Wow, so much to unpack here... > Take any controversial situation and sift it down to a simple good\bad binary pitch that props up some weird view point The a

Wow, so much to unpack here... > Take any controversial situation and sift it down to a simple good\bad binary pitch that props up some weird view point The argument Doctorow makes against Big Tech is not that they're 100% evil, but that they don't (and don't want to) compete. > "monopolistic sociapaths"... Lame. I've benefited GREATLY from some of the open source tools that these big bad tech companies have made freely available. You can benefit from monopolistic sociopaths. You would benefit more from a free (as in competitive) market. > And the non-stop self-masterbratory articles about the evils of "crypto" from these guys is obvious and cheesy (individuals making money = bad). This is not close to an honest reconstruction of his argument. He argues that crypto scams are taking advantage of people's good intentions, which is absolutely true. The vast majority of crypto content is promoting shitcoins and Ponzi schemes, not promoting the freedom of [insert country's citizens] to transact without their government intervening. > Merkle-tree's were popularized by these crypto-bro's... I don't know what "popularizing" Merkle trees means, but you can easily see that there is no relationship between interest in Merkle trees[1] and interest in Bitcoin (which I used as a term because it predated the mainstream discussion of "crypto" or "cryptocurrency" as a general topic). In fact, peak interest in Merkle trees happened well before Bitcoin was invented. > ...and have helped other distributed forms of technology. Crypto has not created or helped any other distributed form of distributed technology except crypto. The closest thing to a distributed technology that has become more popular since 2011 is Mastodon, and that got its surge of attention because of Elon Musk antagonizing Twitter's user base. BFT data stores have been around for a long time, and their usage in industry hasn't increased recently. 1. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=merkle%20tree&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m... 2. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=bitcoin&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=b...