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All those things are means, not ends. Nobody starts their day off saying "wow I could really go for some open p2p consensus this morning" in the same way nobody

All those things are means, not ends. Nobody starts their day off saying "wow I could really go for some open p2p consensus this morning" in the same way nobody starts the day off with "damn I really need my TCP/IP to start the day off right." The things you can build with these tools are better built without these tools. It's been 13 years. Crypto is old enough to be in high school, and it still hasn't found a use case better served with it than without it - despite a list proponents pull out as long as my arm of 'killer applications' that are 'just around the corner, @remind me 6 months'. Soon crypto will be old enough to go off to college without a use case. But of course we're still early, right? They've lost the plot. They're not building products, you know things people want and use.

whizzter 4y ago
I think it's a dual case of architecture astronauts combined with the stickiniess of money that's made a weird mess out of everything. What many wanted (many still wants) is a bittorrent-equivalent-for-social-media,etc.. "free" of the clutches of companies like FB, somehow along the way Etherum made the promise of monetary incentives for distributed computing (even if the computation wasn't the "work" function but rather something more focused on Etherum needs itself). p2p storage,messaging,etc is what people envisions as the building blocks for this (because they don't want to be stuck with a single design). The saddest part is that seemingly most enthusiasts of these kind-of exciting technologies strapped themselves onto the dead end cryptocash bandwagon(bitcoin is fundamentally unscalable, lighting is an interesting bandaid but nowhere near needs required for global scale in practice) and still hasn't let go.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  If people want distributed social media, there are already great models for that. Mastodon is one. Hell, you can make the case that USENET is still a great fit for that application. Adding crypto and blockchains to the story really doesn't gain us anything, and it may lose us the ability to delete messages, which is actually a feature you sometimes want in a social network. If everything you said when you were 12 was indelibly chiseled into cryptographic Stones somewhere, why would you speak into the device that does that in the first place?
deleted 4y ago
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whizzter 4y ago

I think it's a dual case of architecture astronauts combined with the stickiniess of money that's made a weird mess out of everything. What many wanted (many still wants) is a bittorrent-equivalent-for-social-media,etc.. "free" of the clutches of companies like FB, somehow along the way Etherum made the promise of monetary incentives for distributed computing (even if the computation wasn't the "work" function but rather something more focused on Etherum needs itself). p2p storage,messaging,etc is what people envisions as the building blocks for this (because they don't want to be stuck with a single design). The saddest part is that seemingly most enthusiasts of these kind-of exciting technologies strapped themselves onto the dead end cryptocash bandwagon(bitcoin is fundamentally unscalable, lighting is an interesting bandaid but nowhere near needs required for global scale in practice) and still hasn't let go.

shadowgovt 4y ago
If people want distributed social media, there are already great models for that. Mastodon is one. Hell, you can make the case that USENET is still a great fit for that application. Adding crypto and blockchains to the story really doesn't gain us anything, and it may lose us the ability to delete messages, which is actually a feature you sometimes want in a social network. If everything you said when you were 12 was indelibly chiseled into cryptographic Stones somewhere, why would you speak into the device that does that in the first place?

deleted 4y ago

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