7 ms·

Right, and dropbox could be recreated with rsync and some python in a weekend. Just because _we_ can, and have the interest and inclination to do so, doesn't me

Right, and dropbox could be recreated with rsync and some python in a weekend. Just because _we_ can, and have the interest and inclination to do so, doesn't mean it's easy for everyone else.

cowtools 4y ago
Dropbox exists because people don't know how to use bittorrent. You can grift off that ignorance for a while, but not forever
- seized 4y ago
  That doesn't even make sense. Dropbox and BitTorrent are not providing the same service. Maybe you're trying to compare to Resilio Sync but still wrong. Non-technical people need things like Dropbox. You not liking Dropbox doesn't change that.
- cecilpl2 4y ago
  I have been using bittorrent for 15 years and still pay for Dropbox because it's a very useful service.
- camjw 4y ago
  You're saying Dropbox is a grift with a $7bn market cap?
  - cowtools 4y ago
    Yes. The internet is broken, and a lot of these companies are based on selling "solutions" to these artificial problems. Another example is Cloudflare. If the internet was designed properly, you wouldn't have DDoS attacks in the first place. There would be no one to sell DDoS protection to, no one to rent out botnets to. You wouldn't even need most web/file "hosting" in the traditional sense if you could just share static files with bittorrent/IPFS.
    - camjw 4y ago
      Right. I'll bite, how is Dropbox not a _real_ solution to a _real_ problem of "I want to share this file with someone else or somewhere else"? Hate to say it but I feel like the answer is going to involve "web3 fixes this".
      - cowtools 4y ago
        Peer-to-peer file transfers will always be faster than having an intermediary. Why not use bittorrent or IPFS? P.S. The problem dropbox "fixes" is that there is no decent file transfer protocol that is IP agnostic. Using something like bittorrent's or IPFS' DHT fixes this. Dropbox "fixes" this by making file transfer into a paid service
        Kye 4y ago
        I'm not going to deliver a commission over BitTorrent or IPFS. That's absurd.
        IanCal 4y ago
        > Why not use bittorrent or IPFS? The last time I used IPFS it took four hours before I could access the file just using the hash or even the public gateway after pushing it to several major pinning services.
        seized 4y ago
        I've had files sitting on Google Drive for longer than IPFS has existed. Let's not pretend that IPFS/etc is a solution to relying on services that are far older than it.
        camjw 4y ago
        Okay, cool, the majority of Dropbox users I know do not use the product because of speed or because of any IP agnosticism. It's a shame all these users are so stupid and don't use IPFS or bittorrent instead, amirite?
        crummy 4y ago
        > Peer-to-peer file transfers will always be faster than having an intermediary. Why not use bittorrent One reason is that such a scenario relies on one of my computers with bittorrent-dropbox to be online for me to access my files elsewhere. Syncing it in the cloud means they are available reliably.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    People keep saying cryptocurrency is a grift despite having multiple orders of magnitude greater of a market cap, so sure, why not?
    - ultra_chad 4y ago
      Because it is a grift.
      - yellowapple 4y ago
        And so is Dropbox, then. See? We both can play that game!
        jollybean 4y ago
        Dropbox is a useful service. The comment about 'bit torrent' makes little sense. Having cloud storage 24/7 high availability has utility. (Yes, if the interent were designed a bit different, that config might be slightly different, but there'd be some value in Dropbox in there somehow). Bitcoin has no utility. It has the 'promise' of utility, which is the current utility it rests upon, making the underlying value quite difficult to determine. If BTC were to dissapear, the world wouldn't skip a beat, and we would have no need to 'reinvent' BTC. We would likely to continue to think about and experiment with other things, but as it stands so far, BTC isn't the solution to anything.
        yellowapple 4y ago
        > If BTC were to dissapear, the world wouldn't skip a beat, and we would have no need to 'reinvent' BTC. There would be no need to 'reinvent' Dropbox, either. People would do so for both regardless of necessity (and indeed have done so for both, ad nauseam) because they find them and the concepts thereof useful or interesting, contrary to what you or I might assert.
        jollybean 4y ago
  - knorker 4y ago
    Heh, sounds like they're saying "the cloud is just someone else's computer", which is the same as "the bakery is just someone else's oven". The bank is just someone else's ledger. Yes. As a service. Which is what people want. Nobody wants to run their own bakery just to get a bagel.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Some people do, and it should be possible for them to do so. And some people don't, and it should be possible for them to get ledger-as-a-service. Why can't there be room for both?
      - knorker 4y ago
        I'm not trying to ban people from becoming bakers. You do you. I'm saying they should temper their expectations, if they think that secretly everyone wants to be a baker, and in the future a meaningful fraction will be. Most people, when they go to a baker and ask for a bagel, will not want the answer "great, so just buy this oven from amazon. I'll show you how to use it when it arrives'. Cryptocurrency advocates are wrong about what other people want, or will want. They can LARP if they want, but that doesn't mean that it's value to other people.
    - camjw 4y ago
      > Heh, sounds like they're saying "the cloud is just someone else's computer", which is the same as "the bakery is just someone else's oven". I've not heard this before, I will remember it. This is such a good retort.
DennisP 4y ago
That's a drastic exaggeration of the effort required. The backup is to write down 24 words. For more redundancy, write them down again on another piece of paper. Put them somewhere safe enough considering the amount you have stored, and you're good. I know people with crypto who are not especially technical, but have no trouble with this. (Or, follow Vitalik's recommendation to use social recovery wallets, which are available for phones and I think have decent UI.)
- caseyohara 4y ago
  I think ckolkey was referencing this now-HN-famous dismissal of Dropbox when it was first announced in 2007 (top comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
  - DennisP 4y ago
    I admit I missed that. But backing up your self-hosted wallet is way less technical than rolling your own Dropbox, so I don't think it changes my argument.
    - cecilpl2 4y ago
      I have family members that have done the following: * Email me photos because they don't know how to add them to a shared google photo album. * Aren't on Facebook because they can't figure out how. * Forget their email password so just made a new email account. * Make a different decision on iOS vs Android every time they get a new phone. A very large segment of the population behaves in this way. How will self-hosted hardware wallets work for these people? What do you say when Grandpa calls you (because he doesn't text or email) and asks who to call to recover the money he was defrauded of?
      - jboy55 4y ago
        I have family members who paid for computer service because Microsoft was so nice to call them after detecting an issue with their computer. But lets get them all cold wallets to hold their money.

Right, and dropbox could be recreated with rsync and some python in a weekend. Just because _we_ can, and have the interest and inclination to do so, doesn't mean it's easy for everyone else.

cowtools 4y ago

Dropbox exists because people don't know how to use bittorrent. You can grift off that ignorance for a while, but not forever

seized 4y ago
That doesn't even make sense. Dropbox and BitTorrent are not providing the same service. Maybe you're trying to compare to Resilio Sync but still wrong. Non-technical people need things like Dropbox. You not liking Dropbox doesn't change that.
cecilpl2 4y ago
I have been using bittorrent for 15 years and still pay for Dropbox because it's a very useful service.
camjw 4y ago
You're saying Dropbox is a grift with a $7bn market cap?
- cowtools 4y ago
  Yes. The internet is broken, and a lot of these companies are based on selling "solutions" to these artificial problems. Another example is Cloudflare. If the internet was designed properly, you wouldn't have DDoS attacks in the first place. There would be no one to sell DDoS protection to, no one to rent out botnets to. You wouldn't even need most web/file "hosting" in the traditional sense if you could just share static files with bittorrent/IPFS.
  - camjw 4y ago
    Right. I'll bite, how is Dropbox not a _real_ solution to a _real_ problem of "I want to share this file with someone else or somewhere else"? Hate to say it but I feel like the answer is going to involve "web3 fixes this".
    - cowtools 4y ago
      Peer-to-peer file transfers will always be faster than having an intermediary. Why not use bittorrent or IPFS? P.S. The problem dropbox "fixes" is that there is no decent file transfer protocol that is IP agnostic. Using something like bittorrent's or IPFS' DHT fixes this. Dropbox "fixes" this by making file transfer into a paid service
      - Kye 4y ago
        I'm not going to deliver a commission over BitTorrent or IPFS. That's absurd.
      - IanCal 4y ago
        > Why not use bittorrent or IPFS? The last time I used IPFS it took four hours before I could access the file just using the hash or even the public gateway after pushing it to several major pinning services.
      - seized 4y ago
        I've had files sitting on Google Drive for longer than IPFS has existed. Let's not pretend that IPFS/etc is a solution to relying on services that are far older than it.
      - camjw 4y ago
        Okay, cool, the majority of Dropbox users I know do not use the product because of speed or because of any IP agnosticism. It's a shame all these users are so stupid and don't use IPFS or bittorrent instead, amirite?
      - crummy 4y ago
        > Peer-to-peer file transfers will always be faster than having an intermediary. Why not use bittorrent One reason is that such a scenario relies on one of my computers with bittorrent-dropbox to be online for me to access my files elsewhere. Syncing it in the cloud means they are available reliably.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  People keep saying cryptocurrency is a grift despite having multiple orders of magnitude greater of a market cap, so sure, why not?
  - ultra_chad 4y ago
    Because it is a grift.
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      And so is Dropbox, then. See? We both can play that game!
      - jollybean 4y ago
        Dropbox is a useful service. The comment about 'bit torrent' makes little sense. Having cloud storage 24/7 high availability has utility. (Yes, if the interent were designed a bit different, that config might be slightly different, but there'd be some value in Dropbox in there somehow). Bitcoin has no utility. It has the 'promise' of utility, which is the current utility it rests upon, making the underlying value quite difficult to determine. If BTC were to dissapear, the world wouldn't skip a beat, and we would have no need to 'reinvent' BTC. We would likely to continue to think about and experiment with other things, but as it stands so far, BTC isn't the solution to anything.
        yellowapple 4y ago
        > If BTC were to dissapear, the world wouldn't skip a beat, and we would have no need to 'reinvent' BTC. There would be no need to 'reinvent' Dropbox, either. People would do so for both regardless of necessity (and indeed have done so for both, ad nauseam) because they find them and the concepts thereof useful or interesting, contrary to what you or I might assert.
        jollybean 4y ago
- knorker 4y ago
  Heh, sounds like they're saying "the cloud is just someone else's computer", which is the same as "the bakery is just someone else's oven". The bank is just someone else's ledger. Yes. As a service. Which is what people want. Nobody wants to run their own bakery just to get a bagel.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Some people do, and it should be possible for them to do so. And some people don't, and it should be possible for them to get ledger-as-a-service. Why can't there be room for both?
    - knorker 4y ago
      I'm not trying to ban people from becoming bakers. You do you. I'm saying they should temper their expectations, if they think that secretly everyone wants to be a baker, and in the future a meaningful fraction will be. Most people, when they go to a baker and ask for a bagel, will not want the answer "great, so just buy this oven from amazon. I'll show you how to use it when it arrives'. Cryptocurrency advocates are wrong about what other people want, or will want. They can LARP if they want, but that doesn't mean that it's value to other people.
  - camjw 4y ago
    > Heh, sounds like they're saying "the cloud is just someone else's computer", which is the same as "the bakery is just someone else's oven". I've not heard this before, I will remember it. This is such a good retort.

DennisP 4y ago

That's a drastic exaggeration of the effort required. The backup is to write down 24 words. For more redundancy, write them down again on another piece of paper. Put them somewhere safe enough considering the amount you have stored, and you're good. I know people with crypto who are not especially technical, but have no trouble with this. (Or, follow Vitalik's recommendation to use social recovery wallets, which are available for phones and I think have decent UI.)

caseyohara 4y ago
I think ckolkey was referencing this now-HN-famous dismissal of Dropbox when it was first announced in 2007 (top comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- DennisP 4y ago
  I admit I missed that. But backing up your self-hosted wallet is way less technical than rolling your own Dropbox, so I don't think it changes my argument.
  - cecilpl2 4y ago
    I have family members that have done the following: * Email me photos because they don't know how to add them to a shared google photo album. * Aren't on Facebook because they can't figure out how. * Forget their email password so just made a new email account. * Make a different decision on iOS vs Android every time they get a new phone. A very large segment of the population behaves in this way. How will self-hosted hardware wallets work for these people? What do you say when Grandpa calls you (because he doesn't text or email) and asks who to call to recover the money he was defrauded of?
    - jboy55 4y ago
      I have family members who paid for computer service because Microsoft was so nice to call them after detecting an issue with their computer. But lets get them all cold wallets to hold their money.