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Using a centralized form of payment completely defeats the purpose of a peer to peer system. The system is as strong as its weakest link; if your payment proces

Using a centralized form of payment completely defeats the purpose of a peer to peer system. The system is as strong as its weakest link; if your payment processor has the ability to take down your service (by blocking payments) you might as well be hosting the service itself on a centralized system too! I agree that not everything requires payment, but the things that do cannot truly be p2p without p2p payments. Let me pose the question in a different way: why do you see p2p filesharing, hosting, communication etc as valuable but p2p payments as non-valuable?

eternityforest 5y ago
The main value I see in everything else P2P is that they're resistant to network failure. If a wannabe Kaczynski somehow takes out all the data centers, you'll still be able to set up a mesh and have essential communications. Uncensorable payments are important for some and detrimental for others, since the majority of people have no need or desire to do anything that would get them shut down by a bank, and in fact actively benefit from the ability to "censor" fraud. Putting something like that in the core of a protocol as a mandatory element doesn't make a lot of sense. There's an incredible amount of overhead involved, and it means the protocol is no longer general purpose, it's optimized for doing stuff payment processors don't want you to do, at the expense of the other use cases. Which would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that almost all p2p projects have become money-centric, and payment free P2P has almost totally stalled. For most use cases, payments aren't really a weak link. Their tech is highly reliable. If I were to host something with 3 different cheap seedboxes, I'd expect very good reliability, because mastercard probably won't have a long enough outage to make an invoice overdue. P2P payments are definitely valuable, just a bit more niche.

eternityforest 5y ago

The main value I see in everything else P2P is that they're resistant to network failure. If a wannabe Kaczynski somehow takes out all the data centers, you'll still be able to set up a mesh and have essential communications. Uncensorable payments are important for some and detrimental for others, since the majority of people have no need or desire to do anything that would get them shut down by a bank, and in fact actively benefit from the ability to "censor" fraud. Putting something like that in the core of a protocol as a mandatory element doesn't make a lot of sense. There's an incredible amount of overhead involved, and it means the protocol is no longer general purpose, it's optimized for doing stuff payment processors don't want you to do, at the expense of the other use cases. Which would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that almost all p2p projects have become money-centric, and payment free P2P has almost totally stalled. For most use cases, payments aren't really a weak link. Their tech is highly reliable. If I were to host something with 3 different cheap seedboxes, I'd expect very good reliability, because mastercard probably won't have a long enough outage to make an invoice overdue. P2P payments are definitely valuable, just a bit more niche.