ok cool how about you switch to linux like a normal person instead of getting fossil fuel fursona jpegs
These are never people who play with antennas and mesh nets in their free time. They don’t like decentralized tech. They like the aesthetic of the crypto community. Decentralized tech is so much more rich and complicated and in some ways immature than cryptocurrency
Intelligence agencies and other criminals like crypto for being an easy way to move money clandestinely but to almost everyone else it is just another get rich quick scheme.
It’s a network topology as well as a family of networking protocols depending on how specific you wanna get.
The Internet as it stands is largely hierarchical in terms of bandwidth. We have the fiber backbone that runs along the bottom of the ocean and the upstream ISPs pull from there and the local ISPs pull from them and then we get our connections from the locals. So if you want to communicate with a server across the ocean (as must of us do every day whether we know it or not) your packets need to climb all the way back up the bandwidth hierarchy. That hierarchical model you can diagram out like a big branching star.
Mesh networks look more like spider webs with neighbors having direct connections to each other and making the resulting network have a lot of redundant connections which are resilient to outages. Imagine a world where if your ISP had an outage, you could still communicate with your neighbors via federated social media because your houses all have direct connections and each of them hosts a micro server with all their social data on it. This sort of thing could be very useful for emergencies and also much more censorship/surveillance-resistant
I've said it before and I'll say it again, cryptocurrency is the only known way that a group of people who all hate each other can share computers and databases which can't be fucked with. Despite the idiocy in the space it's good actually
It's solves a problem that only exists in capitalism, the need for a loose consensus between entities that are also competitors. This is why it's an innately right-wing technology. Incredible inefficiency all for the purpose of avoiding community, trust and organization.
I think the 2 assumptions that make it inherently right wing are:
- that the unit of control ought to be an individual person
- that its most obvious use case is money
You could have a situation where federated nations use blockchain technology and smart contracts to ensure trust between each other for shared logistics or for automation of mutual aid, for example. The miners in this case could be controlled by an entire community and allow for decentralized ownership of limited goods without needing a single entity to organize them for you. Imagine something like the little free libraries that people put in their yards, but indexable and searchable in real-time.
I definitely see how these things are a solution in search of a problem, especially now that they’ve been fully captured by finance capital, but the underlying tech isn’t inherently as bad as people say. It’s just not mature enough to do what people need it to do
I agree that it's a solution in search of a problem but moreover it's a technological solution for a social problem. If some federated soviets for example had a decentralized logistical software that simply naively trusted what the other soviets reported it would indeed obviously be abuseable but the idea of these groups federating is that they should have a baseline level of trust and shared goals such that cooperate. If they are incentivized to abuse the system then it has already irreparably failed on the social level.
To be clear I'm not being completely utopian here but relying on the fact that abuse of a logistical system can still be detected by other auditing means without needing a fully trustless system like blockchain.
Communities and nations do not need blockchain. Human trust and impartial arbitrators will still be necessary to do anything material.
It's definitely a technology that doesn't have a modern practical use, but in a case like solar system wide colonization, having automated trust networks would be incredibly valuable for simplifying transactions and movements
This is just flat out wrong, it wouldn't simply inter-planetary trading. Regional liquidity and market shocks problems would force the creation of individual currencies that can adopt to monetary policy to prevent economic collapse. These 'trust' arguments have zero economic reasoning.
Someone owns the software repository though. There's still a chain of trust but now it ends at some tech bro.
I would like that :meow-tankie:
I was gonna try the other day but I had an unexpected guest, so I still don't know how difficult it will be for a computer illiterate like me
Oh and maybe start switching to libre software in the meantime, it should make switching to Linux a lot easier.
Purely by chance I already use a lot of these!
Also, I didn't know u could change ur file explorer on windows I thought it was baked in lmao. Shows what I know.
Fair enough haha. Fortunately my program use is pretty light since I don't do dev stuff or use my home pc for work. Or cool things like sound/video/image editing even though it sounds kinda interesting. My main focus is going to be making sure I back up my stuff correctly, since this is my first computer I've never had to do something like that before.
It also sucks because you've got to have an entire replica of every transaction that's ever been made in order to actually make a transaction yourself. Which means in reality it's not much different than regular banks. The cost of entry is obviously a lot lower and it's harder to shut someone out of the network, but it isn't like it's providing some amazing new thing that improves "freedom" or whatever.
Most coins have services to “tree shake” so you don’t need all the transactions to transfer money between two wallets, just the relevant blocks
you’ve got to have an entire replica of every transaction that’s ever been made in order to actually make a transaction yourself.
Not true. Even the Bitcoin core wallet has pruning. Although if you're a purist you would have the whole chain.
Of course Elon_Musk would point this out :disgost: Okay I guess it's not quite that bad, but it still relies on others who do have the whole chain right?
also context for fossil fuel fursonas lol https://twitter.com/PerezWrestler/status/1443707768586870789
My favorite interaction with a crpto guy was on the gravel institute video where I pointed out that El Salvador's switch to Bitcoin as legal tender was just some bullshit scam to get the president richer and some fucking nobody replied to me saying "You think that bad? Then wait around and stick to fiat currency and we'll see who's worse off in 5 years" absolutely unhinged doomsday/boomsday prophecy politics covered in Elon jizz.
-7DeadlyFetishes
