alternative: revocable central bank digital currencies.

It amplifies the existing problems of the financial system instead of solving them (money laundering/scams/financial inequality)

Not really. It is FAR more auditable than legacy systems. People are dumb. AI magnified how dumb companies are and so did crypto. People that understand it and AI will use it well. Those that villainize it (just like AI) do so because they are brainwashed by polarized viewpoints (just like AI). The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

It’s dominated by the same rich cunts you’re trying to escape, but they’re even worse in crypto

That’s not true. Look at the financial holdings of billionaires in fiat vs. crypto. It’s FAR more egalitarian than fiat. You have to be talking about some fairly shitty cryptocurrencies for that to be true. Ethereum and Bitcoin have massive institutional investment. Their money is as green as anyone else’s.

All networks generally need L2s because they’re so shit and slow

It’s called architecture. Do you also not see the need for GPU’s and dedicated modules on a motherboard? Should the CPU do everything. Multithreading is bad I guess? Are you aware of what decentralization and parallelism can accomplish in technological spaces? Do you actually know what an L2 is? Seems like you don’t understand it.

Interesting you talk about gatekeeping information when you’re literally parroting crypto echo chamber rhetoric because if you dare suggest anything other than crypto is the future you will instantly get shut down. It’s a cult, basically.

Interesting that you don’t even have enough self-awareness or knowledge of the problem domains you claim to understand to see that you’re doing the EXACT same thing.

You parroted partially true (cherry picked) all the way down to completely untrue things about the properties of this technology. If you understood the technology in the first place, you’d recognize that. There are so many different permutations of it and you paint it with the broadest brush possible.

Tell me, do you know about proof of stake? Do you know what proof of work is? Do you understand the concept of an oracle?

Of course it doesn’t solve every problem (it won’t ever be used to stream video…of course…did anyone ever say it would?)…but the ones it DOES solve (that you pretend it hasn’t) are not achievable with any as of yet known technology.

Here’s just one that I’d love to see you pretend could exist on any other technology: Digital Identity and Land Deeds in war-torn (or even no longer existing) countries. Let’s say bombs destroy any paper deeds or even deeds on the servers all around a country. A person fleeing the country might return to the country and be homeless because they couldn’t prove that they owned that land. On a decentralized public blockchain, those deeds can be minted and henceforth can never be erased. Even if the official body that authorized them to be minted goes under or out of power, they are, in fact, IMPOSSIBLE TO ERASE SINCE THEY ARE ON A DECENTRALIZED BLOCKCHAIN and would be very hard if not impossible to discredit. The person would be legally able to get their house back.

Another one is voting. Electronic voting on a PUBLIC DECENTRALIZED blockchain would be literally the ONLY way to achieve a fully-open, auditable election. Furthermore, if you’re proposing that a similar centralized government solution (equal in all other ways other than one being truly decentralized and the other not) is even remotely similar in its robustness and trustworthiness, you’re SURELY being disingenuous.

There are TONS more but I don’t feel like wasting my time writing a term paper for someone that is clearly being disingenuous, parroting some world bank wage-slave neoliberal nonsense in the first place.

You don’t want decentralization? Your argument against crypto is that we still use centralized systems? We will do that until we don’t. That’s like way back before cars were ubiquitous, seeing a car and saying, “we use the horse and buggy.” Yes we do. The car replaces the horse and buggy in many important ways. It takes a while to catch on, though. In the same way, IMO technology should always be guided toward further decentralization unless we WANT the powers that be to be the gatekeepers of information.

Honestly, even without crypto attached to it, I’d say the next version of the internet WILL be more servers running by independent operators and less centralization in data centers. It is inevitable regardless of anything I wrote here. Centralization is bad for so many reasons…the most damning of which is censorship.

I’m looking for viable alternatives to the one I mentioned. I can see the cons to the method I mentioned (stake pools that also run instances and collect fees from transaction they process to cover the costs that running an instance incurs) so I am honestly just hoping to see some fresh new ideas. I sympathize with people’s disdain for the ills of crypto but I see some purity in crypto when executed properly (in an open and decentralized manner with 100% public inital token allocation for example).

I couldn’t agree more. When I was proposing crypto tie-in for votes, someone mentioned the Cobra Effect and I honestly had no answer to prevent it. I think it is wise to proceed under the assumption that it is somewhat inevitable that we see some sort of monetization as the user base grows and it becomes prohibitively expensive to run an instance. Personally, I think it is important that we really get deep into these discussion now so we can find a good consensus (with the least tradeoffs) before it’s too late and people just start forcfeeding users the classic “enshittification” modus operandi. I think the method detailed in this article is straight up enshitification incarnate; Patreon with more steps.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-brain-and-value/202402/what-the-cobra-effect-teaches-us-about-reward-psychology?amp

I just wish your perspective was the norm. As these platforms catch on, that toxicity you mention becomes inevitable. Also tired of fleeing. I sincerely hope we don’t have to find a way to tie financial incentive into this relatively untainted community.

As far as I’m concerned, whatever they’re selling here in OP’s article ain’t it. And perhaps my ideas (above) of a future decentralized fediverse are misguided too.

I will say this: I don’t WANT to find a way to monetize this stuff. People are just increasingly more desperate for money. As the world gets worse, people are going to get increasingly more desperate to find a unique niche to fill to make a living.

Let me ask you this then: How do you think servers will continue to run? Do they run for free on fairy magic?

I don’t live in a communist country. So, I fail to see your point about money being a scam. Yes. Of course. But I can’t tell my landlord that money is a scam. He will want money for me to continue not being homeless.

3rd generation cryptocurrencies are an attempt to decentralize and democratize computation. If you have a better way to pay people for use of their servers, I’d be happy to hear it but right now you are literally using a server that runs because someone decided to do so for free. It won’t always be that way when this technology scales beyond one server operator’s practical limit. We will need ways to pay people for the use of their electricity and hardware. If you can think of a better way that ISN’T fraught with corruption, centralization, and loss of anonymity, I’d love to read it.

NixOS

😉

Are we so hive-minded here on Lemmy that we have been brainwashed into hating crypto so much that we, a DECENTRALIZED community, have decided to start a centralized service to pay posters rather than use the trustless, decentralized systems literally DESIGNED for that purpose that already exist?

All crypto isn’t a scam, people. Stop scoring own-goals against the big banksters and do your part against crypto scams by thoroughly vetting crypto projects before you put your trust in them rather than blindly believing that they’re ALL out to scam you.

This idea should obviously be implemented with cryptocurrency but of course it isn’t because of our unfounded vilification of an entire industry that is clearly more philosophically aligned with the principles of the fediverse than centralized, legacy systems that we’ve been duped into continuing to support.

🤦

Yup.

*Exciting

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