leppr

Yes, and that's like arguing that spaces between words is syntactic distraction. It's clearly not, more syntax rules can make a language simpler to understand (for both humans and computers).

It's fine, you can still get the same feeling and experience working on mobile computing.

User-respecting mobile OSes and hardware are still as unusable as the desktop Linux of 20 years ago, the incumbents are not helping at all, and the stakes are even higher (users get their freedom violated 24/7 instead of only when they sit down to their desktop).

As if relying on Paypal by itself wasn't enough of a nightmare, imagine relying on Paypal directly linked to crypto stuff. Or is the value proposition here that Tilia somehow have a deal with Paypal to keep their users accounts open?

Valid point which I expected to come up, but the difference is that AFAIK exfiltrating precise data with such a setup would be challenging, while the software stack is so messy that it's orders of magnitude easier to stealthily compromise.

Sometimes I briefly get out of my bubble and realize that the vast majority of the world population - even the first, highly educated world - still trusts their entire digital lives to a black box controlled by either 1 of 2 US companies.

I mean, the fact that we have a widely available alternative makes the picture slightly less bleak, but still. How many politically-inclined persons rave endlessly about freedom and sovereignty while making no effort on such an important front? The Linux usage numbers are so far from where they should be.

You are both going around my very simple argument that these mind-blowingly huge piles of money poured into crypto scams, don't undermine the undeniable reality of crypto that is not a scam.

Yes, people pouring their savings in tulips, fake railroad companies, and beanie babies is absurd. Does it follow that tulips, railroad companies, and baby plushies are scams and criminal in nature? The grifters and their victims moved on, and the underlying objects of speculation seem to exist and do their respective jobs just fine now.

Crypto is doing its job just fine of being a trustless and permissionless way of transferring value. It doesn't care if grifters hype, pump, and dump its tokens. The few actual decentralized networks in existence just keep running and securing their immutable ledgers. The few actual peer-to-peer researchers and developers keep improving them.

Simply owning digital tokens is not a real world usage of those tokens, full stop.

It's as much real world usage, as people owning stocks and precious metals is.

I can fully accept that 5-25% of a countries population is gullible enough to buy cryptocurrency.

In many countries, it's the 75% of the population saving in their local fiat currency that are the gullible ones. I know we all love United States Dollars, but in many local economies, there aren't enough of them to go around. Acquiring, storing and transacting with cryptocurrencies can be easier, and more secure and discrete than going to your local black market USD dealer and stashing stacks of bills under your mattress.

If anything, crypto at least seems to indirectly put food on your table, articbull. I would find it hard to believe you don't get any compensation from religiously covering every HN comment sections about crypto with misinformation. Surely your motives can't simply be the fear of being out of a job if bigtech fades into irrelevance. AI would logically be a way bigger threat to your occupation.

Here are some stats for any passerby who might be convinced to think crypto really has ~zero non-criminal usage [1]. Surely calling 5-25% of many countries' populations criminals (including the US), should be relegated to a fringe extremist view.

[1] https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership-data/

You are right. From reading the article, Neal Stephenson doesn't criticize cryptocurrency in itself. His whole criticism is about integrating it inside the universe of games.

I don't agree with your opinion that item transferability is necessarily silly, though. I was happy to be able to sell the rare Dota 2 items I accumulated after playing it for a couple years. It was never a central motivation for playing, but the transferability didn't detract from the experience in any way. It just made for some nice pocket change when all was said and done.

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Meta remark: It's pretty sad that one of the only HN comments correctly pointing out the disconnect between the article title, the HN knee-jerk reactions, and the actual content of the article, seems about to be downvoted to oblivion. The article is barely 3 paragraphs. Is it too much to ask to read it, before jumping in with the same tired crypto takes as every link to crypto-related resources on HN gets?

The "Wolf of Wall Street" types and various "crypto-bros" didn't "ruin it for everyone". They tarnished the connotation of the word "cryptocurrency", and wasted a lot of people of a lot of money. But their work has been mostly orthogonal to the real work on decentralized networks being done.

The only use-case for it now is for the criminal underworld

This conclusion doesn't follow, neither logically nor empirically. [1] The exact opposite actually happened: we went from the vast majority of the volume being a darknet market, to most volume being saving/speculation and non-criminal e-commerce settlements.

[1] https://twitter.com/malekanoms/status/1626583628099784705

Are they really that pitiful compared to the global average? I think that in the English-speaking tech sphere we are just too inclined to compare to the US. But compared to the rest of the world, and outside of a few small low-tax hubs (Singapore, UAE, etc), they're quite in line with the rest of the job market.

(I do think we're getting fleeced in absolute terms, but that's nothing specific to the tech industry)

Precisely. People are struggling to internalize how much wealth inequality (both local and global) has shot up in recent years, and instead blame the symptoms of this inequality as if they're the cause.

The woes Portuguese people are feeling now have been felt by the citizens of many countries before. Most of Europe considers its "first world" status as some kind of inherent property. You just need to look outside of Europe to Asia and Africa to see what's going to happen.

The problem is not about the broadcast capabilities, they already support RSS.

The problem is about their content censoring. I don't reckon Automattic reversed the "sexually explicit" purge initiated by Yahoo. I'm not interested in a social network that censors ~30% [1] of the global art production. For now Twitter is the better place for relatively free content sharing.

[1]: Number pulled out of my hat, but the human nude being the most popular drawing subject ever, I wouldn't be surprised if this is close to reality.

Happy to be be proven wrong as I haven't used this specific service, but the quality of Zoho mail-related offerings is so laughingly bad that I wouldn't touch any of their other products.

Tumblr was very close to the perfect social media network. It's a shame it succumbed to corporate greed after the Yahoo acquisition. I really hope someone manages to recreate it as a decentralized protocol

What doesn't work well about mouse scroll wheel on Linux? Its behavior is very similar to MacOS, in that it sends scroll events even to unfocused windows.

If the money is stolen (as is the case in the articles' story), then yes, you can be legally compelled to return the money to its original owner.

This whole episode should hopefully bring donation recipients to do more due diligence on where the money comes from, before spending it.

The US president, those researchers, and many, many startups are holding what is pretty directly the money of FTX's unsuspecting users.

The recovery will be a long and painful process.

The term DAO as it's used now is orthogonal to blockchain and crypto.

It's mostly a term to describe codified governance/community systems. There may be point systems implemented via crypto tokens, but in the vast majority of cases those would be better implemented on centralized ledgers since there's someone with centralized control over either the token issuance, the communication channels, or other essential resources.

If they were developed now, Stack Overflow and Wikipedia would be considered DAOs.

IPFS doesn't solve permanent data availability either, the closest to "solving" this is Arweave[1] but that comes with problems of its own. It's fundamentally impossible to correctly price the availability of a "service" in the far future.

[1] https://www.arweave.org/technology

I'm not sure if HN is a representative audience regarding interest in ChromeOS, but personally all I hope is the money Framework makes from this allows them to release a larger model on which I can slap Linux on. Lightweight 15" laptops with great Linux compatibility aren't so easy to find.

It depends what we're after. Almost all of the code in LoC percent terms might be open-source, which helps people who want to launch derivative browsers or learn from the code. But on the other hand, almost all of the Chrome instances running today are proprietary builds with mystery special sauce added (I'm guessing desktop Linux users are the only significant userbase to run vanilla Chromium), which doesn't help us on privacy, neutrality, etc...

Then we should use a less general word than "technology", because it becomes hard to reason about the problem and gives arguments to luddites who don't make the distinction. "Big tech" is short enough to be used in conversations.

But I disagree that it is possible for individuals to simply change their behavior and create that world using their collective purchasing power. This arrangement works well for the companies and investors that create the options consumers may choose from, and they have and continue to offer the set of options that match their preferences.

With proper cultural norms, it will definitely be possible to change the current corporate technology landscape to be more user-friendly. Individual consumption habits have a huge impact, that's why the advertising industry is so big after all. Of course the necessary cultural change won't happen without a collective pain and awareness of the problem. I would say we might be half-way there in the pain dimension, and awareness of the benefits of open-source is growing everyday (what with the explosion of AI artwork thanks to the Stable Diffusion open-source release).

While traveling through Europe this summer, I noticed many small currency exchange shops process cryptocurrencies. What surprised me most is that many shops handled a wide selection of what I would call shitcoins, not just BTC and ETH.

Why is technology moving us to a Kafka story instead of a Star Trek story?

That's a problem which has nothing to do with technology itself. Technology makes providing support cheaper, so if the only changing variable was adding more technology, we would be getting better support, not worst.

The problem is cultural individualism. People give too much power to centralized entities, and don't respect the paramount importance of free market competition in accountability. A typical argument is that technology causes this centralization, but it's simply not true. For each service, there almost always exists both centralized options, and decentralized open-source ones. It's on users to go above the individualistic perspective and chose the option that's right not only for their own individual needs, but also for their community.

I thought these services charge exorbitant amounts that are a % of your deposited amount, unless you are in the 9 figures?

There is no open-source requirement, like there would be on Gentoo packages for instance. NPM packages frequently pull arbitrary binaries in their install scripts.

I absolutely hate cryptocurrency shilling on HN so forgive me if the following appears like so, but this answers your question.

Those with the most resources to mine will mine the most and thus receive the most, allowing them to mine more, and the cycle of centralization continues.

This is not a problem if the reward distribution is proportional to the investment from miners, which happens when the mining competition has low or inverse economies of scale, and a low barrier to entry.

In PoW and Bitcoin especially, the economies of scale are huge. "Industrial" miners are greatly more profitable than home miners, and ASICs require an upfront investment which comes with risk that smaller operations might not want to take. The result of this high barrier to entry and economies of scale are empirically verifiable by looking at the hash rate from block wins.

A correctly designed PoS system almost completely removes economies of scale (notice I said correctly designed, because many other PoS cryptocurrencies actually explicitly favor larger stakes), but might add some artificial barrier to entry, like Ethereum's 32 ETH minimum. The wealth centralization effect is also amplified in PoS by how directly acquiring the scarce resource required to participate in the competition influences the value of existing stakers' investment.

In Proof of Space consensus protocols (PoST) [1], the scarce resource is storage space. This can have minimal or even inverse economies of scales relative to money invested, as the running costs become almost as minimal as a PoS operation. And since the quality of the storage material is also irrelevant, what matters most is the cost per Tb of acquisition of storage space. The best savings are done on second hand drives, which makes investment in free time rather than money the profit differentiator. The free time to wealth ratio scales inversely, so smaller PoST miners can have a proportional advantage over larger ones. This decentralization effect is empirically verifiable with how much more individual mining nodes the biggest PoST cryptocurrency Chia currently has than Bitcoin and Ethereum, despite the comparatively very low absolute amount of rewards its consensus delivers to its miners.

[1]: full name: Proof of Space and Time, with Time referring to a competition required to get reliable timestamps on the blockchain happening in parallel to the competition over Space.

Yes, this was ad-hominem because it seems obvious the OP is not asking this in good faith. Their first comment is not in the form of a neutral question, but a prejudiced assumption based on a false idea that nothing in the linked article could lead one to believe.

Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely centralized with some extra steps?

Like, you have this proof of stake thing, but the only reason it works is because there's just a small number of validators, which is just going to be the ethereum foundation and friends.

I know Cunningham's Law is a valid discussion strategy, but the topics of cryptocurrency on HN already tends to attract enough flamewars and misinformation as it is.

We all know the pedestrian outsider opinions about cryptocurrency, they are repeated ad-nauseam here on HN and everywhere else. Adding informed color to this is a good thing, I would think.