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Comment by EGreg

1 year ago

Because crypto is literally how entities on a decentralized network get paid in an autonomous network. It's not via cash transfers. It's not via bank transfers. Or having accounts in some central bank.

Look at FileCoin and IPFS, for instance. Once you automate the micropayments and proofs of spacetime, it becomes a cryptocurrency. And then the providers of services can sell it to the next consumers.

Just because you hear the word "crypto" doesn't mean it's automatically off-topic, when it's literally the thing that is inevitably used by decentralized systems to do proper accounting and reward the providers for providing any services. Without it, you'll still be sitting -- as you are -- with no viable alternatives to Twitter and Facebook.

> Because crypto is literally how entities on a decentralized network get paid in an autonomous network

That doesn't ring true. What is an autonomous network? Those things runs on the internet, largely backed by infrastructure funded by traditional money. Moreover, emails, tor nodes, xmpp servers, matrix homeservers, fediverse hosts... None of those need cryptocoins to fund themselves, and are indeed largely and for the most part funded using traditional money. Micropayments are also not something needed for decentralization.

Decentralization is way more than just about decentralizing money and many of us don't trust crypto coins.

> it's literally the thing that is inevitably used by decentralized systems to do proper accounting and reward the providers for providing any services.

Or just like, advertisement. ActivityPub, Matrix, PeerTube, NextCloud and Urbit are all fully decentralized and let any instance host monetize themselves however they want.

Decentralized services, even for-profit ones, are not synonymous with cryptocurrency. Stop spreading misinformation to promote an unrelated topic.

  • Urbit uses NFTs as IDs, which can be transferred

    "Urbit IDs aren’t money, but they are scarce, so each one costs something. This means that when you meet a stranger on the Urbit network, they have some skin in the game and are less likely to be a bot or a spammer." https://urbit.org/overview

    Who pays for the hosting of ActivityPub and Matrix instances?

    What if one instance abuses other instances too much? How do you prevent it?

    What if some spammer abuses Nexcloud? Oh, look at that, Nextcloud and Sia announce "cloud storage in the blockchain": https://nextcloud.com/blog/introducing-cloud-storage-in-the-...

    Now we come to your ActivityPub stuff, including PeerTube. The question is, who pays for storage? What are the economics of storage?

    I literally go into detail here: https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-...

    I met the founders of LBRY / Odysee and other tokens that are actually being used for actual streaming. LBRY is a genuine utility token being used for instance.

    You are totally ignoring the part that people need to get paid for storing stuff, and at the same time the payment needs to happen automatically.

    Any other examples?

    • > Who pays for the hosting of ActivityPub and Matrix instances?

      And

      > What if one instance abuses other instances too much? How do you prevent it?

      Simple, they get blocked by other instances?

      How cryptos change anything to these three questions?

      > Oh, look at that, Nextcloud and Sia announce "cloud storage in the blockchain"

      That just means Sia wrote a Nextcloud integration for their stuff and somehow nextcloud decided to showcase this integration. That doesn't mean Nexctloud has much to do with blockchain stuff. Nextcloud integrates with anything and its dog.

      > What if some spammer abuses Nexcloud?

      What kind of spam are you imagining and how do you think crypto coins are going to solve this? You don't use cryptos for this, you use good old system administration and in particular antispam systems, which don't use coins.

      > You are totally ignoring the part that people need to get paid for storing stuff, and at the same time the payment needs to happen automatically.

      We're not.

      First, they don't always need to, some people run stuff out of advocacy for instance.

      Second, getting paid with regular money is not an unsolved problem, there are plenty of options, many of which also coming with some builtin guaranties against fraud. It's literally how the whole world works. Now, I can't say I'm a huge fan of our financial system but that's a social issue in need for a social solution, not a technical one.

      I'm stopping here, it's pretty clear that I won't get a solid, reasonable argument in favor of cryptos here. And that since your top comment is flagged to death, nobody reads us anyway.

    • I could go on for literal days. The blockchain isn't a panacea, and rationally most solutions don't ultimately settle on a bespoke transactional network with audited consensus protocols. It is stupid, overdesigned, and as a sign of its poor fitness it dies over time. I'm not relaying some "evil villain" speech from someone that wants to see decentralized services die, this is a reality check from your peers who also hate centralization. Borderline intervention if it has to be - you've echoed this same sentiment in several threads while apparently ignoring the self-evident failure of protocols that embody your vision.

      This was a cutting-edge and untested concept in maybe 2011. You missed the boat by a decade and a half.

      > LBRY is a genuine utility token being used for instance.

      Yeah, last I heard of their brand was when a member of my graduating class became a neo-nazi for six months and incessantly uploaded videos detailing his hallucinations to the internet. You're in good company, it sounds like.

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