Sure - I find this stuff super interesting and went from an open minded skeptic to cautiously optimistic (and have a positive long term view). I think urbit’s

Sure - I find this stuff super interesting and went from an open minded skeptic to cautiously optimistic (and have a positive long term view). I think urbit’s approach to spam makes sense. Non-zero cost IDs (cheap) in the form of NFTs that grant network access and a pseudonym. This makes spam no longer economical because spammers can be trivially blocked. Pseudonyms also accrue reputation. It basically moves auth and network complexity into the OS layer under an abstraction which makes application deployment way simpler. No distinction between a user and a server also fix a lot of the other broken things that cause federated systems to centralize or end up DOA to be avoided. In the ETH world, decentralized state and the ability to incentivize network nodes and development via tokens and programmatic money make it possible to push back against the things that advantage centralization. The issue is the protocols have to be good enough to solve a lot of this stuff, the old web didn’t do this well for the reasons you suggest and administering Linux servers is way too hard. I understand the dismissal of technical people because crypto is filled with know-nothing scammers and gamblers, but it’s worth taking a closer look. There’s lots of interesting stuff happening in the space. A lot of people dismissed the web in the 90s too. There can be a bubble and a crash, but still be underlying tech there that will have a big impact.